On the morning of April 13, 2020, the president of the United States delivered a briefing that would, by any conventional measure, be remembered as a catastrophe. The death toll from Covid-19 had surpassed 20,000 Americans. Hospitals in New York were running out of ventilators. Bodies were being stored in refrigerated trucks outside overwhelmed morgues. And Donald Trump, standing at the podium in the White House briefing room, chose to fill the airtime with a video montage.
The footage, which ran for several minutes, had been assembled by White House staff at his direction. It showed images of the president at work: signing documents, meeting with military officials, speaking earnestly with members of his coronavirus task force. It was set to dramatic orchestral music, the kind of swelling score that accompanies a protagonist’s triumph in the third act of a Hollywood film. When it ended, Trump turned to the cameras and declared that the video had been produced to rebut the “fake news” media’s suggestion that he had been slow to respond to the pandemic. He had, he said, been working “around the clock” from the very beginning. The montage proved it.
It was a moment of such surreal self-regard that even some of Trump’s allies struggled to defend it. But it was also, in its way, a key to understanding the nature of his power. The pandemic briefing was not, for Trump, primarily an occasion for conveying information or coordinating a national response. It was a production. He was the star. The briefing room was the set. The cameras were the audience. And the montage was the scene in which the hero reminds the viewer of everything he has already endured.
This was not a departure from the norms of presidential communication. It was the apotheosis of a logic that Trump had been perfecting for decades: the logic of the frame.
The Education of a Producer
Before he was a candidate, before he was a developer, before he was the inheritor of his father’s real estate business, Donald Trump was a student of television. He understood, in a way that few of his contemporaries did, that the medium had changed the nature of fame and power in America. The old hierarchies—the Ivy League, the corporate boardroom, the Georgetown salon—still existed, but they had been supplanted, in the public imagination, by a new one: the hierarchy of the screen. The people on television were the people who mattered. The people who were not on television were, in a sense, not fully real.
Trump’s apprenticeship in this new order began in the 1980s, when he became a fixture of New York tabloid culture and a favorite guest on talk shows. He understood that the gossip columns and the morning shows operated on the same principle: visibility was currency. He cultivated a persona—the brash, unapologetic tycoon—that was perfectly calibrated for the camera. He learned to speak in short, declarative sentences. He learned to repeat his catchphrases. He learned to reduce complex situations to simple binaries: winners and losers, friends and enemies, the best and the worst.
But it was The Apprentice, which premiered on NBC in 2004, that completed his transformation. The show was, on its surface, a competition between aspiring business executives. In reality, it was a machine for the production of the Trump myth. Each episode followed a formula: the contestants competed in a business challenge, one of them was eliminated, and Trump delivered the verdict with his famous phrase, “You’re fired.” The show presented Trump as a figure of unquestioned authority, a man whose judgment was final and whose word was law. It also presented him as a man of immense wealth and taste—his boardroom was gleaming, his helicopter was waiting, his lifestyle was aspirational.
What the show did not show was the reality of Trump’s business career: the bankruptcies, the lawsuits, the contractors who went unpaid, the casinos that failed. It presented a fiction, and the fiction was more powerful than the facts. For fourteen seasons and more than two hundred episodes, millions of Americans watched Donald Trump play the role of a successful businessman. And by the time he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy for president, the role had become, in the public imagination, indistinguishable from the man.
The Aesthetics of the Frame
The French situationist Guy Debord, writing in 1967, observed that modern society had become a “spectacle”—a world in which social relations are mediated by images, and in which the image is more real than the reality it represents. Debord was writing about consumer capitalism, but he might as well have been describing the Trump presidency. For Trump, the image is not a representation of reality. It is reality. And the frame—the camera’s frame, the screen’s frame, the social media feed’s frame—is the boundary within which the real is produced.
Consider the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s daily briefings, which ran for weeks and were carried live by cable news networks, were ostensibly about public health. But they were structured like episodes of The Apprentice. Trump would take the podium, often speaking for an hour or more, and would use the time to show clips, display charts, and introduce members of his task force—whom he treated less as expert advisers than as supporting characters in his own drama. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was cast in the role of the loyal subordinate, permitted to speak but always positioned behind the president, always ready to yield the floor when Trump wanted it back.
