How Donald Trump was created by a reality TV show

themickey · Jun 7, 2024

How Donald Trump was created by a reality TV show

Bill Pruitt Jun 7, 2024
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury...-created-by-a-reality-tv-show-20240604-p5jj61

On January 8, 2004, just more than 20 years ago, the first episode of The Apprentice aired. It was called Meet the Billionaire, and 18 million people watched. The episodes that followed climbed to roughly 20 million each week. A staggering 28 million viewers tuned in to watch the first-season finale. The series won an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, and the Television Critics Association called it one of the best TV shows of the year, alongside The Sopranos and Arrested Development. The series – alongside its bawdy sibling, The Celebrity Apprentice – appeared on NBC in coveted prime-time slots for more than a decade.

We played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Donald Trump. Alamy

The Apprentice was an instant success in another way too. It elevated Donald J. Trump from sleazy New York tabloid hustler to respectable household name. In the show, he appeared to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies and faced yet another when he was cast. By carefully misleading viewers about Trump – his wealth, his stature, his character, and his intent – the competition reality show set about an American fraud that would balloon beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations.

I should know. I was one of four producers involved in the first two seasons. During that time, I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $US5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.
No one involved in The Apprentice – from the production company or the network, to the cast and crew – was involved in a con with malicious intent. It was a TV show, and it was made for entertainment. I still believe that. But we played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Trump, and if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned.

As Trump answers for another of his alleged deception schemes in New York and gears up to try to persuade Americans to elect him again, in part thanks to the myth we created, I can finally tell you what making Trump into what he is today looked like from my side. Most days were revealing. Some still haunt me, two decades later.

‘I want to entertain people’
Nearly everything I ever learned about deception I learned from my friend Apollo Robbins. He’s been called a professional pickpocket, but he’s actually a “perceptions expert”. Apollo has spent his life studying the psychology of how we distort other people’s perceptions of reality and has done so by picking pockets onstage for the entertainment of others. He is a master of deception, a skill that made him, back in the day, the so-called best-kept secret in Las Vegas.

After “fanning” his marks with casual, unobtrusive touch designed to make them feel safe or at ease, Apollo determines where the items reside – the wallet inside a breast pocket, the Rolex fastened to a wrist – and he removes these items without detection. He’ll even tell you what he intends to steal before he does it. He does this not to hurt people or bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality. The results are marvellous. A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what he’s trying to affect is your mind, your moods, your perceptions.

As a producer working in unscripted, or “reality,” television, I have the same goal. Like Apollo, I want to entertain, make people joyful, maybe even challenge their ways of thinking. But because I often lack the cinematic power of a movie, with its visual pyrotechnics or rehearsed dialogue, I rely on shaping the perceptions of viewers, manipulating their maps of reality towards something I want them to think or feel.
The presumption is that reality TV is scripted. What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop. The more authentic it is to, say, have a 40-foot wave bearing down on a crab boat in the Bering Sea for Deadliest Catch, the more we can trick you into thinking a malevolent Russian trawler is out there messing with the crabber’s bait. There is a trick to it, and when it works, you feel as if you’re watching a scripted show. Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.

But the real con that drove The Apprentice is far older than television. The “pig in the poke” comes from an idiom dating to 1555: “I’ll never buy a pig in a poke / There’s many a foul pig in a fair cloak.” It refers to the time-honoured scam of selling a suckling pig at market but handing over a bag (the poke) to the purchaser, who never looks inside it. Eventually, he discovers he’s purchased something quite different.
Our show became a 21st-century version: it was a long con played out over a decade of watching Trump dominate prime time by shouting orders, appearing to lead, and confidently firing some of the most capable people on television, all before awarding one eligible person a job. Audiences responded to Trump’s arrogance, his perceived abilities and prescience, but mostly his confidence. The centrepiece to any confidence game is precisely that – confidence.

From top left: Carolyn Kepcher, Trump and George Ross. Peter Kramer/Getty Images

‘You’d be crazy not to hire me’
As I walk into my interview for The Apprentice, I inadvertently learn how important it is for every one of us involved to demonstrate confidence above all else.
I sit down with Jay Bienstock, the showrunner, who has one last producer position to fill and needs somebody capable and hardworking. His office is sparse, and the desk is strategically placed directly across from the couch, with a noticeable angle downward from his desk to whomever is seated across from him. (I’m recalling all of the quoted conversations here to the best of my ability; they are not verbatim.)

He is smiling and even laughing throughout the interview, but from the steep angle at which he gazes down on me, there is no mistaking who is in charge. He seems to like what he hears and offers to follow up with my agent. “But I have to check your references before I can hire you,” he says. “You’d be crazy not to,” I reply. He laughs, claps his hands together, and grins. “THAT’S what I’m talking about,” he says. “That’s the confidence this show needs!”
I sit there, several inches below eyeline, and ponder what just happened. What, I wonder, is so “confident” about suggesting he’d be crazy to not check my references? Then it dawns on me. He thinks I meant “You’d be crazy not to hire me.” The signal to noise begins.

Before I leave, I have to ask: Why Trump? Bienstock discovers that we both lived in New York for a time. Knowing what we know about Trump, selling the idea that intelligent people would compete to land a job working for him will be a challenge.
“The idea is to have a new and different billionaire every season – just like there’s a new and different island on Survivor. We reached out to Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, among others,” he says. “Trump is the only one who agreed to sign on.” (Bienstock didn’t respond to a request for comment)

“We’ll make it work,” Bienstock says confidently. I rise, shake his hand, and leave, and head over to Dutton’s bookstore to pick up a used copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal. It is filled with takeaways about branding and strategising but conveniently omits Trump bluffing his way through meetings with contractors, stiffing them when it is convenient to do so, and betraying his most trusted colleagues to get what he wants. (The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has since tried to get the bestseller recategorised in the Library of Congress as a work of fiction.)
Another show of confidence is the budget the series commands. It’s not as expensive as a scripted series, but for a reality show, the price is high. Never have I worked on a series with this level of funding, but the cost is justified. This needs to feel real.

The show created a “reception area” with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling “boardroom”. AP

New York City is the perfect – though expensive – backdrop. Trump’s offices are, however, less than telegenic. They are cramped, and a lot of the wood furniture is chipped or peeling. None of it is suitable to appear on camera. We need what grifters call the Big Store: a fake but authentic-looking establishment in which the con goes down. Trump Tower, at the time, is mostly condos and some offices situated in the high-rise. The mezzanine comprises vacant and overpriced retail space, all of it unfinished. Trump offers the space to the production – at a premium, naturally – and it is inside this location that we create our own “reception area” with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling “boardroom.”

Next door, there’s the “suite” where the contestants will live, which is made to look like a trendy loft-style apartment they all share. The lodgings are made up of partitions surrounding tiny, hard bunks upon which the candidates sleep; the illusion comes from elegantly appointed common areas, where most of the interplay will go down.
During a tour of the set, I have my first encounter with Trump. I leave the suite and enter the gear room, the only vacant retail space that will remain unfinished. It is filled with equipment and crew members milling about. In walks a trio of men. In the middle is Trump, in a navy blue suit and scarlet tie. He’s surprisingly tall, and not just because of the hair. He is flanked by two even taller men.

Bienstock makes introductions, and I watch as Trump shakes hands with everyone. I’d been told he would never do this, something about fearing unwanted germs. When it is my turn, I decide on the convivial two-hander and place my right hand into his and my left onto his wrist as we shake. His eye contact is limited but thorough. He is sizing me up. He looks like a wolf about to rip my throat out before turning away, offering me my first glimpse at the superstructure – his hairstyle – buttressed atop his head with what must be gallons of Aqua Net.

I watch as Trump saunters around the room, snatches up a fistful of M&Ms from the craft service table set aside for the crew, and shoves them into his mouth. Then he is gone, ushered away towards some important meeting he must attend, as if to say, to one and all present, This is unimportant.

Eventually, it’s time to roll cameras. When Trump is called to perform, we are filming the first scene of the first episode on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and he is about to deliver the first task. Filming inside this beacon of capitalism and wealth gives the series the legitimacy it needs. A con artist would call staging the scam inside a legitimate institution “playing a man against the wall”.

From the balcony overlooking the famed trading room floor, Trump will set up the entire premise of the show on camera and engage in a little banter with the other participants. This includes introducing his advisers, George Ross, an older, grouchy attorney devoted to Trump’s legal affairs, and Carolyn Kepcher, a perpetual sceptic who runs his hospitality units and one of his golf clubs. (They might be called “the shills,” others in on the con who will act as Trump’s eyes and ears.)

The contestants are there, lined up and zeroed in on by camera operators getting reaction shots to whatever it is Trump says. Although they mostly just stand and wait, they patiently go along with the proceedings. They are not in on the con. They act as “the little blind mice,” who, in fraudster terms, convey a sense of authenticity by reacting to the goings-on, like lab rats caught in a maze.

Nothing is scripted – except for what Trump needs to say. Cue cards are present, but mostly it is Bienstock running up, coaching Trump, tossing out suggestions from the script he has written for the man. The feeling is that while doing a fair job of repeating the necessary words verbatim, Trump also appears to be inadvertently shouting at the contestants. His hands shuttle back and forth as if holding an invisible accordion, a gesture now famous in memes.

A reward in the first series of the show was a visit to Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower. Reuters

Each episode is filmed over three days. For the first episode, the two teams of contestants, divided by gender, take to the streets to carry out the initial task of trying to sell lemonade for the most money. The women pulverise the men.

Having won, the women are invited upstairs for a direct look at Trump’s very own apartment in Trump Tower, a reward designed specifically to introduce viewers to the gaudy but elevated world of Donald Trump at home. The men, who lost, go back to the loft to await their fate at the hands of Trump. He will be sending one of them home.

Inside the now-empty boardroom set, a meeting with the producers is called for the first briefing of Trump before the anticipated firing. With Trump are his cronies, Ross and Kepcher. Trump is “too busy,” so they have each observed both teams in the field and make an assessment of who prevailed and who fell behind.

Now, this is important. The Apprentice is a game show regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In the 1950s, scandals arose when producers of quiz shows fed answers to likable, ratings-generating contestants while withholding those answers from unlikable but truly knowledgeable players. Any of us involved in The Apprentice swinging the outcome of prize money by telling Trump whom to fire is forbidden.

Considering this, Bienstock wisely chooses to record these off-camera briefings in case the FCC ever rolls up on us. Rather than blurt out who they think should get canned, the two producers of that week’s episode – each following one team – are coached to equitably share with Trump the virtues and deficiencies of each member of the losing team. This renders a balanced depiction of how and why they lost. There are obvious choices of whom to fire, but we want it to be something of a horse race, to sustain the drama and keep people watching.

Satisfied he has what he needs, Trump dismisses the prefiring discussion with the wave of a hand, claiming he has places to be, let’s get on with it, etc. We proceed to set up for what will be our first boardroom.
The producers retreat to the adjacent control room to watch the event unfold. Per the show’s format, the losing team is summoned in anticipation of one of its members being sent home. Leaving their luggage in the reception area, the men walk into the boardroom, where Trump is flanked by Ross and Kepcher, waiting for them solemnly. Trump just frowns from a gigantic red leather chair, his eyeline noticeably well above those sitting across from him.
The men proceed to verbally go after one another like gladiators jousting before the emperor. Trump takes the conversation into potentially dangerous terrain, asking one contestant, who is Jewish, whether he believes in “the genetic pool”. The contestant’s retort is swift and resolute: He tells Trump that he does, in fact, have the genes, “just like you got from your father, Fred Trump, and your mother, Mary Trump.” It pours out of him. It is dramatic. It is good reality TV.
The project manager must then choose two of the men to come back to the boardroom with him while everyone else is dismissed. An off-camera prefiring consultation with Trump takes place (and is recorded), right before the three men are brought back for the eventual firing.

Trump unsuccessfully tried to trademark the phrase, “You’re fired”. Peter Kramer/Getty Images

We film Trump, Ross, and Kepcher deliberating and giving the pluses and minuses of each, remarking on how risky it was for one of the contestants to stand up for himself the way that he did. Trump turns back and forth to each, listening. His cronies stick to their stories and give added deferential treatment towards Trump, with Ross strategically reminding him, “You’ve been taking risks your entire life.”

Trump summons the three men back into the boardroom for final judging. Trump grills one and says, “I will let you stay.” (Wow! we think. A benevolent leader.) When he turns his attention to the other man – the one he asked about genetics – it looks clear. He is doomed. So much so that the man stands when Trump tells him, “It seems unanimous.” Trump then offhandedly tells him to sit down, calling him “a wild card,” echoing Ross’s earlier observation of the boss, Trump.

After this comes an unwieldy moment when, at the behest of Bienstock, Trump fumbles through a given line. “We have an elevator,” he says to the remaining contestant, named David, “that goes up to the suite and an elevator that goes down” – he pauses to recall the exact wording – “to the street. And, David, I’m going to ask you to take the down elevator.”
The men react and awkwardly rise. It is an unsatisfactory conclusion, given all the preceding drama.

From the control room, we all watch as the three men depart the boardroom. A quick huddle takes place between the producers and the executive from NBC. We bolt from the control room out into the boardroom and confer with Trump, telling him we will need him to say something more direct to conclude the moment when David is let go.

“Well, I’d probably just fire him,” Trump says. “Why not just say that?” Bienstock asks. “Fine,” Trump says.
We return to the control room. The three men from the losing team are brought back into the boardroom, and Trump repeats his line about the elevator, then turns to David, who already knows his fate, and adds, “David, you’re fired.”

The line insertion happened in a perilously scripted way, but it is deemed satisfactory. “You’re fired” becomes the expression we will stick with. It works. Trump comes off as decisive and to the point.
Later, Trump will try to trademark “You’re fired.” He is not successful.

By the time it was used in “The Apprentice” Trump’s Taj Mahal casino was in poor repair and owned by Hong Kong investors. AP

Glitter and gleam
Trump’s appearances make up so little of our shooting schedule that whenever he shows up to film, it isn’t just the wild-card on-camera moments we both hope for and are terrified of that put everyone on edge. It is the way he, the star (and half owner) of the show, targets people on the crew with the gaze of a hungry lion.

While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. “She’s too heavy,” I hear him say.
Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,” he says towards a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. “That’s all I want to look at.”

Trump corners a female producer and asks her whom he should fire. She demurs, saying something about how one of the contestants blamed another for their team losing. Trump then raises his hands, cupping them to his chest: “You mean the one with the …?” He doesn’t know the contestant’s name. Trump eventually fires her.

(In response to detailed questions about this and other incidents reported in this article, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump 2024 campaign, wrote, “This is a completely fabricated and bullshit story that was already peddled in 2016.” He said that it is surfacing now because Democrats are “desperate”.)

Trump goes about knocking off every one of the contestants in the boardroom until only two remain. The finalists are Kwame Jackson, a black broker from Goldman Sachs, and Bill Rancic, a white entrepreneur from Chicago who runs his own cigar business. Trump assigns them each a task devoted to one of his crown-jewel properties. Jackson will oversee a Jessica Simpson benefit concert at Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, while Rancic will oversee a celebrity golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Viewers need to believe that whatever Trump touches turns to gold. These properties that bear his name are supposed to glitter and gleam. All thanks to him.
Reality is another matter altogether. The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place – Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best. We shoot around all that.

Finalist Kwame Jackson, Omarosa Manigault Newman and eventual winner Bill Rancic.

Both Rancic and Jackson do a round-robin recruitment of former contestants, and Jackson makes the fateful decision to team up with the notorious Omarosa, among others, to help him carry out his final challenge.
With her tenure on the series nearly over, Omarosa launches several simultaneous attacks on her fellow teammates in support of her “brother” Kwame. For the fame-seeking beauty queen, it is a do-or-die play for some much-coveted screen time. As on previous tasks, Ross and Kepcher will observe both events.
Over at Trump National Golf Club, where I am stationed, it is sunny and bright, set against luscious autumn colours. I am driven up to the golf club from Manhattan to scout. With me are the other producers, all of whom are men. We meet Trump at one of the homes he keeps for himself on the grounds of the club.

“Melania doesn’t even know about this place,” he says out loud to us, snickering, implying that the home’s function is as his personal lair for his sexual exploits, all of which are unknown to his then-fiancée Melania Knauss.

We are taken around the rest of the club’s property and told what to feature on camera and what to stay away from. The clubhouse is a particularly necessary inclusion, and it is inside these luxurious confines where I have the privilege of meeting the architect. Finding myself alone with him, I make a point of commending him for what I feel is a remarkable building. The place is genuinely spectacular. He thanks me.

