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For 14 seasons right up to his first run for president, Donald Trump was the star of his own reality shows, “The Apprentice” and then “The Celebrity Apprentice.” The shows stopped, but Trump as president is still creating his own reality.
When so many Americans say they’ve tuned him out — like a bad TV episode — the metaphor is an apt one.
In the increasingly warped world in which the showrunner president appears to dwell, he inherited messes and created the best economy in history. Trump took a country that was an international laughingstock and made it respected again. He won election three times, he said yet again at Friday’s White House Correspondents Assn. dinner. But the second was rigged against him, so brave “patriots” revolted on Jan. 6, 2021; they were ultimately foiled and then unfairly prosecuted and convicted — only to have super-hero Trump return to dispense clemency and spring the freedom-fighters on his first day back in office.
Daily, on matters big and small, the president just makes things up. The botched makeover of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was the work of vandals with box-cutters (neither of which have been found), not mistakes by Trump’s no-bid contractors. He ended eight wars (or is it 10 now?) but was unjustly denied a Nobel Peace Prize. Then he started a Mideast war, never mind that he’d promised voters he would never do so. But good news: He quickly won it (though strikes and counterstrikes — and deaths — continue). What’s left is just a “skirmish” against Iran, Trump dismissively told a crowd in Georgia last week, just days after four service members were killed in Jordan and Iraq.
Rarely, however, has Trump’s recasting of reality to fit his chosen narrative been so evident on varied fronts — and grotesque — as in recent days.
A day after the Georgia rally, the Pentagon was found to have fudged the war casualty numbers on its website, subtracting the latest four deaths from its official count and seemingly minimizing the death toll in Trump’s war/not a war. Amid an outcry, the so-called War Department restored the four soldiers’ deaths, but in a separate, unexplained category. The department also acknowledged a much higher number of wounded troops.
Trump, in true showbiz style, is quick to take a liking to people “from central casting,” and so it is that the wholly incompetent Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News celebrity who tries so hard to give high-T energy, is in charge of the Pentagon. He knows it’s his job to make Trump look good, facts be damned. Recall that in March, just after Trump started the war on Iran, Hegseth assailed the media for harping on the deaths of six service members in Kuwait to “make the president look bad.”
The Pentagon’s wretched scripting of the Iran war’s casualty count came just after Trump posthumously put words in the mouths of the four most recently killed soldiers. He claimed to reporters, “All of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’” Which, amazingly, just happened to echo Trump’s oft-stated rationale for his war.
Who does things like that? Trump, of course. His many “Sir” stories of what favorable things people supposedly say to him are likely fictitious as well, having the puerile whiff of “Penthouse letters” fantasies, but they don’t involve slain men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice and can no longer speak for themselves — including to refute the president.
Separately, and in a different way tragically, Trump lately has escalated his second-term rewriting of American history to fit his celebratory no-warts-at-all version. He doesn’t see that Americans can celebrate the nation’s history even as they acknowledge the periods of enslavement, Jim Crow, women’s long wait for a vote, military failures and much more; most citizens recognize that the perpetual efforts to right such wrongs — their own efforts and those of citizens long before them — truly are what make America great. What Trump sees instead is people who hate their country. He says so.
Last Friday, he signed an executive order calling for signs to be installed outside the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History warning that the museum I’ve visited dozens of times since I was a preteen doesn’t accurately reflect U.S. history. Some day soon, I’m confident, Trump’s signs will themselves be history — just like the ones that read “Whites Only” or “No Irish Need Apply,” another shameful prop proudly discarded.
Trump has targeted the Smithsonian, a national treasure, since regaining office. After a first executive order last year demanded removal of “improper ideology” from its many museums, some material was removed or changed (including references to Trump’s impeachments). The culmination of his scriptwriters’ work was the 162-page, perversely titled “Saving America’s Story,” released on the Fourth of July.
Exhibits at the Smithsonian museums occasionally have sparked controversy, but never before has the entire institution come under assault. “To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History,” the report said, it’s “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”
Huh. I never came away with that sense, nor has anyone I’ve known or shepherded to Smithsonian sites over decades.
As for Trump’s sense of history, it was on sick display over the weekend, in a social-media binge that depicted him in scores of AI-generated posts as, variously, “Guardian of the World,” posed against a fiery backdrop of strikes on Iran; “The Man Who Saved America”; a caped crusader saving George Washington from falling off Mount Rushmore; and the “Cosmic Commander.”
Trump is none of those things, just as he wasn’t the successful mogul he played on TV. And as polls show, Americans have soured on his reality-show presidency, especially when their reality is high prices and headlines of war and killings in city streets.
