Geoffrey Baym. Journal of Communication. Volume 69, Issue 4. August 2019.
In the summer of 2018, David Pecker, chairman of American Media Inc. (AMI)— then the parent company of the National Enquirer and other US supermarket tabloids—cut a deal with prosecutors investigating the ‘hush money’ payment made to keep a former Playboy playmate from speaking publicly about her affair with Donald Trump. Pecker revealed that AMI had bought Karen McDougal’s story in order to suppress it—a process known in the tabloid world as ‘catch-and-kill.’ Trump aide Michael Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to illegally reimbursing AMI for the payoff, and was sentenced to three years in prison. In the context of an unprecedented disruption to the American presidency, the episode highlighted Trump’s relationship with Pecker and the Enquirer, both of which had been staunch supporters of his political ascendency (Toobin, 2017).
The specter of Trump’s affair with Playboy’s 1998 Playmate of the Year and its cover-up by the Enquirer further speaks to Trump’s broader relationship to tabloid media, dating back nearly 40 years (Grove, 2017). Trump’s celebrity had its foundations in the tabloid press of the 1980s and the ‘boisterous culture’ that ‘spawned and nurtured’ his public persona (Grynbaum, 2016). Long before Twitter, Fox News, or reality TV, tabloid media were the primary vehicle of Trump’s fame. He filled covers, column inches, and air time, particularly as his marriage with Ivana collapsed in 1990 and his affair with Marla Maples commanded attention. In popular memory, the New York Post cover in which Maples proclaims that Trump was the ‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’ stands as the exemplar.
Less understood, however, is the explicitly political tone of much tabloid coverage. Across a range of popular media forms, Trump was presented as an inherently political figure. As early as 1987, a People magazine cover speculated about when Trump would run for the presidency. Similarly, anticipating the presidential campaign to come 25 years later, a 1990 feature interview with Trump in Playboy explored at length ‘the first thing President Trump would do upon entering the Oval Office’ (Plaskin, 1990).
When the tabloid fantasy became empirical reality, however, the professional communities that attend to presidential politics were unquestionably surprised. In the hours following his victory, the New York Times would lament that ‘we’re in a state of shock,’ and wonder why ‘almost no one’ saw ‘it coming’ (Barbaro, 2016). Trump’s victory may have been difficult to imagine for so many, Kreiss (2017, p. 444) argues, because he and his 2016 campaign violated the deeply held expectations most journalists and social scientists have ‘for how political discourse works in the United States’. Mast (2017) describes it as a moment of political rupture, driven by unexpected forces of irrationality and institutional fracture. In search of its mediated roots, scholars have examined Fox News, Twitter, and the emergent right-wing digital ecosystem (e.g. Benkler, Faris & Roberts, 2018). Others have looked as far back as The Apprentice and Trump’s career on reality TV (Ouellette, 2016). Zelizer (2018) notably suggests in passing that years of tabloid coverage helped to establish the context for Trump’s eventual victory, but that important point has yet to be explored in depth.
This study seeks to address this oversight, examining the political work tabloid media did in laying the initial groundwork for an eventual Trump presidency. Tabloid media of the 1980s and 1990s were filled with sex and scandal, but also engaged in largely overlooked acts of political story-telling, constructing and politicizing the Trump character. This study offers an historical-critical reading of some of that coverage, tracing the largely obscured foundations of Trump’s political identity. In so doing, it reveals the deeper cultural contours of an imagined political world, one in which, as the radio shock-jock Howard Stern would assert in 1999, Trump could be ‘a great candidate.’ This study suggests that tabloid media constructed a political imaginary adjacent to the normative assumptions of 20th century liberal Democracy (see Ezrahi, 2012), and therefore, one that was largely invisible to much journalism and social science.
The Tabloid Imaginary
An initial challenge is that the concept of ‘tabloid’ exceeds singular definition, manifesting instead in multiple ways across media forms and cultural contexts. Scholarly interest in tabloid itself divides across three distinct approaches. First, within the fields of journalism studies and political communication, the vast majority of tabloid scholarship has focused on the daily newsstand variety—the quintessentially British mode of popular journalism long contrasted with the ‘elite’ or ‘quality’ press (e.g. Conboy, 2006; Sparks, 2000). In contradistinction to the latter’s underlying logic of rational reportage, objective inquiry, and reasonable discussion, the tabloid press indulges largely in sensational storytelling on matters of popular emotional appeal (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2008). Second, in a US context, ‘tabloid’ more readily refers to outlandish rumor publications such as the Enquirer. Rarely the subject of academic inquiry, these exist at a further remove from traditional journalism—‘different breeds, if not quite separate species,’ writes one of the few scholars of the supermarket tabloid, that use the tools and techniques of reportage, but lack commitment either to the civic good or the journalistic ambition of accurately representing reality (Bird, 2011, p. 192).
For much cultural studies scholarship, ‘tabloid’ occupies a third position—an umbrella term used to capture an array of hybrid media modes. These include glossy celebrity magazines, trash-talk TV, shock-jock radio, softcore pornography, and a range of other popular media modes whose stock-and-trade is some combination of celebrity, scandal, sex, and sleaze (see Biressi & Nunn, 2008). Here, tabloid is often difficult to distinguish from the related terms of ‘popular’ and ‘trash’ (Gripsund, 2000), suggesting an uncertain constellation of media that in differing ways focus on the sensational, the vulgar, and the excessive, all in largely unstated opposition to upmarket elite media and establishment journalism (Grindstaff, 2002). In his work on ‘tabloid culture’ and ‘trash taste,’ Glynn (2000, p. 2) argues that as a genre, tabloid resists ‘easy definition or summary characterization,’ and is marked instead by intrageneric diversity and intergeneric overlap among a number of similar forms
This study neither attempts to offer a bounded definition of tabloid, nor to construct a typology of tabloid modes. Instead, it draws on the multiple traditions of tabloid scholarship to examine a variety of media forms that occupy various points of intersection between journalism and popular culture. Tabloid is approached here as a quasi-journalistic representational system that operates beyond the boundaries of a high-modern paradigm of journalism and public affairs (e.g. Baym, 2010) and makes sense of public life through alternative styles, vocabularies, and normative frames. In differing ways, tabloid media transverse boundaries between information and entertainment, the public and the popular, the factual and the fantastic. They emphasize the affective, mining the public domain for the emotionally evocative. In so doing, they exceed the confines of literal language, and often tend toward exaggeration and hyperbole. They also can be deeply ironic, hinting at their own lack of seriousness and encouraging a measure of ambivalence toward their own representational claims (Glynn, 2000). As such, tabloid media are often dismissed as a depoliticized mode of popular information, a ‘social conversation which at best borders political reality’ (Conboy, 2006, p. 10). At worst, ‘tabloid’ is taken as an object of moral panic, an illegitimate form of political representation (see Wahl-Jorgensen, 2008).
