A close read of a speech by a president almost clinically obsessed with television, by jonathanchait
President Trump. Photo: Annabelle Marcovici/Bloomberg via Getty Images Roughly half an hour into his rally in Minneapolis last night, President Trump was reciting his prepared remarks about the evil political establishment shipping jobs overseas and flooding your communities with drugs and immigrants. As usually happens, Trump grew bored and wandered off script. “I got to tell you, isn’t it much better when I go off script? Isn’t it better?” he said.
Trump failed as a businessman, but then succeeded playing one on television. During the Obama era, he hit upon a new market in right-wing paranoia, sensing the racial anxieties of aging white America being underserved by a Republican leadership that wanted to talk about budget deficits. He was drawn unexpectedly into the presidency as he chased this audience. And yet he has made it obvious, especially in Minneapolis, that his goal all along was to be talked about favorably on television.
Trump presents himself as a survivor of negative television coverage, persevering with almost superhuman grit in the face of hostile television coverage. The narrators of this heroic struggle are, of course, other people on television: At another moment in the speech, Trump was talking up a supportive local Republican member of Congress, but grew bored again and told the audience that the friendly politician in the audience mattered less than the friendly Republican on TV:
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