Start With Deb Fischer, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rick Scott & Marsha Blackburn
The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party, a McConnell biography by Michael Tackett was timed to come out right before the election, although it’s hard to imagine who might be influenced by it since Trump’s supporters were long ago taught to hate and distrust McConnell as much as they hate and distrust than anyone who might offer an alternative version of the Trump cult. Tackett informs readers that McConnell, who has endorsed Señor T this year, said Trump’s J-6 behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him. And for a narcissist like him, that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”
Yesterday the Associated Press reported that when Trump held up COVID relief funds, McConnell noted that “This despicable human being is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”
Jim Miller’s assessment of Trump yesterday, might be more impactful since he led the team that marketed the reality show, The Apprentice, that made Trump a nationally-known household name not tied to scandal, the way his name was known in the New York media market. Miller began is commentary with an apology to America: “I helped create a monster… To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.”
In fact, Trump declared business bankruptcy four times before the show went into production, and at least twice more during his 14 seasons hosting. The imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV.
Trump may have been the perfect choice to be the boss of this show, because more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV and didn’t want to hire random game show winners onto their executive teams. Trump had no such concerns. He had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true.
At NBC, we promoted the show relentlessly. Thousands of 30-second promo spots that spread the fantasy of Trump’s supposed business acumen were beamed over the airwaves to nearly every household in the country. The image of Trump that we promoted was highly exaggerated. In its own way, it was “fake news” that we spread over America like a heavy snowstorm. I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.
I discovered in my interactions with him over the years that he is manipulative, yet extraordinarily easy to manipulate. He has an unfillable compliment hole. No amount is too much. Flatter him and he is compliant. World leaders, including apparently Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, have discovered that too.
I also found Trump remarkably thin-skinned. He aggressively goes after those who critique him and seeks retribution. That’s not very businesslike – and it’s certainly not presidential. This week, he threatened to use the National Guard against Americans who oppose him, calling them the “enemy from within.”
I learned early on in my dealings with Trump that he thought he could simply say something over and over, and eventually people would believe it. He would say to me, “The Apprentice— America’s No. 1 TV show.” But it wasn’t. Not that week. Not that season. I had the ratings in front of me. He had seen and heard the ratings, but that didn’t matter. He just kept saying it was the “No. 1 show on television,” even after we corrected him. He repeated it on press tours too, knowing full well it was wrong. He didn’t like being fact-checked back then either.
…I also learned from working with him that he has questionable judgment. At the wrap party for The Apprentice season three, he pitched an idea for the upcoming season. He told me we should make a team of Black players compete against white players. My first thought was: WTF?! I tried to get through to him by speaking the language he understands: money. I explained that sponsors wouldn’t want to be associated with a show that pitted races against each other. But he could not understand why this was such a bad idea. (And, no, we did not use his idea.)
While we were successful in marketing The Apprentice, we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.
Miller completed his commentary by endorsing Kamala… not long after Trump referred to the J-6 insurrectionists as “we,” something likely to show up in court at some point down the road. I guess it decided to stop distancing himself from the violent part of his attempted coup. The episode took place Wednesday at a town hall on Univision, Trump allies, where he “was confronted by a self-identified Republican named Ramiro González who cast Trump’s actions surrounding Jan. 6 as a dealbreaker for him. González challenged Trump to win his support.”
But Trump made no apologies for that day. What he instead did was actually link himself to the rioters— stronger than he ever has before.
“There were no guns down there; we didn’t have guns,” Trump said, before repeating: “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”
The first thing to note is that’s false; Trump supporters did have guns and many other weapons. But also consider what Trump has done rhetorically. He cast the insurrectionists as a “we.”
…Trump clearly wants people to forget and misunderstand the events of Jan. 6, because it was the biggest stain on his presidency; a historic number of Republicans voted to impeach and convict him over it, and many others acquitted him only on a technicality— while still blaming him to varying degrees.
You could also certainly argue that Trump casting this as a day to celebrate serves his more authoritarian impulses; these were people who rose up in his name, and there’s plenty of evidence that he liked that and wants to promote that sort of impulse in his base.
…But there’s also danger with the broader electorate in so closely associating yourself with the rioters, whom Americans writ large have little sympathy for.
A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll this year showed just 12 percent of Americans said the rioters “defended democracy,” while a clear majority— 58 percent— said they “threatened democracy.”
There are also limits to an embrace of the rioters even in the GOP. Fewer than half of Republicans in that poll agreed with Trump that the Jan. 6 defendants’ punishments were “too harsh.” Another poll last year showed just 24 percent of Republican primary voters preferred a candidate who supported those who entered the Capitol.
It’s possible that has changed somewhat as Trump has increasingly bear-hugged the rioters as the 2024 election has worn on; we don’t have a lot of good, more recent data.
But those numbers would seem to confirm that Trump is truly testing Americans’ willingness to write off that day and his supporters’ willingness to lump themselves in with that “we.” And it’s not just a 2024 election issue; it’s also a more lasting test for the strength of our democracy.