Abstract
Following Donald Trump’s rise from NBC’s The Apprentice (2004–2015) to President of the United States (2017), this chapter revisits my work on the business entertainment format (Kelly and Boyle, Telev New Media 12(3):228–247, 2011; Boyle and Kelly, The television entrepreneurs: social change and public understanding of business. Routledge, London, 2012) to reflect on the relationship between reality television, (self)entrepreneurship, and politics. I begin with an overview of the ways in which reality TV has impacted representations of business and politics onscreen. I then examine gendered constructions of ‘authentic’ men and ‘angry’ women before highlighting how regular television exposure has been converted into broader political capital around the world. Despite Trump’s embrace of Twitter through his late-night tweets, this chapter argues for the continued centrality of television in shaping understandings of Trump and political culture within a ‘post-TV’ age.
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Kelly, L.W. (2019). ‘Authentic’ Men and ‘Angry’ Women: Trump, Reality Television, and Gendered Constructions of Business and Politics. In: Happer, C., Hoskins, A., Merrin, W. (eds) Trump’s Media War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94069-4_6
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