“It’s bittersweet,” he tells me. “I’m very proud of this place, but …” He hesitates. “I wasn’t paid what was promised,” he says. I just listen. “Trump pays half upfront,” he says, “but he’ll stiff you for the rest once the project is completed.”
“He stiffed you?”

“If I tried to sue, the legal bills would be more than what I was owed. He knew that. He basically said ‘Take what I’m offering’.” I see how heavy this is for the man, all these years later. “So, we sent the invoice. He didn’t even pay that,” he says. None of this will be in the show. Not Trump’s suggested infidelities, nor his aversion toward paying those who work for him.
When the tasks are over, we are back in the boardroom, having our conference with Trump about how the two finalists compare – a conversation that I know to be recorded. We huddle around him and set up the last moments of the candidates, Jackson and Rancic.

Bill Pruitt was one of the producers on The Apprentice. LinkedIn

Trump will make his decision live on camera months later, so what we are about to film is the setup to that reveal. The race between Jackson and Rancic should seem close, and that’s how we’ll edit the footage. Since we don’t know who’ll be chosen, it must appear close, even if it’s not.

We lay out the virtues and deficiencies of each finalist to Trump in a fair and balanced way, but sensing the moment at hand, Kepcher sort of comes out of herself. She expresses how she observed Jackson at the casino overcoming more obstacles than Rancic, particularly with the way he managed the troublesome Omarosa. Jackson, Kepcher maintains, handled the calamity with grace.

“I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organisation,” Kepcher says to Trump, who winces while his head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting.

“Why didn’t he just fire her?” Trump asks, referring to Omarosa. It’s a reasonable question. Given that this the first time we’ve ever been in this situation, none of this is something we expected.
“That’s not his job,” Bienstock says to Trump. “That’s yours.” Trump’s head continues to bob.

“I don’t think he knew he had the ability to do that,” Kepcher says. Trump winces again.
“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n----- winning?”
Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze towards Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.
Bienstock does a half cough, half laugh, and swiftly changes the topic or throws to Ross for his assessment. What happens next I don’t entirely recall. I am still processing what I have just heard. We all are. Only Bienstock knows well enough to keep the train moving. None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had. (Bienstock and Kepcher didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Afterward, we film the final meeting in the boardroom, where Jackson and Rancic are scrutinised by Trump, who, we already know, favours Rancic. Then we wrap production, pack up, and head home. There is no discussion about what Trump said in the boardroom, about how the damning evidence was caught on tape. Nothing happens.

Prized possessions
We go home and face the next phase of our assignment, the editing. In stitching the footage together, the swindle we are now involved in ascends to new levels.
Editing in a reality TV show is what script writing is to a narrative series. A lot of effort goes into the storytelling because, basically, in every single unscripted series – whether it’s a daytime talk show, an adventure documentary, or a shiny floor dance-off – there are three versions: there’s what happens, there’s what gets filmed, and there’s what gets cut down into 43 minutes squeezed between commercial breaks.

Especially for a competition series, it’s important that the third version represent the first as much as possible. A defeated contestant could show up in the press and cry foul if they’re misrepresented. Best to let people fail of their own accord. That said, we look after our prized possessions in how we edit the series, and some people fare better than others.
We attend to our thesis that only the best and brightest deserve a job working for Donald Trump. Luckily, the winner, Bill Rancic, and his rival, Kwame Jackson, come off as capable and confident throughout the season. If for some reason they had not, we would have conveniently left their shortcomings on the cutting room floor. In actuality, both men did deserve to win.

Without a doubt, the hardest decisions we faced in post-production were how to edit together sequences involving Trump. We needed him to sound sharp, dignified, and clear on what he was looking for and not as if he was yelling at people.
You see him today: when he reads from a teleprompter, he comes off as loud and stoic. Go to one of his rallies and he’s the off-the-cuff rambler rousing his followers into a frenzy. While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items. But as he became more comfortable with filming, Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing – some of them misogynistic as well as racist. We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today and you can hear many of them.

If you listen carefully, especially to that first episode, you will notice clearly altered dialogue from Trump in both the task delivery and the boardroom. Trump was overwhelmed with remembering the contestants’ names, the way they would ride the elevator back upstairs or down to the street, the mechanics of what he needed to convey. Bienstock instigated additional dialogue recording that came late in the edit phase.
We set Trump up in the soundproof boardroom set and fed him lines he would read into a microphone with Bienstock on the phone, directing from LA. And suddenly Trump knows the names of every one of the contestants and says them while the camera cuts to each of their faces. Wow, you think, how does he remember everyone’s name?

While on location, he could barely put a sentence together regarding how a task would work. Listen now, and he speaks directly to what needs to happen while the camera conveniently cuts away to the contestants, who are listening and nodding. He sounds articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand.

Trump with then fiancee, now wife, Melania. AP

Then comes the note from NBC about the fact that after Trump delivers the task assignment to the contestants, he disappears from the episode after the first act and doesn’t show up again until the next-to-last. That’s too long for the (high-priced) star of the show to be absent.

There is a convenient solution. At the top of the second act, right after the task has been assigned but right before the teams embark on their assignment, we insert a sequence with Trump, seated inside his gilded apartment, dispensing a carefully crafted bit of wisdom. He speaks to whatever the theme of each episode is – why someone gets fired or what would lead to a win. The net effect is not only that Trump appears once more in each episode but that he also now seems prophetic in how he just knows the way things will go right or wrong with each individual task. He comes off as all-seeing and all-knowing. We are led to believe that Donald Trump is a natural-born leader.
Through the editorial nudge we provide him, Trump prevails. So much so that NBC asks for more time in the boardroom to appear at the end of all the remaining episodes. (NBC declined to comment for this article.)

When it comes to the long con, the cherry on top is the prologue to the premiere. It’s a five-minute-long soliloquy delivered by Trump at the beginning of the first episode, the one titled Meet the Billionaire. Over a rousing score, it features Trump pulling out all the stops, calling New York “my city” and confessing to crawling out from under “billions of dollars in debt”.

There’s Trump in the back of limousines. Trump arriving before throngs of cheering crowds outside Trump Tower. Trump in his very own helicopter as it banks over midtown – the same helicopter with the Trump logo that, just like the airplane, is actually for sale to the highest bidder. The truth is, almost nothing was how we made it seem.
So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found.

No one lost their retirement fund or fell on hard times from watching The Apprentice. But Trump rose in stature to the point where he could finally eye a run for the White House, something he had intended to do all the way back in 1998. Along the way, he could now feed his appetite for defrauding the public with various shady practices.

‘Reality TV president’
In 2005, thousands of students enrolled in what was called Trump University, hoping to gain insight from the Donald and his “handpicked” professors. Each paid as much as $35,000 to listen to some huckster trade on Trump’s name. In a sworn affidavit, salesman Ronald Schnackenberg testified that Trump University was “fraudulent”. The scam swiftly went from online videoconferencing courses to live events held by high-pressure sales professionals whose only job was to persuade attendees to sign up for the course. The sales were for the course “tuition” and had nothing whatsoever to do with real estate investments. A class action suit was filed against Trump.

That same year, Trump was caught bragging to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush that he liked to grab married women “by the pussy,” adding, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” He later tried to recruit porn actor Stormy Daniels for The Apprentice despite her profession and, according to Daniels, had sex with her right after his last son was born. (His alleged attempt to pay off Daniels was, of course, the subject of his recent trial.)
In October 2016 – a month before the election – the Access Hollywood tapes were released and written off as “locker room banter.” Trump paid Daniels to keep silent about their alleged affair. He paid $US25 million to settle the Trump University lawsuit and make it go away.

He went on to become the first elected president to possess neither public service nor military experience. And although he lost the popular vote, Trump beat out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, winning in the Rust Belt by just 80,000 votes.

Trump has been called the “reality TV president,” and not just because of The Apprentice. The Situation Room, where top advisers gathered, became a place for photo-ops, a bigger, better boardroom. Trump swaggered and cajoled, just as he had on the show. Whom would he listen to? Whom would he fire? Stay tuned. Trump even has his own spinoff, called the House of Representatives, where women hurl racist taunts and body-shame one another with impunity. The State of the Union is basically a cage fight. The demands of public office now include blowhard buffoonery.