When the briefings began to generate negative coverage—Trump had suggested injecting disinfectant as a treatment, had mused about the curative properties of sunlight, had repeatedly contradicted his own public health officials—he ended them. The set was dismantled. The production was canceled. The star moved on to other projects.
This was not governance. It was mise-en-scène—the arrangement of actors, props, and cameras to produce a desired effect. Trump approached every crisis, every policy debate, every diplomatic encounter as a director approaches a scene: what is the frame, who is in it, what do they look like, what is the story we are telling? The substance—the actual content of the policy, the actual consequences for human beings—was secondary. What mattered was the image.
The Politics of the Close-Up
The medium through which Trump reached his audience was not the newspaper, not the policy white paper, not the carefully crafted speech. It was the close-up. Trump understood something that Marshall McLuhan had articulated decades earlier: the medium is the message. And the medium of television, with its preference for the intimate, the immediate, the visual, had reshaped the possibilities of political communication.
Ronald Reagan, the first television president, understood this too. But Reagan came from the old Hollywood, where the image was understood as a construction—something to be crafted, controlled, and presented to an audience that knew it was watching a performance. Trump came from reality television, where the convention is that the camera is capturing something real. The Apprentice did not present itself as fiction. It presented itself as a documentary: here is Donald Trump, in his boardroom, making real decisions about real people’s careers. The fact that the show was heavily edited, that the “firing” was a scripted moment, that the contestants were chosen for their dramatic potential—all of this was hidden behind the convention of reality.
Trump brought this convention to the presidency. He did not act like a president who was aware of being watched. He acted like a man who had forgotten that the cameras were there—who was simply being himself, unfiltered, unscripted, real. The tweets at 3 a.m., the offhand remarks in the Oval Office, the impromptu press conferences on the South Lawn: all of these were presented as evidence of authenticity. He was not performing. He was just being.
This was, of course, a performance. But it was a performance so seamless, so consistent, so attuned to the conventions of reality television, that it was difficult for his supporters to see it as such. When the Access Hollywood tape emerged in October 2016, revealing Trump boasting about sexual assault, his defenders did not argue that the tape was doctored or that he had been misquoted. They argued that it was “locker room talk”—that the man on the tape was the real Trump, and the real Trump was someone who spoke candidly, without the filters that ordinary politicians used. The tape, far from destroying his campaign, became evidence of his authenticity.
The Set
The White House, for Trump, was not the seat of executive power. It was the most valuable set in the world.
He treated it accordingly. He redesigned the Oval Office, replacing the traditional burgundy drapes with gold ones, installing a new carpet, displaying the flags of the armed services in a way that had not been done before. He hosted televised events on the Truman Balcony, in the East Room, on the South Lawn. He used the White House as a backdrop for rallies, for press conferences, for the Republican National Convention—which he held on the South Lawn in 2020, in defiance of a century of precedent, turning the people’s house into a campaign prop.
The purpose of all this was not aesthetic. It was strategic. The White House, in the American imagination, is the ultimate symbol of authority. The man who stands in front of it, who speaks from its podium, who walks through its halls, is invested with the authority of the office. Trump understood that if he could keep the cameras focused on the set, he could maintain the illusion that he was governing—even when he was not.
The daily press briefing was the purest expression of this logic. The briefing room, with its presidential seal, its blue curtain, its podium, is a set designed to convey seriousness and authority. Trump used it as a stage for his own productions. He would enter, often late, often after the press had been waiting for hours. He would take the podium and speak, sometimes for an hour or more, answering no questions, taking no interruptions. He would show videos, display charts, introduce guests. And then he would leave, often without taking questions, leaving the press to scramble to interpret what they had just witnessed.
What they had witnessed was not a presidential briefing. It was an episode of The Trump Show.
The Audience
The audience for this production was not the press corps, who were treated as antagonists, hostile witnesses to be defeated. The audience was the camera. And the camera, Trump understood, was the conduit to the only audience that mattered: the millions of Americans who watched him on television and, increasingly, on their phones.
