Animal Planet

Donald Trump’s Beloved Gorilla Channel Isn’t Real—Except That It Is

In Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik examines the symbiotic relationship between Donald Trump and the small screen, explaining how Trump learned to control TV—and what happened when TV began to control him.
Trump is Foxs chief programmer and most important audience.
Illustration by Barry Blitt for the December 2018 issue of Vanity Fair.

It’s no secret that Donald Trump and television have a special relationship. Before his unlikely ascent to the presidency, Trump used the medium to transform himself into “Donald Trump”: “the multimedia character that he has honed and performed over decades, in the New York newspapers, on Oprah, in Trump: The Art of the Deal, in sitcoms and movies, on The Apprentice, in Fox News studios, on the Internet, in the WWE wrestling ring, in campaign rallies and in the White House,” New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik writes in his new book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, out September 10. Since the 2016 election, Trump and TV have, if anything, become even more intertwined: “As a candidate, Trump controlled TV,” Poniewozik writes. “As president, he would be controlled by TV.”

In the excerpt below, the author details what happened when television began to talk back to Trump, creating a nightmarish feedback loop the likes of which American media had never seen—a strange, absurdist new reality where even the most outlandish claims, like the notion that Trump demanded to watch a TV channel “that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day,” seemed not just plausible, but probable.

When Donny Trump was a little boy in Queens, a childhood friend of his recalls, he used to watch Andy’s Gang, a Saturday kids’ show hosted by Andy Devine. Once a popular comic-relief actor in cowboy movies, Devine was a gentle giant with a big lopsided smile. Every episode, his naughty puppet sidekick Froggy the Gremlin would work the studio audience into wild-edged peals of hysteria with his pranks. But at the end Devine would calm things down and speak straight to the kids at home: “Yes, sir, we’re pals. Pals stick together. Now gang, don’t forget church or Sunday school!”

This was the promise of the show: You would be swept up into a communal frenzy until you could barely control yourself, but in the end you would be accepted, loved, reassured that you were good.

Fox & Friends in the Trump era morphed into a morning children’s show for the president of the United States. Kids’ programs often hold the attention of their distractible audience by addressing them through the fourth wall. Dora the Explorer asked kids to help her chase off Swiper the Fox: “Say, ‘Swiper, no swiping!’” Elmo became the most popular Muppet on Sesame Street by talking to toddlers directly. The local hosts of Romper Room would pretend to look through a “magic mirror” and see the children in the home audience, calling them out by name.

Fox & Friends applied that formula to an audience of one. Its hosts offered Trump encouragement, flattery, and advice. When he tweeted, his tweets—many mornings, in perfect sync with the show’s topics—would materialize on a giant video wall. One morning in January 2017, the show put a video feed of the White House onscreen and asked Trump to flash the lights on and off if he was watching. The producers added an effect of the lights flickering, a “TV trick” the hosts later acknowledged.

But for Trump, the childhood illusion—that your favorite show is as aware of you as you are of it—became real. Fox & Friends was Donald Trump’s magic mirror.

The president was the show’s audience, its subject, its publicist, and its virtual fourth host. His morning tweets set the focus of the show, which often scrambled to keep up. After the failure of a Republican health care plan, his rage tweets careered from “REPEAL failing ObamaCare now” to “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail” to advocating “full repeal” again. The Fox & Friends caption tried to impose order on the morning’s whiplash: “As Congress Spars, President Focuses on Jobs.” Spurred by a Trump tweet complaining that Senate Democrats were holding up his judicial nominees, Brian Kilmeade called the Democrats’ resistance “anti-American.”

“Well, it’s anti-Trump, ultimately,” Steve Doocy said. “Which is anti-American,” Kilmeade answered.

But just as often, the show drove Trump’s agenda, and thus the nation’s. When it aired an incorrect report that former FBI director James Comey had leaked “top secret” information about a meeting with the president, Trump repeated the charge on Twitter: “So illegal!” (Swiper, no swiping!) Easter morning 2018, Fox & Friends Weekend reported an “army” of Central Americans—in truth, a ragtag group of refugees from Honduras—traveling to the United States through Mexico. Trump’s tweets that morning, after some benign Easter wishes, became increasingly agitated about the “caravan” of invaders. (“NEED WALL!”)

By the end of the week, he’d deployed the National Guard to the border. (Thereafter, an immigrant “caravan” managed to appear whenever Fox News and Trump needed it—before the 2018 midterm elections, in the midst of a government shutdown Trump precipitated to pressure Congress to fund his wall.) Media critics took to calling this obsequious iteration of Fox “state TV,” but that term implied that the state was controlling the media. More often in this case, the media was controlling the state. In July 2017, I wrote a column in the New York Times about the feedback loop between Trump and Fox & Friends that ended up as part of that loop. The show’s hypnotic influence on Trump, I wrote, made it “the most powerful TV show in America.” Fox, seeing an opportunity to tweak the Times, took out a full-page ad in the paper highlighting that quote; the hosts of Fox & Friends showed off the ad on the air (not mentioning, of course, why I’d said the show was so powerful).

Minutes later, Trump tweeted out the quote from my column.