I reached out to Apollo, the Vegas perceptions expert, to discuss all of this. He reminded me how if a person wants to manipulate the signal, they simply turn up the noise. “In a world that is so uncertain,” he said, “a confidence man comes along and fills in the blanks. The more confident they are, the more we’re inclined to go along with what they suggest.”

A reality TV show gave rise to an avaricious hustler, and a deal was made: subvert the facts, look past the deficiencies, deceive where necessary, and prevail in the name of television ratings and good, clean fun.
Trump is making another run at the White House and is leading in certain polls. People I know enthusiastically support him and expect he’ll return to office. It’s not just hats, sneakers, a fragrance, or Bibles. Donald Trump is selling his vision of the world, and people are buying it.
Knowing all they know, how could these people still think he’s capable of being president of the United States?
Perhaps they watched our show and were conned by the pig in the poke.

Frederick Foresight · Jun 7, 2024

Excellent article.

themickey · Jun 7, 2024

A new account rekindles allegations that Trump disrespected Black people on ‘The Apprentice’

By GARANCE BURKE and MEG KINNARD June 8, 2024
https://apnews.com/article/donald-t...lection-2024-d962dfce1220920681ede63b90058f5d

Gene Folkes had just been jettisoned as a contestant on “The Apprentice” and was commiserating with a crew member at a bar inside the lobby of Trump Tower. He was indignant — and not just at having been kicked off the reality show after its star, Donald Trump, had delivered his catchphrase: “You’re fired.”

One of two Black contestants chosen for that season in 2010, Folkes was insulted that Trump had called him inarticulate and accused him of illiteracy in a lengthy boardroom tirade minutes earlier.

As the crew member, a Black woman who worked as a contestant manager, consoled him, Trump suddenly appeared at the bar.

“He came up and he asked me: ‘Is this your woman? Because you two would make a really great couple. You both have the same background,’” Folkes told The Associated Press.

Gene Folkes, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” is photographed in a park in downtown Manhattan on Wednesday, June 5, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)

The contestant manager quietly reminded Trump that she worked for him. Then, Trump made a comment similar to something he uttered in the boardroom that never aired on TV, Folkes said.

“He said again, ‘It’s not like I used the N-word,’ and then he walked off, and that was that,” said Folkes, a New York-based consultant, podcast host and U.S. Air Force veteran.

As Trump seeks to make inroads with African American voters in his third run for the White House, fresh allegations are surfacing about his disrespectful behavior toward Black people inside the Manhattan skyscraper that launched his show and political career. There are still questions about whether any of that behavior was caught on tape.

Bill Pruitt, a former producer on “The Apprentice,” published a recent account alleging that Trump actually used the racist slur to refer to Kwame Jackson, a Black contestant who was a finalist on the show’s first season. A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign has vehemently dismissed the account about the Republican ex-president as false and politically motivated. President Joe Biden’s Democratic campaign, meanwhile, spotlighted Pruitt’s account on social media.

Trump, who hosted “The Apprentice” from 2004 to 2015, has long denied such claims and called former contestants criticizing him “failing wannabes” motivated by greed. But he has been trailed in his professional and political life by charges of racism, from a 1973 discrimination lawsuit against his real estate business, to his push to carry out executions of five Black and Latino youths who were later exonerated of rape allegations, to his yearslong fanning of the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was not born in the United States.

Trump’s first campaign in 2016 was rocked by allegations about his conduct on “The Apprentice” and other appearances during his association with NBC, notably in footage in which he said he could sexually assault women and get away with it because he was a “star.” MGM Studios, which bought the production company that made the show, has since been acquired by Amazon.

Almost a decade after he left his reality TV role to run for president, Trump’s television career remains central to his biography and political rise. It presented Trump Tower to tens of millions of people as a symbol of power and success before Trump launched his first campaign from the building’s lobby. Last week, the same lobby was the setting for his first appearance after being convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush money scheme to influence the 2016 election.

”‘The Apprentice’ is probably underrated as a source of that kind of image construction,” said Joel Penney, a professor at Montclair State University who studies the intersection of pop culture and politics. “There’s nobody who could possibly compete on the level of name recognition, brand recognition, that kind of familiarity.”

THE ROLES OF NBC AND AMAZON
“The Apprentice” and its spinoffs were on air for more than a decade, featuring people from all walks of life and later celebrities who competed in contrived business challenges to win Trump’s favor — and potentially a job with his organization.

Hundreds of cast and crew members signed non-disclosure agreements, limiting their ability to reveal what happened inside Trump Tower or any outtakes featuring the ex-president. The show’s producer as well as the network that broadcast it also have refused to release unaired footage. Over the last week, after the AP reached out to more than two dozen former crew members and contestants about Trump’s behind-the-scenes behavior, some said they wondered how contractual agreements may have insulated Trump from blowback about politically volatile comments.

Folkes said he believes his exchanges with Trump inside the bar were recorded since he was still wearing a mic.

After his firing in October 2010, Folkes blogged about his experience on the show. He said he soon got a call from NBC executives. According to a document provided by Folkes, in early November NBC’s then-vice president for legal affairs, Shelly Tremain, sent him a cease-and-desist order and said the network would seek to recover $1 million if he kept talking about his participation in the series or violating his “application agreement.”

Folkes fired back to Tremain’s team in an email, saying his portrayal on the show was “unfortunate, inaccurate, stereotyping being applied to a member of a protected class,” according to a copy of the message viewed by the AP. “Review the boardroom scene of episode 5 in its entirety for a very clear picture of the false portrayal and stereotyping … I harbor no interest in publicly commenting about Mr. Trump.”

Folkes said the network did provide him with extra therapy sessions following his firing, which he said helped him to process the reputational damage he suffered as a contestant. NBC declined to comment about him and Tremain did not respond to a message.

“After a decade of (military) service, I can take a lot of stress. It’s not like, ‘Oh, he fired me and hurt my feelings,’” Folkes said. “When I say I am offended, that is a high bar to cross.”

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “these completely fabricated accusations” had already been debated in 2016 “and thoroughly debunked,” dismissing all of them as rooted in campaign politics.

“Now that Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the election, and President Trump continues to dominate, they are bringing up old fake stories from the past because they are desperate,” he said.

Folkes previously spoke out against Trump’s candidacy and his comments toward and about female cast and crew members in an AP investigation published in October 2016. After reading the AP story, “Access Hollywood” producers said they dug into their own show’s archive, uncovering a 2005 tape in which Trump made lewd remarks about being sexually aggressive toward women.

The tape sparked outrage and calls from some Republicans for Trump to drop out a month before the election. He didn’t — and won. But many of his opponents have continued to press those involved in “The Apprentice” to release their archives, partly out of a belief that a tape of Trump using the racist slur exists.

Entertainment giant MGM said in 2016 that it owned the archive of the reality TV show and contractual obligations kept it from unilaterally releasing any unaired, archived material. In 2022, the online shopping giant Amazon finalized its acquisition of MGM, one of the oldest studios in Hollywood. Amazon MGM Studios declined to comment.

The show’s executive producer Mark Burnett also has said that he doesn’t have the ability or right to release footage from the show. NBC has stated that it does not own the series footage and only licensed it from Burnett for broadcast.

A NEW ACCOUNT
Writing for Slate in an article published last week, Pruitt described a meeting with Trump in the show’s boardroom set, where he famously would dismiss contestants.

According to Pruitt’s account, one of Trump’s company’s managers suggested picking Jackson over Bill Rancic, the other remaining contestant and a white man. After a debate over Jackson’s performance on the show, Pruitt writes, Trump winced before asking if America would accept a Black man winning, referring to Jackson by the racist slur.

Pruitt said he was coming forward now because his non-disclosure agreement — which carried a possible $5 million fine if violated — expired this year. He told the AP that he recalled all quotes in his article to the best of his ability and that the conversation was recorded.

“He’s about to run for a second term as president of the United States and I heard him use a term that should have and would have abolished him from politics forever had more people heard about it,” Pruitt said. “Anyone who is capable of using it shouldn’t be leading the country.”

The Trump campaign denied Pruitt’s claim that Trump used the slur. “Prove it,” wrote Cheung, the campaign spokesperson, on the X platform, adding that Biden’s allies were “peddling” the story “because Biden is hemorrhaging support from Black Americans.” The Democratic president has seen his support among Black voters fall sharply since taking office.

In 2005, a year after Pruitt claims Trump used the slur, the former president proposed a “Blacks” versus “whites” version of “The Apprentice” on “The Howard Stern Show,” telling listeners he was considering creating an episode pitting “nine Blacks against nine whites, all highly educated, very smart, strong, beautiful people.”