More insightfully, however, tabloid can be seen as a parallel, or counterinstitutional discursive formation that challenges, opposes, and fills in the gaps of most journalism and public affairs media. Both the persistence and diversity of the form are indicative of the failure of political and journalistic institutions to adequately recognize audiences and issues beyond the narrow ‘structural elitism in the mainstream mediated public sphere’ (Örnebring & Jönsson, 2004, p. 285). Conboy (2006, p. 2) argues that the tabloid press has long envisioned an audience other than ‘the traditional bourgeois readership targeted by the mainstream press’, strategically constructing an imagined political community built around the habitus of a working-class readership.
Conboy insightfully links Anderson’s seminal notion of imagined community to Bourdieu’s (1984) idea of the habitus—the ‘shared conditions of existence’ that reflect one’s position in ‘social space’ and are ‘necessarily internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions’ (p. 167). Bourdieu explains tastes and preferences across social fields—news consumption included—as expressions of habitus and the cultural logic of differentiation that ‘associates each class of works with its public’ (p. 25). Interest in what he called the ‘informative’ press correlates with higher social status and a related ‘sense of belonging to the “legal nation”’ (p. 444), a point consistent with Bourdieu’s wider argument that rationalist political thought itself is less the universal aptitude that Enlightenment philosophy has imagined, and more a differential outcome of habitus (p. 399). Affinity for the ‘sensational’ press, by contrast, reflects the inverse. ‘The difference’ between the informative and the sensational, Bourdieu wrote, ‘ultimately reproduces the opposition between those who make politics and policy’ and ‘those who undergo it, between active opinion and opinion that is acted upon’ (p. 445).
In her work on the US supermarket tabloids, Bird (1992, p. 126) similarly found that form appealed specifically to working class readers who in the late-1980s may not necessarily have perceived themselves as ‘systematically oppressed,’ but did ‘see themselves as disadvantaged, apart from the forces that control their lives’. Glynn (2000, pp. 5-6) likewise argues that the rise of tabloid news programs on US television in the 1990s reflected ‘cultural tastes born of alienation from power and tempered by popular resentment’ and a mounting ‘dissatisfaction with institutions perceived as incapable of fulfilling the great promises of liberal democracy’. Building on Bakhtin’s (1984, p. 89) understanding of the medieval carnival as a temporary levelling of structures of social power and their attendant ‘prohibitions and hierarchic barriers’, Glynn (2000, p. 102) concludes that the tabloid celebration of ‘spectacle, fascination, grotesquery, and laughter’ is implicitly political in the broadest sense—a gleeful rejection of ‘dominant notions of respectability’
If this argument emphasizes the indirect political work embedded in tabloid media, they also often directly overlap with politics. In the UK context, the tabloid press offers a steady stream of populist stories emphasizing national decline, threats both foreign and domestic, and a political class committed to its own personal gain at the expense of the people’s well-being (Conboy, 2006). In the US context, supermarket tabloids regularly feature hyperbolic stories about government waste, incompetence, and secrecy (Bird, 1992). Consistent with the disjuncture the European daily tabloid press emphasizes between their readership and dominant political institutions (Klein, 1998), Bird (1992, p. 130) finds an ‘us-versus-them’ theme to supermarket tabloid coverage of public affairs—the government a shadowy ‘they up in Washington’ actively ‘conspiring against the people.’
Such stories are calibrated for a conservative readership that, at least in 1992, Bird found not to be partisan, but ‘“family-oriented,” religious, and patriotic in a nostalgic, flag-waving sense.’ The readers she studied ‘expressed the view that America is declining because of liberal attitudes, immorality, and godlessness.’ They similarly articulated the belief that establishment institutions—government, media, and science—regularly conceal critical information and their actual motivations. Readers ‘welcome[d] stories that reveal the “truth” about events.’ Says one of Bird’s survey respondents: ‘I do think we have a right to know what’s going on in our government. … If we could all stand together we could bring it back’ (p. 129).
This conservative populism is interwoven with an epistemic flexibility that butts up against modernist assumptions about the nature of truth and its representation. Readers of the US supermarket tabloids, for example, expressed considerable interest in the paranormal and a corollary distrust of science as the arbiter of truth (Bird, 1992). Glynn (2000, p. 10) characterizes this epistemological standpoint as an ‘openness to types of information and ways of knowing that are typically excluded’ in traditional journalism. Tabloid producers themselves assume their readers inhabit a fundamentally different epistemological standpoint than do readers of the prestige press. As one supermarket tabloid editor explained: ‘This stuff is sensational if you don’t believe it; if you do believe it, it’s the norm, it’s natural’ (Bird, 1990, p. 383).
In contrast to journalism’s epistemic certainty—its efforts to provide objective explanations of empirical phenomenon—tabloid media offer spaces for imaginative play. Bird (1992, p. 122, emphasis added) found that while most readers of the supermarket tabloids approach the more outlandish content with a grain of salt, some ‘enjoy reading tabloids as if they are true, playing with the definitions of reality, wondering if it could be so’. To put the point differently, tabloid media offer an alternative mode of political imagination. Ezrahi (2012) defines the political imaginary as a materially productive force—not a synonym for the unreal, but rather the conceptual preconditions necessary for the realization of an actual political order. Ezrahi explains the political imaginary as the vocabularies, narratives, metaphors, and myths that over time crystallize into particular institutional configurations and acquire the regulatory power to shape, enact, and maintain political worlds. In contrast to modernist assumptions about the necessary differentiations among the popular and the political, the informative and the entertaining, and the factual and the fictive (Baym, 2010; Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011), the political imaginary operates across discursive modes and is realized through the full range of representational forms. In turn, different political imaginaries give rise to different civic epistemologies—the styles of political reasoning; concepts of causality, agency, and reality; and the distributions of trust and authority around which a given political order coheres (Ezrahi, 2012).
