Once upon a time, Donald Trump’s talents as a TV personality and pitchman were obvious to everyone—most of all himself.
When he launched his 2016 presidential run, millions of Americans knew him best not from his bankrupt casinos or the gossip pages of the New York Post but as the swaggering host of NBC’s The Apprentice, in which aspiring entrepreneurs competed for a full-time job in his real estate empire.
Trump routinely overstated the primetime dominance of The Apprentice, which was a breakout hit in its debut 2003–2004 season but saw its ratings steadily decline over subsequent years. Nonetheless, his rise as a candidate, propelled by his willingness to say anything to stay in the news cycle, seemed to affirm his on-camera star quality (even if it was actually people behind the scenes of The Apprentice who had edited his unscripted and less-than-coherent bluster to make him sound like a straight-talking businessman).
But where is Trump’s TV firepower today? His latest press secretary, Katie Zacharia, lasted a mere five days in the job, ousted following a disastrous on-camera performance at her first briefing just weeks before crucial midterm elections. Trump’s own media appearances are unhinged and embarrassing even by his standards; when he’s not falling asleep at events or in meetings, he’s claiming that NATO “gave” Greenland to the US and telling rallygoers about how he checked out Senator Jon Husted’s ass.
During Trump’s second term, his administration has done what it can to circumvent existing media and bring its messaging directly to voters with broadcast content that resembles familiar TV formats. It’s not breaking through at all.
On Tuesday, for example, the US Small Business Administration streamed an hour-long special called the Million Dollar Pitch Competition. The premise was that five business owners would appear before three celebrity judges (property investor Grant Cardone, rapper Nicki Minaj, and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, whose credentials as a member of Elon Musk’s DOGE were not mentioned) to vie for the biggest chunk of a $1 million cash prize supplied by Clover Network, a fintech company that provides point-of-sale platforms.
While the show, hosted by actor Dean Cain, was styled as something like a hybrid of Shark Tank and American Idol, it amounted to an extraordinarily dull attempt to prove that the Trump administration is bringing factory jobs back to the US. For some reason, it featured a short video in which Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, talked to an animated strand of DNA, because “America's DNA is small business.” The judges focused more on how animated the presenters were than the economic fundamentals of their pitch. When Marshall Sasse, the owner and CEO of a pressure valve company based in Wyoming, delivered a solid but subdued presentation, Minaj asked if he had access to any “cowgirls” who could’ve added “more punch to the pitch.”
While Trump himself was not on hand for the pitches, the show featured brief segments in which participants met with Trump in the Oval Office. When the judges asked the president for advice on picking a winner, Trump replied, “You know, it's interesting, because with The Apprentice, I had a very good term that I used: ‘You're fired.’”
A day later, the YouTube stream of the SBA’s Million Dollar Pitch Competition had barely cracked 60,000 views. Even on Trump-friendly X, the reaction to the event was hostile, with users suggesting that the White House cared more about game shows than the cost of living and was taking its cues from dystopian fiction such as The Hunger Games.
Other efforts to supplant mainstream programming have also fared poorly. A month after the White House launched a 24/7 Trump TV streaming channel as part of its ongoing war on news outlets, it’s hard to imagine even the most devoted MAGA disciple watching: on Tuesday, unremarkable B-roll footage from border agents driving alongside the US-Mexico wall segued into a series of testimonials from people describing how their loved ones were raped and murdered by migrants. On Wednesday, the channel showed footage from Trump’s February State of the Union address.
As for Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Food Show on YouTube, a cooking series in which the health secretary enlists chefs to teach viewers affordable and healthy home recipes, audience has declined since a July premiere, with only six episodes released so far. The most recent segment included Cain as well as actor and ex-bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno, as though to underscore that on the celebrity front, some of Trump world’s biggest names are guys known for playing superheroes on TV in the previous century.
If there has been any sort of a ratings win for MAGA media this year, it would be UFC Freedom 250, the mixed martial arts extravaganza held in June at a ring structure controversially erected on the South Lawn of the White House. Though Ultimate Fighting Championship lost some $30 million on the spectacle, it broke the viewership record for a live event airing exclusively on streamer Paramount+, with an average of 7 million viewers tuned in.
That fell well short of the Super Bowl records that Dana White, CEO of UFC, had promised to break. While he was nonetheless able to declare a victory for his sports organization, White has said that he “can’t afford” to return to Trump’s backyard for an encore. Too bad for the administration, which has yet to capture a real TV audience without significant help from a producer who knows what they’re doing.