In an interview, Jackson said Trump never said the slur to his face. But he said Pruitt’s account and the conversation about an alleged Trump recording spotlighted the nation’s inability to resolve broader questions of what kind of speech voters will tolerate in 2024.

“The bigger problem for me is none of this really matters because America is entirely comfortable with both overt and covert racism. And whether there is a smoking gun that says Trump called me an N-word and a tape appears tomorrow, what will that change? How will that make a difference?” said Jackson, president of his own brand marketing, diversity and inclusion consulting firm.

POLITICAL PRESSURE
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, argues Biden’s immigration and economic policies have deprived Black communities of jobs and resources. He and his allies have suggested he can cut into Biden’s margins with Black voters, long a core Democratic constituency.

He has also sought to get a boost from his criminal charges and suggested in February to a mostly Black audience that African Americans related to him more because he had been indicted.

Biden has pointed to several measures benefitting Black Americans, including more funding for historically Black colleges and universities, forgiveness of federal student loan debt and pardons for federal possession of marijuana charges. His campaign has also sought to draw attention to Trump’s past.

On Monday, Biden’s campaign posted a TikTok video featuring coverage of Pruitt’s allegations, as well as the affirmation of Omarosa Manigault Newman, who went from a show contestant to White House aide to a Trump critic, that she had heard a tape of Trump using the slur.

“Donald Trump is exactly who we all knew he was — a lifelong racist,” a woman says in the TikTok. “Black voters kicked Donald Trump out of the White House in 2020, and we’re going to do it again this November.”

Marshawn Evans Daniels, who was one of two Black contestants competing on the fourth season of “The Apprentice,” said she never heard Trump use racist language on set.

“‘The Apprentice’ was a baptism in the highest levels of business and I was always praised,” said Evans Daniels, an attorney, author and consultant. “I never had a negative experience but that doesn’t usually happen when you are there in the room.”

FILE - Donald Trump, right, speaks to Randal Pinkett, left, the winner of the fourth season of Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice,” at the sixth season auditions at Trump Tower in New York, Friday, March 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, File)

That same season, winner Randal Pinkett was rewarded with a job working for Trump. But Pinkett, who is also Black, said Trump treated him differently than other previous winners and asked him to share his title with a white contestant.

“If I give Donald the benefit of the doubt, then what he did to me was racially insensitive,” said Pinkett, now a CEO of an international consulting firm who has also previously criticized Trump. “If I do not give him the benefit of doubt, which I do not, it was racist. And it therefore does not surprise me that he would say the N-word.”
___
Burke reported from San Francisco and Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina.

Buy1Sell2 · Jun 7, 2024

themickey said:
How Donald Trump was created by a reality TV show

Bill Pruitt Jun 7, 2024
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury...-created-by-a-reality-tv-show-20240604-p5jj61

On January 8, 2004, just more than 20 years ago, the first episode of The Apprentice aired. It was called Meet the Billionaire, and 18 million people watched. The episodes that followed climbed to roughly 20 million each week. A staggering 28 million viewers tuned in to watch the first-season finale. The series won an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, and the Television Critics Association called it one of the best TV shows of the year, alongside The Sopranos and Arrested Development. The series – alongside its bawdy sibling, The Celebrity Apprentice – appeared on NBC in coveted prime-time slots for more than a decade.

We played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Donald Trump. Alamy

The Apprentice was an instant success in another way too. It elevated Donald J. Trump from sleazy New York tabloid hustler to respectable household name. In the show, he appeared to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies and faced yet another when he was cast. By carefully misleading viewers about Trump – his wealth, his stature, his character, and his intent – the competition reality show set about an American fraud that would balloon beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations.

I should know. I was one of four producers involved in the first two seasons. During that time, I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $US5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.
No one involved in The Apprentice – from the production company or the network, to the cast and crew – was involved in a con with malicious intent. It was a TV show, and it was made for entertainment. I still believe that. But we played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Trump, and if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned.

As Trump answers for another of his alleged deception schemes in New York and gears up to try to persuade Americans to elect him again, in part thanks to the myth we created, I can finally tell you what making Trump into what he is today looked like from my side. Most days were revealing. Some still haunt me, two decades later.

‘I want to entertain people’
Nearly everything I ever learned about deception I learned from my friend Apollo Robbins. He’s been called a professional pickpocket, but he’s actually a “perceptions expert”. Apollo has spent his life studying the psychology of how we distort other people’s perceptions of reality and has done so by picking pockets onstage for the entertainment of others. He is a master of deception, a skill that made him, back in the day, the so-called best-kept secret in Las Vegas.

After “fanning” his marks with casual, unobtrusive touch designed to make them feel safe or at ease, Apollo determines where the items reside – the wallet inside a breast pocket, the Rolex fastened to a wrist – and he removes these items without detection. He’ll even tell you what he intends to steal before he does it. He does this not to hurt people or bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality. The results are marvellous. A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what he’s trying to affect is your mind, your moods, your perceptions.

As a producer working in unscripted, or “reality,” television, I have the same goal. Like Apollo, I want to entertain, make people joyful, maybe even challenge their ways of thinking. But because I often lack the cinematic power of a movie, with its visual pyrotechnics or rehearsed dialogue, I rely on shaping the perceptions of viewers, manipulating their maps of reality towards something I want them to think or feel.
The presumption is that reality TV is scripted. What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop. The more authentic it is to, say, have a 40-foot wave bearing down on a crab boat in the Bering Sea for Deadliest Catch, the more we can trick you into thinking a malevolent Russian trawler is out there messing with the crabber’s bait. There is a trick to it, and when it works, you feel as if you’re watching a scripted show. Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.

But the real con that drove The Apprentice is far older than television. The “pig in the poke” comes from an idiom dating to 1555: “I’ll never buy a pig in a poke / There’s many a foul pig in a fair cloak.” It refers to the time-honoured scam of selling a suckling pig at market but handing over a bag (the poke) to the purchaser, who never looks inside it. Eventually, he discovers he’s purchased something quite different.
Our show became a 21st-century version: it was a long con played out over a decade of watching Trump dominate prime time by shouting orders, appearing to lead, and confidently firing some of the most capable people on television, all before awarding one eligible person a job. Audiences responded to Trump’s arrogance, his perceived abilities and prescience, but mostly his confidence. The centrepiece to any confidence game is precisely that – confidence.

From top left: Carolyn Kepcher, Trump and George Ross. Peter Kramer/Getty Images

‘You’d be crazy not to hire me’
As I walk into my interview for The Apprentice, I inadvertently learn how important it is for every one of us involved to demonstrate confidence above all else.
I sit down with Jay Bienstock, the showrunner, who has one last producer position to fill and needs somebody capable and hardworking. His office is sparse, and the desk is strategically placed directly across from the couch, with a noticeable angle downward from his desk to whomever is seated across from him. (I’m recalling all of the quoted conversations here to the best of my ability; they are not verbatim.)

He is smiling and even laughing throughout the interview, but from the steep angle at which he gazes down on me, there is no mistaking who is in charge. He seems to like what he hears and offers to follow up with my agent. “But I have to check your references before I can hire you,” he says. “You’d be crazy not to,” I reply. He laughs, claps his hands together, and grins. “THAT’S what I’m talking about,” he says. “That’s the confidence this show needs!”
I sit there, several inches below eyeline, and ponder what just happened. What, I wonder, is so “confident” about suggesting he’d be crazy to not check my references? Then it dawns on me. He thinks I meant “You’d be crazy not to hire me.” The signal to noise begins.

Before I leave, I have to ask: Why Trump? Bienstock discovers that we both lived in New York for a time. Knowing what we know about Trump, selling the idea that intelligent people would compete to land a job working for him will be a challenge.
“The idea is to have a new and different billionaire every season – just like there’s a new and different island on Survivor. We reached out to Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, among others,” he says. “Trump is the only one who agreed to sign on.” (Bienstock didn’t respond to a request for comment)

“We’ll make it work,” Bienstock says confidently. I rise, shake his hand, and leave, and head over to Dutton’s bookstore to pick up a used copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal. It is filled with takeaways about branding and strategising but conveniently omits Trump bluffing his way through meetings with contractors, stiffing them when it is convenient to do so, and betraying his most trusted colleagues to get what he wants. (The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has since tried to get the bestseller recategorised in the Library of Congress as a work of fiction.)
Another show of confidence is the budget the series commands. It’s not as expensive as a scripted series, but for a reality show, the price is high. Never have I worked on a series with this level of funding, but the cost is justified. This needs to feel real.