The modern democratic political arrangement itself is a legacy of the Enlightenment and the ‘distinct kind of civil order’ it imagined that welded ‘together a particular notion of rational individualism and knowable reality’ (Ezrahi, 2012, p. 30). In similar terms, Alexander (2006) has described the specifically civil imaginary that undergirds a democratic order—the ‘common secular faith’ in a social solidarity that transcends the particularities of embodied identity in favor of the universalistic ideals of justice, equality, and inclusion. Alexander notes that the civil sphere increasingly is buffeted by non- and anti-civil actors, agencies, and discourses. Ezrahi (2012, p. 4) likewise argues that no political order is ever permanent, and exists continuously in ‘ambiguous relations to the imaginaries that sustain it and to the actual or potential imaginaries that subvert it’
Democracy, that is, is always vulnerable to its own undoing (Tilly, 2007), while Trump himself may be an indicator of a wider trend toward de-democratization (e.g. Foa & Mounk, 2017). Trump’s 2016 victory represented a rejection of both the civil solidarity and civic epistemology that ‘lie at the deep background of democratic life’ (Kreiss, 2017, p. 444). It violated predominant assumptions about the fundamentally civil and necessarily rationalistic arrangement of democratic politics, and because of that, was for many, unimaginable. As this study reveals, however, tabloid media have long offered an alternative mode of imaginative play, one often in contestation with—and therefore difficult to discern from within—a modernist democratic imaginary. Wahl-Jorgensen (2019, p. 30) argues that the tabloid press’ emotional lens on public life is largely incongruent with the commitment shared by journalism and the social sciences ‘to the rationality of the modernist project’. The normative rejection of tabloid, she writes elsewhere, impedes our ability to adequately account for ‘forms of politics that fall outside’ dominant liberal democratic ideals (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2008, p. 158).
Method
To explore the construction of the tabloid Trump character and the wider political imaginary in which a Trump presidency could be conceivable in the first instance, this study examines Trump coverage in four overlapping media spaces—the New York Daily News, People magazine, Playboy magazine, and the terrestrial radio Howard Stern Show. These illustrate a variety of representational forms that function adjacently to the ostensibly legitimate arena of political media, but that served as core sites of exposure for Trump. The Daily News is the primary US equivalent of the British tabloid daily (Bird, 2009), and in the early 1980s was an origin space for public awareness of Trump. In turn, the celebrity gossip magazine People drew heavily on the Daily News in its efforts to place Trump at the center of national popular interest, before then producing a series of hagiographic articles on Trump in the wake of the 1987 publication of Art of the Deal. In 1990, the Daily News celebrity columnist Glenn Plaskin wrote a 10-thousand-word interview with Trump published in Playboy magazine. That issue featured Trump on the cover (which he long kept framed on his office wall, and gladly autographed for fans during the 2016 campaign). Playboy itself may be the least vulgar instance of the genre of softcore porn, whose central emphasis on sexuality and visual exposure of the female body place it on the edge of the tabloid domain (see Biressi & Nunn, 2008). Finally, the Howard Stern Show, which expanded the scope of sex-and-sensation tabloid on broadcast media in the 1990s, became a central space for Trump’s ongoing efforts at self-promotion throughout that decade
The argument here is not that these four spaces represent the full universe of tabloid media, nor the gamut of Trump appearances in popular media. Rather, they offer multiple points of entry into the long-term, but largely overlooked, fascination with Trump as both popular figure and political possibility. This study does not include the National Enquirer, which has had a complicated relationship with Trump over many decades. The Enquirer’s early interest in Trump focused on his extravagant celebrity life-style and the drama of his romantic life (see Bird, 1992, p. 44), with the magazine only becoming a political advocate for Trump in the years following its purchase by AMI in 1999 (Toobin, 2017). As ongoing legal proceedings continue to reveal, the Enquirer-Trump relationship constitutes a complex and unique case, one that exceeds the parameters of the present study.
The goal here, therefore, is not to capture the intersection between Trump and tabloid in its entirety, but to identify a set of salient themes—the organizing codes that provide the deep structure to the larger Trump narrative. To do so, this study assembled a corpus composed of tabloid content produced between 1980, when the Daily News first wrote about Trump, and 1999, when Trump announced his initial interest in the presidency. Specific stories were collected through a variety of means. The Daily News has curated a collection of its Trump coverage, including cover art and full text of the 20 front-page articles published between 1980 and 1999. A search of the proprietary People magazine electronic archive for the key words ‘Donald Trump’ during that time frame revealed 14 articles of at least a paragraph in length focused specifically on Trump. The full text of Daily News columnist Glenn Plaskin’s Playboy interview with Trump was retrieved from the Playboy website. Finally, a catalogue of Trump appearances on the Howard Stern Show is housed on the website ‘Trump on Stern.’ That included full-text and audio recordings of 10 interviews aired between 1993 and 1999. Together, these offer a complex and meaningful set of foundational texts that have gone largely unrecognized and are now mostly forgotten.
The methodological approach is an historically informed discursive-thematic analysis. The tabloid coverage is understood as assemblages of lexical choices, imagery, metaphor, and narratives that cohere into organizing conceptual themes. Themes themselves function as the connotative structures that render disparate stories and their particular elements into a meaningful whole, and in turn link that whole to wider cultural concerns (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2002, p. 215). The initial intention was to recover the early tabloid construction of Trump’s celebrity, with particular attention paid to the descriptions, self-presentation, and narrative positioning through which the Trump character was articulated. That effort, however, revealed the unexpected point that the Trump character was explicitly politicized from its inception, and cast as possibly presidential as early as 1987. The focus therefore expanded to trace the larger political worldview within which the tabloid’s Trump was embedded. Attention turned to explicit references to politicians, political processes, and public issues; and the deeper representations of leadership, the citizenry, and the normative standards around which the tabloid media discourse of politics coheres. In turn, the following discussion is arranged in two corresponding sections—the first tracing the ‘tabloid Trump’ character, and the second charting the political imaginary within which that character could be politically mobilized.
