Is Reality TV Really to Blame for President Donald Trump?

Last year, Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen noticed Donald Trump using so many pot-stirring tactics from the Bravo franchise that he began cataloguing them on Twitter. When the president used social media to cancel a White House invitation that N.B.A. champion Stephen Curry had not yet officially rejected, Cohen tweeted, “HOUSEWIVES PLAYBOOK: rescind invitations liberally! (See: Bethenny re LuAnn, Mexico; Bethenny & Ramona, Mexico).” Trumps post-election digs about Hillary? “Keep bringing up fights from last season.” Trumps excuse for not immediately calling Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto following an earthquake? “Blame cell-phone reception.” Trumps suggestion that Hillary Clintons presidential campaign colluded with the Russians? Tossing out bogus statements in desperate pleas “to stay on the show,” Cohen wrote.

It isnt surprising that in the first year-plus of his presidency, Trump has returned to the reality-TV toolbox he used so effectively during his 14 seasons on NBCs The Apprentice—where he rebranded himself from 90s tabloid buffoon into something resembling a successful C.E.O. Yet its still scary that Trump—essentially an amusing reality-TV character who wound up in the White House through an arguably Twilight Zone-worthy sequence of events—is running the country with the same kind of schemes Ramona Singer deploys during white-wine-fueled Hamptons getaways on The Real Housewives of New York City. Only, to Cohen, Trumps flagrant headline grabs are so artless that the president would be kicked off a Bravo series that traffics in backseat limo brawls. (Or maybe “impeached” would be the verb.)

“I would fire him after one season, because hes using every trick in the book,” says Cohen. “He is like a stunt queen in that hell do anything to stay on the show.” Referring to short-lived cast member Aviva Drescher—who was booted from the franchise after throwing her prosthetic leg in a restaurant in an over-the-top bid to manufacture drama—Cohen says, “Housewives like Trump dont last because theres no there there. When you throw your leg, what else is left?”

Because the Constitution makes it slightly harder to re-cast the president than a housewife—unless causing the wrong kind of scene at Le Cirque qualifies as a high crime or misdemeanor—the country has spent the last 18 months learning the answer to Cohens rhetorical question. The line between reality TV and Trumps presidency blurs every time Trump makes a momentous political decision as if he were a frazzled contestant on a network competition show where an oversize cardboard check was at stake. And my recent conversations with reality-TV insiders on the subject revealed a class of entertainment executives in various stages of bafflement over the whole thing. Some recoil at the idea of Trump in office, and have been defending themselves against the post-election narrative that their genre is somehow to blame for the current political crisis. Others were somewhat resigned in their acknowledgment of Trumps mastery of manufactured drama.

To Fenton Bailey, an executive producer of RuPauls Drag Race, on VH1, reality TV was merely one possible means to Trumps end: “The fact that he was able to use a show doesnt have anything to do with the genre itself—it has to do with the person. Did he use, kidnap, or hijack the medium to advance his own ends? Sure. But its got nothing to do with the genre.”

“He was on one reality show. And reality TV is as diverse as this country is diverse,” says reality-TV pioneer Jonathan Murray, explaining that high- and low-minded fare co-exist in this genre just like they do in the scripted arena. “As someone who was there at the beginning, when Real World first went on the air—that was about putting seven diverse people together from different parts of the country, different races, different sexual orientations. And, yes, therell be conflict, but out of that conflict will come growth and hopefully understanding. Sometimes I get frustrated that Donald Trump is somehow held up as all things reality TV, because hes just one tiny sliver of it.”

Padma Lakshmi, host and executive producer of Bravos Top Chef, suggests that social media—which Trump has also used to peddle himself—is “just as much to blame.”

SallyAnn Salsano, the creator of MTVs Jersey Shore and VH1s Martha & Snoops Potluck Dinner Party, has a related theory: “Because the news cycle has changed, and because our president takes to Twitter the way that he does, I think it makes him more like an Everyman. I think thats how he actually got elected. He went about it a totally different way and went after—to equate it to TV terms—a different core audience.”

Still, in addition to using The Apprentice in the mid-aughts to make over his image from clown prince of the New York press to Americas favorite TV C.E.O., Trump seems to have honed the dark art of hooking an audience. “He [continues] to just get free press because he knows how to manipulate the press and news cycle,” says Top Chef judge and executive producer Tom Colicchio. “What hes managed to do is, whenever he really is in trouble, he just changes the subject to whatever outrageous thing that comes along, and we forget all the other things that hes done.”

