If TV execs were asked to classify James Poniewozik's illuminating new book…they might use the term "dramedy." Poniewozik is a funny, acerbic and observant writer…[but] uses his ample comedic gifts in the service of describing a slow-boil tragedy…Poniewozik brings a new microscope with which to analyze the drug-resistant bacterium that is our president. And while there is certainly room to examine collusion and Russian interference and the outdated institution that Homer Simpson once referred to as the "Electrical College," this book is really about the role played by all of us, the faithful citizens of TV Nation. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Audience of One is that it makes Trump's presidency seem almost inevitable.
The New York Times Book Review - Gary Shteyngart
★ 06/24/2019
Epochal shifts in entertainment media have driven the derangement of American politics, according to this caustic, scintillating cultural history. New York Time s television critic Poniewozik sets Donald Trump’s political rise against American television’s evolution, from a three-network monopoly broadcasting inoffensive, common denominator fare to a fragmented cable and internet spectrum of isolated niche channels, a world where liberals watched Mad Men while conservatives watched Duck Dynasty . That polarization, he argues, bred new televisual genres that incubated the Trumpian worldview: antihero dramas where ugly violence is needed to defeat even darker forces, reality shows where life is a cutthroat, zero-sum struggle between amoral operators, and cable news shows that portray the world as a chaos of noisy, flashy dogfights where perceptions of truth are dictated by tribal allegiance. Meanwhile, Trump’s own media persona—“the blunt, impolite apex predator” on The Apprentice , the trash-talking bully in pro-wrestling cameos, the birther conspiracy theorist on Fox News guest spots—shaped his political style and then subsumed him entirely: Trump became “a cable news channel in human form: loud, short of attention span, and addicted to conflict,” Poniewozik writes. “TV became president.” Poniewozik’s trenchant, brilliantly witty critique of the cultural archetypes percolating into American politics is one of the best analyses yet of the Trump era. (Sept.)
"Now that the Donald Trump freak show has replaced all regularly scheduled programming, staggering us daily, as one of its longtime chroniclers I’m grateful for this brilliant, lucid, and essential book to help make sense of this American nightmare."
"The smartest, most original, most unexpectedly definitive account of the rise of Trump and Trumpism we’ve had so far. It’s also the best book yet written about the bride-of-Frankenstein mating of American politics and American pop culture, a wedding practically nobody saw coming until Trump provided the shotgun… [An] uncommonly rich and stimulating book."
"A dazzling dual biography of television and Donald Trump.... The book is so rich with insights about the man and the medium that it isn’t until the end that readers will realize it’s still not clear how 60 million Americans could come to see an obviously phony performer as the person they wanted in the Oval Office."
Foreign Affairs - Jessica T. Matthews
"The Mueller Report of television criticism! James Poniewozik’s Audience of One is both damning and illuminating, a witty, penetrating exposé of Trump’s most intimate relationship, the one with the medium that made him."
"With wit, insight, and clarity, James Poniewozik puts Trump at the center of a series of changes that swept through American popular culture and political systems. Poniewozik’s essential book shows how these evolutions incubated Trumpism, even as Trump’s rise exposed the limits and vulnerabilities of the media, which too often found itself floundering in the face of his shameless manipulations."
"We’re saturated in Trump coverage and analysis these days, but Poniewozik has been offering consistently unique, informative, and whip-smart commentary in his post as New York Times TV critic. Here he expands on his newspaper work by dissecting the president through the lens of his favorite medium."
"In the vast literature of Trump-theory, Audience of One immediately takes a place in the first rank; it has to be read by anyone interested in understanding how such a buffoon became our nation’s chief magistrate. We have always known of course that Donald Trump’s success is attributable in some way to television; what we have not grasped—what we have refused to grasp—is how his career reflects the tastes and predilections of our beloved entertainment industry right down to the smallest details of its technological development. For anyone who still counts on enlightened celebrities to deliver us: Read this book and repent."
"In this brilliant new book, James Poniewozik shows how the media landscape increasingly fragmented over the past few decades, with the rise of cable, the Internet, and social media, and how our political world fractured as a result. Smartly argued and beautifully written, Audience of One deserves an audience of millions."
"This is both a fascinating look at the ways television has changed and shaped the U.S., and a compelling lens through which to look at how we got to November 8, 2016."
"Illuminating... Poniewozik is a funny, acerbic and observant writer… [He] uses his ample comedic gifts in the service of describing a slow-boil tragedy. If humor is the rocket of his ICBM, the last three years of our lives are the destructive payload…Poniewozik brings a new microscope with which to analyze the drug-resistant bacterium that is our president. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Audience of One is that it makes Trump's presidency seem almost inevitable."
Narrator Matthew Josdal's delivery style—low-key, neutral, and occasionally skeptical—makes him the right voice for this fresh perspective on Donald Trump. The premise: Trump is a brand mascot, not much different than Mr. Clean or Colonel Sanders, who has "jumped off the cereal box" and into the White House. This triumph of brand over man has its roots in TV's populist history. There's Davy Crockett (a Mexican-hating, plain-talking American), the Beverly Hillbillies (nouveaux riches who thumb their noses at the elite), and CADDYSHACK’s Rodney Dangerfield (a man with "sympathy for the overdog"). More recently, Trump, the brand mascot, capitalized on the fragmentation of viewership and the merger of 24-hour news with reality TV. Josdal's well-paced delivery and the author’s McLuhanesque viewpoint make this mind-bending audiobook a standout. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile
★ 2019-06-30 The chief TV critic of the New York Times sums it up: "Without TV, there's no Trump."
In his stellar debut, Poniewozik demonstrates how Trump, over a period of four decades, "achieved symbiosis" with the TV medium: "Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality." As TV evolved from America's homogenizer (the three major networks) to fragmenter (cable TV), Trump "used the dominant media of the day—tabloids, talk shows, reality TV, cable news, Twitter—to enlarge himself, to become a brand, a star, a demagogue, and a president." Recounting how Trump, who was born in 1946, grew up with TV, the author details how he cultivated a famous image and leveraged celebrity, becoming a reality TV star in the 2000s and a politician in the 2010s. "Playing ‘Donald Trump' became his full-time job." His telling analyses of Trump's appearances on The Apprentice , Fox & Friends , and The Howard Stern Show will come as revelations to readers unfamiliar with those programs, on which Trump emerged as an antihero, known for "being real " rather than honest, in the manner of the not "conventionally likeable" people on reality TV. As Poniewozik writes, he "spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its metabolism, learning to feed its appetites." For Trump, cable TV news, with its "constant fear and passion" and need to "agitate their viewers, not settle them," was a perfect fit. His daily tweeting is based on careful study of his most popular tweets—those provoking "shock, insult, rage." The author chronicles Trump's actions against a deeply insightful history of vast changes in the media and popular culture during the period. TV, he writes, proved "the perfect medium for his sensibility, for picking fights, for whipping up people's hatred and fear and resentment, for taking the express lane around logic."
This intelligent eye-opener belongs on the small shelf of valuable books that help explain how Trump created his base.