How Donald Trump’s Reality Show Changed American Politics Forever

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House is the renewal of a long-running reality show, The Daily Beast’s Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles argued during an appearance on Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s podcast Pivot, casting Americans as extras in a “massive human drama.”

(If the 2024 election was a “tribe has spoken” moment, in other words, then Trump supporters had a voting majority.)

Before entering politics, Trump honed his performance skills on sixteen seasons of The Apprentice; these showbiz instincts translated into his show-boating style of governance, replacing traditional policy and diplomacy with soundbites and confrontations, even re-purposing his catchphrase “You’re fired!” for abrupt personnel shifts amid his administration.

“Trump is the ultimate entertainer. That‘s why he’s president,” Coles told Swisher and Galloway, pinpointing how Trump’s unique mastery of media and chaos continues to dominate American politics.

Coles described Trump as a “tabloid president”—someone who didn’t just make news but became it. And his unorthodox methods worked. Trump’s supporters aren’t just voters. They’re fans. They wear his slogans and iconography—dark MAGA, the garbage bag—like merch but also as their team colors; they travel to his rallies as if they’re hot-ticket concerts; they lovingly embrace the inherent contradictions in his candidacy. Trump has managed to present himself as both the embodiment of “success” and, paradoxically, someone in tune with the struggles of the working class.

This past election was not “business as usual” politics, as Coles argued, adding that Democrats failed to adapt to his unconventional methods.

They were playing entirely different games, perhaps with different stakes too: “He faced two options: go to jail or be president,” Coles noted, describing Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback” as something stranger than fiction.

And Justin Wells, a longtime Tucker Carlson producer, is capitalizing on it with Art of the Surge: The Donald Trump Comeback, a docuseries which has captured the last months of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and will continue to film his transition back into the presidency.

But while Trump may be living (and governing) through the camera’s lens, for Americans, it’s The Real World.