When Donald Trump first moved into the White House in 2016, he is said to have complained about the broken television in his bedroom – he couldn’t receive “the Gorilla Channel”. Apparently Trump believed that there was a TV channel that broadcast gorilla content 24 hours a day. Employees then edited gorilla documentaries that were broadcast in an endless loop from a broadcast tower directly to Trump’s bedroom. Nevertheless, the president was dissatisfied: the gorillas don’t fight – boring! So only fight scenes were shown. On some days, insiders reported, he watched the Gorilla Channel for 17 hours straight.
As untrue as this anecdote is – it is a joke by the cartoonist Ben Ward – it still aptly characterizes the behavior of the US President: addicted to television, simple-minded and keen on violence. James Poniewozik, television critic at the New York Times, compares Trump to Jim Carey’s character in 1998’s “The Truman Show,” “only the other way around.” Trump is a product of private television and his second presidency completed his triumphant march: “Trump was elected. But television became president.”
Poniewozik follows both rises in his book “All the spotlights on me”. Witty and entertaining, he traces the history of US television and at the same time Donald J. Trump’s life path from New York wealthy scion to ruling TV figure.
From a mass medium with only three channels, which relied on the concept of the least offensive program in order to retain as many viewers as possible, cable television developed over the course of the 1980s and fragmented the TV audience into the smallest units. Consensus was now out; instead, many viewers developed a fascination for the rich and famous. At the same time, real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump was thrust into the limelight: he built Trump Tower and bought Mar-a-Lago and had a bestseller in 1987 with “The Art of Success.”
From TV anti-hero to president
Poniewozik approaches the figure of Trump with the tools of French postmodernism: As in a simulacrum by Baudrillard, he writes, the image, the performance of the super-rich Trump has replaced the real entrepreneur. Trump had formed himself into a brand whose only product was the rich businessman’s idea. When the minimalism of computer nerds conquered America’s culture and economy in the 1990s, the self-confessed maximalist Trump became the “star of the counterprogram.” He staged his celebrity comeback out of a divorce and near-bankruptcy. And emerged from it as a TV anti-hero who became president for the first time in 2016.
„The Sopranos“, “Deadwood”, “Breaking Bad”: Using popular series, Poniewozik traces how the audience’s sympathy increasingly turned to unscrupulous, charismatic heroes: not nice, but entertaining. The attacks of September 11, 2001 made the concept “You have to be evil in this sick world” popular with the masses, which was reflected in series like “24” with the agent Jack Bauer, but also in the rise of reality shows with their basic principles of life struggle and competition.
This is where Trump’s TV series “The Apprentice” comes into play, in which he humiliated applicants using sophisticated rituals starting in 2004, and whose iconic saying “You’re fired!” paved the way for his political career.
On Fox & Friends, Trump summed up the paranoia of the Tea Party movement: “Blow up! Call China! You’re fired!”
Poniewozik convincingly explains how perfectly the showman Trump’s self-aggrandizing, aggressive and deeply meaningless behavior suited a TV nation that had become accustomed to show formats saturated with emotions and scandal. Especially when it comes to news, the television critic observes an intertwining of cultural fragmentation and political tribalization, which he shows in the opposition between the calm, liberal broadcaster MSNBC and the conservative, sensationalist Fox News.
“You’re fired.”
The latter, hyper-nervous, emotional and polarizing, became the mouthpiece of American conservatives who felt “dispossessed” by Obama’s election victory. Trump became their natural ally: As a regular on “Fox & Friends,” he verbally summed up the paranoia of the newly emerged Tea Party movement: “Blow up! Call China! You’re fired!” Poniewozik describes Fox and Trump as a perfect symbiosis: the politician with the most controversial program now controls the program – or is it the other way around? According to Newsweek, Trump has appointed 23 former Fox employees to public positions during his current term, including defense secretary and intelligence coordinator.
James Poniewozik is not a political analyst; he wants his book to be understood as an “exercise in applied television criticism”. He is also not a cultural pessimist like Neal Postman, whose prophetic 1985 study “We Amuse Ourselves to Death” he cites several times. The New-York-Times-Editor, who says he loves television, repeatedly points out clever formats and films with emancipatory potential, as if to say: It could have turned out differently.
James Poniewózk: “All the spotlights on me! The birth of Donald Trump from television and the disintegration of America”. Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2025, 424 pages, 32 euros
But it didn’t. “All the Headlights on Me” appeared in its American premiere in 2019, when the first Trump show was over. Back then you could still immerse yourself in his entertaining review of the first “episode” with popcorn. In the foreword to the German translation, Poniewozik describes Trump’s second term as a “consistent continuation of the first season”. With one difference: “This time he and his colleagues are controlling the production.” The whole world is now the backdrop for Trump’s reality show. That’s exactly what makes the popcorn stick in your throat when reading this “television review”.