All eyes are on The Donald as the boisterous real estate baron and former reality TV star takes his position as the de facto headliner in the first Republican presidential debate on Thursday. With an unparalleled 17 candidates in the field (just 10 of whom will be allowed to participate in the prime-time telecast), it’s anyone’s game.  Related: Democrats add Donald Trump to list of serious Republican candidates  But one winner is already clear: Fox News.  Trump, for all his many faults, is a draw. His presence in the room is a major win for the network during this crucial time of the year: Trump is now polling ahead of every other Republican running, and his presence alongside a wide variety of conservatives means that there’s something for every viewer, even if that something is a bit distasteful.  “Trump expresses a lot of the angst the public has on wages and the economy,” said political strategist Greg Valliere of the Potomac Research Group, pointing out that wage stagnation was still seriously affecting voters. “Beyond that, there have to be specific prescriptions, and when you come to prescriptions, Trump is totally clueless. He had a great quote on CNN the other day: somebody asked him how he’d replace Obamacare. He said: ‘I’d replace it with something terrific.’”  That mix of populism and poppycock presented by the resounding Trump is causing tension even within Fox. Trump’s disparaging comments about Mexicans and Senator John McCain have angered Fox’s parent company executive co-chair, Rupert Murdoch, a longtime critic of Trump.  When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?  “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch asked on Twitter. Then, 10 days later, still annoyed: “Why are Trump and Sanders popular? Easy. Real median income of working Americans less than ten years ago.”  Much has been made of Murdoch’s apparent inability to get Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes to stop dignifying Trump’s candidacy with regular coverage. Trump has appeared as a guest on the network, often for long sit-downs, fully 30 times (more than anyone except Rand Paul); Jeb Bush, whose candidacy is considered far more viable, has appeared only three times.  But Valliere said that Thursday’s debate may solve that perceived problem. “My sense is that whoever can speak specifically about policy can get a leg up,” he said. Of course, that person will need to get a word in edgewise.  There are so many candidates that Fox has relaxed the terms of the 5pm telecast (“The kids’ table, as we say at Thanksgiving,” said Valliere) to include as many candidates as possible. Participants don’t have to have polled above 1%; they just have to have filed with the FEC and met constitutional requirements.  The 9pm show, moderated by the network’s top anchors – Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace – at the Quicken Loans Arena, in Cleveland, will showcase the top 10.  There is reason for this, beyond simple news value: it’s fun. “Roger Ailes knows how to make good television,” said Andrew Tyndall, publisher of TV news analysis newsletter the Tyndall Report. Candidates are fat, skinny, tall, short, introspective, garrulous, southern-fried or blustery Yankee; the contrasts pop off the screen.  “It’s got some similarities to how reality TV is produced – staging a competition with large personalities so everybody gets a lot of time and it’s all evened out,” said Tyndall. “Reality TV producers have done that for years.”  Fox News declined to comment on the record for this story. But there’s clear business sense in bigging up Trump. As the rest of the media (including the Guardian) can testify, readers and viewers are a lot more interested in Trump stories at this stage than in any of his rivals, including Hillary Clinton.  And for those taking part in the debates, there’s more at stake than the nomination. For Fox’s audience, and the 17 would-be candidates, the ultimate scope of the presidential debate isn’t limited to politics – it’s also an audition for the conservative media world’s large, influential, and aging core collection of media consumers.  “There are two sets of incentives toward entering that race [for the nomination],” said Tyndall. “The obvious one is ‘I want to be president’; the non-obvious one is ‘I want to raise my profile so I can make a living on the conservative circuit’. There are all sorts of people who are going to appeal to their niche group who won’t stand a chance of getting to the White House, but it’s a media primary as well as a political.”  Older white people remain a very good business. Fox News might get grief for its high median viewer age and ethnic makeup – 68 years old and 92% white as of the beginning of last year – but anybody anxious to celebrate its demise will have a long wait ahead. The network remains jaw-droppingly profitable.  This year Fox News’s affiliate fee revenue – the money cable companies pay to carry a channel – is estimated by data analytics firm SNL Kagan at $1.25 a month and projected to climb to $1.50 for each one of the network’s 90 million subscribers (the industry average is twenty-five cents). That adds up to $1.35bn annually and Kagan projects ad revenue will top $800m this year, despite a slower growth rate in ad sales.  Fox News is merely the largest and most visible piece of a conservative media world that offers big money to its stars. Even deprived of his old TV slot, former Fox News pundit Glenn Beck remains a bestselling author, speaker and radio host worth some $105m. Political nonfiction bestsellers are almost always conservative.  The baby boomer generation may be getting up there in years, but they still have far more money than their kids – 70% of all disposable income, despite being 44% of the population, according to a 2012 Nielsen study – and they’re not nearly as liberal as their children.  “We should not see contemporary conservatism as a political movement solely,” Tyndall said. “If you think of it as cultural, suddenly a lot of this starts to make sense.”  Like or dislike Fox’s take on politics, the network never treats American conservatives as monolithic. Strict Catholics may not get along with hardcore libertarians, but they might also both find someone to root for in the debate. What they, and Fox, have in common is a shared exasperation with the status quo and even more so with the direction they believe the country is headed.  And Trump? Trump seems to represent that frustration with ... well, with everything. “I look forward to the debate on Thursday night & it is certainly my intention to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates,” he wrote on social media. We’ll see how long that lasts.  “I hope you tear them apart, Trumper,” wrote a fan named Frank Payne in response.  “Mr Trump, if at all possible, please fire some of them,” said another, Rich Hanewald.
Republican candidates will take the stage on Thursday, with ratings expected to soar as Americans tune in to see what the frontrunner has to say