Trump’s ‘desperate’ reality-TV playbook is backfiring ahead of midterms: TV critic

Donald Trump is reaching for increasingly desperate television-style gimmicks to keep voters watching — but the backlash is exposing the limits of his showmanship, a veteran TV critic argued.

Writing Thursday for Talking Points Memo, media columnist Brian Lowry compared Trump’s presidency to “an aging reality show” struggling to hold its audience with provocative casting, escalating threats and cash giveaways.

“For a president who sees himself as the ultimate showman, breathing life into a tiring act has notably led to some very rare backpedaling,” he wrote.

Lowry pointed to the abandoned livestreamed execution proposal, Katie Zacharia’s short-lived stint as press secretary and Trump’s promise of $5,000 payments to adults if the election goes his way.

“Based on the polling, nothing really appears to be moving the needle,” Lowry told readers. “Among students of television, that really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since once a ‘show’ enters this phase, there’s often not much that can be done to stave off the inevitable decline.”

The longtime TV critic's assessment of Trump's cash incentives to voters was particularly biting.

“The main difference, actually, is that TV shows have to make good on their payout promises,” Lowry wrote. He went on to argue that the president's earlier television success depended on producers cleaning up his behavior.

“Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” former “Apprentice” producer Jonathon Braun told two New York Times reporters for their 2024 book, "Lucky Loser."

But the stakes now are much different, Lowry said.

“Trump is gambling on a different, more serious playing field, but the inherent strategy is the same,” he wrote. Facing an “angry electorate,” Lowry concluded, “might be confronting his limits, finally, in terms of shaping reality.