Review by New York Times Review
If TV execs were asked to classify James Poniewozik's illuminating new book, "Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America," they might use the term "dramedy." Poniewozik is a funny, acerbic and observant writer. He calls Melania "the most Trump-like of Trump's wives, with a model's glower that matches his own," and remarks of Trump's relationship with cable news, "He pushed the drug, and he got high on it." But Poniewozik, the chief television critic of this newspaper, uses his ample comedic gifts in the service of describing a slow-boil tragedy. If humor is the rocket of his ICBM, the last three years of our lives are the destructive payload. Along with the TV critic Emily Nussbaum's spot-on observation of Trump's connection to the humor of, in her words, the "dark and angry" borscht belt comics, and the cultural and political critic Frank Rich's unsparing account of the role New York's liberal establishment played in Trump's rise, Poniewozik brings a new microscope with which to analyze the drug-resistant bacterium that is our president. And while there is certainly room to examine collusion and Russian interference and the outdated institution that Homer Simpson once referred to as the "Electrical College," this book is really about the role played by all of us, the faithful citizens of TV Nation. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of "Audience of One" is that it makes Trump's presidency seem almost inevitable. Of course he won. This is the United States we're talking about. The same way Boris Johnson tapped into Britain's inner erudite buffoon, so Trump tapped into our inner core, which all too often turns out to have comprised midnight cheeseburgers and hormonal TV childhoods. I once caught some friendly fire on Twitter for trying to discuss Trump's behavior in a way that would suggest he had a personality worth exploring. Poniewozik evades this line of thought by asserting that Trump is TV, the mere simulacrum of a human being projected onto a flat-screen. He grew up with the dawn of television and a TV-watching mother. Over the years, Poniewozik writes, Trump "achieved symbiosis with the medium. Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Chief television critic for the New York Times, Poniewozik traces Donald Trump's rise through not only the current president's relationship with television, but also the American people's connection to TV. He bookends the story with one of Trump's first television appearances, on The Today Show with Tom Brokaw in 1980, and his 2016 election. When television only had a handful of networks, it was of utmost importance that programming had broad appeal; execs looked for the Least Objectionable Program. But as television fractured (more channels, cable, streaming), so did audiences, and programming could become niche. Poniewozik argues that this marks the rise of the antihero, a trend that maybe started with Archie Bunker but was solidified with Tony Soprano and Walter White. It also coincides with the onslaught of reality TV, including The Apprentice: Trump had found his home and his audience. This is both a fascinating look at the ways television has changed and shaped the U.S., and a compelling lens through which to look at how we got to November 8, 2016.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Epochal shifts in entertainment media have driven the derangement of American politics, according to this caustic, scintillating cultural history. New York Times television critic Poniewozik sets Donald Trump's political rise against American television's evolution, from a three-network monopoly broadcasting inoffensive, common denominator fare to a fragmented cable and internet spectrum of isolated niche channels, a world where liberals watched Mad Men while conservatives watched Duck Dynasty. That polarization, he argues, bred new televisual genres that incubated the Trumpian worldview: antihero dramas where ugly violence is needed to defeat even darker forces, reality shows where life is a cutthroat, zero-sum struggle between amoral operators, and cable news shows that portray the world as a chaos of noisy, flashy dogfights where perceptions of truth are dictated by tribal allegiance. Meanwhile, Trump's own media persona--"the blunt, impolite apex predator" on The Apprentice, the trash-talking bully in pro-wrestling cameos, the birther conspiracy theorist on Fox News guest spots--shaped his political style and then subsumed him entirely: Trump became "a cable news channel in human form: loud, short of attention span, and addicted to conflict," Poniewozik writes. "TV became president." Poniewozik's trenchant, brilliantly witty critique of the cultural archetypes percolating into American politics is one of the best analyses yet of the Trump era. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In his first book, New York Times chief television critic Poniewozik turns his eye to an exploration of Donald Trump's symbiotic relationship with television, including how it became an essential part of his career. The book mimics television--organized into three parts divided into episodes with Trump as the main character. Documenting the fragmentation of the media during Trump's coming-of-age, Poniewozik shows how central TV was to the president's life, and how he's used it to brand and develop his political career. The author further argues that reality television blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and claims that the reality show The Apprentice influenced Trump's sense of reality, which in turn shaped his campaign and presidency and how the media could not resist covering him. VERDICT Poniewozik's well-argued work advances the investigations in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and is an important reminder of the media's influence on society. [See Prepub Alert, 2/24/19.]--Judy Solberg, Sacramento, CA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The chief TV critic of the New York Times sums it up: "Without TV, there's no Trump."In his stellar debut, Poniewozik demonstrates how Trump, over a period of four decades, "achieved symbiosis" with the TV medium: "Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality." As TV evolved from America's homogenizer (the three major networks) to fragmenter (cable TV), Trump "used the dominant media of the daytabloids, talk shows, reality TV, cable news, Twitterto enlarge himself, to become a brand, a star, a demagogue, and a president." Recounting how Trump, who was born in 1946, grew up with TV, the author details how he cultivated a famous image and leveraged celebrity, becoming a reality TV star in the 2000s and a politician in the 2010s. "Playing Donald Trump' became his full-time job." His telling analyses of Trump's appearances on The Apprentice, Fox Friends, and The Howard Stern Show will come as revelations to readers unfamiliar with those programs, on which Trump emerged as an antihero, known for "being real" rather than honest, in the manner of the not "conventionally likeable" people on reality TV. As Poniewozik writes, he "spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its metabolism, learning to feed its appetites." For Trump, cable TV news, with its "constant fear and passion" and need to "agitate their viewers, not settle them," was a perfect fit. His daily tweeting is based on careful study of his most popular tweetsthose provoking "shock, insult, rage." The author chronicles Trump's actions against a deeply insightful history of vast changes in the media and popular culture during the period. TV, he writes, proved "the perfect medium for his sensibility, for picking fights, for whipping up people's hatred and fear and resentment, for taking the express lane around logic."This intelligent eye-opener belongs on the small shelf of valuable books that help explain how Trump created his base. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
