I made a few tweets about this, but I figured I’d share some of my thoughts on here regarding the recent Kanye-Trump-Kardashian news cycle.
First things first: don’t make the same mistake.
At the onset of 2015, the Trump brand was tanking. TV ratings slipping. Irrelevance nearing. What happened next? We all know. And in spite of whatever reasons you think Donald Trump - a man who’d spent the past decade on a reality show, trading barbs with his celebrity counterparts in the press, and licensing his name to dozens of projects - ran for the highest office in the country, it’s clear that fame and revitalizing a sinking brand was the main goal. Remember his plans for Trump TV? If you don’t, here’s a refresher.
In the summer of 2016, amidst the presidential race, reports claimed Trump was interested in launching a “mini-media conglomerate” of his own, Trump Productions LLC. He enlisted the help of daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The sources in these reports alleged that the response to Trump’s bid for the presidency brought him “to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network… So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.” Later that year, The New York Times reported Kushner had reached out to a media investment banker to help set up the Trump television channel. (Two years prior, before Trump even announced his run, Kushner had been in talks to purchase American Media Inc. - owner of the National Enquirer, Star, OK!, Globe, RadarOnline, and now Us Weekly.)
Then Trump won, and a campaign designed to achieve maximum fame and brand value for all involved suddenly turned into the very real task of actually running the country.
Nonetheless, the Trumps maintained their media contacts, particularly Harvey Levin of TMZ, whom Donald, Melania, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen had regularly communicated with throughout the presidential race. In return, TMZ ran favorable coverage of Trump.
The Trumps are not political, hence why I’ve often talked about them on this blog. They’re celebrities. They have been from the beginning. Before they were a reality TV family, they were already tabloid fodder. (Trump’s own doing, as he spent years planting stories about himself in gossip columns instead of, y'know, learning how to actually run a successful business without depending on an inheritance or a shitload of loans.) The Trumps are the Kardashians, the Kardashians are the Hiltons, and so on. Self-serving, morally bankrupt reality TV families. They’re all the same. They’re cut from the same cloth. They’re part of the same social circle. They have the same business connections. They’re famous for the same exact reasons, just being themselves. (“But Kim is famous because of a sex tape! Donald is a businessman!” one might cry. Trump was a self-promoter, not a businessman, and his continued fame in the ‘90s rested almost entirely on his sexual exploits - divorce, affair, and another divorce.) The man who helped engineer the release of Kim’s sex tape, Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis - who’s been accused of sexual assault, rape, and filming underage girls, amongst many other things Kim has publicly defended - is also a good friend of the Hiltons and the Trumps, dated Paris, and is so close with Donald that he tried to get Francis on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. That’s only one small example of the web linking all of these people together.
Right now, the Kardashians are in the position the Trumps were in three years ago. Ratings slipping. Growing irrelevance. Failing brand. Like the Trumps, they’re famous for being famous. Like the Trumps, they stick their name on anything and everything - much of it failing. Like the Trumps, people like to justify their fame by referring to them - particularly Kim and Kris - as “businesspeople,” even though their business skill is just as limited as Trump’s, and Kim’s fame, in my honest opinion, relies more on the circle of men around her, Kris’ friends, who helped present her hyper-sexualized public image as far back as 2007: Francis, Levin (who frequently covered Kardashian on TMZ when she received little press elsewhere, dubbing her “The Tush”), and Ryan Seacrest - who you could even argue is their Mark Burnett.
People also defend the Kardashians in the current climate by saying they endorsed Hillary Clinton. Well, the Trumps once did, too. And I’m sure if the money and publicity were good enough, they would’ve easily swung the other way, since they’re not focused on morality, they’re focused on money and fame - as cheesy as that might sound. Self-interest spans political lines. And let’s consider this: if the Kardashians were given the same opportunity as the Trumps, the same chance, would they really turn it down? Be honest.
I say all of this because people do like to consider the Kardashians harmless, forgetting that you could’ve easily made that same, terribly misguided statement about the Trumps roughly three years ago. It’s believed that because they’re not in the White House, at least not yet, they’re somehow not that bad, although they’re a major player in the same game that allowed the Trumps to thrive, and are likely inching toward that same position of power. A longtime celebrity biographer, one of the few I trust, wrote a year ago that Kris was considering running for a congressional position once Keeping Up With The Kardashians came to a close. If Trump could do it, she supposedly told friends, then what was stopping her? And one of Trump’s biggest allies in the media, the same man he personally invited to Trump Tower after the election for a television interview, and invited to the White House to discuss, as Hope Hicks described it, “future opportunities,” just last year, is also Kris’ biggest ally: Harvey Levin. A man she befriended long before TMZ existed, back when her claim to fame was being the friend of Nicole Brown Simpson, is the one who’s helped propel the Kardashians to fame by relentlessly covering them on a website that receives hundreds of millions of hits - often airing “Exclusives” and inside stories fed directly by the Kardashians, the most recent being an exhaustively covered, and highly orchestrated, cheating “scandal” involving Khloe. Once Harvey ends a call with Kris, he starts one with Donald. It’s a cycle.
Levin, according to people I’ve spoken to inside TMZ, is obsessed with politics. He tried to start a D.C. base for TMZ in 2007 and failed, but he’s finally infiltrated Washington by pushing the tabloid celebrity to Washington. Now if you scroll through the website, there are paparazzi videos shot by TMZ camera crews lurking Capitol Hill as much as there is footage of celebrities palling around outside a Hollywood restaurant. He successfully steered Trump into the political arena, so now he’s steering the Kardashians. He’s also tried to steer another reality star, Hulk Hogan, into politics - pushing the idea during an interview for his Fox News show Objectified, and even interviewing onetime Trump aide Roger Stone, who praised Hogan’s political potential. By destroying the line between celebrity news and actual news, Levin would be able to make TMZ more than a gossip site, he would make it one of the most powerful and influential media outlets out there - especially considering he would have an ’in’ with the celebrities-turned-politicians now deciding the fate of the country. I truly believe this is his endgame. Just today, Harvey personally sat down with Kanye West, on the heels of his pro-Trump tweets, and reported that he was “laser-focused” and far from being “erratic” or in the midst of a meltdown. Kanye emphasized his desire to run for the presidency in the future.
So moral of the story? Don’t make the same mistake again. Ignore the Kardashians. Kanye. Hulk. Leave them behind. Don’t extend their shelf life. Keep D-Listers on the D-List, not D.C. And on that note, ignore TMZ. Drain its power so it cannot empower anyone else. Do we really need another person that partied with Paris Hilton running the country?
And I know it might seem a ridiculous stance coming from me, someone who runs a blog dedicated to celebrity gossip - although its readership is practically nonexistent - but being interested in celebrities and pop culture does not mean you have to support or endorse everybody in it. (People who’ve followed me long enough know I certainly don’t.) Plus, self-awareness doesn’t hurt.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, I didn’t have the energy to format it into one of the detailed posts I usually make. I just wanted to write my thoughts down. Have a good day, guys!