It’s August 2021, the summer after Trump was voted out of the White House. His most adoring fans, and his most ardent detractors, probably think he’s at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Yet Trump has covertly made his way back to the city he loves, and he’s agreed to meet me here at Trump Tower to relive his TV glory days. Clad in his familiar armor of a boxy suit and too-long necktie that became his trademark as “The Donald,” he’s going to travel back in time with me to 2004. That’s when his reality series “The Apprentice” became a national phenomenon, transforming Trump into an unlikely blue-collar folk hero with swagger, comedic timing and world-class negotiating chops. Trump, until then a New York celebrity who was pushing his way forward with the help of the tabloids, suddenly blew up as America’s most famous businessman.
Trump’s four-year presidency was a kaleidoscope of distortions and “fake news,” ending with an attempted coup. With years yet to go before the 2024 race, it can almost seem that the country has moved on from him. And Trump seems, for the moment, to have moved on as well. He lost his Twitter privileges because of his role in inciting the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Without a platform on which to rant, in 280-character bursts, about the injustices he’s facing, Trump essentially disappeared.
But on this afternoon, he has reason to crack a smile. He’s about to do something that’s going to remind him just how powerful he used to be. He’s going to revisit some of his best exchanges as NBC’s top reality TV moneymaker, to remember a simpler time when he knew exactly what to say and when everybody, not just his partisan loyalists, looked up to him.
“There are a lot of big moments!” Trump says. I press play on an 11-minute video that I’ve edited together of key scenes from “The Apprentice.” The clips range from the three times he axed the troublemaker contestant Omarosa Manigault (he could never stay mad at her, and later made her a top aide in his White House) to crowning Joan Rivers the winner of the second celebrity edition of the series. “It is true, isn’t it?” he asks, boasting about his unique perch in popular culture. I assure him that yes, his series changed history.
The conference room that we’re in today has the generic feeling of a workspace that could exist anywhere, with a scuffed-up long wooden table, a TV projection screen, and rolling chairs. Only if you squint, though, does it resemble the boardroom from “The Apprentice.” In a way, we’re on a working set: the series was shot in Trump Tower, and Trump charged the show’s creator, Mark Burnett, hundreds of thousands of dollars to lease office space. “Okay, so we had two floors of this building — big floors! — taken up by ‘The Apprentice,’” Trump says after we watch the scene in which he first uttered the words “You’re fired!” “Down below, we had the boardroom. There were hundreds of people that worked on the show. You know, this television stuff is great. You’ll think they’ll have, like, two cameras.” He pauses for effect. “They had two cameras on every person, especially after it became a big hit, actually.”
Trump goes on to say that he improvised the catchphrase that helped propel the series into the ratings stratosphere. The show cast Trump as a no-nonsense CEO tasked with gleefully firing mediocre job candidates (and later celebrities) who couldn’t cut it in his version of the high-stakes world of corporate America. “When I said, ‘You’re fired!’ the whole building shook,” Trump says of that first episode. “Everybody, because they have so many screens, they saw what was going on in the boardroom. The place just reverberated. People were screaming. They were shouting. The crew! The makeup people! Everyone was watching it. There were hundreds of them, and they went crazy.” He sounds like a retired high school football coach, lounging in a diner in the middle of the day, rewinding the clock on his favorite plays.
As a storyteller, Trump can struggle with facts, the chronology of events and what exactly he accomplished as president, but the details of that day from more than 17 years ago flow freely. “In fact,” he says, “they had to stop the tape. They had to get them to shut up, because you can’t have that. Although” — Trump seems to imagine the sound of a crew cheering for him again, right now — “they could have left it; it would have been interesting. But the people in their homes went crazy too! Because that first night, when it aired, that first show, I got calls from people that I hadn’t spoken to in years. They said, ‘That was the most unbelievable show!’”
As he crisscrosses through time, his brain misfires. Even he can’t accept that a version of himself existed that was once broadly uncontroversial and popular. “So, it actually got very good reviews, which is hard for me, because they hate to give me good reviews,” Trump says. “I got unbelievable reviews. Now, that was before my political days, okay? You know.”
Trump makes a face like a toddler being forced to eat his vegetables. If this were a scene from a reality show, the producers might cut to a confessional booth where Trump would look into the camera and admit that he regretted running for president and that starring in “The Apprentice” was the best job he’d ever had. Of course, on “The Apprentice,” Trump, unlike the contestants, never gave confessional interviews. By issuing commands and beheading the unworthy, he was simply the voice of God.
He squints at me from across the room.
“Go ahead. Show me another one.” And so I play another clip, and another one, and another one.
