American Presidential candidate Donald Trump is the ultimate showman. He even said so during Wednesday's third and final presidential debate against his rival, Hillary Clinton. Asked if he would accept the outcome of the election even if he lost: "I'll keep you in suspense, OK?"
A failed businessman-turned-reality TV star, Trump has made sure the media has focused on him over much of the last two years, even if that doesn't translate into an electoral victory. On Wednesday evening, we got a strong indication that Trump is not going off our TV screens even if he does lose.
In the run-up to the final presidential debate, as the gap in the opinion polls between Trump and Clinton has grown larger, the Republican candidate has started complaining about the American electoral system being rigged and insisted that the mainstream media is corrupt. Just hours before the debate, he took to Facebook to advertise a live stream that offered an alternative to "biased, mainstream" media reporting.
In the eyes of many analysts, this is the harbinger of what might come after a Trump loss in November's elections: Trump TV.
American political commentators, from the very beginning of Trump's entry into the race, have suspected that it was a ploy to leverage his popularity into more business opportunities. The surprising ease with which Trump then bulldozed through the Republican primaries upended that notion, giving him and his campaign the idea that they might actually win.
The last few weeks have seen those hopes dashed, after the emergence of leaked audio recordings of Donald Trump describing sexual assault, followed by many more allegations by women confirming that he actually acted on these impulses. Trump is far behind Clinton in most polls now, and even traditionally Republican states look like they might give the Democrat a chance.
Which means Trump might have to go back to the original plan (if that's what it was). And it's not like his campaign has firmly denied that it was the original idea. Trump campaign Chief Executive Officer Steve Bannon, who helped build right-wing media network Breitbart, told CNN that "Trump is an entrepreneur", when asked about Trump TV rumours. The New York Times reported earlier in the week that Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is examining the potential of a television network. And Roger Ailes, the tainted media executive who made Fox News a right-wing news behemoth, is also helping Trump in his campaign.
The most pertinent sign came on Wednesday with the Facebook livestream that was explicitly sold as an alternative to the mainstream. It wasn't particularly good though, but it got plenty of views. Buzzfeed News said it looked "more like public access than a glitzy cable news offering" although it did at one point have more than 200,000 viewers during the debate, trailing only ABC News on Facebook.
"So far, though, the operation looks pretty amateurish," wrote German Lopez on Vox. "The lighting is poor, the sound is messy, and the show featured former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer rambling aimlessly for way too long."
This could be a sign of things to come though, since Trump's natural territory is clearly television. Imagine a Hillary Clinton presidency with an even less accountable Trump – since it's unlikely he'll remain a Republican party operative – getting the chance to offer his punditry on his own TV network every night? (And how soon before the Hindu Sena is invited on?)
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