Tabloid Trump
The central theme around which the tabloids build the character of Trump is fortune—a term weaving together notions of both wealth and luck. The Daily News initially profiles him in a 1980 piece titled ‘Playing the Trump Card’ (Moritz, 1980). A year later, People employs the same frame in its article ‘Trump Holds the Winning Cards’ (Wohlfert-Wihlborg, 1981). In both, one sees the common tabloid interest in those who seem to have beat the odds and for whom lady luck appears to shine (see Bird, 1992). The Daily News describes him as ‘tall and blonde, a fastidious dresser,’ with a taste for ‘flair,’ ‘flamboyance,’ and ‘style.’ For People, he is ‘tall, fair and movie-star handsome,’ his ‘chauffeured black limo’ identifiable by the vanity license plate ‘DJT.’ Both articles note his beautiful wife and their glamourous homes in Aspen, the Hamptons, and on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Who is this person, People asks? ‘Not the newest TV heartthrob but the latest star in the high-stakes world of New York real estate.’ So too does the Daily News proclaim him ‘the rising star’ on New York’s crowded ‘real estate stage.’ Says his father Fred: ‘Everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
‘‘The King of Can-Do’’
If ‘stars’ are clusters of culturally salient and affectively resonant ideals, Trump is a modern-day King Midas, or alternately, the ‘King of can-do’—an old kind of hero for a new social era. ‘Earlier generations venerated saints, war heroes, astronauts;’ People writes, ‘in the age of the Yuppie, a hugely successful real estate tycoon has become the living symbol of can-do America.’ His smile alone suggests ‘there are no problems that might not be overcome by the application of his brains, brashness and money’ (‘Intruigers,’ 1987). For the Daily News, he is a ‘swash buckling success symbol’ of the 1980s (Chadwick, Gluck, Kovaleski, Donovan, & Fulman, 1990).
Trump is a symbol of, but more importantly a vehicle for, the then-emergent logic of neo-liberalism: its celebration of entrepreneurial individualism and the conflation of private wealth with the public good characteristic of the Reagan Administration in the US and the Thatcher regime in the UK (Harvey, 2007). People suggests that two decades of national malaise had left the country ‘licking our psychic wounds,’ the fundamental American ‘creed that each individual among us can do anything if he has enough daring and drive’ in tatters. But:
here came Trump, bayoneting through bureaucracy, knifing through neighborhood watchdog committees and zoning codes, hurling marble and steel and glass into the heavens in half the time it took lesser men, reassuring us that our national myth still might be true. (Smith, 1989, italics added)
Notably, the ‘lesser men’ are not just his competitors (whom the Daily News says have been ‘left gasping’ [Moritz, 1980]), but the New York City government, which had spent six years and 12 million dollars unsuccessfully trying to renovate a skating rink in Central Park. After the city ‘admitted defeat,’ the story goes, Trump ‘offered to take on the job and completed it in only four months’ (Ryan, 1987). Trump here is actively mythologized. He is imagined as the swashbuckler who bayonets ‘through bureaucracy’ and knifes ‘through neighborhood watchdog committees and zoning codes,’ demonstrating for a tabloid readership already skeptical toward government, that it—and the civic compact of an earlier age—exists only as an obstacle to individual success.
Rejecting the notion of human solidarity that underlies the civil sphere (Alexander, 2006), Trump tells People in 1981 that ‘man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat’ (Wohlfert-Wihlborg, 1981). The 1990 Playboy interview expands on the theme. ‘Everything in life to me is a psychological game,’ he says, ‘a series of challenges you either meet or don’t.’ Insisting on his own ability to transcend structural constraints, Trump explains: ‘I like to tell the story of the coal miner’s son’—the son who dies of ‘black-lung disease,’ just like his father and his father’s father before him. ‘If I had been the son of a coal miner,’ he claims, ‘I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination – or whatever – to leave their mine. They don’t have it’ (Plaskin, 1990).
‘The Club that Wouldn’t Have Him’
Trump was no son of a coal miner, but the tabloids celebrate his proverbial ragsto-riches story, situating him as a working-class hero. ‘Rich men are less likely to like me,’ he tells Playboy, ‘but the working man likes me because he knows I worked hard and didn’t inherit what I’ve built’ (Plaskin, 1990). As early as 1980, the Daily News envisions Trump in opposition to the class-based structures—literal and metaphorical—of social power. His dream is not just ‘a skyscraper with his name on it,’ but ‘a tower dwarfing Tiffany’s next door.’ As does People a year later, the Daily News explains that the construction of Trump Tower involved the destruction of two classic Art Deco friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the ‘civic-minded’ Manhattan City Club had hoped to preserve. The Daily News quotes a City Club statement that Trump’s refusal to save the works of art would consign him to ‘a place in history’ with the ‘barbarians rather than [the] builders.’ Trump Tower, the Daily News suggests, ‘will win no praise from the art community’ (Moritz, 1980).
Bourdieu (1984) reminds us that aesthetics are inexorably linked to social position-that the value of art is inseparable from the community that does the valuation. For the tabloids, Trump’s work of construction, material and symbolic, is equally an act of deconstruction. His building projects and public character alike are presented as assaults on class privilege, its attendant tastes, and its institutions of distinction. This point emerges specifically in the Playboy interview when Trump is asked directly about the New York Times architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, who ‘hasn’t been kind to Trump buildings, panning them as garish and egotistical.’ Foreshadowing his ongoing hostility toward the Times, Trump hones in on the intersection between cultural taste and institutional power. ‘Paul Goldberger has extraordinarily bad taste,’ he says, but the ‘fact that he works for the Times, unfortunately, makes his taste important. … If Paul left the Times or the Times left him, you would find that his opinion meant nothing’ (Plaskin, 1990).
