Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

by Joshua Green

  Trump’s power to draw a mass audience during prime time was also vital to NBC because, by the mid-2000s, all of the major networks were beginning to lose audience share to cable television and other outlets. The fact that Trump could reliably hold huge swaths of viewers made it easy for NBC to line up major advertisers. And line them up it did: McDonald’s, Pepsi, Home Depot, Visa, Ford, Capital One, Kellogg’s, Panasonic, and many other blue-chip corporations advertised during The Apprentice, several of them continuing to do so for the show’s entire decade-long run. The fact that Trump’s 20 million viewers were tuning in on Thursday nights also made The Apprentice the perfect destination for Hollywood studios keen to advertise the new films they would be debuting over the weekend.

  But there was an additional aspect of Trump’s appeal that received almost no mainstream media attention at all—and yet it was a key part of why advertisers found his show so desirable, and why Trump, even though he was politically dormant during this period, managed to build a national profile that was dramatically different from any other major Republican figure, then or since: Trump was extremely popular with minority audiences.

  Because The Apprentice drew a mass audience that pulled in an especially high proportion of African American and Hispanic viewers, Fortune 500 companies seeking to reach these particular demographics could advertise on the show and get the best of both worlds. “First and foremost, advertisers are buying the absolute number—and he got really good numbers,” said Eric Leininger, who was chief marketing officer at McDonald’s in 2004. “Secondly, they’re buying against particular demographics. And it’s easier for a company like McDonald’s to buy a program that has a big audience, as opposed to having to aggregate an audience by buying five smaller ones. If you can have a mass program that brings you a diverse audience, that’s a beautiful thing.”

  Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that the appeal of The Apprentice to minority audiences was rooted not just in the manufactured drama of a business competition, but in Trump himself and the world he projected on his show. “As an active marketer watching the show, the beautiful thing about The Apprentice was that it was a wonderfully integrated program,” said Monique Nelson, chief executive officer of UniWorld, an advertising agency focused on minority audiences with two clients, Home Depot and Ford, that advertised on The Apprentice. “There were always people of color, women, people from all different backgrounds—so it connects. The one thing we know about marketing is that when you see a character that reminds you of yourself, you get invested.”

  What’s more, Trump and the show’s creators featured their minority contestants in a role that departed from how minority characters were historically portrayed on television and in movies: The Apprentice presented them as striving, ambitious entrepreneurs. Although she was “fired” from the show in week nine, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African American graduate student at Howard University who had held a low-level White House job for Vice President Al Gore, was the breakout star of The Apprentice’s debut season, styling herself into what remains the epitome of the reality-TV villain. In the show’s fourth season, which aired in the fall of 2005, Randal D. Pinkett, an African American business consultant and a Rhodes Scholar, won the overall title and became the Apprentice. People noticed.

  “They did a wonderful job of showing America as it was even then: multiethnic, multiracial, and multigenerational,” said Nelson. “[The show] appealed to companies looking to reach minority audiences, and it did it authentically, without trying too hard. That means everything in marketing. You always saw a nice swath of America through that business lens.”

  This popularity extended to Trump himself, who, according to private demographic research conducted at the time, was even more popular with African American and Hispanic viewers than he was with Caucasian audiences. “He was getting so much exposure from the prime-time show, and getting good ratings on NBC, that both his positive perception and his negative perception were well above average,” said Henry Schafer, executive vice president of the company Q Scores, an opinion research firm that serves advertisers by measuring the familiarity and appeal of celebrities and television shows and distilling them into a “Q Score.” “He was the kind of vivid character that I would put in the same category as the Kardashians, Martha Stewart, and Howard Stern: celebrities you love to hate.” At his peak in 2010, Trump’s positive Q Score with black audiences was 27, while his positive score among English-speaking Hispanic audiences reached 18. Among nonblack audiences, however, Trump’s positive Q Score was just 8. White audiences, along with everybody else, tuned in to watch Trump—but either they didn’t particularly like him or they simply loved to hate him. Either way, said Schafer, “he definitely had a stronger positive perception among blacks and Hispanics.”

  This perception became even more valuable as the series continued because it dovetailed with a marketing strategy just then coming into vogue in corporate America that was known as “visual diversity”—the idea being that advertisers could run commercials designed to convey the message that corporate America was not merely “in touch” with a racially diverse country, but was itself an active (and inclusive!) participant.

  Well into its run, The Apprentice was a show viewed by corporate America as the epitome of the forward-thinking, multicultural programming that all advertisers were increasingly seeking out, especially after the election in 2008 of a biracial president. “Going forward, all advertising is going to be multicultural by definition, because in most states, majority ethnic populations will no longer exist,” Danny Allen, a top executive at the multicultural-focused ad agency Sensis, declared in 2009. Just as Obama symbolized the country’s uplifting racial progress, Allen added, “advertisers are also tapping into that same yearning, particularly among younger Americans, to put racial divisions behind us and move forward in a more unified way.”

  As unlikely as it sounds from the vantage point of today, Trump and The Apprentice, up through the end of the decade, were considered by advertisers and audiences alike to be a triumph of American multiculturalism.

