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When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Petty moves from a petty man.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

So many bastards, so little time.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / The Apprentice Factor

The Apprentice Factor

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This is an interesting research article by two political scientists.  Abstract:

American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data—content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers—we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of nonconventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.

I don’t know how to evaluate their research methodology, but I sure think Trump’s Apprentice stardom isn’t given enough weight by the political press.  For instance, the huge effort they put into creating a Ron DeSantis boomlet, which fizzled the moment that people actually saw what a stiff that guy is, shows that it’s Trump himself, not just Trump’s authoritarianism, that powers Trump’s appeal.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s good news for Democrats, because some zero charisma stiff who is “a competent Trump” is going to have a harder time with low information voters, simply because of the groundwork laid by Trump’s reality show stardom.

As the authors point out in the paper, the way TV was watched during the time of the Apprentice, which mostly pre-dated streaming, is quite different from the way that people watch TV today.  Maybe someone like Joe Rogan is as close a parallel to Trump’s Apprentice audience.  According to the paper, the Apprentice had 28.1 million viewers at its peak of popularity.  As of this Spring, Rogan had 14.5 followers on Spotify, and 16.4 YouTube followers and 18.9 million Instagram followers.

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    bbleh

    Been beating this same drum for a long while.  The Apprentice WAS what most people “knew” about the Orange Idiot in 2016, and it STILL is for many people, ESPECIALLY the “low-information voters” who were the DECIDING vote in this VERY CLOSE election.

    And yes, the same media system that created The Apprentice also created Her Emails and Joe Old and Inflation Coming To EET Us!  Plus there’s the parallel right-wing propaganda network that brought you Immigrant Invasion and Trans Bathroom Menace and the long-running Democrats Are Communist Fascists.  And the usual misogyny and racism, plus Pandemic Fatigue.  So not saying The Apprentice was THE determining factor, but when it comes to the Orange Idiot himself, I’d say it’s the most defining factor.

  2. 2.

    scav

    Tossing it in before I have to run away alas, but HIGNFY has been blamed (rightly or wrongly) for a long time about enabling Boris Johnson to gain recognition.  I mean, being on HIGNIFY didn’t seem to aid Lembit Öpik andyesIhadtolookitup any.  But still.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    This is why I’m in discussions to create The Baud! Show!

    Coming soon to a streaming channel on the dark web. Stay tuned!

  4. 4.

    Geo Wilcox

    @bbleh: It was the thing that gave him his lifeline when he was all but dead. If he had never been on that show, we would not be where we are today.

  5. 5.

    Old Man Shadow

    As far as I’m concerned, that’s good news for Democrats, because some zero charisma stiff who is “a competent Trump” is going to have a harder time with low information voters, simply because of the groundwork laid by Trump’s reality show stardom.

    Too bad the GOP will do everything it can to insure it will never have to answer to the voters again.

  6. 6.

    TBone

    “The Media” has specific human(oid) owners.

    As we saw with Pecker, et al.

    (yes typing that name always makes me giggle)

  7. 7.

    justawriter

    Another example would be Jesse Ventura. While on the whole not a good governor, he was definitely better than Trump and had a few good ideas while in office. But he never would have been elected without his career in wrestling and movies (many with another celeb turned governor, Arnold S.).

  8. 8.

    WendyBinFL

    Mr. B and I have a 90-year-old friend who voted for Trump in 2016, and 2020, and 2024. When asked why, she insists he is a “good businessman,” so she trusts him to “straighten out the government.” How did she reach that conclusion? From watching The Apprentice. Pointing out the failures of his university, his charity, his casinos and his many business ventures made no difference. Sigh…

  9. 9.

    ArchTeryx

    And of course the OG celebrity president and reactionary, revanchist asshole, St. Ronny of Raygun. Who won against absolutely moribund democratic opposition twice, and those landslides are part of why we are where we are today.

  10. 10.

    J. Arthur Crank

    @Baud:

    This is why I’m in discussions to create The Baud! Show!

    I hope you can properly educate the public on the factorial function and its many uses.

  13. 13.

    trollhattan

    @bbleh: ​
     
    Yeah, lacking the show Donald Trump was primarily defending champion of Most Hated Man of New York and the Short-Fingered Vulgarian. Apprentice normalized him by making him seem like a hard-charging successful bidnezman.

    As if.

  15. 15.

    Steve LaBonne

    Rogan should run for President as an independent and hopefully doom whoever the GrOPer nominee will be.

  25. 25.

    Rusty

    Hell, even the spouse and I watched The Apprentice when it aired.  What turned me off Trump (long before he ran for office), was article about hen he built Trump Tower in what i think was Chicago.   He had pre-sold apartments to various business associates and friends before construction even started.  As it was explained, those are super important sales because they are high risk for the buyer and so you often rely on people you know to help you out.  The project ended doing very well, by the time it was completed the market had risen substantially.   Trump used a clause in the agreement that is very rarely invoked, to cancel those sales so he could instead sell the same apartments at a higher price.  The person telling the story was in real estate said that it was shocking, Trump screwed over people who took a big risk with him.  At that point I knew he was an amoral asshole to screw over his close associates and friends.  Somehow our press never thought that an important story when he ran in 2016.