In the pages of Playboy, Trump challenges the authority of the Times to assign cultural value. On the issue’s cover, he appears wearing a tuxedo, with the jacket draped around that month’s playmate, who seems to be wearing nothing else. The image is carnivalesque, illustrating the recurrent emphasis on Trump’s lack of class. That same year, as his marriage collapses and his business teeters on bankruptcy, a People cover proclaims Donald and Ivana as ‘America’s gaudiest couple’ (Farrell & Balfour, 1990), while the Daily News suggests he is undignified (Burton, 1990) and ‘capable of crass in the first degree’ (McAlary, 1990). Here one sees the ambivalence of the tabloid discourse, the ironic posture that simultaneously celebrates and ridicules, identifying Trump as both hero and anti-hero of the story.
Following the divorce, coverage becomes more focused on his sexuality, chronicling the stream of models and actresses he might be bedding. Sex in particular is the stock-and-trade of his interviews with the radio shock jock Howard Stern through the 1990s. ‘I go to bed with models every night,’ Trump tells Stern in 1993. ‘My sex life is a rampage’ (11 January, 1993). Trump here is a cartoonish hyper-masculine archetype, an aggressive embodiment of the cultural backlash to shifting gender norms. More broadly, that crudeness becomes a marker of his distance from power, a rejection of the class-based values of dignity, tastefulness, and refinement that is characteristic of tabloid media and their ‘vulgar salute to high culture’ (Biressi and Nunn, 2008, p. 1).
Trump is thus projected into the tabloids as an avatar for working-class resentment. In a second 1993 interview (8 May), Stern explains that he befriended Trump because he saw him ‘as a victim’—an object of derision, and even hatred. Trump acknowledges that ‘some people … dislike me intensely,’ and later elaborates that ‘the people that dislike me the most, by far, are the rich people’ (Stern, 1999). Elsewhere, People frames the Trump narrative as a struggle between his ‘new money’ and the establishment structures of ‘high society’—‘the club,’ that is, ‘that wouldn’t have him.’ In New York, ‘they laughed at him after they left his parties,’ while outside of Mara-Lago, ‘Palm Beach society still titters’ about his futile effort to be accepted (Kunen & Nguyen, 1990). Back on Howard Stern (8 May, 1993), Stern assures him the haters are just ‘jealous,’ because he is ‘living the life they want to be living.’ Or at least, ‘you are living my fantasy life.’
‘The Show’
A strong element of the fantastic runs throughout the tabloid coverage—photo spreads illustrating the women and the wealth; hagiographic descriptions of his celebrity connections and material possessions. When Playboy asks him to explain the ostentatious excess—‘the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos’—Trump’s answer is remarkable. All of those, he explains, are ‘props for the show.’ ‘And what is the show’ the interviewer asks? ‘The show is Trump,’ he clarifies, ‘and it is sold-out performances everywhere.’ Trump here baldly acknowledges the fictive, performative nature of his public celebrity, ‘an aura,’ as he describes it later in the interview, ‘that seems to work’ (Plaskin, 1990).
From its inception, the Trump character has been an expression of a postmodern epistemology that rejects the core tenets of modernist empiricism, privileging impression over fact and utility over ontology. That, in turn, was well-calibrated for a tabloid discourse that itself routinely shifts among realist and fictive modes of representation. The point becomes further evident in Trump’s discussion with Howard Stern (11 January, 1993) about the Post cover story where, as Trump characterizes it, ‘Marla came out with a statement that I was the best she ever had.’ He recalls that his lawyers wanted a restraining order to stop the story’s circulation, but he had scolded them. ‘That’s an advertisement!’ Stern interjects, noting the value of the story for Trump’s popular persona, and Trump agrees. ‘It was a great honor,’ he says, ‘it’s a great reputation to have.’ Then, he continues unprompted: ‘I’ll tell you what, even if it’s not true, it’s a great reputation. I think I’d rather have the reputation than the fact.’
Trump reveals to Stern that his public persona is a work of invention, and indeed, 25 years later, the Post reporter who wrote the story would suggest that Trump himself had manufactured the piece, perhaps even pretending to be Marla on the phone (Brooke, 2018). That point is not far-fetched, given People’s 1991 story that Trump had posed as his own ‘fictitious PR man’ to brag in the third person about his latest sexual conquest (Carswell, 1991). Then, the reporter claimed surprise, but tabloid media long served as active partners in the co-construction of the Trumpian myth. Recognizing that the myth serves their mutual interests, People suggests that ‘he has filled a need: America’s media are always hungry for heroes’ (Ryan, 1987). Elsewhere, People quotes Trump’s own suggestion that he plays ‘to people’s fantasies, and concludes that ‘instead of resenting all this, many of us’ are ‘almost grateful’ to imagine that the Trump character might exist, if not in fact, then at least ‘as a possibility’ (Smith, 1989, italics in original). He might not actually be ‘the self-made man of our folklore,’ that is, but ‘this specter of Barnum … knows how to put on a circus’ (‘Intruigers,’ 1987).
Political Imaginary
Despite the modernist inclination to disregard the playful, the fictive, and the fantastic as meaningful modes of political thought, what Ezrahi (2012) describes as the political imagination fluidly transcends such arbitrary distinctions. The ‘fictive fantastic imaginings’ of a given society, he argues, ‘often become significant components of the active political imagination,’ giving shape to ‘the aesthetic, normative, and behavioral clusters of the political world’ (p. 42). Ezrahi here has in mind the works of ‘high culture’—literature, the arts, and the like—but the point undoubtedly applies to popular culture forms, where the boundary line between political fictions and social facts has always been difficult to discern (see also Alexander, 2006). At the same time as they construct the Trump character, these tabloid forms embed him within a political imaginary in which his popular celebrity becomes fused with political representation.