  —

  As a celebrity and a pop-culture icon, Trump was riding higher than ever. And yet, privately he was obsessing over politics. Nobody knew it yet, but soon enough they would—because Trump was about to do something that any ordinary Republican with an eye on the White House would consider reckless to the point of insanity: he was about to torch his relationship with minority voters.

  Viewed through the lens of politics, Trump had achieved by 2010 what Republican politicians had struggled, without success, to accomplish for the better part of fifty years. He had made himself genuinely popular with a broad segment of blacks and Hispanics. This audience did not think of him as a politician, of course. Not yet. But as a starting point in a bid for high office, Trump was already out on the far horizon of where the Republican Party one day hoped to be.

  Truth be told, the party was moving in entirely the wrong direction. Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater championed “states’ rights”—understood to signify his opposition to the civil rights movement—minority voters had turned their backs on the Republican Party. Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—stoking white racism for electoral gain—had only cemented this state of affairs. In the eleven presidential elections that followed Goldwater’s thumping loss, no Republican had won more than 15 percent of the black vote. And in the most recent election, in 2008, exit polls showed that John McCain had pulled a meager 4 percent of them. Republicans fared slightly better among the fast-growing population of Hispanic voters, with George W. Bush hitting a high point of 44 percent in 2004. But here, too, the GOP was backsliding: McCain had carried just 31 percent of Hispanics. Republican strategists looking toward the future were already growing nervous because the changing demography of the United States made perfectly clear that minorities would steadily increase as a share of the eligible electorate. Republicans needed to win more of them
.

  Trump was the furthest thing from a racial innocent. In 1989, after five black and Hispanic male teenagers from Harlem were accused of raping a white female jogger in Central Park, he had felt it necessary to spend $85,000 running full-page ads in the New York daily newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. “Muggers and murderers,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (Even after DNA evidence exonerated the Central Park Five, Trump refused to apologize and held fast to his insistence that they were guilty.) And yet, however improbable, he had managed to win the good favor of millions of minority voters.

  What was it, then, that impelled Trump to suddenly launch his birther attack on Barack Obama? And not just air his suspicion that Obama was born in Kenya, but conduct a full-scale media blitzkrieg that took him from Fox News to ABC’s The View to drive home this fantastical racist slur?

  Trump himself would never say. The charge had been circulating for some time in the darker corners of the Internet, on right-wing conspiracy sites and e-mail chains. Only under great duress, when it was clearly hampering his presidential campaign, did he grudgingly withdraw the charge during a bizarre press conference, surrounded by ex-generals, that was staged in the lobby of his Washington, D.C., hotel two months before the election. As someone possessed of perhaps the best raw political instincts of any Republican in his generation, Trump had intuited, correctly, that a racist attack targeting a black president was the surest way to ingratiate himself with grassroots Republican voters. And so Trump, without even batting an eye, proceeded to destroy the goodwill he had built up with minority voters as a way of appealing to a new audience.

  The effect was almost immediate, and the first place it showed up was in Trump’s television ratings. In the spring of 2011, as his birther crusade took off in earnest, NBC was airing a new season of The Celebrity Apprentice. According to research conducted by National Media Inc., a firm that places political ads on television, the audience that tuned in to The Celebrity Apprentice was among the most liberal in all of prime-time television, owing in no small part to the large number of minority viewers that Trump attracted. As he broadcast his birther charge against Obama, Nielsen ratings for The Celebrity Apprentice took a sharp turn for the worse. “Given the downward trend of Trump’s ratings among his current, liberal audience,” joked one Republican media buyer, “maybe he’s running as a Republican to add a little bipartisan diversity to his viewership.”

  The effect of Trump’s attacks was even more pronounced on his personal image. His favorability rating with minority viewers began to collapse. Trump’s positive Q Score among African Americans, which had reached a high of 27 in 2010, fell to 21 the next year, then to 10, and to 9, before bottoming out at 6 in 2014. That same year, his negative Q Score, which had floated in the 30s, skyrocketed to 55. Hispanics—not yet a Trump target—also soured on the Apprentice host. While his positive Q rating among English-speaking Hispanics roughly held steady in the teens, his negative rating soared up into the mid-40s.

  “I think most people thought they really knew Donald Trump,” said Schafer, of the Q Scores Company. “With his show, it was an emotional pact with the audience.” When minority audiences perceived Trump to have broken that pact, their judgment was severe. The Q Scores Company doesn’t measure the popularity of elected politicians; it rates only people whom it considers to be celebrities and entertainers. (It stopped measuring Trump after 2015, when he became a politician.) But among nonpolitical celebrities, Trump’s favorability dropped to the bottom of the barrel. “We don’t do folks like David Duke—not unless he had a show somewhere,” said Schafer. “But toward the end, Donald Trump’s negative rating with black audiences was the second worst of any celebrity we measured. Do you know who the only guy was they hated worse? It was ‘The Situation’ from Jersey Shore.”

