A reality TV-like presidency, but with real-world consequences

Opinion

Starting next week, there will be two versions of Donald Trump on Prime Video.

One appears in the controversial 2024 film The Apprentice, a biopic Trump’s lawyers tried to block, in which the young Queens real-estate developer (Sebastian Stan) — uncertain and easily influenced, beset by daddy issues, bad business decisions and bankruptcies — is mentored by the venomous, manipulative Manhattan lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

But beginning Monday, Prime Video will be offering another version of The Apprentice — the version the American president actually likes — returning to the reality-TV series that gave the movie its ironic title.

Prime will be rebroadcasting seasons of the NBC show that first hit television screens back in 2004. Trump hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice across various formats, and the series helped craft the myth of the man as a decisive businessman and brilliant dealmaker. It also gave him one of his famous trademark phrases: “You’re fired.”

Trump himself was fired from the show by NBC for “derogatory statements” after his 2015 golden-escalator speech about Mexican immigrants. (How quaint that seems now. Actions having consequences!) A decade later, and the media policy towards Trump is clearly appeasement.

The executive chairman and major shareholder of Prime Video is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, the venerable newspaper now roiled by spiked opinion columns and censored political cartoons, all in service of placating the Trump administration.

Prime Video has also made a US$40-million deal for a Melania Trump documentary, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that US$28 million is going to the U.S. first lady herself. (It’s uncommon for subjects of documentaries to be paid.) Reportedly, Melania Trump’s agent has also been trying to sell “sponsorships” for the film, starting at US$10 million, to prominent businesspeople and billionaires who attended the presidential inauguration.

Meanwhile, Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, has just been appointed special envoy to Britain.

Clearly, there’s quid pro quo-ing all over the place here, which is not much of a surprise with this nakedly transactional White House.

But there’s also another power dynamic in play, the power of pop-culture imagery to create compelling characters and narratives. When journalists went on those “small-town diner” safaris during the 2024 American election, Trump supporters often spoke about wanting to elect an entrepreneur who could really get things done.

The picture of Trump as a can-do, no-nonsense, super-successful businessman comes not from his actual career, which is littered with fraud, debt, lawsuits and bankruptcies. (He even managed to bankrupt Atlantic City casinos, which takes some doing in a business where the house always wins.) That picture comes from TV.

The Apprentice sold an aspirational image of Trump as a wheeler-dealer real-estate titan with a luxe lifestyle. The irony is that he was at a low point as a developer when the show started, coming off yet another casino bankruptcy. During the run of the show, Trump switched over to selling his name to licensed products — vodka, steaks, neckties, urine tests. He was doing branding, basically, and in the case of The Apprentice, the brand was himself.

The term “reality TV,” most people now recognize, is misleading. The boardroom where Trump made his finger-pointing “You’re fired!” pronouncements was a specially constructed set because the actual Trump boardroom was too tatty. The show was strategically planned, shaped and edited — according to Burnett, The Apprentice sometimes shot 300 hours of footage for each televised hour — and the final effect was to make Trump appear sharper and quicker and firmer than he actually was.

The series offered audiences an image of Trump as a take-charge tycoon with an eye on the bottom line. It also gave something to Trump.

The president responded to Prime Video’s announcement about The Apprentice re-release with a statement: “I look forward to watching this show myself. Such great memories, and so much fun, but most importantly, it was a learning experience for all of us!”

What, exactly, did Trump learn during his Apprentice stint? He learned about ginning up dramatic conflict so people would keep watching through the commercials. He learned about keeping things exciting with unpredictable cliffhangers. And, maybe most crucially, he learned about ratings. “It’s all about one thing, ratings,” Trump once told a journalist “If you have ratings, you can be the meanest, most horrible person in the world.”

Unfortunately for the whole world, Trump has never learned that what makes for good TV doesn’t make for good governance. It turns out that competently planning and executing policies that make the everyday lives of ordinary people better is a bit of a boring slog.

So, we now have a ratings-obsessed, attention-craving American president all hepped on conflict, turmoil and surprise.

He’s picking on Greenland, riling up Canada. We have reports of a recent White House meeting in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio and DOGE-bro Elon Musk got into a yelling match while Trump watched with his arms crossed, as if it were a spat between Gary Busey and Meatloaf on Celebrity Apprentice.

Trump is also leaning into the unpredictability with his impulsive, on-again-off-again tariffs, which the Wall Street Journal, not exactly a left-leaning outlet, has deemed “the dumbest trade war in history.” Trump’s waffling has everyone watching — gratifying for him, as a man who loves ratings — but it also has markets crashing, farmers struggling to plan their year, distillers fretting about foreign markets, small businesses wondering about suppliers.

Those Apprentice-style tricks might be entertaining on TV. As we will be reminded many times in the upcoming four years, when applied to the real world, they’re just destructive and exhausting.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca