The TV That Created Donald Trump

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For months, it felt easier to avoid watching Donald Trump on television. It was like sniffing spoiled milk: you didn’t need a sip to know it was bad. Then, in June, the President held the first meeting of his complete Cabinet. It aired live, as Trump’s early campaign rallies had, in full and without commentary, on CNN.

Wearing a striped tie that rhymed with the flag behind him, Trump sat at a massive table, smiling. “Mike?” Trump said, and Vice-President Pence took the cue. “Thank you, Mr. President. It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice-President to a President who is keeping his word to the American people.” As cameras clicked like cicadas, each appointee offered up an homage; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, thanked Trump for the “opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”

Many compared the spectacle to something out of North Korea. But it was also a near-replica of a production closer to home. It’s become a wearying, ugly observation, a media truism at once superficial and deep: if “The Apprentice” didn’t get Trump elected, it is surely what made him electable. Over fourteen seasons, the television producer Mark Burnett helped turn the Donald Trump of the late nineties—the disgraced huckster who had trashed Atlantic City; a tabloid pariah to whom no bank would lend—into a titan of industry, nationally admired for being, in his own words, “the highest-quality brand.” And here we were again, at the boardroom table, listening to the compliments to the boss, suspended in that eerie, unstable blend of improvisation and scripting. It was enough to make a television critic nostalgic.

As it happens, most episodes of Trump on “The Apprentice” are curiously hard to find: they’re not available to stream or download. Only first-season DVDs are for sale, legally, online—and only used ones. The show is not at the Paley Center for Media’s research library, either. (M-G-M, which owns the rights, declined to comment.) To watch, you’ll need occult methods. But at the Paley you can catch something nearly as illuminating: a video of a panel discussion about the show, from 2004, following its first season. It was filmed the day after “The Apprentice” lost the Emmy for best reality show to “The Amazing Race.” The moderator is the “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush, who, a year later, played Trump’s wingman in the pussy-grabbing tape.

Trump, in a dark suit, leans forward in his chair, hands clasped. Mark Burnett, wearing jeans and a shell necklace, lounges next to him. Both are aglow. A year earlier, NBC, whose TV programming was then run by Jeff Zucker, had been in free fall, with the hit sitcom “Friends” about to end and nothing to replace it. Burnett and Trump had provided Zucker with a hat trick: the network’s first strong reality franchise; a solution for its Must-See TV Thursday slot; and a lure for ads from corporations like Pepsi and Microsoft.

Bush asks surprisingly tough questions: he wonders whether Burnett softened Trump with an image “makeover”; he talks about whether reality television is a fad, and whether it’s cruel; and he asks what it felt like to lose the Emmy. As the drip of praise slows, Trump shows flashes of sourness, griping about old enemies, like the host of “The View”—“this fat slob Joy Behar who can’t stand me.”

Burnett never wavers. A brilliant entrepreneur, and one of the most powerful men in television, he had produced “Survivor,” on CBS, which exploded the economics and aesthetics of television, launching a transformative new genre. “The Apprentice” was the savvy workplace variation that he pitched to Trump in 2002. And yet Burnett presents himself, whether humbly or cannily, as Trump’s acolyte: Robin to Trump’s Batman, he insists.

Then he casts Trump in a fresh light, years before the 2016 campaign. Trump, Burnett explains, struck him as “a real American maverick tycoon.” Donald “will say whatever he wants.” He “takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. He’s like the guys who built the West. America is the one country that supports the entire world—because of guys like Donald, who create jobs and a tax base that can support the entire planet.” That’s what “The Apprentice” means to him, the producer concludes, with a grin: it’s “a love letter from me to America, and to New York City, because we chose New York City, about what makes America great.”

In a 1981 segment of “Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich,” the gossip columnist asks the thirty-four-year-old Trump if he’d consider a run for President. Trump laments that television has ruined politics, to the extent that Abraham Lincoln could no longer get elected: “He was not a handsome man and he did not smile at all.” He skirts questions about his political pull, his controversial tax abatements. With his cold eyes, baby cheeks, and rosebud mouth, he resembles James Spader—silky and guarded, a Master of the Universe in a boxy brown suit.