The show created a “reception area” with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling “boardroom”. AP

New York City is the perfect – though expensive – backdrop. Trump’s offices are, however, less than telegenic. They are cramped, and a lot of the wood furniture is chipped or peeling. None of it is suitable to appear on camera. We need what grifters call the Big Store: a fake but authentic-looking establishment in which the con goes down. Trump Tower, at the time, is mostly condos and some offices situated in the high-rise. The mezzanine comprises vacant and overpriced retail space, all of it unfinished. Trump offers the space to the production – at a premium, naturally – and it is inside this location that we create our own “reception area” with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling “boardroom.”

Next door, there’s the “suite” where the contestants will live, which is made to look like a trendy loft-style apartment they all share. The lodgings are made up of partitions surrounding tiny, hard bunks upon which the candidates sleep; the illusion comes from elegantly appointed common areas, where most of the interplay will go down.
During a tour of the set, I have my first encounter with Trump. I leave the suite and enter the gear room, the only vacant retail space that will remain unfinished. It is filled with equipment and crew members milling about. In walks a trio of men. In the middle is Trump, in a navy blue suit and scarlet tie. He’s surprisingly tall, and not just because of the hair. He is flanked by two even taller men.

Bienstock makes introductions, and I watch as Trump shakes hands with everyone. I’d been told he would never do this, something about fearing unwanted germs. When it is my turn, I decide on the convivial two-hander and place my right hand into his and my left onto his wrist as we shake. His eye contact is limited but thorough. He is sizing me up. He looks like a wolf about to rip my throat out before turning away, offering me my first glimpse at the superstructure – his hairstyle – buttressed atop his head with what must be gallons of Aqua Net.

I watch as Trump saunters around the room, snatches up a fistful of M&Ms from the craft service table set aside for the crew, and shoves them into his mouth. Then he is gone, ushered away towards some important meeting he must attend, as if to say, to one and all present, This is unimportant.

Eventually, it’s time to roll cameras. When Trump is called to perform, we are filming the first scene of the first episode on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and he is about to deliver the first task. Filming inside this beacon of capitalism and wealth gives the series the legitimacy it needs. A con artist would call staging the scam inside a legitimate institution “playing a man against the wall”.

From the balcony overlooking the famed trading room floor, Trump will set up the entire premise of the show on camera and engage in a little banter with the other participants. This includes introducing his advisers, George Ross, an older, grouchy attorney devoted to Trump’s legal affairs, and Carolyn Kepcher, a perpetual sceptic who runs his hospitality units and one of his golf clubs. (They might be called “the shills,” others in on the con who will act as Trump’s eyes and ears.)

The contestants are there, lined up and zeroed in on by camera operators getting reaction shots to whatever it is Trump says. Although they mostly just stand and wait, they patiently go along with the proceedings. They are not in on the con. They act as “the little blind mice,” who, in fraudster terms, convey a sense of authenticity by reacting to the goings-on, like lab rats caught in a maze.

Nothing is scripted – except for what Trump needs to say. Cue cards are present, but mostly it is Bienstock running up, coaching Trump, tossing out suggestions from the script he has written for the man. The feeling is that while doing a fair job of repeating the necessary words verbatim, Trump also appears to be inadvertently shouting at the contestants. His hands shuttle back and forth as if holding an invisible accordion, a gesture now famous in memes.

A reward in the first series of the show was a visit to Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower. Reuters

Each episode is filmed over three days. For the first episode, the two teams of contestants, divided by gender, take to the streets to carry out the initial task of trying to sell lemonade for the most money. The women pulverise the men.

Having won, the women are invited upstairs for a direct look at Trump’s very own apartment in Trump Tower, a reward designed specifically to introduce viewers to the gaudy but elevated world of Donald Trump at home. The men, who lost, go back to the loft to await their fate at the hands of Trump. He will be sending one of them home.

Inside the now-empty boardroom set, a meeting with the producers is called for the first briefing of Trump before the anticipated firing. With Trump are his cronies, Ross and Kepcher. Trump is “too busy,” so they have each observed both teams in the field and make an assessment of who prevailed and who fell behind.

Now, this is important. The Apprentice is a game show regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In the 1950s, scandals arose when producers of quiz shows fed answers to likable, ratings-generating contestants while withholding those answers from unlikable but truly knowledgeable players. Any of us involved in The Apprentice swinging the outcome of prize money by telling Trump whom to fire is forbidden.

Considering this, Bienstock wisely chooses to record these off-camera briefings in case the FCC ever rolls up on us. Rather than blurt out who they think should get canned, the two producers of that week’s episode – each following one team – are coached to equitably share with Trump the virtues and deficiencies of each member of the losing team. This renders a balanced depiction of how and why they lost. There are obvious choices of whom to fire, but we want it to be something of a horse race, to sustain the drama and keep people watching.

Satisfied he has what he needs, Trump dismisses the prefiring discussion with the wave of a hand, claiming he has places to be, let’s get on with it, etc. We proceed to set up for what will be our first boardroom.
The producers retreat to the adjacent control room to watch the event unfold. Per the show’s format, the losing team is summoned in anticipation of one of its members being sent home. Leaving their luggage in the reception area, the men walk into the boardroom, where Trump is flanked by Ross and Kepcher, waiting for them solemnly. Trump just frowns from a gigantic red leather chair, his eyeline noticeably well above those sitting across from him.
The men proceed to verbally go after one another like gladiators jousting before the emperor. Trump takes the conversation into potentially dangerous terrain, asking one contestant, who is Jewish, whether he believes in “the genetic pool”. The contestant’s retort is swift and resolute: He tells Trump that he does, in fact, have the genes, “just like you got from your father, Fred Trump, and your mother, Mary Trump.” It pours out of him. It is dramatic. It is good reality TV.
The project manager must then choose two of the men to come back to the boardroom with him while everyone else is dismissed. An off-camera prefiring consultation with Trump takes place (and is recorded), right before the three men are brought back for the eventual firing.

Trump unsuccessfully tried to trademark the phrase, “You’re fired”. Peter Kramer/Getty Images

We film Trump, Ross, and Kepcher deliberating and giving the pluses and minuses of each, remarking on how risky it was for one of the contestants to stand up for himself the way that he did. Trump turns back and forth to each, listening. His cronies stick to their stories and give added deferential treatment towards Trump, with Ross strategically reminding him, “You’ve been taking risks your entire life.”

Trump summons the three men back into the boardroom for final judging. Trump grills one and says, “I will let you stay.” (Wow! we think. A benevolent leader.) When he turns his attention to the other man – the one he asked about genetics – it looks clear. He is doomed. So much so that the man stands when Trump tells him, “It seems unanimous.” Trump then offhandedly tells him to sit down, calling him “a wild card,” echoing Ross’s earlier observation of the boss, Trump.

After this comes an unwieldy moment when, at the behest of Bienstock, Trump fumbles through a given line. “We have an elevator,” he says to the remaining contestant, named David, “that goes up to the suite and an elevator that goes down” – he pauses to recall the exact wording – “to the street. And, David, I’m going to ask you to take the down elevator.”
The men react and awkwardly rise. It is an unsatisfactory conclusion, given all the preceding drama.

From the control room, we all watch as the three men depart the boardroom. A quick huddle takes place between the producers and the executive from NBC. We bolt from the control room out into the boardroom and confer with Trump, telling him we will need him to say something more direct to conclude the moment when David is let go.

“Well, I’d probably just fire him,” Trump says. “Why not just say that?” Bienstock asks. “Fine,” Trump says.
We return to the control room. The three men from the losing team are brought back into the boardroom, and Trump repeats his line about the elevator, then turns to David, who already knows his fate, and adds, “David, you’re fired.”

The line insertion happened in a perilously scripted way, but it is deemed satisfactory. “You’re fired” becomes the expression we will stick with. It works. Trump comes off as decisive and to the point.
Later, Trump will try to trademark “You’re fired.” He is not successful.

By the time it was used in “The Apprentice” Trump’s Taj Mahal casino was in poor repair and owned by Hong Kong investors. AP

Glitter and gleam
Trump’s appearances make up so little of our shooting schedule that whenever he shows up to film, it isn’t just the wild-card on-camera moments we both hope for and are terrified of that put everyone on edge. It is the way he, the star (and half owner) of the show, targets people on the crew with the gaze of a hungry lion.