‘Maybe Donald Trump is Our Next JFK’
Repeatedly, they link Trump directly to the electoral process. In 1980, the Daily News notes his ‘political instincts,’ his ability to bend municipal government to his will (Moritz, 1980). Some years later, People publishes its cover piece suggesting that a Trump run for the White House might be inevitable (Ryan, 1987). That came in the wake of Trump’s purchase of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers complaining that ‘our great country’ was being ‘laughed at’ by its allies.6 People suggests the ad had brought ‘the showman-entrepreneur’ to the attention of both major parties, and revealed him as ‘ready to step out on a larger stage.’ Although ‘talk about a race for the Presidency has intensified considerably in recent weeks,’ the article suggests, Trump ‘insists that he isn’t running – at least not yet.’ Ivana then gets the final word. ‘Eventually Donald’s going to look at some other business,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’s politics. Maybe it’s something else. I never say never.’
Three weeks later, People publishes multiple letters-to-the-editor in response. Although one letter writer argues that ‘the notion of Donald Trump running for president is absurd,’ another concludes in emphatic, affective terms that ‘the last time we had a young, handsome, energetic, millionaire running the country we were all in love. Maybe Donald Trump is our next JFK’ (Trujillo, 1987). Playboy revisits the question in 1990, with the interviewer suggesting that Trump sounds ‘like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.’ Imagining the possibility of a Trump candidacy, the interviewer asks: ‘Why not consider running for President?’ Trump replies with familiar bluster that he’d ‘do the job as well as or better than anyone else,’ but would only run ‘if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes’ (Plaskin, 1990).
In 1995, Howard Stern suggests that rumors of a presidential campaign were simply another of Trump’s self-promotional exercises and Trump initially agrees. He explains that he had merely given a speech as a favor to a friend, and ‘all of a sudden everyone said I was a presidential candidate. Showed you had hard up they were. One good speech and you’re president.’ But after he babbles incoherently about Japan and the US auto industry, Stern’s cohost chimes in encouragingly: ‘Now this is a speech, Donald!’ she cheers, and Stern agrees. ‘Hey, there you go! I’ll vote for you!’ he proclaims, before offering the quick qualification: ‘I don’t even know what Donald’s talking about’ (Stern, 1995). That comment is laced with irony, an ambiguity as to whether Stern is implying that the thought of a Trump presidency is nonsensical, or that for a tabloid imagination and its anti-realist epistemology, Trump would not need to make sense to qualify as presidential. Either way, Stern here is both willing to imagine a Trump presidency, while also willing Trump to do the same.
Finally in 1999, Trump announced on CNN’s quasi-tabloid program Larry King Live that he was interested in pursuing a third-party presidential nomination. Reveling in the melding of the popular and the political, Trump suggested he would want Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. The following day, the Daily News focuses on the announcement. ‘I WANT TO BE THE PREZ,’ the cover proclaims in bold, next to a mockup of a ‘Trump-Winfrey 2000’ campaign poster evocative of a presidential seal. The accompanying article, based on an interview with Trump that day, suggests that ‘the larger-than-life character New Yorkers know simply as The Donald wants America to think of him as The President’ (Siegel, 1999). A month later, Howard Stern (1999) concludes simply: ‘President Trump will be a reality.’
‘They’re My People’
For more than a decade, tabloid media encouraged their audiences to imagine Trump as president, while also encouraging Trump’s own presidential ambitions. In 1999, he insists to the Daily News that his interest in the presidency ‘was all started by tremendous polls. The National Enquirer came out with incredible polls,’ he explains. ‘Other people came out with incredible polls’ (Siegel, 1999). The Enquirer indeed had conducted a non-scientific poll: a survey of 100 readers, 37 of whom said they would pick Trump over George W. Bush or Al Gore. In an interview with the New York Times at the time, Trump reiterated his point that the Enquirer poll had demonstrated to him that he could win. ‘Those are the real people,’ he suggests of the Enquirer readership. Notably, the political operative Roger Stone was also in the room, coaching Trump throughout the interview. Stone explains to the Times reporter that the tabloid audience ‘is the Trump constituency’ (Nagourney, 1999). Following 2016, David Pecker of AMI echoed the point, describing his readers as ‘white working people’ who ‘voted for Trump’ and already wanted to see ‘him re-elected’ (Toobin, 2017).
Although the Times refused to take the point seriously in 1999, the episode illustrates the long-term strategic effort to cultivate the notion that a working-class tabloid audience could become the Trump constituency. In the 1990 Playboy interview, Trump imagines that ‘if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican’—the Democrats at the time still being the party of labor. ‘The working guy would elect me,’ he explains. ‘He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.’ Evoking a similar image, the 1987 People article anticipating a Trump presidency opens with a scene of him entering a room to the adoration of the crowd. ‘Mr. Trump, can I have your autograph?’ one person calls out, while another cheers, ‘Donald, why don’cha run for Governor?’ Characterizing the crowd in a working-class vernacular, the story then makes the point explicitly. ‘The English peasantry did this to Edward the Confessor,’ it suggests, once again envisioning Trump as a mythic king, and his fans literally as peasants who clamor ‘to touch the sleeve of his blue cashmere overcoat’ such that they might be bestowed with ‘good fortune’ (Ryan, 1987). Bird (1992, pp. 125-6) argues that the recurrent tabloid focus on ‘the whims of fortune’ connects to ‘a class-based feeling’ of disempowerment and a sense of distance ‘from the forces that control their lives’. People here imagens Trump as a kind of supernatural, or as Ezrahi (2012, p. 22) might suggest, pre-modern hero, who could become the working man’s champion.
People repeats the scene two years later, this time picturing Trump as a contemporary Alexander the Great: ‘The people of Alexander’s time engraved his image upon their rings for good luck. The people of Trump’s were known to lunge through the phalanx of his bodyguards, believing that simply to touch his pinstripe-suited body would accomplish the same’ (Smith, 1989). The piece then quotes Trump, speaking of his working-class fans: ‘They’re my people … For whatever reason, they love me.’ Here People merges its prior notion of ‘the peasantry’ with a more political arrangement of ‘the people,’ and its vision of Trump as hero morphs into political representative. He becomes a populist leader for a tabloid constituency. In contrast to traditional theories of democratic representation that posit constituencies as exogenous to the political process, contemporary representational theory suggests that constituencies themselves are constructed through acts of representation. ‘Constituencies, like communities, have to be “imagined,”’ writes Saward (2010, p. 51), and are brought into being through multiple political, affective, and performative strategies across a range of representational forms. The discursive work of tabloid Trump was in part a process of cultivating a constituency, of reimagining the overlapping set of tabloid audiences as Trump’s people.
