It worked. The show was a hit. Broadcast at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday nights—a valuable time slot in a pre-streaming era when nearly all viewers watched programming when it first aired—The Apprentice, debuting January 8, 2004, was the number-five-ranked show on television for the 2003–2004 season, averaging 20.7 million viewers.
Pivotally, Trump had stepped into a network TV publicity machine that multiplied his brand’s reach. The morning after each Apprentice episode aired, that week’s fired candidate would appear for a postmortem interview on the Today show, the most popular morning show in America. NBC News staffers bristled at Trump’s omnipresence, but Jeff Zucker, promoted in December 2003 from NBC Entertainment president to president of NBC’s Entertainment, News & Cable Group,1 had propounded a new model of doing business at NBC, where certain quarters of the news division served the entertainment division. Jonathan Wald, an NBC News executive producer who would later work at CNN, was a key intermediary between Zucker and the news side.
A Newsweek article about “the most addictive new show on television”—a “15-episode infomercial for Trump himself”—mooned that “not long ago, Trump, 57, was a bloviating real-estate developer with a taste for young women and the spotlight. Today he’s—exactly the same” but somehow “so cool.”2 His hair, his resurgence, and sometimes even his political views became part of the national conversation.
Darryl Silver, co-producer of The Apprentice: It became an overnight sensation. I’d never been involved in a hit like this, and overnight, it was like, holy shit. It was pandemonium. I got a call from Conrad [Riggs], who said, “We just got picked up for seasons 2 and 3. You’ve got to get back here. You’ve got to sign your contract. We’re going right now.”
Bill Pruitt, co-producer of The Apprentice: So many of the fired contestants were jilted beyond belief. I mean, they were borderline suicidal. They come out beating their chest, saying, I’m the one. I’m the best, and then Trump very ceremoniously fired them on national TV, 30 million people watching. Then you go away for three months. You brood on it. Maybe get over your desire to hang yourself, and you get through life, and then all of a sudden it’s airing, and you’re watching it all happen, and then the publicity machine is chauffeuring you over to the Today show, where you’re going to sit at six in the morning New York time with Matt Lauer, who is chiding you about why the hell did you do such a stupid thing.
Katie Couric, former co-host of Today: Before The Apprentice, Trump would come on the Today show and do interviews occasionally. But after he would just come on to talk about The Apprentice. He was pretty relaxed, sauntering in like he owned the place. That was his M.O. I never heard that he was difficult or a prima donna, or demanding, or anything like that. I think he felt like he was a bit of a fixture, a part of the NBC family, and I think he liked that. One time, I dressed like him for Halloween when The Apprentice was super popular. He came by and mugged with me in the Halloween costume.
Jonathan Wald: We called it “logrolling,” the promotional aspect of the Today show and all network broadcasts touting the network siblings. That’s why he was around. It wasn’t just a function of himself. You have to put them on, and then later it becomes, oh, you want them on? And then it’s like, oh God, these guys again? At the beginning, Jeff [Zucker] was the architect of everybody supporting everybody else promotionally, and then it just became regularized.
Katie Couric: There was, at times, at least from me, some level of frustration that we were increasingly used as an NBC network promotional machine, which is something that grew as time went on at the Today show. I think, back in the day, we weren’t expected to promote every time there was a new NBC show. But that started to happen more and more. People felt, well, it’s just part of the deal. If The Apprentice does well, that helps the Today show and that helps NBC. I understood the economics of it all, but it felt a little excessive. But I also wanted to be a good company person too, so I tried to balance that.
Elizabeth Spiers, media reporter, Gawker and the New York Observer: When they started The Apprentice, I was at New York magazine. Adam Moss had taken over, and Adam assigned me to go try out for The Apprentice, hilariously, and of course I walked in and immediately got fired the first round. I wrote about the casting committee and how the screening works, like, “I tried out for The Apprentice and I got fired!”
Jim Dowd, NBC publicity representative for The Apprentice: Donald Trump and politics and his yearning, perhaps, to run for office, was very much alive and bright during The Apprentice days, to the point where every week, he did Don Imus’s program, which is pretty well-known for political conversation. And he would go on supposedly for The Apprentice, but it ended up being a couple of minutes on The Apprentice and usually 30 to 40 minutes was the average. Sometimes he’d have him on for an hour, [that] was all about foreign policy, jobs, immigration, all the topics that he’s speaking about now, he was talking about in 2004 with Imus and O’Reilly and others.
Darryl Silver: We went from “Does anybody want to watch this?” to “We’re geniuses.” I was in charge of product integration. It became that the joke was, you’d call Home Depot, “Okay, so we’re going to need two executives, two stores, a couple vans, some gift cards, we’re going to need some paint, a million-some-odd dollars, and we’re going to need this and that.” They’d be like, “What was that other thing?” And we’d be like, “Oh, the two trucks.” They’d say, “No, the other thing.” And we’d be like, “Oh, a million-some-odd dollars. That’s the standard fee.” We were just making it up, what we thought a corporation would pay. Every corporation wanted to be on the show. In season 1, the ice cream place didn’t even want to give us free ice cream.
Glenn Beck, political commentator and founder of TheBlaze: Very first encounter was at Larry King’s, I don’t know, 700th birthday party? It was in New York, and we were leaving, my wife and I, and in came Melania and Donald. He had such a presence to him, the room really stopped and everybody sort of ran to greet Donald. Tania and I were by the door, because he was blocking the exit. He was talking to us, and I don’t remember what he said, neither does Tania, because when he walked away, all I said was, “I don’t know how that works.” And she said, “Right, right?” And we realized that when he was talking to my wife she was looking him in the eye, and I was trying to figure out his hair, and when he turned and talked to me, I was looking into his eyes, and she was trying to figure out how his hair worked.
Darryl Silver: Everybody always talked about his hair. We were shooting one day, and it was outside, and it was windy. I was standing right next to him when the wind literally swirled, this 50-mile-hour wind that just hit for like two seconds, and his hair went almost into a tornado shape. I was about six inches from his hair and I did a deep dive to see what was going on in there. Because everybody thought it was a piece, and I’m like, “There’s no way that’s a piece.” It was all hair. It was just this long, thin hair. I was six inches from it, because I actually had to back my head away.
For strivers who themselves wanted to get close to Trump, his 2004 book How to Get Rich offered tips on getting cast on The Apprentice, along with shallow reflections such as, “I’m told that The Apprentice is the highest-rated show featuring a non-acting businessman in the history of television.”
Beneath the fluff, Trump went deep—with assistance from Trump Organization staff writer Meredith McIver,¶¶* whom he credits in the acknowledgments for doing “a remarkable job of helping me put my thoughts and experiences on paper.” A three-page chapter titled “Read Carl Jung” urges would-be tycoons to delve into the writings of the influential Swiss psychoanalyst. “Carl Jung’s theories fascinate me and keep my mind open to my own—and the collective—unconscious,” the chapter’s first paragraph informs. Trump delves into the meaning of the word “persona,” noting that it comes from the Latin word meaning “mask.” He cautions about the danger of becoming lost in one’s own persona. “These people will end up hiding behind the false personality that works professionally. As I am very much in the public eye, this hit home and I gave it considerable thought.”
Jung is also known for describing 12 classic character archetypes, from the Hero to the Jester. A classic “Hero’s Journey” myth, echoed in nearly every superhero movie, starts with someone taking charge reluctantly, forced by injustices and external events. This person then emerges as a hero by overcoming obstacles, eluding shape-shifters, and defeating villains.
If Trump or his ghostwriter was stretching the truth about his interest in Jung, you wouldn’t know it from watching the developer/author/TV star operate in real life. From his earliest public musings about politics with Rona Barrett, he cast himself as this sort of hero, insisting there was one man who could turn things around in the United States—not him, he didn’t need it, but, well, if things got bad enough and people seemed to want him to step up … This portrayal of himself as dauntlessly holding off powerful evil forces is another example of the myth-making craft he carried into the presidency. By his side would be his third wife, statuesque.
On January 22, 2005, three days before the premiere of season 3 of The Apprentice, Donald Trump married Melania Knauss. The couple wed at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach, Florida, before moving over to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for an ostentatious soiree that reportedly cost $1 million.3
The wedding was a public performance, complete with wardrobe consultants. Knauss, 34, wore a white satin John Galliano for Christian Dior wedding gown that she had picked out in Paris with assistance from Vogue’s André Leon Talley and Sally Singer and modeled for the magazine’s February cover.4 With a 13-foot train, the $100,000 embroidered gown, a dreamcoat of glittering distraction, showcased 1,500 crystal rhinestones and pearls.5
Trump had thrown lavish matrimonial ceremonies twice before. A guest list of 1,000 for his 1993 nuptials to Marla Maples in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel included New York politicos, celebrities, and sports figures with East Coast pedigrees. Among the businessmen in attendance was Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi,6 whose nephew Jamal Khashoggi was an editor and foreign correspondent at a Saudi Arabian newspaper at the time.7 (Jamal Khashoggi, who became a regime critic as a Washington Post correspondent, was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, a year after Adnan died from Parkinson’s disease in London.)