While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. “She’s too heavy,” I hear him say.
Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,” he says towards a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. “That’s all I want to look at.”

Trump corners a female producer and asks her whom he should fire. She demurs, saying something about how one of the contestants blamed another for their team losing. Trump then raises his hands, cupping them to his chest: “You mean the one with the …?” He doesn’t know the contestant’s name. Trump eventually fires her.

(In response to detailed questions about this and other incidents reported in this article, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump 2024 campaign, wrote, “This is a completely fabricated and bullshit story that was already peddled in 2016.” He said that it is surfacing now because Democrats are “desperate”.)

Trump goes about knocking off every one of the contestants in the boardroom until only two remain. The finalists are Kwame Jackson, a black broker from Goldman Sachs, and Bill Rancic, a white entrepreneur from Chicago who runs his own cigar business. Trump assigns them each a task devoted to one of his crown-jewel properties. Jackson will oversee a Jessica Simpson benefit concert at Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, while Rancic will oversee a celebrity golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Viewers need to believe that whatever Trump touches turns to gold. These properties that bear his name are supposed to glitter and gleam. All thanks to him.
Reality is another matter altogether. The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place – Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best. We shoot around all that.

Finalist Kwame Jackson, Omarosa Manigault Newman and eventual winner Bill Rancic.

Both Rancic and Jackson do a round-robin recruitment of former contestants, and Jackson makes the fateful decision to team up with the notorious Omarosa, among others, to help him carry out his final challenge.
With her tenure on the series nearly over, Omarosa launches several simultaneous attacks on her fellow teammates in support of her “brother” Kwame. For the fame-seeking beauty queen, it is a do-or-die play for some much-coveted screen time. As on previous tasks, Ross and Kepcher will observe both events.
Over at Trump National Golf Club, where I am stationed, it is sunny and bright, set against luscious autumn colours. I am driven up to the golf club from Manhattan to scout. With me are the other producers, all of whom are men. We meet Trump at one of the homes he keeps for himself on the grounds of the club.

“Melania doesn’t even know about this place,” he says out loud to us, snickering, implying that the home’s function is as his personal lair for his sexual exploits, all of which are unknown to his then-fiancée Melania Knauss.

We are taken around the rest of the club’s property and told what to feature on camera and what to stay away from. The clubhouse is a particularly necessary inclusion, and it is inside these luxurious confines where I have the privilege of meeting the architect. Finding myself alone with him, I make a point of commending him for what I feel is a remarkable building. The place is genuinely spectacular. He thanks me.

“It’s bittersweet,” he tells me. “I’m very proud of this place, but …” He hesitates. “I wasn’t paid what was promised,” he says. I just listen. “Trump pays half upfront,” he says, “but he’ll stiff you for the rest once the project is completed.”
“He stiffed you?”

“If I tried to sue, the legal bills would be more than what I was owed. He knew that. He basically said ‘Take what I’m offering’.” I see how heavy this is for the man, all these years later. “So, we sent the invoice. He didn’t even pay that,” he says. None of this will be in the show. Not Trump’s suggested infidelities, nor his aversion toward paying those who work for him.
When the tasks are over, we are back in the boardroom, having our conference with Trump about how the two finalists compare – a conversation that I know to be recorded. We huddle around him and set up the last moments of the candidates, Jackson and Rancic.

Bill Pruitt was one of the producers on The Apprentice. LinkedIn

Trump will make his decision live on camera months later, so what we are about to film is the setup to that reveal. The race between Jackson and Rancic should seem close, and that’s how we’ll edit the footage. Since we don’t know who’ll be chosen, it must appear close, even if it’s not.

We lay out the virtues and deficiencies of each finalist to Trump in a fair and balanced way, but sensing the moment at hand, Kepcher sort of comes out of herself. She expresses how she observed Jackson at the casino overcoming more obstacles than Rancic, particularly with the way he managed the troublesome Omarosa. Jackson, Kepcher maintains, handled the calamity with grace.

“I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organisation,” Kepcher says to Trump, who winces while his head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting.

“Why didn’t he just fire her?” Trump asks, referring to Omarosa. It’s a reasonable question. Given that this the first time we’ve ever been in this situation, none of this is something we expected.
“That’s not his job,” Bienstock says to Trump. “That’s yours.” Trump’s head continues to bob.

“I don’t think he knew he had the ability to do that,” Kepcher says. Trump winces again.
“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n----- winning?”
Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze towards Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.
Bienstock does a half cough, half laugh, and swiftly changes the topic or throws to Ross for his assessment. What happens next I don’t entirely recall. I am still processing what I have just heard. We all are. Only Bienstock knows well enough to keep the train moving. None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had. (Bienstock and Kepcher didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Afterward, we film the final meeting in the boardroom, where Jackson and Rancic are scrutinised by Trump, who, we already know, favours Rancic. Then we wrap production, pack up, and head home. There is no discussion about what Trump said in the boardroom, about how the damning evidence was caught on tape. Nothing happens.

Prized possessions
We go home and face the next phase of our assignment, the editing. In stitching the footage together, the swindle we are now involved in ascends to new levels.
Editing in a reality TV show is what script writing is to a narrative series. A lot of effort goes into the storytelling because, basically, in every single unscripted series – whether it’s a daytime talk show, an adventure documentary, or a shiny floor dance-off – there are three versions: there’s what happens, there’s what gets filmed, and there’s what gets cut down into 43 minutes squeezed between commercial breaks.

Especially for a competition series, it’s important that the third version represent the first as much as possible. A defeated contestant could show up in the press and cry foul if they’re misrepresented. Best to let people fail of their own accord. That said, we look after our prized possessions in how we edit the series, and some people fare better than others.
We attend to our thesis that only the best and brightest deserve a job working for Donald Trump. Luckily, the winner, Bill Rancic, and his rival, Kwame Jackson, come off as capable and confident throughout the season. If for some reason they had not, we would have conveniently left their shortcomings on the cutting room floor. In actuality, both men did deserve to win.

Without a doubt, the hardest decisions we faced in post-production were how to edit together sequences involving Trump. We needed him to sound sharp, dignified, and clear on what he was looking for and not as if he was yelling at people.
You see him today: when he reads from a teleprompter, he comes off as loud and stoic. Go to one of his rallies and he’s the off-the-cuff rambler rousing his followers into a frenzy. While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items. But as he became more comfortable with filming, Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing – some of them misogynistic as well as racist. We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today and you can hear many of them.

If you listen carefully, especially to that first episode, you will notice clearly altered dialogue from Trump in both the task delivery and the boardroom. Trump was overwhelmed with remembering the contestants’ names, the way they would ride the elevator back upstairs or down to the street, the mechanics of what he needed to convey. Bienstock instigated additional dialogue recording that came late in the edit phase.
We set Trump up in the soundproof boardroom set and fed him lines he would read into a microphone with Bienstock on the phone, directing from LA. And suddenly Trump knows the names of every one of the contestants and says them while the camera cuts to each of their faces. Wow, you think, how does he remember everyone’s name?

While on location, he could barely put a sentence together regarding how a task would work. Listen now, and he speaks directly to what needs to happen while the camera conveniently cuts away to the contestants, who are listening and nodding. He sounds articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand.

Trump with then fiancee, now wife, Melania. AP

Then comes the note from NBC about the fact that after Trump delivers the task assignment to the contestants, he disappears from the episode after the first act and doesn’t show up again until the next-to-last. That’s too long for the (high-priced) star of the show to be absent.

There is a convenient solution. At the top of the second act, right after the task has been assigned but right before the teams embark on their assignment, we insert a sequence with Trump, seated inside his gilded apartment, dispensing a carefully crafted bit of wisdom. He speaks to whatever the theme of each episode is – why someone gets fired or what would lead to a win. The net effect is not only that Trump appears once more in each episode but that he also now seems prophetic in how he just knows the way things will go right or wrong with each individual task. He comes off as all-seeing and all-knowing. We are led to believe that Donald Trump is a natural-born leader.
Through the editorial nudge we provide him, Trump prevails. So much so that NBC asks for more time in the boardroom to appear at the end of all the remaining episodes. (NBC declined to comment for this article.)

