Variety Names Trump ‘Worst TV of 2016’

Variety has named President-Elect Donald Trump the No. 1 worst television show of 2016 — even though Trump is a person, and not a television show.

The magazine’s list of bad television included 12 finalists ranging from “The X-Files” reboot in 12th place to “The Walking Dead” in 2nd place. In between those entries, Variety included other non-shows aside from Trump, including: “The Today Show” host Billy Bush’s interview with U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte.

“It’s ironic that Variety complains, ‘everything that Trump has touched over the last year has turned to crap,’ when it’s their own ‘journalism’ that has gone that route.”

But to top off the list, Variety decided to name “Donald Trump (everywhere)” as the absolute worst case of TV of 2016 because “everything that Trump has touched over the last year has turned to crap.”

“It’s ironic that Variety complains, ‘everything that Trump has touched over the last year has turned to crap,’ when it’s their own ‘journalism’ that has gone that route. And they can’t blame Trump for their lack of a clue,” Dan Gainor, the vice president of business and culture for the Media Research Center, told LifeZette in an email.

Variety’s screed against the president-elect did not hold back.

“Donald Trump is the television show we wished we could have stopped watching,” Variety’s staff concluded. “With his easy confabulation and commercial-length attention span — his carefully maintained pompadour and fake tan — he is the embodiment of television’s most pandering, superficial, and morally bankrupt tendencies.”

How can Variety compare the democratically elected president-elect of the United States of America to “The Walking Dead” zombie show and the paranormal “The X-Files”?

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“Perhaps it sounds reductive to refer to our president-elect as a work of television. But Trump is television — the worst kind of television, which is commercial, nonsensical, and image-obsessed,” the Variety staff wrote. “Trump … built an entire political platform on the dehumanizing logic of ratings — that playing to our basest fears with bullying, racism, and untruth is guaranteed to be a hit.”

“Sometimes it seems as if Trump believes we are idiots for watching him — no better than mindless drones plugged into the screen,” Variety continued. “But we are not idiots. Donald Trump was the worst television in the year — partly because he showed us how television’s worst impulses were getting the better of us. Now it just remains to be seen if he is — already — the worst TV of 2017, too,” the magazine said, cavalierly waving aside the myriad of legitimate and practical reasons millions of Americans turned out to vote for Trump on Election Day.

“Journalists refuse to get it. The election is over. Their candidate lost. They act like babies upset that someone took their blankie away,” Gainor said. “They don’t like Trump, we get that. But to slip attacks on him into everything just shows their disconnect with a huge chunk of American voters.”