Being outrageous, erratic and unpredictable is a selling point for a reality TV figure. But not for a president.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that Trump’s long run as the star of “The Apprentice” and “The Celebrity Apprentice” has carried over into the presidency, with Trump still acting as a reality-show “showrunner” who constructs a personalized storyline rather than engaging with verifiable facts, echoing commentary that his 14-season TV career carefully manufactured a persona of decisive success.[6][3]
Building on that TV metaphor, the article contends that Trump continually rewrites major events — claiming, for example, to have created the best economy in history, to have turned an “international laughingstock” into a respected nation, and to have effectively won three presidential elections — treating disputed or false assertions as if they were scripted plot points in an ongoing show.
The piece stresses that this reality-bending extends to foreign policy, describing how Trump’s framing of the conflict with Iran oscillates between boasting that he “quickly won” a war and dismissing continuing violence and U.S. troop deaths as a mere “skirmish,” thereby minimizing casualties and recasting a deadly situation as a triumphal storyline designed for audience appeal.
Additionally, the article criticizes the Pentagon’s handling of casualty data—under Trump’s chosen Pentagon chief—as an extension of this showmanship, portraying the fudging and reclassification of death and injury figures as an effort to protect the president’s image rather than transparently account for the human cost of his decisions.
The article highlights Trump’s habit of inventing flattering anecdotes, including attributing policy-affirming quotes to recently killed service members, and links these “Sir, they said to me…” stories to the performative, scripted praise that was common in his TV career, noting that this crosses a moral line when it uses the voices of people who can no longer speak for themselves.[3]
Moreover, the piece describes Trump’s second-term approach to U.S. history as a kind of ideological rewrite: executive orders targeting the Smithsonian and the 162-page “Saving America’s Story” report are portrayed as attempts to erase or downplay slavery, Jim Crow, women’s disenfranchisement, and other injustices in favor of an unblemished, celebratory narrative of American greatness.
The article argues that Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and his demand for warning signs criticizing its exhibits, represent an assault on a respected national institution and on a broader public understanding that patriotism can coexist with an honest reckoning over past wrongs.
In addition, the piece links Trump’s flood of AI-generated images depicting himself as “Guardian of the World,” “Cosmic Commander,” and other heroic figures to a broader pattern of self-mythologizing, suggesting that these digital fantasies mirror the way his reality-TV persona once recast a troubled business record into an image of unqualified success.[1][8]
Finally, the article concludes that Americans are increasingly rejecting this “reality-show presidency,” noting that polls show public souring as everyday realities of high prices and ongoing violence clash with the president’s grandiose narrative, and asserting that qualities prized in reality TV—outrageousness, unpredictability, and theatrical conflict—are profoundly ill-suited to the responsibilities of governing.[5][2]
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the article’s portrayal of Trump’s TV background as purely corrosive, some coverage has emphasized how “The Apprentice” effectively introduced Trump to millions of viewers as a confident decision-maker, arguing that the series remade his image into that of a successful business mogul and helped many voters perceive him as a strong leader fit for high office.[1][7]
Additionally, profiles of Trump’s television career have noted that his long tenure at the center of a high-rating network show, his ability to command audience attention, and the significant revenue he earned from “The Apprentice” are, for supporters and some observers, evidence of real-world accomplishment and branding savvy rather than mere illusion.[8][1]
Whereas the article treats Trump’s reality-TV style in politics as inherently dangerous, other analysts have framed it more neutrally as a defining feature of contemporary media politics, describing Trump as the first “reality TV president” whose instinct for spectacle, visual staging, and direct performance for the cameras reflects a broader shift in how political figures communicate and maintain public attention.[2][4]
Moreover, some commentary has suggested that focusing on Trump’s reality-TV persona can oversimplify the dynamics of his rise, arguing that the “reality-TV president” label risks reducing complex structural factors—such as media incentives, party polarization, and economic discontent—to a matter of showmanship alone, and that this framing may let institutions that enabled his ascent off the hook.[6]
In contrast to the article’s insistence that Trump’s TV persona is fundamentally deceptive, certain analyses have stressed that all reality television involves constructed narratives, editing, and performance; from this perspective, Trump’s blending of entertainment and politics is seen less as uniquely dishonest and more as a particularly vivid example of how modern public life routinely blurs the lines between fact and spectacle.[6][3]
While the article criticizes Trump’s self-aggrandizing imagery and heroic narratives, some observers have noted that such mythic framing resonates deeply with his base, who see depictions of Trump as “saving America” or fighting global threats as symbolic reinforcement of a broader populist story in which a strong outsider defends ordinary people against corrupt elites.[5][2]
Finally, unlike the article’s stark conclusion that reality-TV traits are incompatible with the presidency, certain commentators have argued that Trump’s ability to generate drama, dominate coverage, and keep supporters engaged has been politically effective, contending that this theatrical style—though polarizing—has allowed Trump to control the narrative in ways more conventional politicians struggle to match.[2][4]
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