When it comes to the long con, the cherry on top is the prologue to the premiere. It’s a five-minute-long soliloquy delivered by Trump at the beginning of the first episode, the one titled Meet the Billionaire. Over a rousing score, it features Trump pulling out all the stops, calling New York “my city” and confessing to crawling out from under “billions of dollars in debt”.

There’s Trump in the back of limousines. Trump arriving before throngs of cheering crowds outside Trump Tower. Trump in his very own helicopter as it banks over midtown – the same helicopter with the Trump logo that, just like the airplane, is actually for sale to the highest bidder. The truth is, almost nothing was how we made it seem.
So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found.

No one lost their retirement fund or fell on hard times from watching The Apprentice. But Trump rose in stature to the point where he could finally eye a run for the White House, something he had intended to do all the way back in 1998. Along the way, he could now feed his appetite for defrauding the public with various shady practices.

‘Reality TV president’
In 2005, thousands of students enrolled in what was called Trump University, hoping to gain insight from the Donald and his “handpicked” professors. Each paid as much as $35,000 to listen to some huckster trade on Trump’s name. In a sworn affidavit, salesman Ronald Schnackenberg testified that Trump University was “fraudulent”. The scam swiftly went from online videoconferencing courses to live events held by high-pressure sales professionals whose only job was to persuade attendees to sign up for the course. The sales were for the course “tuition” and had nothing whatsoever to do with real estate investments. A class action suit was filed against Trump.

That same year, Trump was caught bragging to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush that he liked to grab married women “by the pussy,” adding, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” He later tried to recruit porn actor Stormy Daniels for The Apprentice despite her profession and, according to Daniels, had sex with her right after his last son was born. (His alleged attempt to pay off Daniels was, of course, the subject of his recent trial.)
In October 2016 – a month before the election – the Access Hollywood tapes were released and written off as “locker room banter.” Trump paid Daniels to keep silent about their alleged affair. He paid $US25 million to settle the Trump University lawsuit and make it go away.

He went on to become the first elected president to possess neither public service nor military experience. And although he lost the popular vote, Trump beat out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, winning in the Rust Belt by just 80,000 votes.

Trump has been called the “reality TV president,” and not just because of The Apprentice. The Situation Room, where top advisers gathered, became a place for photo-ops, a bigger, better boardroom. Trump swaggered and cajoled, just as he had on the show. Whom would he listen to? Whom would he fire? Stay tuned. Trump even has his own spinoff, called the House of Representatives, where women hurl racist taunts and body-shame one another with impunity. The State of the Union is basically a cage fight. The demands of public office now include blowhard buffoonery.

I reached out to Apollo, the Vegas perceptions expert, to discuss all of this. He reminded me how if a person wants to manipulate the signal, they simply turn up the noise. “In a world that is so uncertain,” he said, “a confidence man comes along and fills in the blanks. The more confident they are, the more we’re inclined to go along with what they suggest.”

A reality TV show gave rise to an avaricious hustler, and a deal was made: subvert the facts, look past the deficiencies, deceive where necessary, and prevail in the name of television ratings and good, clean fun.
Trump is making another run at the White House and is leading in certain polls. People I know enthusiastically support him and expect he’ll return to office. It’s not just hats, sneakers, a fragrance, or Bibles. Donald Trump is selling his vision of the world, and people are buying it.
Knowing all they know, how could these people still think he’s capable of being president of the United States?
Perhaps they watched our show and were conned by the pig in the poke.
More...

Way too long didn't read. Really old news and likely false.

themickey · Jun 8, 2024

Buy1Sell2 said:
Way too long didn't read. Really old news and likely false.
More...

I understand, GOP cultists are not known for having much attention span on facts.
".....I didn't read, it's likely false". Hahaha that be GOP logic.

Frederick Foresight · Jun 8, 2024

Buy1Sell2 said:
Way too long didn't read.
More...

Of course you didn't read it. Your awareness is limited to catchy bumper stickers.

nitrene · Jun 8, 2024

I would say the article is accurate, I don't know about the details. I've read biographies & seen documentaries about Trump and they seem inline. In 2012 Trump was going to run but he thought the time wasn't right for his type of politics, and he was right, so he endorsed Romney instead.

The point of the article is what exactly? That given all the facts about Trump why do people still support & vote for him? I believe it is a combination of people like that Trump is a success & they hate the Democrats. Trump was & still is the physical embodiment of a permanent middle finger to the mainstream elites who tell them what to do & who to like. Just like the infamous What's The Matter With Kansas.

Roger Stone was the one who stated that Trump could win 2016 because of his success on The Apprentice. He looked like an authority figure on The Apprentice & the public would see that as being akin to being Presidential.

What really motivated Trump to run was when Obama insulted him in 2012 in a correspondents dinner. It was a partial rebuke of Trump's claim that Obama wasn't an American aka the Birther controversy. I think that really lit a fire under him to beat Obama & the Democrats.

themickey · Jun 8, 2024

My impression back in 2016 was Trump was only partially interested in the presidents race and was all more about a stunt to boost his reputation, aka, more about being under the spotlight in order to further business interests.
When Trump won he was just as surprised as anyone, he didn't expect it, neither did most American voters. That was my impression.
For some reason the public were more interested in keeping Hillary out than they were in voting Trump in.
Hillary lost imo because of an effective smear campaign.......

"One of the most striking elements of Russia’s plan to influence the U.S. election did not involve votes at all, but rather agents with Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, hacking into the emails of staff working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. These efforts, as laid out by Mueller in the key July 2018 indictment, began in earnest in March of 2016.

During that month, the agents sent emails that looked like Google security notifications to many Clinton campaign staffers and volunteers. But rather than helping them lock down their accounts, these emails instructed recipients to click a link to change their password, and when the user did so, this gave the Russian agents access to their accounts. Using this method, the GRU agents stole tens of thousands of emails from Clinton campaign staffers, including campaign chairman John Podesta.

The GRU agents then created a fake online group called Guccifer 2.0 and used that persona to share these emails with WikiLeaks. That group in turn released the stolen emails in the run up to the November election, creating frequent negative news cycles for Clinton and distracting from the message she hoped to send voters in the final days of the campaign."

https://time.com/5565991/russia-influence-2016-election/

themickey · Jun 8, 2024

2024 elections will have some similarities imo, Biden will lose to Trump due to bad reputation which the Russians may well attempt to further influence.

nitrene · Jun 10, 2024

themickey said:
My impression back in 2016 was Trump was only partially interested in the presidents race and was all more about a stunt to boost his reputation, aka, more about being under the spotlight in order to further business interests.
When Trump won he was just as surprised as anyone, he didn't expect it, neither did most American voters. That was my impression.
For some reason the public were more interested in keeping Hillary out than they were in voting Trump in.
Hillary lost imo because of an effective smear campaign.......

"One of the most striking elements of Russia’s plan to influence the U.S. election did not involve votes at all, but rather agents with Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, hacking into the emails of staff working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. These efforts, as laid out by Mueller in the key July 2018 indictment, began in earnest in March of 2016.

During that month, the agents sent emails that looked like Google security notifications to many Clinton campaign staffers and volunteers. But rather than helping them lock down their accounts, these emails instructed recipients to click a link to change their password, and when the user did so, this gave the Russian agents access to their accounts. Using this method, the GRU agents stole tens of thousands of emails from Clinton campaign staffers, including campaign chairman John Podesta.

The GRU agents then created a fake online group called Guccifer 2.0 and used that persona to share these emails with WikiLeaks. That group in turn released the stolen emails in the run up to the November election, creating frequent negative news cycles for Clinton and distracting from the message she hoped to send voters in the final days of the campaign."

https://time.com/5565991/russia-influence-2016-election/
More...

The WikiLeaks emails definitely hurt Clinton. It was quite explicit on her megalomania & hubris that she could easily beat an "idiot" like Trump.

If you read the emails she is a master Machiavellian character. It was her plan to make Trump the candidate since she was sure could easily beat him. Trump in 2016 was just a Teflon candidate. Nothing bad that came out ever reduced his popularity. Even I was amazed.

If you haven't watched Showtime's serial documentary with the Bloomberg Politics journalists (Mark Halperin & John Heilemann) called The Circus Season 1, its worth watching if you are interested in the nitty gritty of the 2016 campaign. Season 1 Episode 23 "From Russia With Love" covers the WikiLeaks angle. Halperin & Heilemann go to London to meet an associate of Assange and they try to assess the validity of the Russian connection.