He was the first president to govern through social media. His Twitter feed—more than 88 million followers at its peak—was his primary means of communication. He used it to announce policy, to attack enemies, to float trial balloons, to vent his frustrations. He used it to set the news agenda, to force the media to react to him rather than the other way around. And he used it to bypass the traditional gatekeepers—the press, the political establishment, the party leadership—who had always controlled the terms of political discourse.
The effect was to collapse the distance between the presidency and the audience. When Trump tweeted, he was speaking directly to his followers, without mediation, without filter. The tweets were often ungrammatical, sometimes incoherent, frequently false. But they were his. They were not vetted by a speechwriter or approved by a communications director. They were the unmediated expression of the man himself—or so they appeared. And in the logic of reality television, the unmediated is the authentic, and the authentic is the real.
This was, of course, an illusion. The tweets were mediated by the platform, by the algorithm, by the conventions of the medium. But the illusion was powerful enough to sustain a political movement. Trump’s followers did not see him as a politician performing for their approval. They saw him as a man who was finally saying what they had been thinking, who was finally giving voice to their grievances, who was finally willing to break the rules that had been keeping them silent.
The Show Must Go On
The ultimate test of the aesthetic dictatorship came on January 6, 2021.
Trump had spent months telling his followers that the election had been stolen. He had held rallies, sent fundraising emails, and tweeted constantly, all in service of the same narrative: the Democrats had cheated, the courts had failed, and only he could save the country. On the morning of January 6, he addressed a crowd of supporters on the Ellipse, just south of the White House. He told them to march to the Capitol. He told them to “fight like hell.” He told them that he would be with them.
He was not with them. He returned to the White House and watched the events unfold on television.
For hours, as the mob stormed the Capitol, as police officers were beaten, as the certification of the election was suspended, Trump sat in the private dining room off the Oval Office, watching the coverage. He watched his supporters, many of whom had come at his urging, break through barricades and windows. He watched them chant his name. He watched them erect a gallows on the West Front. And he did nothing. He refused to call off the mob. He refused to authorize the National Guard. He watched, as he had watched so many episodes of his own show, waiting to see how it would end.
When he finally recorded a video message, hours later, he told the rioters: “We love you. You’re very special.” He told them to go home. He did not condemn them. He did not apologize. He treated the attack on the Capitol as another episode of The Trump Show—a dramatic twist in the narrative, perhaps, but not a crime, not an insurrection, not a betrayal of his oath of office.
The show ended, eventually. Trump left the White House on the morning of January 20, 2021, refusing to attend the inauguration of his successor. He boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for the last time. As the helicopter lifted off, it flew low over the crowd of supporters who had gathered to see him off. He had wanted a grand exit—a flyover, a moment of drama, a final image that would linger. He got it.
The Afterlife of the Frame
In the years since, Trump has continued to produce. He launched a social media platform, Truth Social, designed to replicate the experience of his Twitter feed without the interference of fact-checkers. He holds rallies, the same rallies he held as a candidate, with the same music, the same language, the same rhythms. He has turned his legal troubles into a reality show: the indictments, the mug shot, the courtroom appearances—all of it is content, all of it is material for the ongoing production.
The question that remains, and that the American political system has not yet answered, is whether the frame can be broken. Is it possible to have a politics that is not structured by the logic of the screen? Can a democracy function when its citizens have been trained to see themselves as audiences rather than participants, and their leaders as stars rather than public servants?
Trump did not invent the aesthetic dictatorship. He inherited it. He inherited a political culture that had been shaped by television for more than half a century, a culture in which the image had long since triumphed over the reality. But he perfected it. He showed what happens when a figure who understands the medium better than anyone else seizes control of the set. He showed that the frame is not a window onto reality. It is a machine for the production of reality. And the man who controls the frame controls everything.
The Covid montage, the January 6 video, the mug shot, the rallies, the tweets, the briefings, the helicopters, the gold curtains: all of it was content. All of it was material for the ongoing production. And the production, Trump understood, was the only thing that mattered. Because in the society of the spectacle, the spectacle is the only reality there is. The rest is just the credits, rolling after the show has ended, watched by no one, remembered by no one, leaving no trace.
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