Magic-mirror time had begun for the day.

From Liveright.

There was a tragic dimension to Trump’s TV dependence. TV was the true love that he could never confess. To a gaggle of reporters on a trip to Asia, he griped, “People that don’t know me, they say I like to watch television. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.” On that same trip, he had tweeted that he was “forced to watch @CNN” because Fox News was unavailable in the Philippines.

His denials of his TV watching were jarring for being so obviously, needlessly false. Trump clearly loved TV and loved being on it. His administration boasted about The Apprentice. His aide Stephen Miller defended the president to CNN’s Jake Tapper as “a self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV.” Sometimes, Trump would slip and refer to the Cabinet Room as “the boardroom.” At a particularly low point in summer 2017, he held a live-TV cabinet meeting in which members around the long table competed to praise him—chief of staff Reince Priebus thanked Trump for “the opportunity and blessing” of working for him—exactly like Apprentice contestants kissing up before an elimination.

TV was mother’s milk to Trump; it was the focus of one of the few memories he shares of his actual mother in The Art of the Deal, watching Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation when he was a boy in Queens. But on some level—maybe it was that voice of Fred Trump telling Mary, For Christ’s sake, turn it off—he also seemed to find TV watching shameful, weak, infantile. When he saw a New York Times report that his campaign manager Paul Manafort would try to send him messages by going on TV, he erupted: “Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”

“Baby” was one of Trump’s most common, seemingly deep-rooted, insults. Fred Trump raised Donald to admire the strong and the active; to sit and watch was weak and passive; to be weak and passive was to be a baby; and he was not a baby. “I am not a baby,” he said—twice—to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes during a combative interview in October 2018. To give a weak interview on TV: that was also being a baby, as he told Rudy Giuliani after what Trump considered an insufficiently zealous defense following the Access Hollywood tape, a time when Giuliani was one of the only people willing to speak up for him in public at all. “Rudy, you’re a baby!” Bob Woodward recounted him saying. “They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed.” Trump saw all this, of course, because he’d been watching TV, like a—but he was not a baby.

He was like a binge-eater self-soothing with tubs of ice cream: he would indulge, then spiral, then deny it all, chocolate sauce still staining the corner of his lips. “I have very little time for watching T.V.,” he tweeted one morning. The three days before that, he had retweeted six different videos from Fox & Friends.

In early 2018, Michael Wolff, a journalist who specialized in Manhattan media and power circles, published Fire and Fury, an account from inside the Trump White House. It depicted an administration in chaos. At the center of the chaos, invariably, was TV.

The president, Wolff wrote, would refer to himself in the third person, like a character in a story. (This rang true if you’d watched The Apprentice, or followed him on Twitter.) He would watch an interview on Fox and then post a misspelled, false rage tweet claiming that President Obama had ordered intelligence agencies to “tapp my phones” during the campaigns. He would replay slights to him on his DVR, fuming, his mood worsening, like Nixon with upgraded technology. He would refuse to watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe out of pique, then have his 28-year-old assistant Hope Hicks—formerly a PR aide to Ivanka Trump—tremulously recap the show for him every morning.

Shortly after Fire and Fury came out, the cartoonist Ben Ward posted what looked like an excerpt on Twitter, with the comment, “Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind”:

On his first night in the White House, President Trump complained that the TV in his bedroom was broken, because it didn’t have “the gorilla channel.” Trump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.

To appease Trump, White House staff compiled a number of gorilla documentaries into a makeshift gorilla channel, broadcast into Trump’s bedroom from a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn. However, Trump was unhappy with the channel they had created, moaning that it was “boring” because “the gorillas aren’t fighting.”

Staff edited out all the parts of the documentaries where gorillas weren’t hitting each other, and at last the president was satisfied. “On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me.

The parody so perfectly comported with the stories about Trump—the endless TV watching, the lust for conflict, the tantrums—and so deliciously satisfied his critics’ desire to see him exposed as an addled child, that Ward’s joke was widely shared as true. Ward finally had to go on Twitter to clarify that the gorilla channel wasn’t real.

But also, the gorilla channel was real.

It was real that the president’s staff tried, fruitlessly, to manage him by managing what TV he saw and limiting his “screen time.” (Steve Bannon, seeing that his boss was mainlining up to eight hours of tube a day, asked, “Think what your brain would be like if you did that?”)

It was real that TV personalities—who cast his world in terms of exciting victories and wicked antagonists—were more persuasive to Trump than his own staff. He directed his secretary of state to “closely study” a white nationalist conspiracy theory that white South African farmers were targeted for “large-scale killing,” because Fox’s Tucker Carlson had promoted it. Sean Hannity, who fulminated about conspiracies against Trump nightly on Fox, was the most influential White House counselor. “He basically has a desk in the place,” a Trump adviser said.

Trump ordered the release of classified intelligence on the Russia investigation at the behest of his favorite TV hosts: “the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanine Pirro.” He disastrously shut down the government for five weeks, in a failed attempt to pressure Congress into funding his border wall, after Fox & Friends said he would “look like a loser” if he didn’t. He was as impressionable as a 1950s kid eating Cheerios because the Lone Ranger said to. Sometimes he would hire people who talked about him on his programs, like Anthony Scaramucci, then fire them when the flesh version disappointed.