I first started talking to Donald Trump in 2004 as a 22-year-old Newsweek reporter covering “The Apprentice.” Most celebrities employ a publicist to field their interview requests, but such a system proved too bureaucratic — and perhaps too costly — for Trump. Instead of going through a PR flack, I’d call his office at Trump Tower, and his secretary would patch me through to his desk (or cell phone) so quickly that Trump wouldn’t even stop to ask which publication was on the other line.
When I announce in the press that I’m writing this book, Trump reaches out to me through his office, offering to be the first person I interview. Given the circumstances — that he’s a former U.S. president engulfed in scandal — I expected that I’d need to work much harder to track him down. Once we get started, he keeps extending our time together, which would spill over into follow-up appointments. “Okay, so why don’t we do another meeting?” is how he’d usually end our sessions. Sitting across from him with my prepared list of questions, I have no way to contain our conversations just to “The Apprentice.” He haphazardly swings from one monologue to the next.
A question about a contestant cascades into a defense of his leadership as POTUS, and then he swings back to the 2000s again. On some days, I have the feeling he has no idea whom he’s even talking to; at our second meeting, he tells me he couldn’t remember sitting down with me, even though it was only a few months earlier. “That was a long time ago,” he says. (Reached for comment last week about Trump’s memory, his communications director, Steven Cheung, provided this response: “President Trump was aware of who this individual was throughout the interview process, but this ‘writer’ is a nobody and insignificant so of course he never made an impression. After recognizing the importance of The Apprentice and its significant cultural impact on a global scale, this ‘writer’ has now chosen to allow Trump Derangement Syndrome to rot his brain like so many other losers whose entire existence revolves around President Trump.”)
Each time we meet is another chance for Trump to drum up press for himself, to prove that he still matters. And there is something about talking about “The Apprentice” that soothes him. “If this comes out right, it’s such a great thing,” Trump explains. “The true story has never been told.”
For my first interview in May 2021, I take a car to Trump Tower. The stillness on Fifth Avenue reflects the widely held belief by most New Yorkers that Trump has permanently fled their city. There are no crowds to mark his presence, in the form of MAGA fans or curious tourists. The skyscraper that shields him from a Manhattan that no longer wants to be associated with him has its own history — most notably as the recurring co-star of “The Apprentice” and the site of the escalator that he famously rode down in 2015 to announce his first run for president.
In that spring and summer, he looks lonely, a shadow of a famous person. He seeks validation from even the tiniest groups of humans, assembled in his office on any given day, badgering his adviser Jason Miller or deputy communications chief Margo Martin to voice their approval aloud as he tells stories about how much better he’d be than “Sleepy Joe” (President Biden) or how unfairly the media treats him. In other ways, for all that he’s visibly aged, the presidency hasn’t fundamentally changed him, not as a man, nor as an interview subject who’d never learned how to listen in a conversation. He pivots to his vendettas and lashes out about his many enemies, from Anthony S. Fauci to the MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell to the “Will & Grace” co-star Debra Messing. “She’s brutal,” Trump hisses, admitting that he’d spent time in the White House closely monitoring the Twitter account of a sitcom actress.
If you’ve ever said a negative word about Trump, chances are you’re on his enemies list. The Clintons, Obamas and Bidens of course haunt Trump’s thoughts every day; the intensity of the hatred is unusual, but at least it can be explained by their being his political adversaries.
On one of my visits to Trump Tower, I cued up a clip of Kim Kardashian making a cameo on “The Apprentice” in 2010, in order to promote her signature fragrance line. In the scene, Kim mentions that her sister Khloé sends her best, even though Trump had fired her from “The Celebrity Apprentice” the year before. This early meeting of members of reality TV dynasties led to friction for all involved. And while at first Trump seems nonchalant while talking about the Kardashians, he grows increasingly frustrated.
“Yeah, I never got along great with Khloé,” Trump says, immediately attacking her looks and character. “There was little chemistry.” (Women who did well on “The Apprentice” often fawned over Trump, even on the celebrity version; Khloé never seemed that impressed by him.) “Khloé was arrested” — in 2007— “for drunken driving. Did you know that?” Trump flashes a smug look at his ability to recall this piece of compromising information. “I think it’s a terrible thing — so many people die with drunken driving. You don’t hear about it, but they do.”
Trump is once again claiming, as he did on “The Apprentice,” that he fired Khloé because she’d been arrested for drunken driving one year before filming his reality show. But this excuse contradicts a 2016 Huffington Post story alleging that he actually axed her because of her weight. According to the story, published just a few weeks before he was elected president, sources who worked on the show recalled that Trump referred to Khloé in derogatory language such as “piglet” and called her “the ugly Kardashian.” The story ran after a presidential debate in which Hillary Clinton had reminded America that Trump, as owner of the Miss Universe pageant, mocked the 1996 winner as “Miss Piggy” when she gained weight.
