Why Trump, the Page Six president, is winning
Despite the horrors of January 6th and his nonsense on tariffs, the Republican has the momentum. Why? He's the zeitgeist candidate who understands media, the celebrity revolution and fame.
This is Iain Martin’s newsletter exclusively for Reaction subscribers
If you want to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the contemporary American fusion of politics, wealth, garish celebrity, robust opinions, comedy and entertainment, a good place to start is the Page Six gossip column in the New York Post.
Page Six was launched in 1977 by the Post’s then editor James Brady and an ambitious proprietor called Rupert Murdoch. Whether they anticipated where culture was headed in the 1980s and rode the wave, or whether they had a vision and helped deliberately create the change, is unclear.
Either way, the page, a collection of short items, became a sensation, redefining the way American newspapers and then radio and television handled celebrities, fame and revelations about actors, models, sports stars, socialites, magazine editors, TV anchors, media moguls, inexplicably famous random hangers on, local politicians, criminals, criminal local politicians, Wall Street titans, the high-spending partners of Wall Street titans, and real estate moguls. It was a fast, sometimes funny, scurrilous, vulgar, irreverent fusion of the British Fleet Street tradition, Hollywood Babylon and the essence of wisecracking old New York updated for the rapacious 1980s.
The denizens of all major cities care a lot about money and fame, the two main subjects on Page Six. That is because space is constrained in a big city and money does not go far enough. Readers crammed in on the commute like to read gossip about those who have the money and power and who even better may one day lose the money and power. This is human nature. In New York it is even more so. Walking down Fifth Avenue a few weeks ago, after an absence of a few years, the realisation hit me anew as a bourgeois Brit. In New York two things, and only two things, matter: How much have you got? Who the hell are you?
Someone who has always taken a lot of interest in Page Six - lot of interest, so much interest (say it in a Trump voice) - is Donald Trump.
As a real estate mogul in the 1970s, emerging from Queens, Trump the trainee globally famous person learned how fame and publicity work in the city that is, or was, effectively the capital of the world. Page Six was the court circular for wannabe moguls and tales abound of Trump trying in that period to place stories and get maximum attention in ways that emphasised his wealth, supposed success and fame.
Several times I have heard Trump described as being best understood as the Page Six President. As with a good gossip item in a newspaper diary, I can’t find the precise source of the observation, but whoever thought it and said it, well done.
In the digital age as the power moved away from print newspapers, Page Six became a celebrity brand in its own right, spawning its own websites and television shows on the Murdoch-owned Fox.
Simultaneously, there was an explosion on both sides of the Atlantic in televised talent shows and global entertainment franchises sold in multiple territories. Latterly this has been amplified by social media sites, all owing something to the original noisy spirit of Page Six.
Trump was right in the middle of it, perfectly positioned to benefit from the lucrative development of this new media ecosystem when he became host of the business mentoring Apprentice show in 2004. He knew how this worked. New York was where the new formula had in its way been perfected.
When he first tried to transfer it into politics, it seemed like a joke, at first, although the joke was on the rest of us supposed sophisticates. In 2015 I walked past the launch of his campaign in Trump Tower, the day he came down the big escalator and declared he was running. Don’t worry, a Republican donor told me at a subsequent meeting that day, Trump will not be the Republican nominee. This is not serious, it will not be allowed, he said.
And then look what happened.
Trump had understood - either on an intellectual level or more likely by animal instinct - that in an era of low trust, for many voters the old barriers which roped off austere public service from entertainment were no longer there. Although Ronald Reagan had started out as an actor, there was a dignity to his bearing and a gentleness to his humour. Trump was something different, in a nastier age.
Now, anything, absolutely everything, was entertainment.
For Trump it could all be fused together - politics, gossip, business promotion, attacks on opponents - and used as ammunition in the fame and attention game. A new hotel and casino, here. A call for a return of the death penalty, there.
Trump had been using his celebrity to make political points from very early on, against nuclear weapons in 1984 for example, when he suggested bumptiously he be given control of the negotiations with the Soviets. Remember, Trump has a child of the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation.
In 1989 his interest in public policy took a destructive turn when in a rage Trump took out full page advertisements in four newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reintroduced after five young black and latino men were accused and convicted of rape. One of the innocent Central Park Five said later, once the conviction was crushed and the real perpetrator convicted thanks to DNA evidence, that he had not heard of Trump until someone told him a famous guy had taken out adverts calling for him to be killed. To this day Trump has never apologised or acknowledged he got it wrong.
On Thursday evening, Trump came home to New York.
This was for the 79th annual Al Smith white tie dinner, a Catholic charity fundraiser traditionally addressed in an election year by the candidates for the presidency. Kamala Harris decided to be elsewhere and sent a video message instead, a mistake.
If you doubt how intrinsically New York Trump is, and how his career was shaped and defined by the rhythms and cadences of the city’s hard headed social scene, I recommend you watch - here - his entire speech at the dinner, although the final five minutes of politics and thanks are worth skipping.
Whether you are a Trump fan or not, and I am certainly not, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in this speech his execution and delivery were brilliant. Ignore the Twitter/X commentary and the New York Times saying it was awkward in front of an elite crowd with many Democrats in the audience. Even his discomfort at reading from a script was turned to his advantage with ad libs and asides. If you like the films of Woody Allen as much as I do, you’ll recognise the motifs and gestures. This could be a cartoonish character from one of Allen’s best films - Broadway Danny Rose. A club comedian, a “businessman” big in cement, or a guy just sitting around telling stories to other guys.