‘A Toughness of Attitude Would Prevail’
Any act of constituency building can succeed only to the extent that it enables a public ‘to recognize itself in terms of a “generality” – a common enemy, shared problem, shared virtue – that is neither given nor self-evident but must be narrated into being’ (Disch, 2017, p. 145). According to tabloid Trump, the shared problem is weakness – both individual and systemic. The shared virtue is a hyper-masculine, blue-collar strength, imagined as an antidote to the underlying weakness of the liberal-democratic model of governance.
Among the content examined here, the Playboy interview offers the fullest expression. There, Trump laments that the country lacks ego, and because of that, is being ‘ripped off so badly by our so-called allies’ who are ‘screwing us’ while ‘they laugh at our stupidity.’ The economic ascendency of Japan is, he says, ‘an embarrassment,’ but he gives ‘credit’ to the Japanese leaders ‘because they have made our leaders look totally second rate.’ He suggests that as president, he would support ‘extreme military strength,’ while domestically, ‘we need the death penalty and authority given back to the police,’ so that we can ‘bring law and order back into our cities.’ He rejects then-President Bush’s call for a ‘kinder, gentler America.’ Echoing the kind of hyperbolic right-wing discourse common to the then-emergent genre of AM talk radio, he warns, ‘if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.’
Remarkably, having recently returned from his first business trip to Russia, he likewise characterizes Michael Gorbachev as showing ‘extraordinary weakness’ and not having ‘a firm enough hand.’ Displaying early affection for autocratic leaders, he praises the ‘top level Soviet officials’ with whom he discussed business, and says the US political leadership pales in comparison. ‘Generally, these guys are much tougher and smarter than our representatives. We have people in this country just as smart, but unfortunately, they’re not elected officials.’ Similarly, he hesitates to praise the Chinese leadership, but none-the-less notes that the crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising ‘shows you the power of strength.’ By contrast, ‘our country is right now perceived as weak.’ A decade into the Reagan-Bush era, he insists ‘we’re still suffering from a loss of respect that goes back to the Carter Administration.’ Describing presidents of both parties as ‘incredible jerk-offs,’ he concludes that ‘we need to be tough.’ And if he were to be president, the interviewer asks? ‘A toughness of attitude would prevail.’
Aligning with the tabloid emphasis on national decline and distrust in the statusquo (Bird, 1992; Conboy, 2006), Trump continuously impugns individual leaders and the political system itself. He disparages the Democrats Carter and Clinton, but also the Republicans Reagan and Bush. In 1990 he imagines the United States as ‘going down the tube’ (Plaskin, 1990), and in 1999 bemoans that ‘a lot of people, including myself, are very unhappy with what they see out there. The spirit of the country is wrong,’ (Siegel, 1999). He likewise argues to Howard Stern that neither political party could fix the imagined problem and that the solution could only come from outside the establishment institutions. ‘Look, I made billions of dollars,’ he tells Stern, asserting his alternative claim to political authority. ‘I watch Bush the other day on television. And I’m not sure if that’s what you want.’ Stern, whose own brand is institutional contrarian, is happy to agree. ‘I’m not sure that’s what I want either,’ he says of Bush. ‘I don’t know anything about him. All I know is he knows less than I do about world politics.’ ‘Right,’ Trump affirms, and then broadens the complaint. ‘You watch the [Democratic] debate … and I don’t think that’s the one you want either. You take a good strong look at it’ (Stern, 1999).
‘That is Why You’re a Great Candidate’
Grounded in a deep cynicism toward the institutions of representative democracy, the tabloid fantasy of a Trump presidency offers a counter-institutional incursion on political propriety. If the tabloids celebrate the normative disruption he poses to ‘high society,’ a Trump presidency promises the same for the political domain. The 1999 interview with Howard Stern is particularly illustrative, and worth considering in some detail.
Calling in to the show, Trump suggests he was encouraged to run for president by fans of the show, ‘thousands’ of whom he says had shown up for a book-signing event. Asking for Stern’s endorsement, he then suggests that Stern ‘should come out with me sometime’—the implication being the pursuit of sex, or as Trump revealingly puts it, ‘what presidential candidates aren’t supposed to be doing.’ Flouting his eagerness to violate the implicit rules of political decorum, he continues, ‘I tell you this, for a presidential candidate I have the best time.’ Trump’s use of the superlative is familiar, but here it functions to differentiate himself from those who would work within the normative expectations of the political system.
The conversation then turns to Trump’s then-girlfriend Melania and her sex appeal. ‘When we walk into a restaurant,’ Trump brags, ‘I watch grown men weep.’ As he often does, Stern targets the boundaries of decency, and asks if Melania goes out without wearing underwear. At that point the cohost interrupts. ‘Howard, you’re talking about a potential first lady, and this is not appropriate,’ she says, perhaps seeking to reassert some limits on acceptable political talk. Surprisingly, Trump then puts Melania herself on the phone, and Stern immediately frames the conversation in sexual terms. ‘What are you wearing right now,’ he asks? Melania answers ‘not much,’ coquettishly suggesting that she is ‘almost’ nude. The bawdy back-and-forth continues, with Stern asking if Melania and Donald ‘go out every night and … have sex?’ She replies: ‘That’s true. We have a great, great time.’ When Stern presses the point—‘Every night, you’re saying?’—Melania obliges, teasing: ‘Even more.’ At that point Trump comes back on the phone and Stern asks, ‘She’s naked there, isn’t she?’ When Trump affirms the fantasy—‘she is actually naked,’ he says—Stern concludes fawningly, ‘What a life you have there.’
The gratuitously sexual and sexist banter is familiar in its corner of the tabloid realm. More than simply exploiting a retrograde gender dynamic, however, Trump performs an oppositional mode of political identity, built on the rejection of normative standards for public speech and behavior. The performance itself is strategic. Trump recognizes the cultural inappropriateness of the exchange, and its wider violation of the discursive boundaries of traditional representational politics. ‘Is this your average interview, for a presidential candidate?’ he gloatingly asks, assuring the Stern audience of his deviation from the norm.
