Forging the Celebrity Politician with Fame and Weapons of Mass Distraction
October 29, 2024
Editor’s note: If you watched Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and are incensed about how he got this far, remember that his foundation is the cult of celebrity which is unique to the United States. As the late Landon Y. Jones explains in this passage from Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers, the former president was abetted not only by fame but also by the popular demand for his antics as platformed by the media.
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The received wisdom is that Donald Trump was an aberration in American political life. Attention to his rise usually focuses on his assiduously cultivated celebrity status and picturesque obsession with acquiring more fame, more praise, and more money.
Yet he was hardly the first celebrated American to make a calculated leap into politics. The military hero Andrew Jackson did so in the Early Republic, becoming the first political celebrity to take advantage of the rise of a new form of media: daily newspapers. As his biographers David and Jeanne Heidler put it, “The use of newspapers in the campaign of 1828 was the most revolutionary aspect of a revolutionary year in American politics . . . the first instance of deliberate image building and mythmaking and of skillful manipulation of public perception and popular opinion.”
More recent examples of celebrities who used their name recognition to their advantage politically include California governors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, TV stars Al Franken and Fred Thompson (senators from Minnesota and Tennessee, respectively), Clint Eastwood and Sonny Bono (mayors of Carmel and Palm Springs, California, respectively), and the 2003 American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, who in 2022 was defeated for the Democratic nomination in North Carolina’s Sixth Congressional District.
Before the arrival of The Apprentice in 2004, Donald Trump was a B-list inhabitant of gossip columns who specialized in filing serial bankruptcies and prowling beauty contests. But even then he exhibited a degree of celebrity self-absorption high on the Celebrity Worship Scale. In an eerily prescient column Nora Ephron wrote for Esquire in June 1989, she said:
Here is what interests me about Donald Trump: He wants to be famous. He wants people to talk about him. He wants people to notice him. He wants people to write about him. He wants people to ask him for autographs and recognize him and invade his privacy; not that he seems to have any privacy; he doesn’t even seem to have a single solitary thought he manages to keep to himself, so perhaps there’s no privacy to invade. Perhaps that’s the secret. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. I tip my hat to Donald Trump, because except for an occasional churlish moment he seems to be genuinely enjoying the experience of fame in a way that no one in his right mind ever does, and the fact that he therefore seems not to have any sense or intelligence or taste whatsoever is beside the point. The man has adapted.
It speaks to those times that, when Ephron wrote her column, anyone’s obsession with fame seemed to be a novelty. During that time, Trump appeared on People’s cover regularly, including once in 1990, grinning and grasping $1 million in cash in his arms. I shudder to remember that I was the editor. But frankly, in those days, we thought he was simply a buffoon—a defiant buffoon, to be sure. Once again, defiance was a celebrity’s calling card.
The turning point in Trump’s pursuit of celebrity arrived in 2004 when the British producer Mark Burnett adapted his pioneering reality show Survivor to a business setting and called it The Apprentice. With Trump as the host and a catchy tagline, “You’re fired!,” the series became a ratings hit. In the end, Trump hosted The Apprentice and its spin-off, The Celebrity Apprentice, for a collective fourteen seasons. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” one of the show’s producers told the New Yorker in 2019. “He has just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”
What propelled him were the same forces that Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone. After the turn of the century, the internet and social media promoted individualism at the cost of the social capital all societies need. Celebrity worship self-selects for narcissistic males with a ravenous need for public attention. As he became increasingly famous, Trump began to monetize his fame with half of the profits from The Apprentice plus the gains from endorsements and product placements that included steaks, vodka, a board game, cologne, neckties, shirts, and casinos. Soon his name was on buildings, golf courses, a for-profit college, and an airline shuttle, most of which went bankrupt.
In 2010, Mark Burnett aimed his weapons of mass distraction at the American public again with Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential nominee who in 2008 had made politics about cultural identity. He created Sarah Palin’s Alaska, a reality television show that ran for eight episodes in just a single season before it was canceled. But in translating presidential politics into a reality TV show, she gathered five million viewers and demonstrated to Donald Trump that there was nothing crazy about his continuing quest to do the opposite—turn his own reality show into presidential politics.
Meanwhile, with an additional boost from his “Mondays with Trump” segment on Fox & Friends, by the time the 2016 Republican primaries arrived, Trump was the only presold celebrity among the many candidates. Of the seventeen declared candidates, he was the only one with meaningful television exposure and who understood how tightly celebrities are embedded in the lives of the voters. There was nothing new about this for him. Trump had consistently used his visibility as a celebrity to promote his brand and his public career. What he uniquely realized was that people wanted unmediated access to the president, just as they now had with any other social media star.
