The Bluestocking, vol 322: Donald and Doge
much wow, RIP
Happy Friday!
And hello from Liverpool, where I have been out reporting.
Reporting on what, you ask? Here’s a clue that the millennials among you should be able to decode:
As for the election, I watched the Sky leaders’ interrogation on Wednesday and was surprised to see that Keir Starmer doesn’t yet have a good answer for “did you really think Jeremy Corbyn was amazing in 2019 when you tried to make him prime minister?” It shouldn’t be that hard: Starmer just needs to point to a moment, post-2020, when he became disillusioned with his former leader. The day he suspended him from the party springs to mind.
Apart from that, I thought it was a solid performance — and I’m about to dive into the Labour manifesto, which seems to have some good stuff on house-building (be still my beating heart).
Helen
The Most Consequential TV Show in History (The Atlantic)
It is by now a truism of the Trump era that the 45th president rose to power in large part thanks to the persona he popularized on The Apprentice, which he hosted from 2004 to 2015. Few readers will be surprised to learn that the character he played on the show—the tough-but-fair executive who doles out savvy business advice and decisively fires underperforming employees—was more reality-TV invention than reality. But the book’s peek behind the scenes of what is arguably the most consequential television show in history is still revealing. In Setoodeh’s look back at the series, Trump, a man who has now served in the most powerful office in the world, shows himself to be thoroughly steeped in the tawdry, lowbrow celebrity culture of the aughts—a culture that remains influential on his politics.
That the former president cooperated so extensively for a book about his reality-TV career is telling. According to an author’s note at the end of the book, Trump granted Setoodeh six interviews, four of them in person. That’s more than Trump has given to most of the people writing books about his presidency. Setoodeh writes that the interviews sometimes went on for hours, and that his subject seemed to thrill at watching old clips of the show. On the day Trump’s sister died in November 2023, Setoodeh assumed their scheduled interview would be canceled. But Trump proceeded as planned, alternating between taking personal phone calls and recounting old episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice to Setoodeh in the Mar-a-Lago living room. “In our days together,” Setoodeh writes, “Trump is happiest when he talks about The Apprentice and crankiest when he relives his years as the commander in chief.”
My colleague McKay Coppins reviews a new book on Donald Trump’s time on The Apprentice. The details are great, if completely expected: Trump was a dog to the female contestants, casually dismissive to the black contestants, and beefed with all the celebrity contestants if they later went on to support Joe Biden.
The man has a ferocious appetite for gossip and bitchfights. “He might struggle to define nuclear triad, but he can tell you which Apprentice contestants sided with Rosie O’Donnell over him in their 2006 feud,” writes Coppins. If only we could have put him in a reality show where he could have played at being the US president. That would have been better for everyone, including him.
EMBRACE THE ASTEROID news: “We find that the public is relatively open to the concept of total electoral obliteration for the Conservatives. 46% of the public agreed with the slightly excessive statement that the Conservatives “deserve to lose every seat they have”, including around a quarter of their own 2019 voters (24%), and a whole 64% of those who intend to vote Labour.”
Bluestocking recommends: I just read the final two Shardlake novels, spurred by the launch of the Disney adaptation of the first book, Dissolution, and the sad news of the death of their author CJ Sansom. When Wolf Hall won the Booker, I commissioned Chris to write a piece about Thomas Cromwell (who also features in his Shardlake books) for the Mail. Some writers would have been sniffy about doing that—praising another writer who was, at the time, more successful—but he was just pleased to nerd out.
What Sansom did best was weave genre fiction—detective stories, usually featuring lots of murder—around real historical events. The final two books in the series, Lamentation and Tombland, will leave you much better informed about Henry VIII’s wavering attitude to religious reform in the last years of his reign, and then the peasants’ uprising led by the Kett brothers under Edward VI, which was partially driven by unjust enclosures of the commons. My favourite book, though, is probably Revelation, which features an apocalypse-obsessed serial killer.
The TV series is also enjoyable, although I fear Sean Bean’s veneers are not authentic to the period.
Quick Links
“A series of events in a suspicious order, a handful of well-connected people: This was what Donovan’s allegation boiled down to.” A “misinformation scholar” being prone to the same bias as all other humans rather than being a pure and mystic oracle? This has simply never happened before! (Chronicle of Higher Education, reg required)
Talking of people rewriting their experiences into a self-serving narrative, here’s Daniel Engber on the, er, evolving anecdotes in Johann Hari’s oeuvre (The Atlantic)
“I now cringe remembering that my friends would use Doge vocabulary aloud, saying “much wow” and the like, during the same peak-millennial moment that included American Apparel skinny jeans and side-swept bangs. The infantilized language spoke to the peculiar twee-ness of those years, a post-financial-crisis desire to forestall an already halting adulthood.” The real dog that became the Doge meme has died, following Grumpy Cat in 2019. Such mourning. Much vet bills. Wow. (The New Yorker)
Japan is old. How is it also a leader in youth culture? (Matt Alt, Substack)
“His art was real. His Native American heritage wasn’t.” Not another one! The musician Roxy Gordon wasn’t out to profit from his alleged Chocaw heritage—he’s one of those pretendians who simply found Native life and culture more meaningful and authentic. (Texas Monthly)
See you next time! In case you didn’t get the friendship bracelet clue, it says “champagne problems,” the title of my favourite Taylor Swift song.
Shouldn’t the Starmer anger be something like ‘the UK needs an effective Labour Party and I wasn’t prepared to quit the party and hand it to Jeremy and his cranks, so I decided to stay and fight and that’s a fight we have won, the importance of which is proven by the fact that we are now ready to kick this terrible government out too’
That’s a great review of Hari’s utterly woeful relationship with the truth. When we overlapped at The Independent, I once wrote a blogpost on my very small, much unregarded personal blog about how his claim in an Indie column that remand amounted to unfair imprisonment was bunk. A person then came into the comments arguing that no no no I was wrong and Hari was totally right. I pushed back, still in the comments of this backwater blog, and he kept on. I’m now pretty sure it was Hari. His continued presence in publishing continues to mystify me.