Throughout the eighties, as Trump built Trump Tower, then the Javits Center, helping to make Manhattan into a luxury playground, he played himself on television. He was omnipresent in pop culture, often as a punch line. He was the “short-fingered vulgarian” of Spy and the inspiration for the bully-villain of “Back to the Future Part II.” But on TV he had swagger: in 1985, he feuded with Mayor Ed Koch on “60 Minutes”; he was a sharp-dressed landlord on the Judith Krantz miniseries “I’ll Take Manhattan”; he appeared briefly in a 1983 “This Old House” episode about Trump Tower. There were numerous appearances on David Letterman, and the time when he asked Larry King, “Do you mind if I sit back a little bit, because your breath is very bad. . . . Has this ever been told to you before?” (King laughed, shocked, and then analyzed Trump’s neg: “That’s how you get the edge.”)

Early on, Trump had greater self-control than he had as a candidate, but he couldn’t quite crack the likability factor—and, maybe, he didn’t want to. Long before Tony Soprano launched the anti-hero drama, Trump was that guy. He was a handsome go-getter, but also an arrogant self-promoter, proud of his toughness, a flirt with a fat wallet. On “60 Minutes,” he complains about media coverage. “I believe they like to make me out as somebody a little more sinister than I really am,” he tells Mike Wallace. “I don’t look at myself, necessarily, as being sinister.”

In 1990, Trump appeared on a game show called “Trump Card,” set at Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City. As his life became unstable, rocked by divorces and bankruptcies, his TV persona stayed flush. He made cameos on sitcoms: on a 1994 episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” (Carlton faints in admiration); on a 1996 episode of “The Nanny” (he dates Fran). In 1999, he ruined a perfectly good episode of “Sex and the City.” In these incarnations, Trump is a Manhattan fixture. And yet it feels as though he’s shrunk to a fun-size Trump: red tie, yellow hair, “the Donald.” He’s less an icon than he is a retro cartoon.

By the turn of this century, in the eyes of New Yorkers, all that remained of the once powerful developer was his logo. This was when he began to reinvent himself as a star in new genres: reality television, pro wrestling, and cable news, particularly Fox News. These combative art forms suited his style—flamboyant and vaudevillian. When Trump first entered TV, the entire medium had been dismissed as junk. Now, even as critics were swooning over the artistry of cable drama, Trump swerved deeper, into stranger regions, straight into the types of television that nobody took seriously, the ones dismissed as guilty pleasures.

When Burnett pitched Trump to NBC, it was as the host of only the first season of “The Apprentice”; after him, new tycoons, including Mark Cuban and Martha Stewart, were supposed to step in. According to the book “Trump Revealed” (2016), by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the plan quickly changed. Trump’s comfort on camera, his ability to improvise—including the “You’re fired!” tagline—cemented his value, as did the strong first-season ratings. Burnett conceived of the show as “Survivor” in the “urban jungle,” and it became NBC’s flagship. Trump’s relationship with viewers was transformed: “He was a hero, and he had not been one before,” Jim Dowd, then NBC’s publicity director, told Kranish and Fisher.

Rewatching “The Apprentice” more than a decade later, it’s easy to see why it struck a chord. Glossy and upbeat, the show, which débuted after 9/11 but before the economic collapse, introduced itself as a stirring advertisement for Wall Street as a meritocracy. Each episode opens with the earworm “For the Love of Money,” by the O’Jays, with its “moneymoneymoneymoney” groove: “Talk about cash money! / Dollar bills, y’all . . . For that lean lean lean mean green / Almighty dollar.” The credits feature a dazzling, supersaturated montage of Manhattan, studded with Trump logos, along with cabs, clocks, sped-up clouds. The names of contestants glide by, in neon, formatted as Wall Street tickers. In the voice-over that begins the pilot, Trump recasts his failures as triumphs: “I fought back and won—big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills.” Now he will teach us to do the same.

The show’s early contestants were bona-fide strivers, with business backgrounds, not show-biz wannabes. In Season 1, there’s a nerd, Sam Solovey, who moons over Trump like a stalker; and there’s the villainous, dishonest Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, who became a breakout star (and, once Trump was elected, assistant to the President in the White House). But the contest narrows to a white Loyola graduate named Bill Rancic and an African-American Harvard M.B.A., Kwame Jackson. As Joshua Green points out, in his book, “Devil’s Bargain,” “The Apprentice” attracted an unusually high percentage of black and Latino viewers, in part because it highlighted contestants from those groups not as criminals but as entrepreneurs. It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants. But race is rarely explicitly discussed.

Gender is, all the time. In fact, from a certain angle, the show resembles a “Lean In” feminist boot camp. In this utopian twist on Wall Street, half the players are female, and, initially, all are on the same team. Together, they strategize about how to work with their eccentric male boss and his icy female lieutenant (in later seasons, Trump’s daughter Ivanka). He’s a supportive mentor, but he’s also prone to saying things like “You’re all beautiful women. Do you think you had an advantage over the men, in selling ice cream?”

The show’s early “challenges” are sweetly low-key: in the pilot, the players hawk lemonade—no brand names are visible. As with most reality shows, a huge proportion of the series consists of facial expressions—apprehension, disgust, glee—with musical cues, to heighten tiny conflicts. But each episode ends in grandeur, when Trump arrives to pass judgment. First, the losing team deconstructs its failings. Then three candidates grovel before him. Finally, one gets fired, and descends in a golden elevator. These final sequences take place in a boardroom so dimly lit that stripes of shadow pass over the contestants’ faces, as if they were crossing into the underworld. In many ways, “The Apprentice” is a classic reality show of the era, a sleek blend of game show, documentary, and soap opera, spiked with comedy. And yet “The Apprentice” is also “classy,” in Trumpian terms: no one eats bugs or gets too drunk. It’s a fun, upscale fantasy, a voguing competition in executive realness.

“You jest.”

In one way, however, it departs radically from reality: no one criticizes the boss. Instead, the Trump of “The Apprentice” receives endless praise, even behind his back. All scandal and debt are erased; Trump’s combative streak is alchemized into Daddy’s tough love. Celebrities who sign up for reality shows often agree to be made fun of. On “The Apprentice,” while Trump is outrageous, he’s rarely ridiculous: if he insults people, they deserve it (and often love it). He’s a family man and a business genius. Contestants are grateful for his attention, even negative attention, since he could be off doing deals. Frequently, he narrates from a helicopter, hovering like Zeus. Early on, the prizes are tied to Trump’s biography: a visit to his Louis Quatorze apartment (which he describes as being generally reserved for “Presidents and kings”), to meet his then girlfriend, Melania; dinner at the 21 Club, where the winner is seated at the “Fred Trump table.” In the finale, the winner chooses which Trump property to help manage. Often, the winners—who do, in fact, go on to work for Trump, with a salary of $250,000—tell him that they’ve chosen the project that will let them be “closer to you.”

The Trump of “The Apprentice” is not a wholly foreign figure. In the second episode, he practically pulls the advertising C.E.O. Donny Deutsch off his feet with a handshake. He rates women’s looks reflexively. He’s also hung up on eugenics, an unspoken contradiction of the show’s meritocratic themes. In one episode, Sam is interrogated in the boardroom. “You don’t believe in the genetic pool? That what you have, you have?” Trump asks Sam. “I’ve got genetic pool big-time, Mr. Trump!” Sam insists, gesticulating. “Just like you got from your father, Fred Trump, and your mother, Mary Trump.”

Trump determines who has a “lousy personality” and who “is not very well liked”—this comes up most often with women, especially in the show’s final rounds. He can be crude. “This suit is really gross,” he says, dangling a skimpy bathing suit, designed by a black gay contestant. Yet the negativity doesn’t linger. “The Apprentice” is set in a patriotic world of capitalist potential, where the boss takes you in a helicopter to view the Empire State Building (he boasts, deceptively, about his stake in it), and to gaze at the sunset-lit Statue of Liberty, which is, in Trump’s telling, “one of the truly beautiful symbols of anything, anywhere in the world.” In an emotional voice-over, the contestant Adam Israelov speaks about his immigrant father, who arrived with “nothing in his pocket.” “Not bad, Adam,” Trump says. “If you make a lot of money, this”—he gestures at their private aerie—“is the way you’re going to live.”

After Season 1, the ratings began to drop. Each year, Trump obsessed over and lied about them, needling reporters who cited them. Even during the 2004 Paley panel, which took place just over a week into the second season, Trump complained that the show’s launch did better because in January “everyone was watching TV,” whereas, in September, “everyone was playing golf.” As cable began its ascent, Trump clung tightly to network values: quality measured only by ad dollars and Nielsen ratings.

The producers began to fiddle with the recipe. The second season stuck with the men against the women; the next tried “street smarts” versus “book smarts.” Then back to a battle of the sexes, then no categories, with the contestants instead advertised as “personally selected by Trump.” He had other ideas: in 2005, Entertainment Weekly reported that he wanted to pit black contestants against white ones. (“Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world,” he explained later.) The sixth season jumped to Los Angeles, where each week’s winning team (the Haves) lived in a mansion and the losers (the Have-nots) in a “tent city.” Each year, the challenges got less creative; often, contestants were simply deputized to promote a sponsor. Trump seemed crankier and nastier. He more frequently called people “losers,” “quitters,” “pathetic.”

In 2007, NBC dropped “The Apprentice” from its fall schedule. In what felt like a preëmptive strike, Trump announced new reality-TV projects, without Burnett. There was “Pageant Place,” for MTV, about an apartment full of beauty queens. And there was “Lady or a Tramp,” a Fox series in which “rude and crude” party girls were sent to finishing school—a concept that, over two years, morphed into the Britishized show “The Girls of Hedsor Hall.” The host was Tara Conner, a former Miss USA, to whom Trump had given a second chance after she broke pageant rules. The comedian Rosie O’Donnell accused him of hypocrisy—who was the womanizing Trump to judge? During a press conference for the show, in 2009, Trump spun the incident into a crass rant, speculating about O’Donnell’s motivations: “Tara, I hate to tell you this, for reasons you don’t want to know about, but Rosie would have given you a second, third, and fourth chance, O.K.? And she would’ve loved every minute of it.” Neither series lasted more than a season.

This lurid display was a striking break from “The Apprentice.” But Trump was also embracing yet another role, one that let him play out his most aggressive and debasing impulses: a spot in the pro-wrestling ring, an industry he’d supported since 1988, when he sponsored the W.W.E. event WrestleMania.

The first W.W.E. Trump-based story was a bout between wrestlers dressed up as “Trump” and “Rosie,” a one-time experiment that flopped with fans. Then, the spring that “The Apprentice” vanished from NBC, Trump himself entered the ring as a W.W.E. character—a preening, crudely macho version of his role on “The Apprentice.” In the story, “Mr. Trump” arrives to vanquish his former friend Vince McMahon, the insecure tyrant who owns the W.W.E. Trump is introduced as an Oz-like face on a giant screen, as “For the Love of Money” plays and dollar bills tumble from the rafters. (McMahon’s money, not Trump’s.) Their showdown is more of a bro-down: Trump brags that his “Trump Towers” are bigger than McMahon’s “grapefruits.” The audience might be rooting for Trump, McMahon says, “but ninety-five per cent of them are idiots.” Trump replies, “To me, they look like a very smart group of people.”

Wrestling—even more than reality TV—makes anyone who describes it sound like a lunatic. But the series climax, “Battle of the Billionaires,” is so campily homoerotic, so rife with heat and humiliation, that it’s a critic-proof fever dream. “It’s the hostile takeover of Donald Trump!” announcers shriek, as Trump pounds McMahon. Trump’s “second” in the ring is a near-naked black wrestler named Bobby Lashley. McMahon is represented in the ring by Umaga, a Samoan who grunts and screams. When Trump wins, he shaves McMahon’s head.

Trump might have forged a different path on television, as a libidinous Barnum. Instead, in 2007, just before the economy crashed, NBC revived his old show as “The Celebrity Apprentice.” The reboot was glitzier, more circus-like. The ensemble now comprised C-level celebrities: wrestlers and lesser-known country singers; piggish guys like the rock star Gene Simmons, who bonded with Trump over women; and various others, among them the singer Cyndi Lauper, the athlete Darryl Strawberry, and the disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Rather than compete for a job, the contestants raised money for charities, often by pestering more famous friends. The professional poker player Annie Duke gives to Refugees International, interviewing an Iraqi translator who had difficulty getting visas for her children; Simmons to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

The original show had painted the bankrupt Trump as a respected mogul; “The Celebrity Apprentice” made the tightwad a philanthropist. During Season 5, Trump filmed a special boardroom segment with Ignacio, a child beneficiary of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Ignacio, from Milwaukee, had won an essay contest on “Why I’m Proud to Be Bilingual.” His “wish” is to be fired by Trump. Instead, the host praises him and hands him a check.

For all the do-gooder icing, the deeper shift was toward more aggressive product integration. As always, Trump touts his hotels and resorts, his water and his ties; and the celebrities do the same for their albums and perfumes. The human brands praise the corporate ones, which benefit by association with the charitable ones. The structure echoes that of the Trump Foundation: each week, money is funnelled to philanthropy under Trump’s name, though none of it is donated by him. Whereas the original “Apprentice” bore some resemblance to Wall Street training, “The Celebrity Apprentice” was sheer shilling: its sponsors paid from five million to nine million dollars for a slot, according to an estimation by Ad Age. “There’s never been another show where you’ve had a product sold for two hours,” Trump told the magazine, in 2011. “They do a 30-second commercial, but where do they do two hours?”

