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    Win a game show, become a US citizen? We’ve entered the realm of the truly depraved | Dave Schilling

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    I guess Republicans really love game shows. Just a few days after Fox aired its “isn’t Trump wild” guessing game, What Did I Miss, it was revealed that the TV producer Rob Worsoff has pitched the United States Department of Homeland Security on a series premise he calls The American, which would give immigrants a chance to compete in a series of challenges for the prize of US citizenship. The actual process of winning citizenship is obviously too boring to film. Filling out an N-400 form? Snore. A written exam? I’d rather watch a dog eat grass. Skip all that and give us an obstacle course instead.People have stupid ideas all the time. My child thought it would be fun to squeeze lemon juice in his hot chocolate. He took one sip, almost barfed on the table, then begged me to order him another, lemon-less beverage. Stupid ideas are great, because most of them are harmless. “Oh, I ate a large bug off the ground. Whoops.” The only stupid ideas that are a problem are the ones where the actual government considers cosigning them. The DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin was asked by Time magazine what the status of Worsoff’s pitch was and responded via email that it “has not received approval or rejection by staff”.Gotta really think this one through, I guess. Something like this must be thoroughly vetted by serious people. How cruel is this one, exactly? How desirable is the bloodthirsty demo for advertisers these days? Can we sell a presenting sponsorship? And is this for streaming or broadcast? Can we get Chris Hardwick to host? These are all vital questions to consider before making a decision in show business.Such an idea would be eye-rollingly low-class in normal times, but as the Trump administration attempts to ramp up deportations and to do away with the constitutional right of citizenship by birth (and federal courts bravely fight back), this dumb concept travels at warp speed to the dimension of the truly depraved. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services website takes great pains to describe the process of becoming an American as solemn and full of responsibility. Step 10 of the site’s “10 Steps to Naturalization” is “Understanding U.S. Citizenship”. It states: “Citizenship is the common thread that connects all Americans. Check out this list of some of the most important rights and responsibilities that all citizens – both Americans by birth and by choice – should exercise, honor, and respect.”Yes, but what if you had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar first?To make his pitch even more appealing to the bigwigs in Washington, Worsoff suggested a few choice ideas for challenges that correspond to the most stereotypical aspects of life in America’s 50 states. A pizza-making contest for New York, a rocket-launching challenge for Florida, and a “gold rush challenge” for California. Nothing says “vital skills for living in 2025” like panning for gold in a pair of tattered Levi’s 501s. Perhaps Levi’s will sponsor the segment. Gosh, this thing pays for itself.But why stop there? Maybe a Breaking Bad-themed meth-making challenge for New Mexico. Polygamy challenge for Utah? How efficiently can you operate a turn-of-the-20th-century steel mill in Pennsylvania? Can you safely land a plane at Newark airport? For Washington state, you just have to answer trivia questions about Seattle inaccuracies in the sitcom Frasier. The possibilities for inanity are significant.In order to advance to the next round of this bottomless pit of human misery, contestants would be subjected to a vote, which Worsoff described as “like a presidential election”. Oh, how fun. Can you contest the results of that vote, too? Worsoff said in an CNN interview that his idea is “not like the Hunger Games”. Mostly because the costume budget isn’t as high.The Democratic opposition in Congress has, naturally, lined up to publicly condemn such a grotesque notion. The New York congressman Jerry Nadler said on X (formerly known as a useful platform for conversation) that “human lives are not game show props.”A nice sentiment, but I must be the bearer of bad news. Human lives have been game show props since the invention of the form. In 2005, Fox (why is it always Fox?) aired a reality show called Who’s Your Daddy, where a woman had to guess which of eight men was her real father. If she guessed correctly, she’d win both an awkward conversation and $100,000. Presumably the cash prize would go directly to her therapy bills. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, while not a game show (the real winners are the viewers, I suppose) is a reality universe where women frequently abuse alcohol to the detriment of their own lives and the lives of others around them. If human lives are not props in these shows, are they even entertaining to the masses?An idea like The American, then, is the natural extension of the genre, taking someone’s desperation, fear, and overwhelming desire and squeezing all the drama possible out of it. Worsoff told CNN that he had pitched this idea to previous Democratic administrations, but weirdly, we never heard about it back then. It’s only now that such a concept feels enough in line with the zeitgeist of immigration paranoia that Worsoff felt emboldened to speak freely about it.He said: “I’m putting a face to immigration. This is a great celebration of America.” Yes, it is a celebration of America. Specifically our worst impulses: the desire to make everything a game and revel in the bread-and-circuses spectacle of life and death, but to cloak it in nobility and charity. Worsoff continued: “I’m very fortunate and lucky and honored to be an American. And I want everybody to understand the process.”At no point did I think that a pizza-making contest was part of the process.

    Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check | Peter Pomerantsev

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      In Washington DC, I measure out my life in polls and heart palpitations. The polls are relentless, nail-biting, maddeningly contradictory. There are national polls, swing state polls, polls from tiny counties that predict a whole election, partisan polls designed to demoralise the other side.There are polls on whether a candidate inspires confidence, compassion, leadership. I’ve noticed how, after a bad poll, I start looking for another that tells me numbers I like. I’ve also noticed how, after a good one, I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality”.But the polls never do quite take you to reality. Instead, they shape it. It’s not just what the polls are saying, or even how they were put together, that’s the great problem here – it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. Who’s up? Who’s down? What tactics have they used to get one over on each other? What does it say about their personality? Words are seen as weapons with which politicians show off their ability to subvert or scare the opposition – not as substantive statements about what they intend to do.And what sort of politician will thrive in this world where political speech is just a game? A candidate such as Donald Trump.It was the communications professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella who first noticed the connection between describing politics as a series of strategies and a growing cynicism among voters.This was back in the mid-1990s, when the media was constantly analysing the rivalry between US president Bill Clinton and speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, the early iteration of today’s identity-based partisanship. Jamieson and Cappella found the media was focusing less on the issues the two were debating – often around health reform – and more on how they were competing.The coverage fixated on who was winning, utilised the language of games and war, emphasised the performance and perception of politicians, put a new weight on polls.This sort of coverage activated people’s cynicism about politics – the sense that it’s just a game between self-serving schemers – and then made them more cynical about the media.Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of polls to the headlines. After Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris uses ex-Trump chief of staff’s remarks to paint him as unfit for office”.The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not was reduced to highlighting a rhetorical tactic. The idea that all politics is just a cynical game, and that the “mainstream media” is not really looking out for the cares of the voter, has become so pervasive it has helped pave the way for politicians who stand on sweeping away the whole edifice of democracy as we know it.It’s no coincidence that this turn began in the 1990s, when the cold war had finished and the big philosophical debates about policy seemed to be over. Instead, politics became about entertaining performance – the era of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin. And the media began overgenerating coverage that replaced ideological debate with personality and tactics.The 1990s were also when the reality show emerged as the dominant entertainment format. It initially grew out of observational documentaries seeking to understand society better by ceaselessly filming ordinary people in their homes in such a way that they would forget about the cameras and be more themselves.It quickly became the opposite: a circus where all behaviour was for the cameras. Contestants learned to say and do the most vile things just to engineer scandal and generate attention for themselves.American political TV debates started to imitate the same logic. In a busy primary debate, candidates only get a little sliver of airtime. The way to get more is to attack another candidate in the meanest and most personal way possible, and thus provoke them to attack you back. If you are attacked, then you are allowed more time to respond.So you quickly got debates where supremely clever candidates sling personal abuse at each other to get more attention. The debate stage was set for reality show host Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe design of most social media has followed the same incentives: rewarding taking the most extreme and often nasty statements to generate attention. And Trump has flourished on that as well.The 1990s is when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) boomed, with its cabaret wrestlers pulling obviously fake fighting moves, where violence is theatre. Trump was always an aficionado of WWE, even taking part in mock fights, and a member of its hall of fame.This year the 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention; Trump enters his own rallies to the theme tune of the Undertaker, who, at the height of WWE, was the “evil” foil to Hogan’s all-American “goodie”. Many of Trump’s followers apply the cultural logic of WWE to his statements. Sure, the argument goes, Trump might say some very authoritarian-sounding things – but it’s just a game.So can we ever find a way back to reality? To issues rather than strategies? We can, and we can even use polling to do so. When pollsters recently gave voters a choice of policies, rather than personalities, to choose from in this election, the majority, including Trump supporters, preferred Kamala Harris’s.Partisan polarisation dissolves when we change how we cover politics. We can also develop different TV political debates, which preserve the excitement of competition but repurpose them to reward collaboration instead of abuse.Imagine a debate format where candidates had to solve a real policy problem, and show how they would work with each other and with the opposition party to achieve it. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically detect the commonalities in political disagreements to generate common policy solutions. Such platforms are already being used in Taiwan.Of course, there’s appeal in fleeing from reality to the grotesque circus of politics. But if we can’t face facts, others will force us. This month, at the Wilson Center in DC, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Centre presented a chilling analysis of Russian weapons manufacturing and supply chains.The slideshow featured satellite photos of munitions factories where freshly cleared tracts of land are being readied to produce more weapons. Vladimir Putin is preparing for a vast war. China’s arms production is on a wartime footing. They are not playing. More

