Donald Trump, a former celebrity of the wildly popular business game show, “The Apprentice,” knows the power of reality TV in the entertainment world. The popularity of the dog-eat-dog competition was a surprise even to its creator, according to Politico Magazine.
“Do you believe this?” Trump said. “I go into the boardroom, I rant and rave like a lunatic to these kids, and I leave and I go off and build my buildings. And then it gets good ratings, and they pay me,” Trump said. “I mean, can you believe this?”
Trump has run his Presidential campaign with a similar “shock and awe” attitude, and as politicians and reporters voiced their outrage at his many and varied blunders, the spotlight turned on Trump and his popularity – paradoxically – grew.
Some say that’s not an accident.
In an interview with Politico, former Republican candidate Ted Cruz said the media’s focus on the Trump phenomenon distracted voters from learning about better-qualified Republican leaders.
“[Trump would] lose state after state after state and the media would say that he can’t be beaten … and the media liked to paint me as some whacked-out theocrat,” Cruz said.
According to Cruz, the fascination with Trump is more than simply watching a trainwreck in slow motion.
Politico’s Glenn Thrush, “[Cruz] sees collusion, if not an outright conspiracy, between the reality TV candidate and the titans of cable news. Their goal, he told me, was to elevate a hard-to-elect Republican nominee while shoving aside more appealing candidates like himself.”
Cruz said the media decided Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was dead early in the primary cycle, and that verdict sucked the life out of a campaign that still had a shot at pulling off Sanders’ promised “revolution.”
Trump and Hillary Clinton have been the big winners in a Presidential race filled with all the colors in the “bad to worse” spectrum, but Republican leaders say that Trump’s attention-grabbing can’t go on forever. Eventually, Trump has to convince voters – and establishment Republicans – that he can lead a country, not just a presidential version of “The Apprentice.” And the media spotlight has turned into an unflattering anti-Trump glare.
House Speaker, Paul Ryan, who endorsed Trump in May, has repeatedly called for Trump to clean up his rhetoric, especially after Trump’s attacked Hispanic judge Gonzalo Curiel on Twitter.
Politico talked with GOP delegates before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and found that many were uncertain about whether Trump is presidential quality.
“I think Trump’s new campaign manager has talked some sense into him and he realizes now that the same kind of rhetoric that he used during the primaries, which earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars of free media time and boosted his candidacy, will no longer work,” a Colorado Republican said. “He needs to be seen now as ‘presidential,’ and he has certainly been doing that.”
It may be time for Trump to enter a new role in the 2016 election show – it’s time to audition for President.
