For more than a decade, Donald Trump appeared on NBC playing a master builder of New York City, a family man and exacting authority figure who nonetheless had empathy for the workers he fired. It was utter bullshit, of course, but in that odd alternative universe of Reality TV, it was presented as real.
By the time Mark Burnett figured out he could make some cash on Trump’s elephantine ego, the blowhard’s career was in disrepair, his garbage reputation and business practices making it all but impossible for him to open any structure in Manhattan bigger than a tent in Central Park. No respectable person with funds wanted to float Bull Connor as a condo salesman, but fortunately for him money often finds its way into disreputable hands.
Despite his idiot-box persona, Trump was, more accurately, the capo of a crime family, one who’d been fined $10 million dollars for money laundering, stiffed contractors, bilked classes full of desperate people who’d attended his ludicrous Trump University, regularly conducted business with the shadiest types, and whose children had been spared arrest for fraud for strange and mysterious reasons.
You could say that anyone with half a brain would have known Trump was merely playing a role on television, but that’s not how things currently work in America. Trump in the White House never could have happened with the rot of our system in many areas—law, politics, media, education, etc.—but there’s no doubt he would not currently be appearing on Fox, CNN, and every other channel as a Simon Cowell-ish strongman without our damaging real-unreal television culture.
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Kris Jenner is is very good at a certain type of business, despite being a hideous person. (Or, more accurately, because she is a hideous person.) Truth be told, she’s not as awful as Joe Jackson whose main saving grace is the accident of genetics that allowed him to have children with traditional entertainment talent, but she is still awful. She will never be President, but she is like a terrible congressperson who serves endless terms, never going away. She is ours, for good, and that’s not a mistake. That’s the system we’ve built—that’s who we are.
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The opening of James Walcott’s New York Times review of books about the Trump and Kardashian clans:
There are those who have fame thrust upon them, and those who thrust themselves upon fame like an invasion force. It is the latter troupe of shameless, relentless thrusters that occupies us here, the Trump and Kardashian clanships. Until fairly recently, family dynasties — whatever skeletons they may have had in their closets — thrived on a mantle of achievement handed down from generation to generation, whether we’re talking about the Adamses, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes or Flying Wallendas. Such a quaint ideal and needless effort this service obligation seems now, when exhibitionism in the pseudoraw is what gets rewarded, thanks in large measure to the phony theatrics of reality TV, which turned the social theorist Daniel Boorstin’s notion of a celebrity — someone famous for being famous — into a terrarium thronged with dance moms, mob wives and Honey Boo Boos. It has elevated into omnipresence those who would have otherwise played out a normal cycle in public awareness and then disappeared to pester us no more. Without “The Apprentice” and its successor, “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Donald Trump would have remained an egregious real estate self-promoter and gossip-column fixture, and his children minor adjuncts and boardroom props; without “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” the brood bearing that name would have been living footnotes to the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Instead, one family wields incalculable political power, the other pervades pop culture and fashion like an incurable virus. The two books under review offer peep-show views of preening lives and impostures before they went panoramic.•