  27. 27.

    Mingobat (f/k/a KareninGa)

    @bbleh: Exactly. I said when Palin was selected by McCain that she looked like the won it on a reality show competition, and these people were just voting for who they wanted to see on TV for the next four years.

    And now Trump is appointing people to his cabinet who he liked seeing on TV. So we’ve come full circle.

    Thats exactly what’s happened here. It wasn’t difficult to figure out.

    (All due respect to the researchers — it’s important to see legit research methods used to confirm this),

  30. 30.

    ewrunning

    Thanks for this post. I made this point in a comment to a New York Magazine Intelligencer article last week when the writer called these kinds of reality tv shows “harmless.” So harmless that they convinced enough of our low info voters to saddle us with TFG. Meanwhile, in the annals of “Mike Allen and Jim Vanderhei are idiots” I point to today’s Axios monstrosity titled, I kid you not, “Trump’s Liberal Cabinet.” If the headline isn’t enough to make you spew your coffee, the first sentence talks about how his cabinet strongly resembles a European style coalition government!

  31. 31.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @TBone: I watched that show for years with my parents. Sometimes you would see him do “firings” that appeared poorly thought out given what the shows portrayed. Apparently I didn’t know the half of it because I wasn’t surprised to learn that this was a common problem and they edited the show to make his choice appear as logical as possible.

    Early forays into sanewashing.

  36. 36.

    JoyceH

    Anyone saying they know Trump is a good businessman because they watched his TV show should be sentenced to six months watching nothing but Celebrity Jeopardy. They really need to get that those brainiacs they watch on television are played (usually) by dolts.

  37. 37.

    R'Chard

    That is why the NBC exec who concocted the show was apologizing so profusely before the election. He built the lie that built the show. Around ’05 or so I was telling people the only reason Trump was on The Apprentice was to build up familiarity and name/face recognition so he could run for president. I wasn’t taken very seriously, and stopped — cause who could say, and it built up his brand in any case.

    To be fair Trump made some money off The Apprentice — though it was chump change next to what he could hustle off a decent real estate deal. But by the time he ran in 2016 his cachet/charisma/brand was a product, A Thing, and so was his conjured image as a tough savvy businessman. That show was the only reason why, cause his ventures (the steaks, the wines, the ‘university’, all that stuff) were losers, and in the ’90s he was widely considered a bankrupt playboy.

  39. 39.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @JoyceH: Anyone saying they know Trump is a good businessman because they watched his TV show should be sentenced to six months watching nothing but Celebrity Jeopardy. They really need to get that those brainiacs they watch on television are played (usually) by dolts.

    Wolf Blitzer comes to mind. And he’s not even a character. We’re supposed to look at him as an authority conveying important facts. 🤢🤮🤮🤮

  41. 41.

    Gvg

    We also thought the fact that Musk’s get out the vote operation was incompetent would hurt republicans and that our was working. This was not the case. I still think Musk wasted his money and that other republicans were hurt. But what happened anyway? Both for them and us? Different questions.

  45. 45.

    AWOL

    @Parfigliano: Doubt it. We’re a cruel, sadistic, racist, misogynistic, and dumb-as-all fuck collection of states formed when humans could be legally owned. We’re religious sociopaths. Half the nation can’t grok a book above a sixth-grade level. We’re math morons.

    Those tapes would increase his appeal. We’re surrounded by deplorable morons and shits.

    Let them drown in the rain.

  46. 46.

    cmorenc

    A long-standing factor in American pop culture is superhero who possesses some specia lstrenghs and power(s) other people in society lack, and who is therefore the only one able to save society from some looming threats.  This is especially true of Children’s programs, such as “Power Rangers” or “Mutant Ninja Turtles”, but also adults, e.g. the Marvel Superhero movies.  This is also a core theme of Fascism – a powerful leader promoted as uniquely capable of fixing threatening problems created by an opposing force of “others”, whose rise is corollary with the growth of a mythology supporting that notion.  The American public is conditioned by this background to at least sort of with the Avengers were real.

    This is the role Trump claims and attracted a cult behind.  “The Apprentice” created the myth across a wide swath of the American electorate of Trump as uber-alpha powerfully successful business-man also capable of picking the right people as supporting characters for success.

  47. 47.

    KatKapCC

    @TBone:

    As we saw with Pecker, et al.

    (yes typing that name always makes me giggle)

    I’m glad I’m not the only one! What must it have been like to go through school with a name like that…

  48. 48.

    hrprogressive

    This is also why objectively stupid people like MTG and Boebert get elected; They’re essentially reality TV style people.

    Americans by an large don’t want civics, they want trash TV and shitposting.

    Part of the reason this doesn’t exist on the left is because what passes for the left tries to live in “objective reality” with “facts”.

    The American People have proven they don’t give a shit about that.