  —

  From a raw political standpoint, Trump’s decision to adopt a set of views that offended and alienated minority voters, ugly though it was, turned out well for him. He would soon go further, broadening his attacks to include illegal immigrants. Trump did so at precisely the moment when Republican leaders, led by party chairman Reince Priebus (Trump’s future chief of staff), released an “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s defeat that included a detailed plan for how the party could recover. Its most important recommendation was that Republicans embrace comprehensive immigration reform in order to broaden their appeal to minority voters. In so many words, Republican leaders were telling their rank and file that they needed to be more like Trump during his Apprentice glory days—while Trump was arriving at the opposite conclusion and, with Bannon’s eager encouragement, doing everything he could to build a political movement around white identity politics.

  A wily manipulator of public sentiment whose New York upbringing taught him the power of racial resentment, Trump understood exactly what he was doing in leveling the birther attack. As he rose to the top of Republican primary polls in the spring of 2011, his instincts were borne out. But he never accepted the trade-off he had made. By the commutative property of Trump’s exalted self-image, blacks and Hispanics still supported him with the same zeal they had during his Apprentice heyday—of this he was certain—and if the Nielsen ratings and poll numbers didn’t back him up, then anecdotal evidence would suffice. A few days after locking up the GOP nomination in May 2016, Trump, sitting high up in his Trump Tower office, parried a question about his poor image with minority voters by insisting that he was as popular as ever: “A radio announcer, a Hispanic from New York, said, ‘I don’t know about these polls, because every listener that I have’—they call in Spanish—‘they’re all for Trump!’ I think I’m going to do very well with Hispanics.”

  Whether or not he was deluding himself, Trump really had once looked poised to perform better among minority voters than any Republican since Dwight Eisenhower—at least on paper. His multicultural appeal in 2010 raises the intriguing thought that Trump could have run an entirely different sort of campaign, one that drew on his strength with a set of voters Republicans don’t typically command and that sought to build on the diverse, entrepreneurial image of his TV show. “There was a time,” Monique Nelson pointed out, “where he was talking to everyone.” Had he been so inclined, Trump could have run a forward-looking campaign to “Make America Greater” rather than alluding to the past with “Make America Great Again.” Instead, he plunged deeper into the racial morass.

  After his excommunication at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump fell off the mainstream political radar, save for his periodic appearances on Fox News. Things settled down. Despite the outcry over the birther issue, only a single corporate advertiser, Groupon, bailed on The Apprentice. For people who read newspapers and watched the evening news, Trump appeared to have left politics safely behind.

  But he hadn’t, really. Instead, he jumped the tracks to the parallel world of right-wing websites and talk radio. Here, his celebrity could still garner him the validation and genuflection he constantly craved. One of Trump’s most faithful attendants during this period was Christopher Ruddy, the publisher of Newsmax and a Clinton conspiracy buff whose 1997 book, The Strange Death of Vince Foster: An Investigation, darkly posited that the 1993 suicide of the associate White House counsel and longtime Clinton friend might have been a murder. Ruddy, as the journalist Michael Isikoff memorably described him, was “the Inspector Clouseau of the Foster case—a determined, if bumbling, former New York Post reporter who has virtually single-handedly spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy buffs dedicated to the proposition that a foul and monstrous cover-up surrounds the circumstances of Foster’s death.”

  By 2006, Ruddy had built a successful right-wing publishing empire near his home in West Palm Beach, Florida, where prominent Republican politicians would come to seek his favor. There he befriended Trump, who extended an invitation that Ruddy accepted to join his Palm Beach
club, Mar-a-Lago. Ruddy’s Newsmax supplied a steady stream of fawning testimony to Trump’s supposed political power (“The Trump Effect”) along with face-saving ego balm when the GOP establishment denied him the respect he desired (“Trump Declines Prime-Time GOP Convention Speech”—he wasn’t offered one). In a colorful burst of cross-promotional synergy, Ruddy even arranged for Newsmax to host a 2012 Republican presidential debate in Iowa that Trump himself was going to moderate. “Our readers and the grass roots really love Trump,” Ruddy said, in announcing the event. Alas, Trump backed out when only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to participate. The debate was canceled.

  Trump was still feeling his way toward a political identity when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election. Through Newsmax, Trump delivered a blistering critique of why Romney had failed, one that now feels disorientingly out of character because he attacked the former Massachusetts governor over his stance on immigration—but did so from the left. “He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump complained to Newsmax. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.” Romney’s approach was too “mean-spirited,” Trump averred, and thus was always destined to fail.*

  But as he navigated the fever swamps of the right, Trump quickly became attuned to the roiling grassroots anger over illegal immigration, which was very much coming from the right. “It was intuitive by him,” said Sam Nunberg, the former Trump adviser, “to use immigration as a new wedge issue.” Recognizing that his base of support would never come from genteel, country-club Republicans, Trump felt free to abandon niceties and embrace the same mean-spiritedness for which he had just criticized Romney. “He digests this stuff,” said Nunberg. “He knew who his audience was going to be—it was not going to be people who want to have policy debates. It was going to be older people, people who work with their hands.”