Talk about a lack of self-awareness.
Over there in U.S. News and World Report, former NBC executive John Miller felt compelled to grovel to his fellow liberal media elites and the Trump-hating world beyond. The headline:
We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for 'The Apprentice’
NBC’s former chief marketer regrets selling an illusion that has had dire consequences for the world.
Miller writes:
I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.
For nearly 25 years, I led marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal. I led the team that marketed “The Apprentice,” the reality show that made Donald Trump a household name outside of New York City, where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns.
To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.
….At NBC, we promoted the show relentlessly. Thousands of 30-second promo spots that spread the fantasy of Trump’s supposed business acumen were beamed over the airwaves to nearly every household in the country. The image of Trump that we promoted was highly exaggerated. In its own way, it was “fake news” that we spread over America like a heavy snowstorm. I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.
….While we were successful in marketing “The Apprentice,” we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.
I spent 50 years successfully promoting television magic, making mountains out of molehills every day. But I say now to my fellow Americans, without any promotional exaggeration: If you believe that Trump will be better for you or better for the country, that is an illusion, much like “The Apprentice” was. Even if you are a born-and-bred Republican, as I was, I strongly urge you to vote for Kamala Harris. The country will be better off and so will you.
Cue the uproarious laughter.
Mr. Miller, like so many of his fellow elites in the liberal media and the Washington Establishment beyond, is so far gone into the cocoon of left-wing elitism that he has no clue that it is sentiments exactly like those he has expressed that, in fact, played a real role in motivating millions of Americans to elect Donald Trump in the first place -- with more millions poised, according to the polls, to do it again next month.
Nowhere in this teary eyed apologia does Miller show the slightest sign that all he is doing is regurgitating the elitist attitude expressed by Hillary Clinton when she called millions of her Trump-supporting fellow countrymen and women a “basket of deplorables, ” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”
Nor does he show the least awareness that he sounds like then-candidate Barack Obama complaining of millions of his fellow Americans as “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
This elitist attitude has become bedrock principle on the Left, both in the media and elsewhere. And John Miller’s US News piece, in which he apologizes for what he sees as his creation of the Trump political tidal wave by creating The Apprentice TV show, is simultaneously pathetic and laughably snooty.
It is a crystal clear picture of the elitism that has swamped the Democrats, once FDR’s party of “the forgotten man” - blue collar, hard working Americans who get out of bed every day to make sure their kids are educated, go to work, make sure their families are healthy and that the larger community that is their state and nation is well and patriotically served.
Along the way, revealingly, Miller says:
While we were successful in marketing “The Apprentice,” we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.
Again, does one laugh or cry at this elitist nonsense? At this point, Americans have had the entire time of the Biden-Harris Administration to compare directly to Trump’s presidential leadership. And poll after poll shows millions of Americans believing the Biden-Harris era to be an utter disaster. Neither Biden or Harris are seen by Americans as “successful leaders.”
With an appallingly weak and not very bright president and vice president in charge, the world has erupted into wars in Ukraine and Israel. The Chinese are sending their Navy to taunt Taiwan. The hard fact is that Russia’s Vladimir Putin didn’t dare invade Ukraine while Trump was president, nor did Hamas attack Israel or China threaten Taiwan.
Which says that in fact Trump has been, Reagan-style, a “peace through strength” president. And he succeeded.
John Miller’s opinion piece, which he ends by endorsing a proto-socialist who is impossibly weak and unsuccessful as vice president, is nothing if not typical of the left-wing, decidedly elitist mindset that runs the liberal media of today.
Which, to say the least, surprises no one.