    I’m not going to say the left needs to start fabricating things like the Fascist GOP.

    But for fuck’s sake you gotta start communicating like them.

    Whenever serial adulterer MTG speaks, I’d be sure to note it.

    When noted statutory rapist Matt Gaetz speaks, I’d note it.

    And so on.

    The dems have got to stop pretending they are in a high school debate class, put on the brass knuckles of communication, and fucking punch these thugs back.

  49. 49.

    Starfish (she/her)

    @Van Buren: Pete Davidson. He is erratic so definitely “shaking things up,” and all the “Pete Davidson is banging your mom” jokes give him masculinity cred.

  51. 51.

    Another Scott

    Unfortunately, it was probably ever thus.

    Stephen Ambrose makes a decent case in Crazy Horse and Custer that one of the reasons why Custer rushed the attack at Little Big Horn was so that he could get back home as the Conquering General that Won the War Against the Sioux and Saved America™ and accept the 1876 Democratic Presidential nomination.

    DJT had run for president several times before, but not gotten anywhere. Was it his TV show that pushed him over the top? Dunno, but kinda doubt it. Remember that he announced 1 day after JEB! (Remember that guy??). People were tired of the Bushes, tired of “dynasties”, JEB was a wet squib, and the GQP didn’t know what to do with Donold. (I’m sure part of it was his reputation for suing everyone – they didn’t want to be sued.) So, Donold won the nomination pretty much by default, helped by the party deciding to go to a “winner take all” system because they were afraid of a floor fight.

    And too many Americans didn’t want “that woman” to be President, so he won the race.

    The GQP is still afraid of him, because they know they don’t have anyone else who can win enough votes. And they refuse to stop all his hate mongering and lies, so his voters keep coming out. And the complexity of life and the world today, and people being tired of being disappointed by that complexity, means that too many of Biden’s voters stayed home 2-3 weeks ago.

    And here we are.

    Will it be a celebrity next time? Far too early to know, IMHO. But I think he was mostly a one-off and his TV show didn’t have too much to do with him winning.

    YMMV.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  52. 52.

    trollhattan

    @Steve LaBonne: I like recalling they found Trump’s actual offices such a dump they had to build a set to convey the look of competence and taste. “Are those ketchup stains on the wall?”

  53. 53.

    trollhattan

    Lord help us all.

    President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

    Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.

    Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.

    Dr. Makary, 54, rose to prominence more than a decade ago as a critic of the medical establishment, speaking out about patient safety and working with hospitals to improve practices. He also gained attention during the pandemic, weighing in on herd immunity, vaccines and masks in 2021, roiling some doctors who were still contending with packed I.C.U.s and hundreds of deaths a week.

  55. 55.

    AM in NC

    @hrprogressive:  I was a nationally ranked high school debater, and we threw a lot sharper elbows at opponents than “old guard” Democrats throw at their opponents today.

    We had the sarcasm and snark down, and POUNDED every single mistake the opposing team made.  No quarter.

    We knew our stuff and showed no mercy.  And we were two girls taking it to the overwhelmingly male teams we faced – and the overwhelmingly male judges (some of whom we knew we had no chance of getting to vote our way unless the boys on the other side literally dropped dead).

    We need the old guard to truly understand how the landscape has changed utterly from when they came up. Or, barring that, step the fuck down for people who do recognize the times we are in.

  59. 59.

    hrprogressive

    @AM in NC: ​
     

    The Old Guard is full of rich, privileged fuckheads who think they inhabit the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” universe / are too wealthy and powerful to care about consequences.

    From the standpoint of being dangerously out of touch, all of them need to go, and they need to be replaced by a generation or two younger than them. People who “get it”.

  60. 60.

    E.

    @cmorenc: I think almost all of our successful TV programming is fascist. It’s always the strong-man stuff, tempered with the women-are-pretty-and-somewhat-fragile stuff, and all wrapped up in “realists know how to make hard choices when the time comes. Some shows also throw in a lot of gun fetishism and conservative ideology about families. The Walking Dead being Exhibit A for this stuff.

  65. 65.

    different-church-lady

    @bbleh: The problem here is anyone with a half a brain would watch The Apprentice and think Trump was a total asshole.

    And yes, I do see the underlying issue that statement indicates.

  70. 70.

    Anotherlurker

    @TBone: After work many years ago, while flipping thru the cable channels and lamenting the absence of anything good to watch, I stumbled upon The Apprentice.  As a NYer my revulsion to trump was baked in so I instantly changed channels.  I happened to stumble upon Jersey Shore and sat thru 5 seconds of  a big haired —-o (Snookie? is that a name associated with that show??) pontificating on tanning.   I immediately shut off the TV, called Cablevision’s customer service and canceled by TV subscription .  I kept internet service.

    I have never looked backed.

  73. 73.

    Ramona

    @Another Scott: that show had everything to do with my boyfriend’s New Jersey blue collar Republican voting Fox watching parents. When their oldest grandchild said incredulously to me in 2014, people are talking about Donald Trump running for president, my boyfriend’s mother said, who else?

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