Stern responds in kind, suggesting the norms themselves are problematic. ‘That is why you’re a great candidate,’ he tells Trump, ‘because you’re refreshingly honest.’ Amplifying the mounting distrust of the representational system and those who would claim to be representative, he compares Trump to then-President Clinton. ‘Clinton is doing the same stuff,’ Stern complains, but ‘he’s just not talking about it.’ For Stern, Trump’s rejection of the norms of political discourse becomes a marker of his authenticity and his capacity to provide an alternative mode representation—an imagined ‘levelling mechanism,’ Mast (2017, p. 469) has described it, ‘for erasing the hierarchy between the people and its government’. ‘Wow!’ Stern concludes. ‘There it is, an exclusive interview with possibly the next president of the United States.’
Conclusion
In 1999, Trump, of course, would not be the next president. That would take another four election cycles and a set of radical changes in political culture, some of which the tabloid coverage gives insight into. The Trump character—‘the show’ as he called it—was crafted across a range of media forms that conceptualized the possibilities of politics in ways adjacent to the representational strategies and underlying epistemology of most 20th century public affairs media. Relative to both journalism and the ideals of a Habermasian public sphere, they advanced an alternative political imaginary, disinclined toward the modernist ideals of objective information, the rational citizen, and the reasoned argument. Representation itself—in both its political and symbolic modes—was understood primarily as affective and performative, an enactment that obscures boundaries between the fictive, the fantastic, and the factual.
Within this narrativistic imaginary, Trump represented a return to the age of heroes and the pre-democratic desire for a champion (see Ezrahi, 2012, p. 22). In Playboy he was the strongman, in People a king. He became not just the ‘king of can-do,’ but a broader representation of class resentment—years before such resentment would become a driving force in American politics (Cramer, 2016). For a set of counter-institutional media forms, Trump was positioned as an agent of normative disruption, mobilized against the socio-political status-quo and its communicative institutions. In turn, they explicitly imagined that such a character could be president—over multiple decades naturalizing the notion of a ‘President Trump’ and encouraging an overlapping assemblage of audiences to see themselves as his constituency.
If in the 1980s this tabloid imagination was confined to politically marginal spaces, in the ensuing years it would diffuse broadly through media culture (Bird, 2011). Most acutely, Fox News is a direct descendent. As Peck (2019) insightfully discusses, Fox News emerges immediately from the tabloid realm—its ownership, management, and on-air talent all coming from tabloid media and bringing with them its sensibilities. If tabloids had long exploited class differences, Fox News served ‘to partisanize such differences’ (p. 44), amplifying a tabloid discourse of workingclass resentment and victimization. By 2016, the disruptive imaginings of an earlier configuration of tabloid media would become a primary influence on American politics, fueling a candidate who could ‘bend the norms of political and civil discourse’ and be rewarded by many citizens eager for ‘such transgressive performative acts’ (Mast, 2016, p. 283).
Hindsight helps to illuminate this point, but many still struggle to recognize the profound contestation among political imaginaries that was antecedent to the Trump presidency, and likely accelerated by it. In 1999, the Times would dismiss Trump’s early presidential aspirations as a side-show; more recently the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin (2019) has suggested that Trump’s re-election would be, in a word, ‘unimaginable.’ Rubin’s argument is more normative than empirical, but as Kreiss (2019) suggests, the social identity of journalists—that is, their habitus and the implicit normative standards therein—fundamentally guides their representations of the political world. The same point undoubtedly extends to the academy, where scholarly patterns of awareness, interest, and interpretation are often difficult to disentangle from the Enlightenment mindset of dispassionate reality and the sovereign citizen (Achen & Bartels, 2016; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019), or what Alexander (2006, p. 4) has described as ‘our putative commitment to a common secular faith’.
The early tabloid coverage examined here demonstrates that commitment may never have been as common as many would imagine. It illustrates the continuous swirl of counter-imaginaries unanchored to the civic epistemologies of democracy or the ideals of universal civil solidarity that motivate most journalism and political communication scholarship alike. As such, it emphasizes Ezrahi’s (2012, p. 5) call for closer examination of ‘how the collective imagination works in politics’ and why some political imaginaries ‘become institutionalized and sustainable … while others remain unnaturalized or even unnaturalizable fictions’.
This study has attempted to reconstruct a particular tabloid imaginary, one developed through overlooked media spaces and incongruent with a modernist imagination. In so doing, it has focused on one assemblage of tabloid forms. There are, of course, many others. As noted earlier, the current study does not include the National Enquirer. Court documents from ongoing legal proceedings will provide a wealth of insight into the relationship between Trump and that particular tabloid publication. Moreover, historical copies of the Enquirer remains housed only in analogue and unindexed physical archives (Onion, 2018). The point that only a handful of US libraries have deemed the supermarket tabloid worthy of preservation emphasizes the larger argument here that the importance of tabloid media forms to the political imaginary has been chronically under-acknowledged. Further research could explore the specific Trump-Enquirer relationship, historical and contemporary, with attention to both its textual and extra-textual dimensions. The specter of Roger Stone lurking in the background of the 1990s tabloids further suggests an element of political strategy—an intentional effort by tabloid producers and political operatives to harness the class-based appeal of tabloid as an asset in a long-term project of agenda setting and agenda building. That point, which is central to Peck’s (2019) work on Fox News, warrants significantly more empirical attention.
Finally, to facilitate further empirical research on the role of tabloid media in the political imaginary, future work could seek to better bound the concept of ‘tabloid’ and clarify the distinctions among its multiple forms. Similarly, research could also explore the extent to which the historical analysis provided here maps on to the current discursive environment. As Bird (2011) notes, tabloid content permeates internet culture. The potential linkages between what this study has described as a tabloid imaginary, its more contemporary articulations in a host of internet locales, and the rising tide of anti-democratic political movements remains in need of greater elucidation. This study offers a starting point, illuminating the foundations of the Trump character and the easily overlooked disruptive imaginings within which that character was made meaningful and that subsequently have taken root in contemporary political life. Recent history emphasizes the point that we can no longer afford to dismiss that simply as unimaginable.