Donald Trump. Meet Lonesome Rhodes.
The blistering movie A Face in the Crowd deliciously exposes how Americans are seduced by people who swindle us. “This parable about a small-town con man who attains the power to sway the nation to his whims is America: our fanaticism, whimsy, and desire for elusive authenticity at the expense of our souls,” April Wolfe wrote in a spot-on review of the 1957 movie.
Andy Griffith, in his first film role, long before he played Andy Taylor, the low-key widowed sheriff of Mayberry, plays a charismatic hayseed who rises to popularity in a television show and, with an exaggerated sense of his new persuasive power, goes berserk.
Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, investigative reporters for The New York Times, recently wrote a lengthy, perceptive and revealing inside story of how the producers of “The Apprentice” crafted a TV version of Donald Trump — measured, thoughtful and endlessly wealthy — that ultimately fueled his path to the White House.
The story meticulously exposed how the producers of The Apprentice turned Trump from a slightly garish, smug New York real estate schmuck with a history of business failures who worked out of a musty, messy office into business royalty, an astute, self-made billionaire.
“The facts never really mattered,” the New York Times story noted. “Drama mattered. Comedy mattered. Entertainment value mattered. Mr. (Mark) Burnett (the show’s executive producer) liked to call it “dramality.” And Mr. Trump was dramatic, occasionally funny, and always entertaining.”
So when he came down the escalator in June 2015, staging the announcement of his candidacy for president, he was a new man, remade by reality television.
Since producing The Apprentice, Burnett has made other successful shows, including “Shark Tank” and “The Voice”, but as Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in The New Yorker in 2018, “…his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told Keefe. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”
The New York Times story agreed.
But Burnett and his associates kept their opinion of Trump to themselves, giving him free reign to elevate his prominence based on lies.
Commenters on the Times story savaged Burnett and his associates for foisting Trump on the American public.
“Mark Burnett created this mess the country is in,” one commenter posted in the paper’s online comments section. “The dumbing-down of America is from all reality TV and especially this egocentric reality “star” turned president. It’s all a complete disgrace that has ruined the fabric of our country.”
“You couldn’t print what I think of these garbage people,” another commented. ”Between Burnett’s greed… and all these enablers, they tipped over the first Domino to end what is left of our Democracy.”
“He was always a 2-bit husband, father and criminal,” wrote another. “Then, the megalomaniac and pathological narcissist gets a gig on probably one of the most scripted and controlled shows ever produced and becomes a 2-bit actor. Ratings and fakery will take you a long way in TV.”
“He’s a phony who starred in a show that presented him as a wildly successful businessman while his real business “empire” was failing with numerous bankruptcies despite his $400 million inheritance,” said another. “His political success is also a product of the same fake narrative coupled with a vast army of low information voters who enjoy his racist tinged insult comic act.”
But Burnett and his cronies weren’t the only ones willing to hide the reality of Trump from the public. Hangers-on who rode Trump’s coattails to the White House and then stayed on in Trump’s administration were guilty, too.
They were perfectly willing to advance an empty vessel of a man created by television, just like the admirers of Chance, a simple gardener whose TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity in Peter Sellers’ 1979 movie, Being There.
The essential difference between Chance and Trump is in their relative naïveté.. Chance is a picture of childlike innocence thrown out among vultures. Trump is no innocent. Nor are the hangers-on who have attached themselves to his star like remora, fishes noted for attaching themselves to sharks for food and locomotion.
The remora men (they are mostly men) who have attached themselves to Trump, likely knowing full well of his destructive narcissism, includes key campaign advisors Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Brad Parscale, and Hope Hicks, his Chiefs of Staff, Reince Priebus, John Kelly and Mark Meadows, as well as cabinet members including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.
Then, of course, there were the Republican members of Congress who derided Trump and his incendiary rhetoric in private and gave him rapturous praise in public. I recall reading a story about how, after Trump left a private meeting with key members of Congress when he was president, they could be heard laughing at him.
They have all been in a position to tell the truth to the American people, to the mob Trump has spawned, but they have chosen not to. They are as guilty as Burnett, more-so because they had an obligation to the country.
They all have displayed the same self-serving weakness as the men and women who were well aware of President Biden’s declining mental and physical state, kept it from the public and still backed him in his ego-driven selfish run for another term. “Taken together, this is all a troubling portrait — of unelected staffers trying to shield the public from Biden’s declining mental health so they can preserve their access to power and ability to make policy,” Philip Klein wrote in the National Review.
We deserve better.