As Biden and Trump Square Off in Their First Debate, Let’s Revisit Why Trump Won the 2016 Showdowns

Don’t worry about it, Little Marco …. Low energy …. You are the single biggest liar….

The first 2024 presidential debate is set for Thursday, and there may be wisdom in the old adage: Past is prologue. A case can certainly be made that one of the main reasons Donald Trump earned his party’s nomination in 2016—and went on to win the general election—is because of the sheer must-see spectacle of his off-the-rails debate performances. Eight years later, a sizable audience will be either tuned into the faceoff, to be hosted by CNN, or will spend time scrolling through the online highlight reel. In preparation, it is useful to consider why those bygone showdowns played to Trump’s strengths.

It is a given, of course, that Trump went into the early debates with a substantial advantage against the large GOP field. The main reason: he was a reality TV star, extremely comfortable with the medium of television and in tune with the audiences at home and in the studio. Experience in reality TV—a genre that is untethered to the real world—allowed Trump to parse the truth and make up facts on the fly, behavior that proved especially effective when courting a public with a compromised rumor-immune system.

Not to belabor the obvious, but Trump knew how to treat politics itself as a reality show. In the first few months of the primaries, skeptics had viewed his candidacy as little more than his way of burnishing his brand. Full stop. Yet once Trump had gotten a debate or two under his belt, he realized—as did the political and media establishments—that he had found his political métier. In short order, the cable and network news divisions began to cast him in the lead.

Soon, they were marketing the presidential race like a prime-time series. On two dozen evenings, TV provided live coverage of the primary and caucus results. Over the course of 15 months, beginning in August of 2015, there were 31 debates, town halls, and forums. In addition, Trump’s campaign rallies and primary night speeches were sometimes broadcast or streamed live.

Jeff Zucker, for one—then the boss at CNN—was going all-in for Trump. No wonder: he’d been the executive at NBC who’d help steer the success of Trump’s own reality show, The Apprentice. Roger Ailes, then running Fox News, also saw the candidate as his kind of marquee talent: loud, brash, unpredictable, and physically imposing, all of which translated into ratings catnip. In no time, this saturation coverage on cable and broadcast got viewers hooked on The Great Race. The debates became, in effect, an episodic TV series, in simulcast. The program merged three formats, all of which had been perfected during the 1990s: the reality show, the talk/opinion show, and the monthslong TV-news saga, from “Conflict in the Gulf” (’90–’91), to the O.J. Simpson “Trial of the Century” (’94–’95), to the March to Impeachment (’98-’99), not to mention Bush v. Gore (’00–’01).

The debates—and the race itself—turned out to be tailor-made for a reality-TV character like Trump: the serialized nature of the contest, the faux suspense, the obsession with process. So, too, was the fixation on the week’s winners (“We are going to win big-league, believe me”) and losers (“I like people who weren’t captured”). This was a format Trump knew intimately. And he solidified his hold on voters early by appearing in a setting that suited his showman’s flashiness and his insult-comic style.

As the Republican candidates lined up on the debate stage, Trump would typically be positioned at the center lectern. He would field more questions than his competitors. The setting had hints of Survivor and The Apprentice. At times, the moderators would focus less on the candidates’ policies than on their views about one another: “Senator Cruz, you suggested Mr. Trump ‘embodies New York values.’ Could you explain what you mean by that?” This line of questioning encouraged conflict and helped amplify Trump’s tendency to razz his rivals. Meanwhile, the postmortems by experts would reverberate for days across websites, social media, the print press, and the news and opinion programs, prolonging the agony and the exegesis.

All along, Trump was playing by reality-TV rules. He didn’t “prepare.” He played his malaprops and bluster as authenticity. He and his surrogates “spun” his performance in pre-interviews and post-interviews. He inserted his family into the process, which helped bolster his appeal and fill out his back story. He spread hearsay (“I’m hearing…”; “Everybody is saying…”). When things weren’t going his way, he blamed his mic or his earpiece. He cast doubt on the moderators. He whined and he sulked and he scowled.

Trump seemed to have the facility to say whatever sounded sensible or outrageous in the moment. He would build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border—which Mexico would pay for. He would alter his positions, debunk fellow candidates he’d previously praised, deny saying things he’d actually said. And all of it went relatively un-fact-checked by his opponents—or even the moderators. While the other presidential hopefuls on the debate stage gave responses that were based IRL, by and large, Trump played virtually. He understood that on reality programs the cleverest half-truth could mortally wound an opponent, and the craftiest player would often win—and win over his audience.