General Discussion

The TV That Created Donald Trump

Rewatching “The Apprentice,” the show that made his Presidency possible.

By Emily Nussbaum
The New Yorker, 24 July 2017

Excerpt...

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.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/the-tv-that-created-donald-trump