Says Lakshmi, “I know when I say something thats going to get sound-bited. He learned to harness media attention by saying these outlandish things, so that his network, which is, I think, also my parent network [Bravo and NBC are both owned by NBCUniversal], could [splice together] these little ads to promote him [playing] Big Billionaire on his little Apprentice.”

“I think Trump was a great reality character,” says Murray, whose nose for casting has yielded long-running hit series like MTVs Real World (32 seasons), Lifetimes Project Runway (16 seasons), and E!s Keeping Up with the Kardashians (14 seasons). “A lot of the things that made him a great reality character, I guess, appealed to a segment of the population. Hes unpredictable. Youre never quite sure what hes going to say . . . which viewers love. They love when it doesnt all go [as planned].”

But reality-TV shows have strict parameters that their cast members must operate within. As W. Kamau Bell, the host of CNNs United Shades of America, points out, “A reality show has rules. Trump had to fire somebody on every episode of The Apprentice—and at least he had an executive producer [to guide him]. Every day were guessing because theres no rules [for the president]. Even Flavor Flav had rules on Flavor of Love. Audiences knew when the beats were going to happen—but there are no checks, no balances, no act breaks, no cliffhangers . . . . Its all a cliffhanger.”

If Bell and Cohen were to appoint one of their own reality-TV brethren to the countrys highest office, they would have chosen differently. “Id give Kris Jenner a shot [because] she seems to know how to make things happen and wants to be inclusive,” says Bell. “She seems like she understands how to run economies of scale.” When pressed to pick a president from his own stable, Cohen selects Bethenny Frankel. The Real Housewives of New York City cast member sold her Skinnygirl cocktail company in a hefty multi-million-dollar deal in 2011, and arguably did more to help the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico than Trump did—chartering four planes to personally deliver 20,000 pounds of medical and survival supplies and nearly $225,900 in gift cards. She was also, coincidentally, a member of The Apprentice universe (on Martha Stewarts 2005 spin-off).

With the 2016 season decidedly in the rearview mirror, and the midterms and 2020 ahead, some reality-TV show-runners have been using their platforms to respond to Trump. A few series have even begun addressing, incorporating, or directly responding to his presidency in ways that scripted programming cant.

“Trump gives our show homework assignments, whether he knows it or not,” says Bell, who embeds himself in a different American community for each episode—including the K.K.K. in the South; Muslims in the Midwest; and the gangs of Chicago. “Its my responsibility to use my show to set the record straight and respond directly to his facts. Its not an accident that our first episode this season was about the U.S.-Mexico border,” says Bell, referencing his season premiere spent interviewing those affected by the U.S.s current hard-line immigration policy.

If the country had a more “inclusive, equitable” president, Bell says, he would love to explore more lighthearted subjects on his series. “Remember when Jimmy Kimmel was just a fun guy? Now even Jimmy Kimmel has to be woke.” Explaining how the political crisis has fractured the TV landscape, Bell adds, “You can be the [TV show] thats the break from the news or you can be the [TV] show thats going to help people process whats going on in the news. But you have to choose to opt out [of the political crisis]. You cant pretend like you dont know the conversation is going on.”

The Real Housewives of New York City integrated the 2016 presidential election as a multi-episode story line. “It was very much on [the cast members] minds, and it was part of their lives in a very deep way. Anything thats part of their lives to that extent were going to cover,” says Cohen.

This season, Top Chef judges Lakshmi, Colicchio, Gail Simmons, and Graham Elliot notably wore Planned Parenthood pins during one episode, and introduced Syrian refugees and Mexican immigrants to chefs during a heritage-food challenge in another. Other reality-TV insiders have found that, in a cultural climate where the president seems to be encouraging divisiveness, their series have taken on new meaning for audience members.

“I do think that the audiences commitment has grown deeper [while Trump has been in office because] there is a greater need to be connected to a community,” says RuPauls Drag Race executive producer Randy Barbato, who singled out an episode during which contestant Dusty Ray Bottoms shared a story about his parents pressuring him to go through conversion therapy as a particularly poignant moment this season. “At a time when politicians are trying to limit L.G.B.T.Q. rights, we need vehicles that not only champion outside voices but create visibility for them.”

Reflecting on the impact Trump has had on some corners of the genre, Barbato says, “I think [his election] raised the stakes for content-makers to double down on quality and protect the people who are making the content that is confronting this kind of red wave.” The question, of course, is whether fighting the fire coming from the bully pulpit with more reality will have any effect. That question wont be answered for another two years. In the meantime, at least one executive was thinking about an advantage that TV has over the American approach to representative governance.

“The great thing about television is that it is a true democracy,” says Murray. “If you dont get the ratings, youre not going to stay on the air.”

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