Rabbit Hole: "The Apprentice" 2024: Trump's Return
Why Donald Trump's prowess in the fake boardroom is helping him toward a victory in 2024, with the media lending a hand (again)
“Rabbit Hole” is a single-topic deep dive column that comes out twice per month for paid subscribers. The free newsletter returns Sunday.
It was a serious, challenging, moment filled with tension, as Lil’ Jon and Meat Loaf teamed up to try to run a pizza shop better than Star Jones and Dionne Warwick. In the end, it was the women who were more successful, and so the boardroom became a tough situation for the men. Would it be goodbye for Jose Canseco? In the end, it was time for Donald Trump to say “you’re fired” to former teen heartthrob David Cassidy.
I was a regular viewer of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” an offshoot of the original “The Apprentice,” which premiered in 2004, without the B-ish list celebrities involved. That version of The Apprentice was actually a serious reality show. The winner of the first season was Bill Rancic, who went on to oversee a Trump hotel project in Chicago, write business books, and marry Giuliana DePandi, who became Giuliana Rancic, and has a huge career in entertainment at the E! Network.
It’s instructive to think about The Apprentice for several reasons, as we assess Donald Trump’s entire cultural oeuvre entering 2024. We need to really dissect what The Apprentice was, what it says about the media industry built around Trump, and about us — as consumers of content and culture featuring the man at the center of it.
The first thing to know about The Apprentice is that it was tremendously successful. People throw around the whole “You’re Fired” line and the involvement of the celebs like it’s a joke, but The Apprentice was an enormous hit for NBC. The finale of the first season in 2004 averaged 28 million viewers, and was seen live by more than 40 million total people. At the time, Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC and the person who would become the antagonistic foil to Trump’s presidency as president of CNN, said the show was “the cultural phenomenon of the television season.”
In February 2007, Joe Hagan profiled Zucker for the New York Observer. “Now Mr. Zucker could get down to business: hammering home the brand, making Donald Trump into–for his NBC–what Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld had been for earlier versions of the network: the emblem, the spokesman,” wrote Hagan. “Somehow, this big, cheesy, unscripted megahit, The Apprentice, had become the savior of NBC’s Thursday nights, and a face-saving legacy for Mr. Zucker’s hitless three-year tenure as head of NBC Entertainment.” (I reference this in more detail in chapter 5 of my book, Uncovered, which you can buy here!)
Jeff Zucker was made by Donald Trump and The Apprentice, and in many ways, the character of Donald Trump was created and solidified thanks to The Apprentice and NBC, and thus Zucker, as well.
His whole career didn’t start there, of course. He was a well-known businessman, and also a cultural figure, before 2004. Like his appearance in Home Alone 2. “The Art of the Deal” was a huge hit book published in 1987, and actually explains so much about Trump’s later career as a politician, in ways I’ll dig into in more detail in the next Fourth Watch newsletter in a few days.
So Donald Trump became “Donald Trump, The Apprentice Star,” and the public responded to it in a big way. The same press that valorized him as a television star were later willing participants in the entire endeavor of his presidential run. He literally was hosting the 14th season of The Apprentice just months before his famous escalator ride to announce his candidacy. So we should take seriously the dynamics of how The Apprentice became a hit, and what the public actually consumed — beyond just the Trump involvement. Let’s break it down: