After season 6 of The Apprentice floundered in Los Angeles, NBC entertainment chief Kevin Reilly canceled the series. At the time, its 7.5 million weekly viewers was considered substandard, but the industry has changed. In late 2018, those numbers would make it a top-20 broadcast show, on par with an influential hit like This Is Us.
Soon after Reilly decided not to renew The Apprentice, he left NBC. His replacement, Ben Silverman, was hired by Jeff Zucker, who had become the chief executive of NBC Universal. Silverman had previously worked with Mark Burnett. On his first day at NBC, Silverman called Burnett about making two more seasons of The Apprentice. A key business change was that this time NBC would be a one-third partner in the product integrations. But it was the format change, celebrities playing for charity instead of regular people vying for a job, that allowed Trump to project an image of power in a new way. The original, noncelebrity version was tried one more time in 2010 as a recession-themed show, where Trump was to help candidates who faced tough times, but ratings were low. The first season of the celebrity version improved viewership to 11 million weekly. With casts that included Joan Rivers, Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey, Adam Carolla, and Meatloaf, it ran for seven seasons with Trump as host. There were other celebrities whose feuds with Trump made them enticing possibilities for a medium that thrives on conflict, but not all could be wrangled. Al Sharpton declined to be on the show, and Rosie O’Donnell refused at any price.1 When Trump’s young social media director Justin McConney, unaware of the offer to O’Donnell, suggested the idea again years later, Trump dismissed it.
It’s not just that The Apprentice made him more famous. It’s also that from The Apprentice Trump learned methods of holding an audience’s attention and of playing up his own persona that would serve him when he turned his full attention to politics. What’s more, with good ratings he prospered most, and therefore had the most power when he was giving the people what they want.
Reverend Al Sharpton: In 2006, Trump came to the National Action Network convention for the dinner I was throwing to honor James Brown, who had performed at the Taj Mahal a lot. We always do it in April because that was the month Dr. King got killed. When James died that December, I called Trump and said that I had a problem. We wanted to fly James’s body to the Apollo. His kids had got this gold-plated casket, and the body was in Augusta. We couldn’t get a plane. Could he get his or a friend’s plane to bring the body back? He said his plane was in repair. He never sent it, of course. We ended up driving the body. Then I get a call out of nowhere, 2007, that Mr. Trump wanted me to be on Celebrity Apprentice. I said, “I’m not interested.” I would not do Dancing with the Stars. I wouldn’t do Celebrity Apprentice. Trump told them, “Let me talk to Al. I can talk him into it.” He called me twice. “Come on, Al. Do you know how many people watch my show?” He gave me the whole spiel. I said, “You know, Mr. Trump, we started fighting over housing discrimination. We totally went at it over [the Central Park Five]. You would like nothing better in front of a huge audience than to fire Al Sharpton. You will never get that opportunity.” He couldn’t conceive that I was going to turn down being on television. I always knew how to work television, but I also knew what I wanted to be projected as, and an apprentice or having on tights doing Dancing with the Stars was not what I wanted to be.
Rosie O’Donnell: They offered me $2 million to be on The Celebrity Apprentice [around 2007]; I said, “No.” And they offered me $2 million to do a Doritos commercial with him, and I said, “No.” He didn’t understand why I wouldn’t do this and take the money. I think I confused him. He never met a woman that he couldn’t buy. Even my agent was trying to convince me to do it, and I’m like, “I don’t think you fully understand. Are you ready? I will never do anything with him. The darkest energy of any human I’ve ever met in my life.”
Justin McConney, Trump social media director: We did a video where he was feuding with both Lawrence O’Donnell and Rosie O’Donnell [in December 2011] and the tagline was, “Same last names, same bad ratings.” I tried to convince him to get Rosie on The Celebrity Apprentice. I said, “She would probably do the show. Howard Stern had a huge feud with her for years. They made up. It would be a TV event. She would be a great contestant raising money for charity and the guests she would bring in.” He just wouldn’t go for it. “Nope, not doing it. I just can’t do it.”
At a certain point he cut back on feuding with people. He said, “I think there’s something to what you’re saying here. I’m going to stop doing this.” But he went right back to it. His line was always, “I have to hit back.” Because I would question sometimes, “Is there really a reason to respond to this guy?” He goes, “You don’t understand. I have to hit back. You have to hit back.”