Trump’s 2015 announcement at the Trump Tower of his presidential candidacy mimicked the gaudy visuals and production values of The Apprentice. Like earlier celebrities from the nineteenth century, such as P.T. Barnum and Sarah Bernhardt, he did not pause at the edge of self-parody. If Trump could have had himself photographed in a coffin, as Sarah Bernhardt did, he would have done it to win attention and fame. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said Les Moonves, the network’s CEO at the time.
Never again will a national election be so devoid of celebrities. If anything, the population of celebrities who have tested the political waters has only increased since the Trump presidency. In 2022, they included the following:
- Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV doctor, who lost his race for the US Senate in Pennsylvania after his former celebrity patron, Oprah Winfrey, endorsed John Fetterman
- Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a professional wrestler and actor who in September 22 had 334 million Instagram followers and has expressed presidential ambitions
- Matthew McConaughey, the actor who flirted with running for the Texas governorship and spoke with passion at the White House about the school shooting in Uvalde
- Herschel Walker, the former NFL player who ran a competitive race for the US Senate in Georgia
- J.D. Vance, the author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, who won his first-ever campaign for the US Senate in Ohio
- Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympian, reality-show star, and self-styled transgender rights activist whose bid to replace Governor Gavin Newsom in the California recall election failed dismally
What does the rise of celebrity candidates tell us about our politics? As analyst Chris Cillizza observed on CNN:
For Donald Trump, success on television is the only yardstick of success. When Trump endorsed TV doctor-entrepreneur Mehmet Oz in the 2022 Senate campaign in Pennsylvania, Trump explained, “I have known Dr. Oz for many years, as have many others, even if only through his very successful television show. He has lived with us through the screen and has always been popular, respected, and smart.” At a rally in North Carolina, Trump elaborated, “When you’re in television for eighteen years, that’s like a poll. That means people like you.”
As Cillizza noted, Trump’s support was based on the fact that Oz was on TV regularly for more than a decade. That made him famous. It also made him popular. “Trump likes famous, popular people who were on TV,” Cillizza summarized. “Trump isn’t endorsing Oz for any other reason. That’s good enough for him. TV then is—and always has been—the way that Trump relates to the world. If it’s on TV, it’s real to Trump. And, if it’s on TV for a long time—as he would often note his show The Apprentice was—then it (and the person behind it) must be good. . . . There’s no part of his calculation to endorse Oz that dealt with whether the TV doctor would actually make a good senator.”
What have we learned? First, that the celebrity politician has replaced community organizations. People who used to be bowling or working for their voting leagues are now at home watching TV or hunched over their smartphones on social media—likely both. Celebrities have stepped into the space vacated by civic engagement. This has allowed pop culture to be more democratic—more directly responsive to the taste of the masses—than ever before. But it has also elevated and empowered those celebrities who are most able to engage the greatest number of people. Empowered might be too strong a word, because these celebrities aren’t so much leading their millions of followers as being led by them. To be popular to so many, so successfully, for so long, you must necessarily appeal to and, in appealing, reinforce your followers’ popular notions.
Second, that the art of governing is at risk. If your job as an entertainer has been to appeal to as many of the cultural commonplaces of your audience as possible, it would run against your nature, even if you are now a politician trying to solve problems, to look beyond their commonplace political assumptions for answers. To do so would to be to risk alienating an audience that has, since you declared your candidacy, become your political base—an audience that you’re the world expert at reading and keeping satisfied. So, instead of taking professional advice, you start giving them what they want to hear, and not what is necessarily good for the country—true whether your audience is conservative or liberal. While the typical politician risks taking advice from fairly obscure and potentially unpopular experts—economists, academics, policy analysts— you use your skill at appealing to huge audiences to excite and affirm what your base thinks.
While these appeals will likely make you a good candidate, they’re unlikely to help you solve the complex problems that imperil the very complex system of government you must head when you win the election. The social media savvy celebrity who runs for office (and which celebrity isn’t social media savvy these days?) is a populist in spirit and in practice, perfectly attuned to the will of the people. While it may seem harmless to be attuned to entertainment that directly appeals to popular tastes, there’s lots of potential for harm when this highly democratic culture uses the vessel of celebrity to infect politics with ratings-tested policies—that is to say, when it’s no longer ideas for songs, cover art, and performances that arise from the Twitter feeds of followers but ideas for executive orders, legislative solutions, and trade agreements. This seems to be the natural drift of things because the celebrity-politicians are highly attuned to their base in the broadest terms. What they are less sensitive to are the opinions and needs of voices in the back of the room and the ideas from the historical margins that need and deserve a hearing.
About the Author
Landon Y. (Lanny) Jones was an editor and author. He was the former managing editor of People and Money magazines and the author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West (2004), a biography of the co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jones also edited a selection of the expedition journals, The Essential Lewis and Clark (2000). In 1980, he published Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which coined the phrase “baby-boomer” and was a finalist for the American Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2015, he received the Henry R. Luce Award for Lifetime Achievement from Time Inc.