Even now, Trump can’t stop himself from commenting on Khloé’s appearance. “She looks so much different today,” Trump says. “I saw her fairly recently.” He searches for the right word. “Better! She looks better. It was just her time to be fired. It’s hard to be on a show like that. You’re with other people who are very smart. I mean, some of these contestants are vicious. I’d watch it go on, and they were ferocious.”
Trump zeroes back in on his target. “And some weren’t. Some were eaten alive. Khloé was quiet.” He asks to go off the record, but rather than offer some Kardashian tea, he simply mumbles.
Then the conversation turns to Kim, who, in 2018, visited him in the Oval Office and persuaded him to grant clemency to a woman named Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving life in prison for a 1996 arrest for cocaine trafficking. The trip was, of course, chronicled for the cameras on her hit E! reality series “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” For a made-for-TV president, being merciful — something not in Trump’s nature — was a small price to pay for the reward of the spotlight (Jared Kushner brokered the meeting, in an attempt to give his father-in-law some good publicity).
Kim returned to Washington for another gathering with Trump in early March 2020, bringing along Johnson and other women whom she’d help free from prison as part of her criminal justice efforts. Kardashian had the good luck of coming into her activism at a moment when the White House was occupied by a president who was obsessed with celebrity culture and was happy to receive her. Because of the access Trump gave her, and the success of her passion projects, she walked a fine line in avoiding criticizing him. “I have nothing bad to say about the president,” Kardashian said to Jimmy Kimmel in 2018. “I’m very grateful. I’m very hopeful more good things will come out of our meeting.”
But Trump now believes that Kim betrayed him by celebrating Biden’s 2020 win on Twitter and posting three blue heart emojis next to a picture of Biden and Kamala D. Harris. “I was disappointed in Kim,” Trump says. “I get along with her fine. I got along with her then-husband”; infamously, he’d struck up a bromance with Kanye West. “In fact, he endorsed me” — in 2016, even though West later said he didn’t vote — “and all that stuff. But with Kim, I did a lot of prison reform that she couldn’t get done with anyone else. Then, in order to be accepted by Hollywood, she didn’t endorse me. I heard …” He corrects himself. “Somebody told me she did not endorse me.”
He shifts back in his chair. “Now, I’m a very strict person when it comes to drugs.” Trump says of Johnson. “I don’t think these were really hard drugs, and there was a question as to whether or not she was using. I did a very good thing. People liked it very much.”
I never know when our afternoons together will end. There is always the possibility that if things went extremely well, Trump could keep talking at me through dinner, and maybe I’d have to excuse myself to escape from him.
“So do you think I would have been president without ‘The Apprentice’?” It’s a question that Trump asks me in every conversation we have. He offers a different answer depending on the day. “I say yes,” Trump announces in our first meeting, after a dramatic pause. “But some people say no. Many smart people say no.” He hedges, considering how much to acknowledge that he had some assistance in his rise to power. “It helped me a little bit, probably.”
Trump compares himself to Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood and notes that the latter star, whom he calls a friend, moves with the same macho swagger in real life that he did as Dirty Harry. “It’s sort of not acting,” Trump says. “It is what it is.” Eastwood, of course, never achieved office higher than the mayoralty of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., but the organizing principle remains the same: what makes a celebrity, to Trump, is charisma, which can’t be taught. “Look,” he concludes, “you either have it or you don’t have it for television.”
When we discuss this topic again a few months later, Trump is stuck on coming up with an answer. “I guess it was great for my brand,” he says about the show. “The theory is they” — millions of Americans — “got to know me, because they didn’t really know me. Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker, those two main characters, they either get praised or blamed for me becoming president. Mark Burnett says without ‘The Apprentice,’ I wouldn’t have been president. I never spoke to Zucker about it.” (Representatives for both Burnett and Zucker declined to comment.)
As the president of NBC Universal, Zucker coddled Trump and treated him like a TV star as big as Jennifer Aniston. Later, as the boss of CNN, Zucker pumped him up as a Republican candidate in the early days of his run, airing his rallies live as “breaking news” events before the two had an ugly falling-out. As for Burnett, Trump was an important cog in his reality TV empire, and the two operated as one entity, splitting profits from the show. Even now, it’s hard to know where the mirage of him began and where it ended: Was Trump a self-creation, or made for TV by Burnett?
Trump suddenly gets quiet, revealing something that he’s never said before. “Maybe I wouldn’t have run if I didn’t do ‘The Apprentice,’” Trump says. “You know, that’s a little bit of a different thing. I might not have run.”
Ramin Setoodeh is co-editor in chief of Variety and the author of “Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of ‘The View.’” He previously worked as a senior writer for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. “Apprentice in Wonderland” will be released June 18.
