Trump and Farage are politicians for the post-TV age
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When we say someone is a good “TV politician”, what do we mean? We perhaps think of someone like John F Kennedy, who marked himself out as a youthful and energetic agent of change while being mired in corruption and battling ill health. Or maybe his British counterparts: Harold Macmillan, who spent almost his entire career pretending to be older than he was, or Harold Wilson, who pretended to a love of simple pleasures like a pipe and tinned salmon while enjoying cigars and brandy.
Perhaps, more recently, we might think of David Cameron, who expertly presented himself as being an upper middle-class, middle of the road, Boden-wearing tough-but-fair dad to the nation, despite being considerably posher and more radical than he seemed. And often, in my view wrongly, we think of Donald Trump.
It’s true that Trump in part owes his political success to television. He was not a particularly successful businessman, but he did a brilliant job playing one on television, thereby fostering the perception that he had the knowhow to run the US government “like a business”. It’s true, too, that the firings and the set piece announcements that are part of his governing style all owe something to Trump’s understanding of theatre, which made him such a success as the host of The Apprentice.
But Trump isn’t a TV politician — he is actually the first post-TV politician. Unlike JFK, Wilson or Cameron, Trump is not playing a sanitised version of himself on television. (Indeed, the belief that he is has led some people to embarrass themselves by seeking to find nuance or depth where there is none, to imagine grand strategy or the ghost of a coherent argument about free trade behind the bluster.) Rather, Trump’s gift is to give a performance that looks more authentic than his rivals.
Even UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s closest allies would concede that he is not a natural TV star — but he is a TV politician in that his approach is to deliver tightly drafted and controlled statements, what we used to call “soundbites” but now often just seem like banalities of their time and place.
It doesn’t help that the art of political communication now seems antiquated, not to say dishonest, in both form and content, by comparison with other sectors.
For instance, someone watching the media blitz for the final episodes of the Star Wars spin-off Andor will know that Genevieve O’Reilly was initially cast for the role of Mon Mothma in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, and that her scenes were cut. She talked frankly about her initial upset at being cut and her assumption that her association with the franchise was over — a level of candour we now take for granted, but we are unlikely to hear from ministers who wish that an internal debate had gone in a different direction.
And anyone who follows a musician they like on Instagram will be used to the occasional gripe about getting through customs or the perils of practice. (Of course, it’s not an easy line to walk. Plenty of pop stars — think of Chappell Roan, say — have been monstered online for being a little too frank about the challenges, as well as the joys, of stardom. That the cast of Don’t Worry, Darling seemed to have visibly fallen out on their press tour attracted a lot of gossip and attention online, but it is far from clear that it got any bums on seats.)
Part of what makes Trump, and also Nigel Farage, appear more “authentic” than their rivals is that they have managed to achieve a kind of “controlled anarchy”, where they sound more candid, their communications more like those from other parts of the modern media world, than the distinctly old-school traditional major parties.
And one reason why Trump and Farage are able to be authentic in this way is that they lead parties in which they are the unquestioned, unchallengeable leader. For Trump to look authentic, it is necessary for Scott Bessent to look a fool whenever he explains why the latest presidential outburst actually does make sense in the context of the one before or the one still to come. For Farage to say what he thinks, the rest of Reform must be subordinate.
But the problem for their opponents, and for traditional politicians more generally, is that they remain wedded to an approach that is still built for the world of TV. We can sense that they aren’t giving us the full picture because we have grown used to getting, if not the whole truth, a bigger one than we used to have. Having adapted so effectively to a world of television, the dominant parties of the 20th century now find themselves floundering in a world in which news, politics and culture are digested on a smartphone rather than a set in the corner of the living room.
