An engaging blast from Tina Brown.

“Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.”

The wonderful Neil Postman of blessed memory would have understood (and indeed might have predicted) Trump’s victory. Brown’s post sent me scurrying back to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman didn’t live to see the transformation of our media ecosystem wrought by the Internet, but he was amazingly insightful about the cultural impact of its predecessor, broadcast television. This book of his was all about that — and particularly about the way it had transformed American politics into a branch of show business. Indeed in one chapter he wondered if the US had “reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”.

The thing that most struck me when watching videos of Trump rallies was that people forget that he owed his rise not to social media (though he did exploit Twitter brilliantly in 2016) but to his mastery of television in the Apprentice years. His rambling, disjointed, disconnected discourses and ravings on the platform led opponents and critics to conclude that must be losing his mind; but his audiences enjoyed it and clearly didn’t see it that way — just as British TV audiences used to enjoy comedian Tommy Cooper’s mimed incompetence.

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