The value of those products was another matter. In one episode, about identity theft (“a yuge problem,” Trump says), the sponsors are Norton and Lifelock, a subscription online-security service based in Tempe, Arizona. The challenge is to create an advertorial in Time. In a particularly delightful moment, Blagojevich worries that they’re misusing the term “bank fraud” in their copy. The episode aired on March 28, 2010. Nineteen days earlier, the F.T.C. had fined Lifelock twelve million dollars for deceptive business practices and for failing to secure sensitive customer data. In 2015, the company was ordered to pay a hundred million dollars after failing to meet security standards.

In the third episode of Season 7, “Outside the Box,” the client is Kodak, which also sponsored the season, creating miniature “Kodak moments.” In January, 2007, when the episode aired, Kodak was veering toward collapse, owing to the rise of digital photography. But, on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Kodak appeared to be a gleaming model of vigorous corporate muscle, a company that had “reinvested in digital.”

The two contestant teams—Empresario and Hydra—are assigned to create Airstream trailers touting the company’s printer ink. Inspecting the project is a guest judge, Jim Cramer, the investment-plugging host of “Mad Money,” on CNBC. He greets the country-music star Trace Adkins by saying, “How’s business?” Trace drawls back, “Well, you know, I’ve got a stock tip for you, man.” As Cramer smiles encouragingly, Adkins explains that, once he’s “done exposing the world to what the Kodak Easyshare will do,” the stock will be “through the roof.”

In the boardroom, Simmons is mocked for talking back to the clients when they reject his slogan, “It’s a Kodak World.” “Talk your way out of this one, big boy!” the British pundit Piers Morgan scoffs. “Mate, you say Kodak’s wrong. Kodak’s the biggest success story in America right now.” In the end, Trump fires Simmons. Two years later, the company posted a hundred-and-thirty-seven-million-dollar loss. In 2012, it filed for bankruptcy.

In the fifth season of “The Apprentice,” Ivanka Trump chastises a contestant for bearing grudges. Trump cuts her off: “Who doesn’t! I do. Nobody takes things more personally than me. When somebody says something personal about me, I hate them for the rest of my life. It’s probably wrong, but I hate people.” He pauses. “Do you understand that? I hate ’em. . . . I never recover from it.”

It’s a villain’s speech—and a glimpse of a darker Trump. In response, everybody laughs. Those are the boardroom rules. The same Trump shows up on the 2004 Paley panel, fuming over his loss at the Emmys, which he argues hurt the credibility of the awards. “The Amazing Race,” he says, “wasn’t a threat, it was nothing,” and then he makes fun of the winner’s speech: “Some guy with a piece of paper, who conceived of this piece of crap.” He also complains, repeatedly, that HBO’s “Angels in America” got too many prizes, a tangent that likely won him points with the ghost of Roy Cohn, if not the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.

In 2004, the top Emmy winners were “Arrested Development” and “The Sopranos”—two brilliant series that were, coincidentally, about rich criminal families. For television critics, it was a triumphant year. But Trump had a rougher sense of the medium’s power: he knew that numbers were what counted. He would go on to win an election fuelled by class rage and racial fury; but he also won because he’d starred in a show in which high-school-educated small-town white men cheerfully vied with big-city black female lawyers. If you can have it both ways, you can have everything.

In 2015, NBC fired Trump. By that time, he’d been an Obama-baiting birther for four years, but his comments about Mexican rapists went too far. He’d alienated black and Latino viewers. For others, the spell was cast: many of his biggest fans would continue to see him through the filter of Burnett’s TV hit, no matter what Trump said or did. By 2017, the media was his enemy. That included his old friend Jeff Zucker, who was now the president of CNN. One day, the President tweeted old footage from “The Battle of the Billionaires,” repurposed as a bizarre meme. A CNN logo was superimposed on McMahon’s head as Trump pummelled him.

Trump was a different sort of TV celebrity now. But if he’d wanted to conquer the medium, things had not worked out. Trump kept producing his own reality stunts as President: in a press conference, he gestured grandly at piles of folders, props that he claimed were filled with financial disclosures; he theatrically whipped up suspense over the competition between two Supreme Court nominees. And yet he couldn’t control how these stunts played on TV—other people would have the final edit. Day and night, he watched for hours, searching for people to hate. They were easy to find. If you squinted a bit, the President might look like just another old man, yelling at the screen. ♦

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