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      Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setoodeh review – how Donald Trump’s big break changed America

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      Every time someone complains that our new prime minister is boring, I rue the day that politics became a performing art. The degradation began, as the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh relates, when Donald Trump was catapulted into power by The Apprentice, a reality/talent/gameshow over which he presided on NBC from 2004 until 2017. Before this, Trump was best known as a loud-mouthed, laughable vulgarian, a fixture in tabloid gossip columns whose business career mostly consisted of bankruptcies. The British producer Mark Burnett endowed him with a new persona as a charismatic leader, a “godlike character” worshipped by teams of ruthless young entrepreneurs who fought for the chance to serve as apprentices in his property company. It was in this phoney guise that Trump won the election in 2016; installed in Washington, he nationalised the show’s cut-throat scenario by stoking social and ideological feuds, then sat back to enjoy the mayhem that ensued.Trump’s rabid animosity energised The Apprentice. The show’s ethos was supposedly aspirational, but success proved less telegenic than the gloating spectacle of failure: at the climax of every episode Trump eliminated losers by abusively booming: “You’re fired!” This catchphrase became a clarion call. “When I said it,” he boasts to Setoodeh, “the whole building shook. The place just reverberated. People were screaming, they went crazy.” Was their reaction ecstasy or hysterical alarm? Either way, they heard a megaphonic deity trumpeting doom.As president, Trump shrank from recreating that eschatological reign of terror. Afraid of real-life confrontations, he sacked chiefs of staff and cabinet members remotely, in small-voiced tweets, not thundering public denunciations. But in interviews with Setoodeh after he was voted out of office in 2020, this hunched, dejected “shadow of a famous man” physically bulks up again as he recalls a time when he was judge, jury and executioner. Play-acting authority on television was his forte; by contrast, running the country turned out to be both a chore and a bore.On The Apprentice, as in the White House, Trump disdained preparation and refused to read briefs, “purely focused on maximising his screen time”. The only protege to whom he paid attention was the back-stabbing diva Omarosa Manigault Newman, who saw herself as a female Trump. He subsequently eased her into a job at the White House, where what Setoodeh calls her “weaponised incompetence” soon caused her to be marched off the premises in disgrace. Although she then underwent a “total Trump detox”, he still speaks of Manigault Newman admiringly. He tells Setoodeh that in her first season on the show “she was evil”, which from him is high praise, then adds that the next year “she tried to be evil – and when you try it doesn’t work”. It’s a revealingly self-reflexive remark: is Trump himself authentically malign, or just pretending to be? He probably doesn’t know. As one would-be apprentice puts it, “Trump conducts himself like an actor playing Trump”; to further complicate matters, he plays the part badly.View image in fullscreenListening as he rants and rambles, Setoodeh likens him to “a novelty talking Trump doll, its battery on the fritz”. But that battery has recently been recharged: he now resembles a dummy perched on a ventriloquist’s knee, compliantly voicing the diatribes of the homegrown fascists who are his handlers. He has also revived the demeaningly competitive format of the show that launched him, and at a rally this July he claimed to be remaking The Apprentice by goading JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott to outdo one another in sycophancy as they vied to become his vice-presidential running mate.The framing conceit of Setoodeh’s book comes from Alice in Wonderland. Trump, he argues, “took America through the looking glass” and warped government into nonsensical farce. Other literary antecedents cast darker shadows. Burnett “envisioned a Lord of the Flies society” and devised initiatic trials as exercises in psychological torture. Auditions even included invasive STD tests. One male competitor shudders as he describes “a funnel that they stuck in there”; scraping his urethra, it extracted a sample that somehow testified to his aptitude for a business career. The ritualised firings were brutal, “carried out like public floggings”.The show’s title had an equally sinister provenance. Burnett chose it as a homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Goethe’s ballad about a trainee magus who runs amok with his master’s spells. In the poem, acted out by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the absent sorcerer returns to chasten the apprentice and immobilise all those strutting broomsticks and sloshing pails of water. Trump’s mischief-making, however, has continued unchecked, and his current wheeze is to pretend that the burgeoning crowds at Kamala Harris’s rallies are conjured up by AI, like a digital version of Mickey Mouse’s phantasmagoric broomsticks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSetoodeh – whose parents emigrated from Iran in the 1970s to live the American dream – seems so resigned to Trump’s victory in November that he raises a white flag in the book’s dedication. Choking on the fatal name in disgust or dismay, he offers it “To my dad, who is voting for him”. Sticking to pronouns, let’s hope that more Americans vote for her.

      Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setooheh is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Ex-Apprentice producer claims Trump used racial slur for Black contestant

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      Donald Trump used a racial epithet to reject the prospect of a Black winner on the debut season of The Apprentice, the Emmy-nominated series that transformed the former president into a reality TV star and fuelled his political career.Trump rejected the views of close aides that Kwame Jackson, a broker who worked for Goldman Sachs, had been the most impressive contestant, saying, “Would America buy a [N-word] winning?”, according to a producer who worked on the NBC show’s opening series in 2004, when it was called Meet the Billionaire.The anecdote is related by Bill Pruitt in a long essay in the online magazine Slate, titled The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice.According to Pruitt, Jackson had emerged from a field of candidates to contest the final with a white competitor, Bill Rancic, after being assigned the task of overseeing a Jessica Simpson benefit concert at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.Jackson reportedly impressed two Trump advisers with his ability to overcome obstacles, including his handling of a difficult fellow contestant who had earlier been eliminated but whom he had hired to help stage the concert.Yet when one adviser, Carolyn Kepcher – who ran Trump’s hospitality units and one of his golf clubs – praised Jackson, saying he “would be a great addition to the organisation”, Trump demurred, winced – and then uttered the racial slur.“Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red,” Pruitt writes. “I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.”He adds: “None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had.”Trump’s racist remarks were subsequently unmentioned at the production meetings, and Rancic was duly announced as the winner.Their disclosure comes at a time when Trump – who has a history of racist rhetoric – is making efforts to woo Black voters, a bedrock of Joe Biden’s support, amid polling evidence that some are warming to him as he seeks a second presidency in November. Last week, Trump addressed a rally in New York’s Bronx borough, whose audience was about a quarter Black or Hispanic.His outreach to a voting bloc that backed the Democrats by more than nine to one in his 2020 election victory over Trump – but has shown apparent signs of apathy to Biden in polling – has alarmed the incumbent president and prompted him to launch his own charm offensive to retain its loyalty.Race is not the only sensitivity uncovered by Pruitt. He paints Trump as a confidence trickster incapable of delivering his lines to the camera or remembering contestants’ names – but who was falsely portrayed as competent, prescient and insightful by careful production treatment in the interests of making a successful series.“While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items,” Pruitt writes. “He could barely put a sentence together regarding how a task would work.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presumptive Republican presidential nominee – who on Thursday awaited the verdict in a trial alleging that he arranged for hush money to be paid to an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels – is also depicted as sexist. At one point, he reportedly ordered a female camera operator out of an elevator where she was about to film him, calling her “too heavy”.Pruitt also describes being taken by Trump to one of his houses, which the then property tycoon suggests was a venue for his illicit sexual trysts, adding with a snicker: “Melania [then his fiancee, now his wife] doesn’t even know about this place.”He recalled meeting the architect of the clubhouse at the Trump National Golf Club, who told him that he was proud of the building but bitter that Trump did not pay him what he owed. “Trump pays half upfront,” he quotes the architect as saying. “But he’ll stiff you for the rest once the project is completed.”According to Pruitt, even the show’s trademark “you’re fired” line was not Trump’s work but was coined by producers after the star of the show had initially used a convoluted line to a losing contestant about taking an elevator down to the street that was deemed unfit to broadcast.None of this made it on to the final edit seen by the viewing public.“The truth is, almost nothing was how we made it seem,” Pruitt writes in mea culpa style. “So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found.”Contacted by Slate to comment on the allegations, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, called it a “completely fabricated and bullshit story that was already peddled in 2016” and attributed its current publication to the Democrats, who he said were “desperate”. More