It is important to stress, especially for the benefit of NYC friends and readers who might be offended, that I know Trump’s New York is not the only New York. There are other New Yorks, the best of which is the bookish, sophisticated, stylish, Hannah and Her Sisters NYC crowd, that loves food, travel and the Frick (closed for an impossibly long time for renovations). I feared the best New York might be disappearing, buried under a tidal wave of vulgarity, until a few weeks ago I stayed again in one of the nicest and longest established clubs in the city. Dining alone that first night, I got to observe the dinner party groups of friends in full flow, with the lights twinkling in the distance on the other side of the Park. That New York is still there, just about.
Earlier this year, Peggy Noonan got it just right, as ever, when explaining Trump’s wisecracking version of NYC and how his appeal rests on a particular comic style: “Trump grew up, as did I, watching The Ed Sullivan Show. I’m sure it was on every Sunday night at 8 at the Trump house in Queens. On that show, you saw every week the great Borscht Belt comics of 1950-70. Their timing — ‘Take my wife — please!’ — is ingrained in him. What he does now is shtick, because he likes to entertain and is a performer.”
The tough truth for the Democrats is that a lot of American voters see this, recognise a familiar archetype and like it, certainly more than they like the awkward, coached, robotic style of Kamala Harris. At least his thing is authentic, even when it is authentically bad and he spends time listening to music on stage and talking gibberish.
Harris, on the other hand, is always awkward, tentative and forced. The best that can be said for her interview on Fox News this week is that she just about got away with it and no more.
The bottom line is that winners in these difficult contests are almost always candidates who properly like campaigning, who enjoy being in front of a crowd of twenty or twenty thousand and either get a kick out of the attention or seek the thrill of persuading people. Bill Clinton had this, and Obama too in another way, and Reagan of course. Thatcher had energy and wanted to win arguments. Trump loves to perform. Kamala Harris looks like someone who can't campaign, thinks she is losing and doesn’t know what to do about it.
The Al Smith dinner performance followed a Trump interview on stage in Chicago this week, where he was cross-examined by John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News. Micklethwait did a good job in old school terms of correcting Trump and trying to get him back on track when he wandered away from a question and wittered on about Macron or whatever his brain landed on that second.
It doesn’t matter though. Micklethawait was playing by the old rules, the serious rules many of us wish still applied to public affairs. Trump's answers were cut up into social media clips by his supporters and even his defence of tariffs had a bar room ring of folksy authenticity about it as though he was just sitting around with the guys shooting the breeze and talking common sense.
Trump was talking terrifying nonsense, of course.The high tariffs he proposes will be an economic disaster causing inflation, misery and unemployment, triggering a trade war that may, if we are unlucky, accelerate the slide into another type of war for which we are unprepared.
Ultimately, he is winning, and she will need a lot of luck to avoid it, not just because many voters feel worse off. He is the candidate of the zeitgeist, the Page Six President of our anxiety-inducing celebrity mad culture, the sprit of the age, unfortunately.
Right, that’s almost enough newsletter for this week as I got too immersed in Trump and New York. Three very quick observations before I leave you to enjoy your weekend.
Get ready for 3% of GDP on defence
If Trump does defeat Harris, we in Europe are in a world of trouble. We have barely begun to process how much. Not only will Trump demand that Ukraine surrenders to Russia, constituting an incredible humiliation for Ukraine and the West. He is highly likely to demand that European countries spend 3% of their GDP on defence, which we should.
Britain is struggling to get to 2.5% with defence facing cuts, along with most other departments. Trump has floated the 3% figure before, and turning it into a formal demand quickly - get to 3% or the US will draw down from “free-riding” Europe - is the obvious way for him to make us Europeans snap to attention. If it happens, it will turn politics and budgets upside down. In all the angst and infighting over the looming budget Rachel Reeves will unveil on 30 October this question has received very little attention. If Trump wins, Reeves may have to come back to the Commons to do it all again soon and find more money for European defence.
Labour getting the Tories back in business
Is there a secret Tory working near the top of the Treasury team? I ask because of the news this week that Rachel Reeves is considering increasing inheritance tax by closing loopholes, which is code for taking money people have earned, paid tax on, saved, built up in their home and invested legally. No policy could be better designed to get the ailing Tory party back in business and give it a way to rally supporters who abandoned it because the party had become addicted to incompetence and infighting. A great many voters, even those who will not pay IHT, absolutely hate death duties on the grounds of fairness and natural justice. If the Treasury does this it will not end well for Labour.
The rule of law(yers)
Perhaps it is worth returning at some point to a speech given by the new Attorney General Richard Hermer KC this week. This - you can read it here - was the Bingham lecture in which he provided an unintentionally revealing insight into the governing philosophy of our new rulers from the north London human rights lawyer community. Not only was it a surprisingly overt political text, it amounted to a declaration of government by human rights lawyers. Not so much the rule of law, more the rule of lawyers. His argument can be summed up as follows. Disagree with me and you are a nasty populist, whereas I am virtuous with law on my side. These are my views and, how convenient, my views happen to be the law. Again, this won’t end well.
What I’m reading
I returned to Craig Brown’s unorthodox biography of the late Queen and finished it. Highly recommended, especially the final chapters on the death of Diana, Rolf Harris painting a portrait of the Queen, and the late monarch filming with James Bond for the 2012 London Olympics.
Have a good weekend.
Iain Martin,
Editor, Reaction