Last year, Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen noticed Donald Trump using so many pot-stirring tactics from the Bravo franchise that he began cataloguing them on Twitter. When the president used social media to cancel a White House invitation that N.B.A. champion Stephen Curry had not yet officially rejected, Cohen tweeted, “HOUSEWIVES PLAYBOOK: rescind invitations liberally! (See: Bethenny re LuAnn, Mexico; Bethenny & Ramona, Mexico).” Trump’s post-election digs about Hillary? “Keep bringing up fights from last season.” Trump’s excuse for not immediately calling Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto following an earthquake? “Blame cell-phone reception.” Trump’s suggestion that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign colluded with the Russians? Tossing out bogus statements in desperate pleas “to stay on the show,” Cohen wrote.

It isn’t surprising that in the first year-plus of his presidency, Trump has returned to the reality-TV toolbox he used so effectively during his 14 seasons on NBC’s The Apprentice—where he rebranded himself from 90s tabloid buffoon into something resembling a successful C.E.O. Yet it’s still scary that Trump—essentially an amusing reality-TV character who wound up in the White House through an arguably Twilight Zone-worthy sequence of events—is running the country with the same kind of schemes Ramona Singer deploys during white-wine-fueled Hamptons getaways on The Real Housewives of New York City. Only, to Cohen, Trump’s flagrant headline grabs are so artless that the president would be kicked off a Bravo series that traffics in backseat limo brawls. (Or maybe “impeached” would be the verb.)

“I would fire him after one season, because he’s using every trick in the book,” says Cohen. “He is like a stunt queen in that he’ll do anything to stay on the show.” Referring to short-lived cast member Aviva Drescher—who was booted from the franchise after throwing her prosthetic leg in a restaurant in an over-the-top bid to manufacture drama—Cohen says, “Housewives like Trump don’t last because there’s no there there. When you throw your leg, what else is left?”

Because the Constitution makes it slightly harder to re-cast the president than a housewife—unless causing the wrong kind of scene at Le Cirque qualifies as a high crime or misdemeanor—the country has spent the last 18 months learning the answer to Cohen’s rhetorical question. The line between reality TV and Trump’s presidency blurs every time Trump makes a momentous political decision as if he were a frazzled contestant on a network competition show where an oversize cardboard check was at stake. And my recent conversations with reality-TV insiders on the subject revealed a class of entertainment executives in various stages of bafflement over the whole thing. Some recoil at the idea of Trump in office, and have been defending themselves against the post-election narrative that their genre is somehow to blame for the current political crisis. Others were somewhat resigned in their acknowledgment of Trump’s mastery of manufactured drama.

To Fenton Bailey, an executive producer of RuPaul’s Drag Race, on VH1, reality TV was merely one possible means to Trump’s end: “The fact that he was able to use a show doesn’t have anything to do with the genre itself—it has to do with the person. Did he use, kidnap, or hijack the medium to advance his own ends? Sure. But it’s got nothing to do with the genre.”

“He was on one reality show. And reality TV is as diverse as this country is diverse,” says reality-TV pioneer Jonathan Murray, explaining that high- and low-minded fare co-exist in this genre just like they do in the scripted arena. “As someone who was there at the beginning, when Real World first went on the air—that was about putting seven diverse people together from different parts of the country, different races, different sexual orientations. And, yes, there’ll be conflict, but out of that conflict will come growth and hopefully understanding. Sometimes I get frustrated that Donald Trump is somehow held up as all things reality TV, because he’s just one tiny sliver of it.”