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding to Melania, with a shorter but more A-list guest roster than the Maples jamboree, showed how he had grown beyond his New York tabloid roots. Mark Burnett’s son Cameron was the ring bearer.8
The 350 guests at Mar-a-Lago included heads of state and governors (Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki, and Chris Christie), media and business personalities (Oprah Winfrey, Matt Lauer, Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Mark Burnett, Kathie Lee Gifford, Regis Philbin, Barbara Walters [who arrived in a white Volvo station wagon], Anna Wintour, Heidi Klum, Star Jones, Simon Cowell, Pat O’Brien, Stone Phillips, Gayle King, Les Moonves, Jeff Zucker, Steve Wynn, and Kelly Ripa), sports icons (Derek Jeter and Shaquille O’Neal), and musicians (Elton John, Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, Usher, Paul Anka [who complained to a reporter about being seated behind a pillar during the ceremony], Billy Joel, and Tony Bennett), who feasted upon Cristal champagne, Jean-Georges Vongerichten–catered hors d’oeuvres, and a seven-tier wedding cake.
Rick Wilson, Republican political strategist: It was going to be a huge event with a lot of other people that the [Clintons] know. Remember Donald Trump was not a Republican donor, heavy hitter, activist, conservative of any kind at that point in his history. Trump had supported Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons, and Planned Parenthood. They weren’t going to Jerry Falwell’s house for high tea.
Andrew Stein, Democratic Manhattan borough president: The kids gave toasts. Melania’s mother gave a toast. The Clintons were there. He thought it was prestigious, The Donald.
Conrad Black, Canadian financier and publisher: I had a talk with both the Clintons and Rudy Giuliani, who I knew. I didn’t feel out of place. We knew Anna Wintour really well—nice talk with her and Barbara Walters.
Roger Stone, political consultant and Trump adviser: It was in Palm Beach at the church that’s not far from Mar-a-Lago, where there was a reception afterward. I still have the invitation. I drove a 1959 Jaguar Mark 9, which is a behemoth of a four-door sedan, not terribly valuable, but I bought it off Craigslist. It overheated on the way. I have read that the [Clintons] were there, but I don’t remember seeing them. I wasn’t that impressed with [Bill Clinton] at the time. There were a lot of famous people there, so they didn’t stand out.
Bo Dietl, former NYPD detective: Bill Clinton was sitting in a corner sucking on his thumb, and Hillary was running around. She came over, she gave me a big hug and kiss. “Bo, I love you.” She was very nice. I hadn’t met her before, but she knew me. I’m a high-profile guy. I had been doing TV.
Conrad Black: I have to say that they seemed to me to be happier there and more convivial than one would think from just reading Hillary Clinton’s description of it in her book What Happened. She represents that it was just sort of a curiosity to drop in, and that they left right away. They were subject to a good deal of attention, and they even worked the room. You didn’t have the impression that they just showed up out of pure curiosity.
Roger Stone: The wedding was amazing. I sat in the same row with Chris Matthews. It’s funny. Chris really liked Trump when I got Trump to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for a live show [in 1999]. He just doesn’t like Trump so much now.
Katie Couric: I guarantee you, if I hadn’t been anchoring the Today show, I would not have been at that wedding.
Conrad Black: By the way, if I may ask: Katie Couric, did she make any reference to the fact that she rose up and moved around the room a lot? I think after a while she went and sat somewhere else.
Katie Couric: I had a hidden camera in my purse. I took some video through the camera. We were going to do a fun thing on the Today show.
Conrad Black: I don’t think they asked that phones be checked at the door. All they did was ask that they not be used. I took her moving around as her finding someone more interesting for her purposes as a news figure than us.
Bo Dietl: I would say that the British royalty can go fuck themselves. Donald Trump’s wedding was the wedding everybody and their mother wanted an invitation to. Shaq O’Neal, everybody. Jack Welch, Jeff Immelt of General Electric. It was the who’s who. What I remember, Shaq, he was so big, he was showing me his sheriff badge.*
Conrad Black: Don King sat behind us. When we were leaving the church, he complimented my wife on her appearance, which he had seen chiefly from behind at that point.