Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America

Audience of One reframes America's identity through the rattled mind of an insomniac, cable-news-junkie president. New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik offers a darkly entertaining (Carlos Lozada, Washington Post) history of mass media from the early 1980s to today, demonstrating how a volcanic, camera-hogging antihero merged with America's most powerful medium to become our forty-fifth president.

In charting the seismic evolution of television from a monolithic mass medium into today's fractious confederation of spite- and-insult media subcultures, Poniewozik reveals how Donald Trump took advantage of these historic changes by constantly reinventing himself: from a boastful cartoon zillionaire; to 1990s self-parodic sitcom fixture; to The Apprentice reality-TV star; and finally to Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue.

Already lauded as a brilliant and daring (Annalisa Quinn, NPR) work that defines a generation, Audience of One emerges as a classic in cultural criticism. Read more Review "With wit, insight, and clarity, James Poniewozik puts Trump at the center of a series of changes that swept through American popular culture and political systems.

Poniewozik's essential book shows how these evolutions incubated Trumpism, even as Trump's rise exposed the limits and vulnerabilities of the media, which too often found itself floundering in the face of his shameless manipulations." — Maureen Ryan, chief TV critic for Variety "The smartest, most original work on this subject I have ever read."