For Trump, Everything is a rating

[frazzled]

Because few people read the "Arts" pages of the New York Times for their political coverage, I felt it would be useful to call your attention to this article from today's Times by their TV critic, James Poniewozick. It helps us to understand the bizarre obsessions and alternative facts that the Trump administration has been setting the world on fire with for the past few days. And it makes it difficult to understand why Mr. Poniewozick did not mention all this before, for it is old territory for him. He says: "For the political news media, the brazenness was stunning. But those of us who cover television have seen this kind of thing before: the inventions of a celebrity, surrounded by yes men and women, who creates his own reality."

For Donald J. Trump the TV star, ratings were made to be embellished. This turns out to be true as well of Donald J. Trump the president. . . .

Mr. Trump has a reputation among TV reporters for using his own bespoke numbers. In 2015, he came to a Television Critics Association panel for his final season hosting “The Celebrity Apprentice” and declared it “the Number 1 show on television.”

It was not. Publicly available Nielsen ratings flatly proved that. Pressed by reporters, he insisted that it was at least the top-rated show on Monday nights. It was not that either. (It finished the season 67th.) . . .

Last year, Mr. Trump’s former “Apprentice” publicist, Jim Dowd, was interviewed for the PBS “Frontline” election documentary “The Choice.” Mr. Trump, he recalled, would demand that he call up TV-ratings reporters and tell them, “Number 1 show on television, won its time slot,” even if “we were Number 72.” (Mr. Dowd died in September.)

Mr. Trump has always used an aspirational calculator. As a real estate developer, he built Trump Tower with 58 stories and declared it 68 stories tall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/arts/television/for-trump-everything-is-a-rating.html?&hpw&rref=television&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

Mr. Poniewozick had an inkling, though he never shared it with us. Perhaps he thought all this would change if Trump became president, or perhaps he thought he'd never be president anyway; or perhaps he thought who listens to a television critic anyway. Nonetheless:

If you knew all this, then you knew, when you saw the expanses of white space on the National Mall on Friday, that Defcon 1 klaxons were going to be blaring in the command center of Mr. Trump’s ego. He would be made small. His crowds would be smaller than Mr. Obama’s — smaller than the Women’s March! It would be in pictures, on TV, where things are the most real of all. It would make him look, in his understanding of the world, like a loser. Donald J. Trump is not a loser. Ergo, it was not true.

Even television critics can see things clearly, however, and know the difference between real and unreal. And he ends his article by making the most cogent, if chilling, statement about the situation I have yet seen:

Mr. Trump’s tendency to treat truth as negotiable was idiosyncratic in a TV star. In a president, it’s disturbing. Alternative facts are what they use in alternatives to democracy.

[dalton99a]

1. It's all about size

[2naSalit]

2. Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who's the bigliest king of all?

I did hear him say "bigly" again yesterday so I don't think it was anything else when he said it in a debate last year.