Jonathan Wald: Piers [Morgan, onetime CNN host] owes his initial prominence in the U.S. to Trump because he was the first Celebrity Apprentice winner, and he translated that into appearing on and then signing with America’s Got Talent. That was how Piers became known in the States. He established a relationship with Trump, and when he came to CNN, he leveraged the friendship with Trump to book him on the show numerous times. It was a crazy time at CNN, when we were doing whatever we could to prop up the already dying franchise of the nightly interview at 9:00 p.m., which had been the biggest thing on TV at one time. We had Trump on a few times, and executives asked me, “Why do you keep booking Donald Trump on Piers Morgan?” I said, “Because he’s great TV, the ratings are always good, and he always says something interesting, to put it mildly.”
Tucker Carlson, Fox News: Trump believes that television is the most democratic of the media, and by definition when a show has high ratings, its producers understand what people want. That’s a lesson he learned from working in television. If you want to know what the public thinks, pay close attention to the programming. There’s some truth in that. It’s probably at least as accurate as public opinion polling.
Reverend Al Sharpton: He thinks that he’s telegenic. He knows that you don’t need heavy language on television, because you’re talking to people in their living rooms, so he doesn’t have to be scholarly. He’s not a reader, he’s a talker, so it’s a natural medium for him. He didn’t want to just be a businessman. He wanted to be a star, and television was a way to be a star. He created a brand that was more based on hype than anything else.
Surya Yalamanchili, Apprentice candidate, season 6: There’s this entire universe created by the producers. You’re waiting for him, and then when he arrives, you start filming.
Tucker Carlson: He’s a natural television communicator. He doesn’t speak like a writer speaks. Obama was a writer, and he talks like one. Trump speaks to be heard rather than to be read. There’s a huge difference between the two. Trump is a television expert. You listen to him talk, you hear it, the producer in him. He literally speaks in teases. “We’re going to reveal the next ambassador to the UK!”
Stuart Marques, former producer, A Current Affair: It’s all, “I’ve got some good news for you, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. I’ll tell you tomorrow or the next day.” Then the next day he’ll say, “Pretty soon I’ll tell you.” That’s all tabloid TV. That’s all reality TV. Keep ’em hanging on. Keep ’em guessing. Keep ’em anticipating. He’s a master at it.
Surya Yalamanchili: The Apprentice playbook boiled down to its simplest form is really boiling things down to their simplest form. The producers told us how you won’t recognize yourself, because it may be an exaggerated version of you. It’s very easy to follow along, and there’s good guys, and there’s the bad guys, there’s the idiot, there’s the genius.
Conrad Black, Canadian financier and publisher: He uses a mixture of these ethnic words like “schlong” and old words like calling someone a “stiff.” I haven’t heard anyone call someone a stiff since the movies with Jimmy Cagney. So he’s got traditional jargon mixed with New York ethnic words, and that coupled with his delivery makes the whole thing hilarious.
Tucker Carlson: I never thought Trump got credit for being as amusing as he is, because he’s highly amusing. Paradoxically, he turns a lot of people completely humorless, which is sort of interesting. Most funny people make the people around them funnier, but Trump seems to zap everyone else’s sense of humor completely. His defenders become kind of robotic true believers versus critics who go completely insane and try to ban humor. He’s like the one funny guy at the center of all of this.
Corynne (Steindler) Cirilli, Page Six reporter: He was becoming more endearing to the general public. He was kind of hated in New York for a long time, by Kurt Anderson and Spy magazine and by these gritty leftist journalists. He was mocked by Graydon Carter. Joan Rivers, who I know at one point was not a fan of Donald, went on Celebrity Apprentice, and then she would be out on the scene talking about what a great guy he was and how he gave all this money to charity. Donald Trump understands the media game almost better than the media itself. He’s the best bully there is, and he knows how to pick his target and how to get the narrative spun in his favor. Now that it’s politics, it’s gotten a little more serious, but for many years he was able to do it with a shrug and a laugh in the celebrity world, and he really honed it.
Michael Avenatti, lawyer: I did meet him once, in 2009, when he hit on my date. I was standing at the bar with her at the BOA Steakhouse in Los Angeles. I went to get drinks. Donald Trump walked up to her, looked her up and down, and introduced himself. He was startled that I walked up. He clearly figured out that I was with her, introduced himself, we shook hands, and he turned around and left. If you’re going to go out with an attractive woman, then it’s to be expected to a certain degree. She made some joke about feeling like a piece of meat hanging from the rafters.
Conrad Black: The Apprentice made him much more popular than he had been and much more well-known than he had been to the socioeconomic middle of America, and he came across as a competent, humane, and humorous person. It also gave him a huge amount of publicity for all these products he was selling with his name on them and some of the locations he had. A large section of the public got to think of him as a person they liked to see on television and had respect for him.
