OPINION
Jerry Springer, carnival barker of a modern freak show, cleared way for Trump


Nick Bryant

Journalist and author

WESTERN AUSTRALIA TODAY
April 30, 2023 — 

When did the penny drop that America was careering off the rails? Doubtless for many it was watching those early returns on election night in 2016, as it became shockingly clear that the politically impossible was about to be made real and Donald Trump would soon be reciting the presidential oath of office.

Perhaps it came earlier in the Obama years, after reading all those polls which suggested three-quarters of Republicans doubted whether the president was even a US citizen. Or maybe, like me, you turned on cable television sometime in the ’90s and found yourself transfixed by The Jerry Springer Show.

Donald Trump “stole my show and took it to the White House”, Jerry Springer once complained.

The presenter of what TV Guide once famously labelled the worst television program of all time died last week, although clips from his shows will continue to enjoy an afterlife on YouTube for years to come.

Springer, of course, was the carnival barker of a modern freak show, which featured, among other things, the “man who married his horse”, a porn actress who claimed to have slept with 251 men in the space of 10 hours, and a steady stream of white supremacists, including a self-styled “breeder for the Klan”. In a tabloid decade that brought us the OJ Simpson trial, John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena, the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tapes, and what we erroneously called the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Springer plumbed new lows.

His show was vulgar, foul-mouthed, gratuitously combative, unashamedly populist, defiantly anti-elitist and a massive ratings winner. Little wonder that Springer complained years later that Donald Trump “stole my show and took it to the White House”.

There was also something about the emotional connection that the host enjoyed with his audience that foreshadowed the rise of Trump. Certainly, it was easy to imagine the people in his studio audience who chanted “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry” joining in the Trumpian chorus that bellowed “Lock her up, Lock her up”. When Hillary Clinton spoke of “the basket of deplorables” she could almost have been describing some of Springer’s most devoted fans.

Most bizarre and unhinged moments on the Jerry Springer Show


The Jerry Springer Show was notorious for fights, bizarre relationships and shocking reveals.

Unlike Trump, however, Springer realised the ridiculousness of it all, and was laughing up his sleeve at his followers. A former liberal-minded mayor of Cincinnati, who had once worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he wanted to see America elect its first female president. “Hillary belongs in the White House,” he tweeted after watching a presidential debate in 2016: “Donald Trump belongs on my show.”

But those Clinton/Trump debates sometimes felt like Jerry Springer had produced them; and never more so than when, in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood scandal, Trump arranged for some of Bill Clinton’s female accusers, including Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, to sit in the studio audience. It was a Springer-esque stunt.

Certainly, Springer is a seminal figure in the trashification of US popular culture. The reality TV shows that became so prominent at the turn of the century tried in many ways to do in primetime what Springer was doing so profitably in daytime: to tantalise, to shock, to thrive off orchestrated confrontation. Maybe the cable news channels that arose in the ’90s, like Fox News, borrowed from that same confrontational playbook, as they sought out guests with the most outlandish views and tried to set up polarising on-air battles (although the founding CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes, honed those tricks working for the Nixon campaign in 1968).

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Crucially, all this came about at the very moment when politics, entertainment and even journalism were becoming so synergetic, a symbiosis illustrated by Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on late-night TV and telling MTV that he preferred briefs rather than boxers. In those years, the famed Overton window of political acceptability moved towards becoming floor-to-ceiling.

In the 30 years since, US political culture has unfortunately absorbed the worst traits of American popular culture. The freakish dramatic personae, faux combat and pantomime-style chanting of trashy daytime television. The venality and amorality of reality shows, such as Survivor, which are based on the belief that winning isn’t everything, when it is the only thing. The tropes of professional wrestling. The narcissism of social media influencers. All this helps explain how a reality TV star reached the White House, and why the GOP has become so crazed.

Unquestionably, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is pure Jerry Springer. You could build an entire show around her pet theory that a “Jewish space laser” was to blame for the 2018 California wildfires. Other Republican lawmakers could tell us how they bought 251 assault rifles in 10 hours. The Proud Boys could take the seats once occupied by the KKK. And all the time the studio audience could chant: “Donald, Donald, Donald.” The Trumpification of US politics might not have happened had its Springerisation not come about first.