Remember how Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called mainstream media “the ultimate super PAC” for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats? If so, his opponent Donald Trump’s favorite precinct captain must be television.
In the first major poll of the new year, released by NBC News and SurveyMonkey, Trump maintains his lead among the Grand Old Party’s contenders with 35 percent support, way ahead of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, in second place with 18 percent, and Rubio, in third with 13 percent.
Regardless of what happens after actual votes are cast, Trump’s surprising success was the past year’s biggest political story. We know he has struck a chord with white men, in particular those who have a high school diploma or less and have been buffeted the most by economic changes since the 1950s.
But if major issues really matter above all else, Republicans have plenty of alternative candidates who, unlike Trump, can discuss them in terms that sound better-informed than a second-grader.
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Yet Trump has surged ahead of the pack. How? Why? In most of the year-end assessments I have seen, too little attention has been given to the tremendous advantage that the real estate developer’s years of building his brand have brought to him.
He has been the star of his own TV show, “The Apprentice,” and has produced and hosted events as varied as the “Miss Universe Pageant” and “WrestleMania.”
Instead of dismissing his showbiz background as a poor substitute for experience in public office, I think we need to appreciate how effectively Trump has blurred the lines in this video age between politics and entertainment — for better or worse.
This occurred to me last summer after I encountered former “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault in the lobby of NBC’s Washington studios, shortly after Trump launched his campaign.
Newly hired to help lead Trump’s Ohio campaign, Omarosa advised me that in assessing Trump’s appeal, “there’s a different analysis and metrics you have to use.”
“Reality television has now taken over television,” she said in an MSNBC discussion later. “People want to see real moments and see life unfold in front of them. Not scripted, but real moments.”
Calling Trump the “Tiger Woods of politics,” Omarosa noted how his name on the bill helped the first Republican debate 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. “(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 showbiz.
Clarence Page, a member of the baiduhai Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
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