Behind the billionaire - A profile of Donald Trump

Reality TV show 'The Apprentice', where the Republican candidate could write his own narrative, is key to understanding his rise, says Nancy Benac.

The skyline shimmers, the music pulses and Donald Trump’s helicopter swoops in for a landing.

Oozing authority, the billionaire strides purposefully — in slow-motion, for added impact — toward some important matter of business in “New York, my city”, as Trump calls it.

Week by week, year by year, 14 seasons of The Apprentice or Celebrity Apprentice served as a grand homage to all things Trump, running from 2004 to 2015.

Donald Trump the actor made Donald Trump the businessman seem pretty fabulous. Americans never saw what was taking place behind the scenes.

The show offered Trump the ultimate opportunity for product placement: Contestants fawned over Trump’s gilded-to-excess Fifth Avenue apartment, his casinos, golf courses, even his girlfriend, later wife, Melania. They promoted his modelling company, his water bottles and other Trump-branded businesses, as the man himself spun out bits of business advice known as ‘Donaldisms’ and bemoaned the daunting task of telling eager young dreamers: “You’re fired.”

This picture of Trump as smart, decisive, blunt, benevolent, rich — really rich — and never wrong turned out to be the ideal launching pad for his improbable presidential campaign.

That it didn’t always jibe with reality didn’t seem to matter to the millions of Americans who turned The Apprentice into a national phenomenon. Or to NBC, which revelled in the show’s sky-high ratings early on, and kept tinkering with the formula in an effort to revive them in later years.

It turns out that the unseen side of The Apprentice was darker: Show insiders have told how that, in his years as a reality TV boss, Trump repeatedly demeaned women with sexist language, rating female contestants by the size of their breasts, and talking about which ones he’d like to have sex with.

And one former contestant, Summer Zervos, said that Trump made unwanted sexual advances toward her in 2007 when she met with him at a Beverly Hills hotel to talk about a potential job. Zervos, who had competed on the show in 2006, said Trump became sexually aggressive during their meeting at the hotel, kissing her open-mouthed and touching her breasts.

Trump’s boorish behaviour toward women wasn’t apparent to viewers of the reality TV show.

And for all of the snickering about the silliness of reality TV, pop culture expert Robert Thompson says, the show was “very, very important to shaping, framing and establishing the person of Donald Trump who would then go on to become the GOP nominee”.

“If The Apprentice had never happened, I don’t think Donald Trump would be where he is right now politically,” says Thompson.

Trump already had an outsized reputation when he launched The Apprentice in January 2004. By that point, the businessman with a knack for self-promotion had already soared high, fallen from grace, become something of a punchline, and was on the back, more focused on licencing his name than building things. He’d eagerly done any number of cameos in movies and TV shows to promote himself as a titan of business.

“My name’s Donald Trump and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York,” Trump declared as he launched Season 1, Episode 1 of The Apprentice with trademark immodesty. “I’ve mastered the art of the deal and I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand. As the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else.”

That was a factcheck-worthy way to start things off, and Trump’s hometown newspaper, The New York Times, obliged by pointing out that while the audacious star of The Apprentice might have had the highest profile among the city’s developers, plenty of others were doing more and bigger deals.

Trump had been approached with reality TV proposals before, but nothing clicked until Survivor producer Mark Burnett came to him with the idea of a show set in the “urban jungle” of New York.

People gravitated to Trump’s persona as a tough, decisive, irreverent boss who offered “at least the illusion of a pathway to success,” says Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean who wrote public critiques of the show for newspapers. He got to know Trump after the mogul called to complain about the academic’s harsh reviews of Trump’s on-air practices.

To many Americans, says Sonnenfeld, Trump represented the “embodiment of the American dream”, harking back to the ‘Daddy Warbucks’ imagery of decades past.

It made for good TV — never mind the reality that Trump got ahead with inherited money, that his casinos were headed for more bankruptcies, that his deals often weren’t as lucrative as he’d suggested, or that his projects left behind a trail unpaid bills. Beyond of all of that, there are the revelations about Trump’s vulgar comments about women contestants and crew members, and Zervos’ allegations that Trump made sexual advances toward her.

Trump himself initially seemed almost gob-smacked by how quickly the show took off.

“I go into the boardroom, I rant and rave like a lunatic to these kids, and I leave and I go off and build my buildings,” he told CNN’s Larry King in 2004. “And then it gets good ratings, and they pay me. I mean, can you believe this?”

The line between reality and TV on the show was blurry then, and it’s still a matter of debate now.

Trump has suggested that the show was a hit because it captured the authentic Trump. At other times, though, he’s dismissed some of his insulting comments on The Apprentice by saying “a lot of that was entertainment”.

Reality was nothing like the show reel in some aspects. Despite Trump’s on-camera declaration in January 2004 that he’d weathered financial trials and “worked it all out” by using his savvy to come back stronger than ever, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc declared bankruptcy that August. In 2009, Trump’s casino interests went through another bankruptcy. An additional corporate bankruptcy in 2012 wiped out Trump’s remaining stake.

As for the benevolent side of Trump showcased on The Apprentice, The Washington Post reported in August that, in almost every instance in which Trump pledged on the show to make a personal contribution to a charity highlighted on Celebrity Apprentice, the donation really came from sources other than Trump.

Eric Dezenhall, a Washington crisis management consultant, says Trump was adept at the two skills necessary to succeed on TV: “Having a rap and being provocative.” His rap: “I’m a business wizard.” His provocations: Unending.

“You scream, you shout,” says Dezenhall. “The whole concept of ‘you’re fired’ is isolating your enemy. You’re identifying someone bad and exposing them. That’s exactly what this campaign is about.”

'The beauty of me is that I'm very rich' - Trump in his own words

Trump on Mexico

- “I will build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me — and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

- “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump on his personal life

- “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.”

- “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father . . . “

Trump on his opponents

- “I think that (Clinton’s) bodyguards should drop all weapons. I think they should disarm immediately. What do you think, yes? Take their guns away — she doesn’t want guns. Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay? It’ll be very dangerous.”

- “(John McCain’s) not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

- “(Marco Rubio) referred to my hands, if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee it.”

- “The other candidates — they went in, they didn’t know the air conditioning didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. How are they gonna beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”

- “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!”

- “The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5% of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”

- “Look at that face (Republican primary opponent Carly Fioria). Would anybody vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

On Fox News anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly

- “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her — wherever.”

On waterboarding

- “I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

On a protester

- “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

A tweet in response to the mass shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people

- “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

To Russian hackers, about Clinton’s emails as secretary of state

- “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

On Obama and Islamic State

- “He is the founder of ISIS.”

On women

- Donald Trump at the third presidential debate: “Nobody respects women more than me.” Three minutes later: “Such a nasty woman.”

- “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p**sy. You can do anything.”

On his campaign

- “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

- “I’ve had a beautiful, flawless campaign. You’ll be writing books about this campaign.”

- “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing many, many millions of people. In many cases first-time voters ... If you disenfranchise those people? And you say, well, I’m sorry, you’re 100 votes short, even though the next one is 500 votes short? I think you’d have problems like you’ve never seen before.

- “I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things will happen.”