Review: Tom Arnold’s ‘Trump Tapes’ Blows Smoke With No Smoking Gun

The most obvious question raised by the title of Tom Arnold’s “The Hunt for the Trump Tapes” is: which (alleged) ones? Outtakes from “The Apprentice”? Recordings from the Miss Universe pageant? Surveillance footage captured in a Moscow hotel room, or in Trump Tower, or God knows where else?

The answer, in the eight-episode series that begins Tuesday on Viceland, is any of them. And none. Full of sound and fury and producing few receipts, the series seems most concerned with the tape rolling in Arnold’s own camera, the one that will get him back on TV.

Arnold, the ex-husband of Roseanne Barr and co-star of the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger action film “True Lies” (a credit “Hunt” will make you very familiar with), took on a freelance gig after Donald J. Trump’s election as a mosquito buzzing around the president’s head, insisting in interviews and tweets that there were horrifying recordings out there of the president’s private behavior.

The logic behind “Hunt” is that video brought Trump into the White House, and video will take him out of it. At a pre-Emmys party two days before the premiere, Arnold reportedly scuffled with Mark Burnett, the “Apprentice” producer whom Arnold has accused of covering for his former star.

But he’s produced more publicity than results. To call “Hunt” a nothingburger is inadequate. So far, it’s more of a nothingbuffet. (I’ve seen two episodes of eight, but Arnold has said that if he had found a damning tape, he would not have withheld it until air.)

Much of the first episode is devoted to a “search” for Trump’s radio interviews with Howard Stern; Arnold provides a link to a website containing the audio. But those interviews were searched for and found long before “Hunt”: Offensive excerpts were reported during the campaign and referenced in the debates. The transcripts, the episode even notes, are searchable online.

There’s more, and less, in the second episode. Arnold gets the former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant Penn Jillette to make accusations about Trump’s language — “homophobic, racist, misogynistic things” — but Arnold does not follow up for details. He stages a dramatic reading of similar claims from “Apprentice” crew members. He resurfaces a story of Trump calling the rapper Lil Jon an “Uncle Tom” that, again, came out in 2016.

Arnold recognizes the absurdity of his playing Bob Woodward — a minor celebrity investigating a minor-celebritocracy — and “Hunt” is at least half a comedy, sending up its star’s manic obsession and D-list status. It’s good that he has a sense of humor about himself, but after a while this plays like a joke on anyone in the audience who earnestly pinned their hopes on him.

At one point Jillette describes Arnold as shameless, and he gamely agrees. In his defense, some of Trump’s most effective antagonists — Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, Michael Wolff — have a knack for the outrageous. Maybe trying to best Trump while encumbered by shame is like diving for sharks while wearing concrete blocks.

In August, Omarosa Manigault Newman, the “Apprentice” contestant and onetime White House aide of nebulous portfolio, published “Unhinged,” an “insider’s account” of the White House full of tantalizing hints that there was an “N-word tape” of Trump using a racial slur on the set of his reality show.

Manigault Newman didn’t produce that tape, just accounts of staffers agitated over the possibility that it might exist. But she did cannily respond to the offensive against her book by releasing recordings of conversations with Trump and other officials.

One thing this multiple-time reality star understands is the corollary to “tapes or it didn’t happen”: If you produce tapes — any tapes — people will assume other things happened as well. Another is that there is a proven market for people promising the dramatic, imminent doom of the administration.

Yet Trump is not exactly J.D. Salinger. There are Trump tapes everywhere. There is tape of him bragging to Billy Bush about grabbing women by the genitals. There is tape of him categorizing Mexicans as criminals and rapists. There is tape of him angrily insisting that “very fine” people marched in the streets with Nazis.

This is not an argument for cynicism. If there is footage of the president saying something reprehensible, it should come out, whether it changes anything or not.

But the interest in it is about more than entertainment. It comes from ordinary people’s very real concerns, fears and sense of decency. You can harness that anxiety and passion for political action, or you can milk it for another turn in front of the camera. On that enterprise, the tape never stops rolling.