How TV paved America’s road to Trump

“A brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box”: TV critic James Poniewozik explains the multimedia character Trump created.

Donald Trump is the show we can’t turn off, the car crash we can’t look away from, the news cycle we can’t escape.

There are just too many reasons why we got here to distill into a single explanation. But certainly one reason for Trump’s ascendance is television. It’s not quite right to say that TV made Trump president, but it is fair to say that TV created the conditions that...