Opinion | When Trump Was Only Funny Mean

Tribalism is definitely unhealthy. It is also effective, and entertaining.

People forget that crowds gathered for “Apprentice” watch parties in bars. The show’s first season was a smash, averaging over 20 million viewers. (By comparison, the season eight premiere of “Game of Thrones,” this era’s cultural juggernaut, had 17.4 million viewers across all platforms.) There have long been two ways of absorbing Donald Trump’s presence: seriously but not literally, as has often been said. Or with holier-than-thou irony — the way his fans eagerly watch his exploits and the way A-listers, like the magazine editor Tina Brown, invited him over to play a sort of court jester at their parties. (Mr. Trump is “con man, but fun to listen to,” Ms. Brown explained.)

My family thought it was in on the joke. But after watching a few episodes, I’m not so sure we didn’t end up invested. I could see how my father identified with Mr. Jackson’s unspoken but visible feeling that he had to play down his insight in order to not come off as an uppity minority. I could sense how my mother, who sniffed at reality TV as a rule, found herself annoyed by Ms. Manigault yet also had a begrudging soft spot for her — something I can’t separate from her own effort to overcome workplace bias against women of color.

And despite my innocence, I was sentient enough to understand that Mr. Trump and his producers must have known there was an entire cross-section of other households across America that probably had a soft spot for the contestant Jessie Conners, an earnest young white woman from Wisconsin who’d carved out a managerial position for herself. Or others that perhaps cheered for Mr. McClain. (Mr. Trump himself would later state, “Guys like Troy are what make America great.”)

Donald Trump is someone who “got that everybody plays identity politics, not just people of color,” said Mr. Jackson. While he told me production editing had “a lot to do with it,” he argued people who now find it comforting to think of Mr. Trump as a puppet deny his “diabolical genius” for starting fights. “I think that’s how he got elected, by doing the same thing,” he said.

When I asked Mr. Jackson whether he could sense the support from the people of color even though in 2004 there was no real social media, he joked, “If it had been 2019, I would literally have 20 million twitter followers.” Still, he continued, “I definitely got love across the TV, radio, print and event platforms from the black community and it was obvious and endearing.”

As we spoke, I couldn’t help but think that many voters seemed at the end of the 2016 campaign to have chosen Mr. Trump in the way my family and many others rooted for “Apprentice” contestants. At least partly, it’s the way we’ve elected presidents for ages.

As a broad, “Apprentice”-sized field of Democrats fight for their party’s presidential nomination, it looks as though the major candidates have bought into a gentler version of Mr. Trump’s identitarian worldview — that when push comes to shove you’re more likely to root for “your kind,” whatever that is.