A brand is “relevant” to its audience when it delivers two important things at once: comfort and surprise.
In the Republican Presidential contest, Jeb(!) Bush has begun calling Donald Trump a “chaos candidate.” But, in a sense, Bush is missing the point because “chaos” (i.e., the “surprise” part of the relevance equation) is only half of the formula. Jeb(!) is forgetting the comfort part.
Among the many examples of Trump brand and business absurdities that have appeared over the past 30 years, there have of course been successes. And the biggest success of all, from a brand relevance perspective, is unquestionably Trump’s 14 years as host and co-producer of NBC’s “The Apprentice” (and later the equally successful “Celebrity Apprentice.”)
The premise of “The Apprentice” is the essence of the Trump meme brought to life. It includes every element that The Donald is currently developing in this year’s Presidential conversation. Trump is unquestionably “The Boss” . . . making decisions by fiat at the end of each episode as contestants scramble in deference to that authority to win his approval.
If you achieve his approval, you are a “winner” . . . or a “good person.” If you fail to win his approval, you may be treated either decently or harshly, but you are a “loser.” In the Apprentice, you are, by definition, a loser if Trump says you are.
In his decisions, Trump is tough, no-nonsense and ruthless, but, in the end, nothing more than a contestant’s feelings get hurt. The storyline of every Apprentice episode is the story of a well-functioning, get-things-done relationship between a man who can make things happen by fiat and a team of contestants who compete tirelessly to anticipate his wishes and fulfill them.
It presents Trump as both vigorously powerful in judging performance and, while all contestants but one ultimately have to face Trump telling them “You’re fired,” the show gives us a Trump who is essentially non-threatening. He’s non-threatening first because all involved (including the viewer) realize this is a game; but more importantly, he is non-threatening because no action Trump may take on the show can disrupt the fundamental simplicity of the narrative.
The basic story re-enacts an essentially soft-focus version of the story many viewers need to be true . . . of working for a tough-but-smart, but often unpredictable autocrat, within a system that rewards the performers judged by that autocrat to be the best in ways that are often invisible to the average person, in a world where most people are weeded out from receiving the ultimate prize.
The Apprentice told us this was all ok. If we ever expressed discomfort with the arbitrariness or potential unfairness of Trump’s judgement, it reminded us that “this is just a game, just an entertainment.” But if we wanted to draw conclusions about the game being a helpful guideline for what to think in and about real life, the Apprentice and Trump told us that was ok, too.
The voted-off-the-island format was not invented by The Apprentice, of course. Survivor and The Bachelor pioneered the trope. But The Apprentice was the first to migrate it toward the unilateral judgement and decision of an autocrat. Survivor is an exercise in democracy (flawed by “alliances” but still based on “votes”). The Bachelor/Bachelorette is the narrative of a competition for winning someone’s heart (where each of us is allowed to be his or her own autocrat anyway).
But the repetitive structure of the narrative may not be as important as the fact that the face of this story, organized behind the face of Trump, came into the homes of millions of Americans regularly for more than a decade. Even if we didn’t watch, we all know how it works.
In other words, we are all tacitly ok with what’s going on here. The Apprentice gives us the repetitive experience of a domesticated form of autocracy, where we little by little learn to accept that, while Trump may be a tyrant, he’s the kind of tyrant we can be comfortable with . . . he’s the kind of tyrant who “tells it like it is” and “gets things done” and “doesn’t fall for ‘spin’ or equivocation and “is focused on results,” all while we the viewers can sit peacefully in front of the TV and experience no distress related to Trump’s behavior.
The result: Unlike any of the other 2016 Presidential candidates, Trump is as familiar to us as the blowhard uncle or nutty aunt at Thanksgiving. He is part of the family. You can love him or hate him, but you can’t help talking about him. You just can’t. If you think you can, you’re not being honest with yourself.
If relevance is comfort plus surprise, it’s worth remembering that neither “comfort” nor “surprise” always mean delight. When comfort is bad we call it “resignation.” When surprise is “bad” we call it, following Jeb(!) “chaos.” Comfort without surprise is invisible. Surprise without some foundation of comfort is unprocessable noise and typically filtered out.
Over decades, the Trump phenomenon has created the perfect admixture of comfort/resignation and surprise/chaos in a way that no other Republican candidate can begin to match.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: What is relevance, anyway?