This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers! Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, proclaims in the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film Network.

Beales character may be fictional, but his message isnt wrong. Just look at the Kennedy-Nixon debates; Jimmy Carters malaise speech ; Ronald Reagans rise as the first actor and TV star to become president; George H.W. Bush checking his watch ; George W. Bushs declaration of Mission Accomplished ; Barack Obama s 2004 convention speech ; and, of course, theres Donald Trump .

No political figure has owed so much to television as Trump. He mastered the medium in his rise to national fame in the 1980s, pitching himself as a post-cultural revolution update to the self-made man myth. (Never mind the $400 million he inherited from his father.) After a string of bankruptcies and divorces in the 1990s, he rebooted as a reality TV star playing the archetypal boss no-nonsense, loyal to those who listen to him and in total control on NBCs The Apprentice. And then another reboot in the 2010s, first as an anti-Obama heel on Fox News and next as a reactionary right-wing pol who would descend, godlike, from the tube to stand as an avenging angel for a supposed Real America that increasingly saw itself as besieged by economic and cultural change.

Ever since his 2015 ride down the Trump Tower escalator, Trump ran his campaign and then his presidency as a television spectacle and the TV bosses obliged by carrying it all live.

It began with press secretary Sean Spicers lies about Trumps inauguration crowd, making the daily press briefing into a must-watch absurdity. He teased policies and plans with stay tuned announcements that often left the audience hanging. His dalliance with North Koreas Kim Jong-Un played as a will-they-or-wont-they script. When the coronavirus hit, he bragged about the ratings his news briefings received. Then came his plot to steal the 2020 election, orchestrated in televised press conferences, state legislative hearings and, ultimately, a speech on the Ellipse and a march on the U.S. Capitol that became the Jan. 6 insurrection.