Donald Trump has a problem with reality. To be specific, he has a problem distinguishing reality television from reality. With each passing news cycle, it’s alarmingly clear that he believes in his own character from the fantasy show known as The Apprentice.

Now, most viewers above the age of four have already figured out there’s a certain artifice to the world of TV. There’s the dramatic music and the heavy editing, the make-up and the lights, and of course the word “show”, which gives away the whole game.

But our commander-in-chief sees something else when he stares into the screen during his many daily hours of executive time inside the White House. He sees a window on the world in which he can utter his catchphrase and people just disappear, along with all their problems.

“You’re fired!” worked so well on The Apprentice. Why shouldn’t it work so well with the multiple investigations into all these allegations of collusion with the Russian government, money laundering through his real estate business, obstruction of justice and his chaotic management of the executive branch of government?

After months of denials, Trump officials have finally confirmed what has long been rumored: the president ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating his Russian collusion.

Donald Trump denies report he tried to fire Robert Mueller in June Read more

This would be the fourth attempt to fire someone either investigating the Russian connection, or allowing the investigation to proceed. The first, and only successful firing, was of course that of the FBI director James Comey.

But we know that Trump also wanted his attorney general Jeff Sessions to quit because he recused himself over the Russia investigation. And we now know that he wanted the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe to be fired, nominally for his wife’s ties to the Democrats, but actually because of, well, Russia.

You don’t need to be a former FBI director to see a pattern here.

The only person standing between Mueller and the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is the unlikely hero of the White House counsel, Don McGahn. McGahn threatened to quit if Trump insisted that the justice department actually followed his orders to fire Mueller.

McGahn is no obvious defender of the rule of law. Through the 2016 election, as Trump’s campaign counsel, he fought off all legal challenges – from the primaries to the convention – that would have blocked Trump’s goose-stepping march to power. A former George W Bush appointee to the Federal Election Commission, McGahn is a Washington insider who has pushed hardest for some of the most conservative and least qualified judicial appointees under his boss.

He also followed orders when Trump wanted Sessions to oversee all this pesky Russia stuff, but failed to convince the attorney general to bend the rule of law just enough to protect the president.

Now it’s McGahn’s turn to feel the heat of a reality TV star who finds his lines are ignored like so much play-acting.

Don’t be surprised if McGahn finds out he’s next to be asked to leave the fake boardroom, ordered out by some other desperate official who wants to save his own neck. Someone like chief of staff John Kelly, who also risked heading for the door when he suggested that Trump was clueless about his fantasy wall across the Mexican border.

The truth is that Trump has never had the guts to fire people himself, and he knows it. His own Trump Organization is staffed by loyalists who swear oaths of omerta and never leave. He got Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci to push out his first White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and he got Reince’s replacement to push out The Mooch. Steve Bannon was almost pushed out by the Mooch, but Kelly finished the job. Which means that Kelly now needs to finish McGahn. The plot of The Godfather Part III practically demands it.



Which begs the question: why can’t the Godfather himself pull the trigger? Why is he so weak?

It’s worth revisiting the pivotal moment in our anti-hero’s rise to power: the fateful moment at the White House correspondents dinner in 2011, when Barack Obama mocked Trump so perfectly. After ripping into Trump’s conspiracy theories about his own birth certificate, Obama moved on to Trump’s real job: reality TV.

“All kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience,” Obama deadpanned. “For example, no seriously, just recently in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr Trump, recognized that the real problem as a lack of leadership, and so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf, you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”

In hindsight, we may have underestimated the depth of Trump’s feelings at this point. What if Trump actually believed he was asserting leadership in these moments of reality TV? What if this was the kind of decision that actually did keep him up at night?

According to multiple reports, sourced unreliably from aides with knowledge of what happens inside Trump’s brain, the humiliation of the dinner prompted the reality TV star to run for president after all. And we all know how well that turned out.

If you think the comparison with the Mueller situation is outlandish, please take note of this gem: Trump believed Mueller should be fired for having three conflicts of interest. One of those was a dispute about the fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.

Trump’s delusions about reality TV might be the only humane explanation for his purported friendship with Piers Morgan, whose greatest achievement in life may well be his triumph on Celebrity Apprentice.

Sadly for Trump, the real world has a certain logic to it. As McGahn has tried to point out, it is even more real than reality TV. Firing Mueller would end the Trump presidency – either in conviction at an impeachment trial, or in the complete obsession with defending Trump at such a trial. Just the report about ordering Mueller’s sacking may be enough to torch that dumpster.

There is a precedent for this kind of presidential delusion: Ronald Reagan. The now-beloved conservative hawk served in the second world war at a motion picture unit in Los Angeles. But he watched the footage of the liberation of the concentration camps, and later told several people that he personally had filmed at Buchenwald.

One of Reagan’s favorite stories, retold multiple times, was about a heroically doomed tail gunner. It was almost certainly ripped from a wartime movie he loved.



Reagan is the perfect model for Trump. He was a deluded showman presiding over a gilded age of conspicuous consumption and trickle-down economics. It was a time, before bankruptcies, when Trump was young and the darling of the New York tabloids. Reagan made up racist stories about welfare queens, just like Trump does about immigrant rapists from all those “shithole” countries. Reagan was so good at this kind of bamboozling that Trump ripped off his slogan about making America great again.



For now, Trump’s lawyers have bamboozled their boss into thinking that Mueller will just wrap up his investigation and go home without finding much ado about anything. Of course, they said that would happen by the end of last year.

Maybe Trump hopes he can turn the Russia scandal into another Iran-Contra: a complex, illegal, sordid conspiracy that he just can’t recall. In the meantime, he needs to fire someone before the folks at home realize The Apprentice wasn’t real.