James Poniewozik: “When I say that Donald Trump, in his first term, was a ‘TV president,’ I mean something different than when we used the phrase for, say, Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton.”
“It isn’t just about his having been a politician who “used the medium” to send a message, though he was that. It isn’t just about his having been a reality-TV star and decades-long media gadfly who instinctively thought like television, who craved the same types of conflict and provocation that the cameras do, who was always on, who for all practical purposes was as much TV character as man — though he was that too.”
“Mr. Trump was more than that: He was the No. 1 TV show in America. From the day he rode down the Trump Tower escalator and sent the media into a permanent state of overdrive, he was a kind of multiplatform crossover event, a ubiquitous text and subtext that cut across genres.”