Tucker Carlson: The Apprentice recast him for the masses. If you spent a lot of time in New York at least, you knew Trump for many years. But it was really The Apprentice that created that brand, somewhat of an illusion. It’s not just that The Apprentice brought Trump into more homes. It’s that The Apprentice, starring on it, being the executive producer of it, trained him in a certain kind of communication, so it changed him, it didn’t just change our perception of him.
If you think of The Apprentice like a magical car wash, Trump stepped in one end a dinged-up classic luxury car with high mileage, a Rolls-Royce that had seen better days. The nozzles sprayed some bronzer, the soapy scrubbers buffed out dents, the suction pulled out dirt, and then, through the magic of TV, a polished new Trump emerged. That 1989 Rolls appeared to be a sparkling new model with its odometer rolled back. Underneath the hood may have been the same engine, but it had been tuned up, ready to race.
Many people played their parts in this transformation: Burnett—perhaps Bethea—Riggs, Pruitt, Bienstock, Zucker, Silverman, and others. But Trump ultimately was both vehicle and driver, the person behind the persona. He was at the wheel.
And yet, although he had conquered television and books, a new form of media was emerging. In April 2009, publisher Vanguard Press, a division of Random House, was publishing yet another Trump self-help title, Think Like a Champion. Vanguard’s director of online marketing, Peter Costanzo, went to meet with Trump’s team. Trump, ever eager for free publicity, expressed interest quickly when he heard about Twitter and Facebook. The only problem was an online imposter.
Peter Costanzo, Vanguard Press director of online marketing: We were publishing a book by Donald Trump, and we began having meetings at Trump Tower with his core team. They kept asking, “What can we do that’s different for Mr. Trump?” I strongly recommended we start a Facebook account and a Twitter account. The challenge was that there was an imposter who was already using Donald Trump’s name. They were very surprised to learn of that. I contacted Facebook and informed them the actual Donald Trump wanted to start using Facebook. They transferred the account over to us, but Twitter was so new that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were unable to reach anyone. The team was Rhona Graff and Meredith McIver, who was the co-writer of the book, and Amanda Miller, who, at the end of The Celebrity Apprentice, people would see and say goodbye to before they got on the elevator. They informed me that I would meet with Mr. Trump and it would be seven minutes long, to explain to him why social media would be very important to the successful promotion of the book.
Inside the conference room was a full-size image of Mr. Trump, one of those cutouts you could put your arm around and look like you’re with the person. He came in the room very serious-looking, determined, and he sat down and said, “Okay, what do you got for me?” I explained that for social media to be effective, there has to be some level of participation by the actual person. I explained to him that initially I could be the one tweeting on his behalf. He was asking, “Why are we going to do this? Who’s going to care?” I explained that the beauty of it was that you could communicate directly to your fans. I was talking about fans of The Celebrity Apprentice, who we were hoping to convert into buyers of the book. I wasn’t thinking politically.
When I explained to him that we could use it to promote anything having to do with the Trump Organization, such as a new golf course or Ivanka’s jewelry line, that’s when he started to get very interested, and he became intrigued by it. He said, “I like the sound of that. I like the idea of being able to directly communicate to people.” When I told him about this hurdle with the imposter, he didn’t like that. “What are we going to do?” I said, “While your lawyers are trying to resolve this and get the handle @DonaldTrump, let’s call you @realDonaldTrump. You’re the real deal. You’re the man that people want to follow. Let’s let them know that it’s really you.” He nodded. He said, “I like the sound of that.” He stood up, said, “Let’s do it, make it happen,” and he left.
The first known tweet from @realDonaldTrump, on May 4, 2009, a month after the book was published, said, “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight.”2 The next couple of weeks had “Enter the Think Like a Champion signed book and keychain contest,” and “Did you know Donald Trump is on Facebook?… Become a fan today!”
Peter Costanzo: Benign and promotional. There were no political tweets. I made a request to interview Mr. Trump to create a YouTube video to promote the book. He did a very good job in giving answers that you would want him to say. He knows how to sell. After we were done, I asked him what he thought about the newly elected President Obama, and he said, “Oh, he seems like a nice family man. I really hope he does some good for the economy.” But then he said, “But if he doesn’t, I’m thinking of running for president.” He said that to me in a way that I felt like he was telling me something in confidence, so I never mentioned it to anyone.