How Trump Made TV His Best Precinct Captain
Calling Trump the "Tiger Woods of politics," Omarosa noted how his name on the bill helped the first Republican debate to attract 24 million viewers, according to Nielsen data, a virtual tie with the biggest "Sunday Night Football" audience last season.
"This is the new reality," Omarosa said on MSNBC. "He (Trump) is going to have to give his position on serious issues and he may also call people pigs, but that's part of the Trump thing that comes with the package."
Trump's success with that package so far has fulfilled the prophecy of the late media theorist Neil Postman's 1985 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business."
"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business," he wrote, "largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."
Unlike George Orwell's "1984," in which a "Big Brother" government would tell us what books we could not read, Postman's vision was closer to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," a pleasure-seeking society in which no one would want to read a book.
Instead of pleasure, Trump pushes the pain, often in demagogic tones that would bring a smile to the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who turned his fame as a segregationist Southern Democrat in the early 1960s into presidential campaigns. He didn't win, but his fiery populism helped to shape the political polarization with which we live today.
Trump's remedies suspiciously lack detail. Yet the more he is attacked, the more his fans root for him -- as they would root for an audacious reality TV star.
It remains to be seen how well Trump can turn his fans into voters. But he already has mapped out a tempting path for other political hopefuls to follow. That's show biz.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
