The world is not exactly lacking conspiracy theories about Donald Trump, but here’s another: the President of the United States of America still thinks he’s on a reality show. For years, the people around him have simply referred to the whole business – the elections, the criminal trials, the assassination attempt, the Epstein subplot, the presidency itself – as The Show. As far as he’s concerned, this is all for the cameras. Summits and speeches are talked about as shoots and episodes; other world leaders are referred to as characters. Before a meeting or a press conference, aides will brief him on his script for the scene. Hundreds of people spend their time reassuring a nearly 80-year-old man in charge of 5,244 nuclear warheads that he and everyone he meets are just characters in a loosely scripted series.
The problem with this theory is that it’s obviously true. Donald Trump has been closely involved with the fake rivalries and mock combat of WrestleMania since the late 1980s. In 2004 he was hired by the British reality TV producer Mark Burnett as a pantomime businessman on The Apprentice. Burnett remains Trump’s friend, adviser and his special envoy to the United Kingdom. Trump’s meetings with world leaders at the White House this year have had the unmistakable confected drama of semi-scripted reality television, in which characters enter into staged confrontations over their interior design choices, or who’s dating whom, or (in this series) the fate of Western democracy. Trump himself openly acknowledged this when he wrapped one of these scenes – his hour-long harangue of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February – by announcing: “I think we’ve seen enough. This is going to be great television.”
The arrival of the Trump show in Scotland allowed its star to try out some new material. “Trump takes time out to open Scottish golf course,” the BBC reported, but this was backwards. He took time out from his real job of promoting his own businesses to travel not exactly to Scotland, but to the bits of it he owns (hotels and golf courses) to play golf and do a little diplomacy. This was international relations as practised by Henry VIII, who in 1520 travelled not exactly to France, but to the bit of it that he owned (Calais) for some sport and a little diplomacy. The décor for that summit included fountains that flowed with wine and a pair of live monkeys that had somehow been covered with gold leaf. Trump was pleased with the new ballroom in his hotel; he devoted almost as much time to it in his press conferences with Ursula von der Leyen and Keir Starmer as he did to the trade deals he’d agreed with both leaders. At other moments he gestured to his golf course outside. “Even though I own it,” he observed, “it’s probably the best course in the world.”
Footage emerged of Trump, who claims to be an expert golfer, and whose best scores are always recorded at clubs he owns, arriving near a bunker in a buggy. A few metres ahead of him, a caddy could be seen discreetly dropping a ball on to the course for him to play, rather than the ball he’d hit into the sand or the long grass. Who cares? It’s not cheating, because it’s not real.
Also on display was Trump’s capacity for comic timing. When he met the Starmers on the steps of his golf resort, Turnberry, there was a moment in which they were all supposed to stand while a bagpiper played. Any other politician would have waited for the music to end. Trump, with his gift for farce, began taking questions immediately. The journalists had to yell over the blaring, dissonant noise of music being squeezed out of a leather sack. Victoria Starmer’s mouth was set into such a perfectly flat line that her expression could have been used to calibrate a spirit level.
Trump’s mockery of Starmer was delightful to watch. The Prime Minister, he observed, is: “Slightly liberal. Not that liberal. Slightly.” He grouped Starmer together with his friend, Nigel Farage: “They’re both good men.” When it did not seem the PM could wince any harder, Trump declared: “I respect him much more today than I did before, because I just met his wife… and family”, he added, just a little more quietly. “He’s got a perfect wife. And family.”
He declared his love for Scotland, the land of his mother, especially those parts of it which he has had bulldozed for golf courses and hotels. The natural beauty of Scotland is augmented by golf courses and hotels, but ruined by wind turbines (which he calls “windmills”, which is funnier, and which he opposes because he thinks they ruin the view from the 18th hole of one of his golf courses).
“Wind is the most expensive form of energy,” he declared (it’s actually the cheapest form of electricity), “and it destroys the beauty of your fields and your plains and your fields and your waterways… If you shoot a bald eagle, in the United States, they put you in jail for five years. And yet windmills knock down hundreds of them.” The monstrous eagle-mashers are also bad for the mental health of whales. “It’s driving them loco. It’s driving them crazy.”
There is nothing in which Trump cannot immediately be an expert, because this is a TV show and no one knows anything anyway. He was asked about the UK’s problem with illegal immigration in small boats: “I know nothing about the boats,” he declared, but he knew who was on them: “They’ll be murderers, they’ll be drug dealers.” He claimed to have stopped six wars. “I’m averaging about a war a month.” India and Pakistan were now at peace, thanks to him. He had put an end to the Congo-Rwanda conflict: “They’ve been fighting for 500 years… but we solved that war.” Before Trump brought peace to the land, the situation was just: “Machetes. Machetes all over the place.”
He said hostages who were taken by Hamas during the 7 October massacre have since been to see him in the Oval Office. This is what he asked them: “When you were a hostage, and you have all of these people from Hamas around you… did they ever wink at you and say, like, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be OK?’” He cited the more noble situations he has seen in “the movies” – “you even see it with Germany, where people would be let into a house, and live in an attic in secret” – as if they were real, because for him they are.
When someone lives in reality TV, rather than reality itself, they see no line between what can be material and what should not be. And so Trump continued his comic pace even when talking about “what they used to call the Gaza Strip. You don’t hear that line too much any more.” He spoke about the $60m in aid the US has sent as if it were generous (his government spends that in less than five minutes) and opined: “You really, at least want to have somebody say thank you”. Asked if he believed the people of Gaza were starving, he replied: “I don’t know. I mean, based on television I would say, not particularly, because – those children look very hungry, but we’re giving a lot of money and a lot of food.” Later he would try to appear more concerned: “Some of those kids are… that’s real starvation stuff. I see it. And you can’t fake that.”
It is truly grim is to see leaders who live in the real world nodding along, powerless or unwilling to describe the situation in Gaza as anything other than, as Starmer put it in response, “a humanitarian crisis… an absolute catastrophe”, as if the bloodshed and mass starvation were the result of a natural disaster rather than the deliberate actions of soldiers and the Israeli cabinet. It reveals who has the power to make jokes about anything, and who is the butt of them. And that is the point at which the Trump show stops being funny.
[See more: A Trump-shaped elephant]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent
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