It was real that political reporters would get thousands of dollars’ worth of dental work, to look more telegenic when the president saw them on his programs, the better to get their calls returned from the White House.

It was real that critics, lobbyists, and corporations trying to persuade or curry favor with the administration started reaching out to the president, not by booking meetings, but by buying commercial time on the TV-news shows he binge-watched.

It was real that Trump’s own staff created TV events to placate, control, and persuade him. Things were more real to Trump if he saw them on TV. People were more real if he saw them on TV—even people he saw, in person, every day. White House officials would go on TV “to emphasize points to their boss, who was likely to be watching just steps away in his residence.” When that didn’t work, they booked outside experts onto his shows. When Trump took a shine to Fox’s Pirro, a former prosecutor who offered him on-air advice on his legal troubles, someone from the White House had to go on her show every week to get the staff’s voice into his head.

The president was like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show (1998), except in reverse. In the film, Truman Burbank, an ordinary man, is raised from infancy on an island that serves as a vast, hermetically constructed reality-TV set, which he takes to be the real world. In fact, he’s being surveilled for a long-running, voyeuristic TV series, which he finally discovers one day when he sails off for the horizon and his boat punctures the skin of a sky-colored dome. On The Trump Show, the president was the star of the TV series that he lived inside, but he was also its sole audience; it was the rest of the world that needed to be conscripted as stage set and players, to perform the required story.

Others quickly got the idea, crawling inside the magic mirror to ask Trump to bomb Syria, to fire Robert Mueller, not to fire Robert Mueller. Ann Coulter, conservative TV’s perpetual font of spite, went on Fox amid news coverage of children being imprisoned at the Mexican border—“I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV”—and told Trump, directly to the camera, that the suffering kids were “child actors”: “Do not fall for it, Mr. President.” “One of the ways to influence the president,” a high-profile white nationalist told the Boston Globe, “is to make sure there’s things on Fox that interest him.” Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, seeking a meeting with Trump about opioid abuse, said on Morning Joe: “To the president: I know you’re watching, so I’m looking forward to meeting with you.” That morning, Trump called him.

At times, the president would attempt to program the gorilla channel himself. An associate of his reported getting a call in April 2018 from Trump, who asked the source to go on TV and tell Trump to fire the special counsel investigating him. It is possible, of course, to see this as the act of the president as canny media manipulator, attempting to engineer a “Will no one rid us of this turbulent priest?” chorus to excuse putting himself above the law (although he ended up taking no action). But you could also see it as a frustrated couch potato, unhappy with his programs, fiddling with the antenna, smacking the sides of the box, demanding that it tell him a better story.

The performances for the audience of one could take on the high drama of a reality-show season finale, as when Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused by research psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of sexually assaulting her when they were high school students in the 1980s. Ford was called to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a live-TV spectacle that recalled the wrenching 1991 hearings where Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. But this time, with the Senate entrenched along partisan lines, Kavanaugh’s fate would largely depend on the continued support of the News-Junkie-in-Chief.

Ford spoke the morning of September 27, 2018, her tremulous account moving some spectators in the hearing room to tears. Trump, the TV native, knew how persuasive she came across; even Fox News was calling her testimony a “disaster” for Republicans. Trump had been upset for days, since Kavanaugh had given a numb, robotic interview to Fox, stumbling over canned lines like “I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.” What bothered Trump was his meekness. Why wasn’t Kavanaugh hitting back? Jesus! He’d fired people for that on The Apprentice.

When Kavanaugh took the stand that afternoon, he delivered what the president wanted to see: an imitation of himself. The judge showed up hot and angry, roaring that the hearing was a “national disgrace,” his features twisting and reddening, his plosives smacking against the microphone. His rage was discomfiting and divisive. But he knew that there was one show, and there was one viewer, who required one performance—who wanted to see his guy stop being polite and start getting real. Almost the second the closing gavel struck, Trump tweeted his review: “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him.”

Trump’s choleric face was mirrored in the face of the next associate justice of the Supreme Court; it was reflected in the legislators who learned to ape his blown-gasket affect to win over his followers and avoid his displeased tweets; it was reflected in the campaign ad for the winning gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, who threatened to “round up criminal illegals” in his big ol’ pickup truck; it was reflected in the conservative-news pundits spinning uglier conspiracy theories and sharper vitriol to enflame his imagination; it was reflected in the Montana congressional candidate who won his election, and Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement, after body-slamming a reporter for asking him a question; it was reflected in the school bullies yelling “Build the wall!” at their Hispanic classmates.

The world had become a closed-circuit TV network dedicated to the cultivation, appeasement, emulation, and management of one excitable viewer. Every character on the channel mattered only in relation to him, for how they could affect him or be affected by him. It was tacitly understood that American civic life had become a show, and that there were expectations when one was called to perform in it. The president would be satisfied only once the gorillas were fighting.

Excerpted from Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America by James Poniewozik. Copyright (c) 2019 by James Poniewozik. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

This post has been updated.

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