The Most Consequential TV Show in History
In a CNN interview shortly after launching his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump told a skeptical Jake Tapper that he was “in it to win it” and boasted, “I’m giving up hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. I’m giving up a prime-time television show.” In fact, according to a new book, Trump wasn’t quite as confident as he claimed. For at least six months after he entered the race, he insisted on keeping the set for The Apprentice intact on the 14th floor of Trump Tower—if the whole presidential-campaign thing didn’t work out, at least it would generate good publicity for the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice. “There was a cognizant decision to leave the boardroom,” Trump’s son Eric told the book’s author, “and there was a possibility of it coming back.” When the set was eventually torn down, campaign staffers took over the floor.
This almost-too-perfect metaphor for the melding of Trump’s reality-TV and political careers appears in Apprentice in Wonderland, by the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh. The book comes out later this month; I obtained an early copy.
It is by now a truism of the Trump era that the 45th president rose to power in large part thanks to the persona he popularized on , which he hosted from 2004 to 2015. Few readers will be surprised to learn that the character he played on the show—the tough-but-fair executive who doles out savvy business advice and decisively fires underperforming employees—was more reality-TV invention than reality. But the book’s peek behind the scenes of
