Every time someone complains that our new prime minister is boring, I rue the day that politics became a performing art. The degradation began, as the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh relates, when Donald Trump was catapulted into power by The Apprentice, a reality/talent/gameshow over which he presided on NBC from 2004 until 2017. Before this, Trump was best known as a loud-mouthed, laughable vulgarian, a fixture in tabloid gossip columns whose business career mostly consisted of bankruptcies. The British producer Mark Burnett endowed him with a new persona as a charismatic leader, a “godlike character” worshipped by teams of ruthless young entrepreneurs who fought for the chance to serve as apprentices in his property company. It was in this phoney guise that Trump won the election in 2016; installed in Washington, he nationalised the show’s cut-throat scenario by stoking social and ideological feuds, then sat back to enjoy the mayhem that ensued.
Trump’s rabid animosity energised The Apprentice. The show’s ethos was supposedly aspirational, but success proved less telegenic than the gloating spectacle of failure: at the climax of every episode Trump eliminated losers by abusively booming: “You’re fired!” This catchphrase became a clarion call. “When I said it,” he boasts to Setoodeh, “the whole building shook. The place just reverberated. People were screaming, they went crazy.” Was their reaction ecstasy or hysterical alarm? Either way, they heard a megaphonic deity trumpeting doom.
