By the early 2000s, Donald Trump had become the kind of over-the-hill celebrity you once found on the 1980s television programs, “Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.” Trump was then a self-promoting caricature whose real estate empire had collapsed. He had filed bankruptcies several times. His schtick had dried up. Nobody applauded when they saw him coming anymore; they pointed and laughed.
Nobody thought he was a good businessman and he wasn’t.
In 1991, the satirical magazine Spy captured Trump with the headline, “How to Fool All of the People, All of the Time: How Donald Trump Fooled the Media, Used the Media to Fool the Banks, Used the Banks to Fool the Bondholders, and Used the Bondholders to Pay for the Yachts and Mansions and Mistresses.”
But then came television producer Mark Burnett who created his own fantasy island for Trump called The Apprentice that declared Trump was a financial genius and a kingmaker.
Jonathon Braun, supervising editor of Apprentice, told the New Yorker that “we knew Trump was a fake,” but under Burnett’s orders, “we made him out to be the most important person in the world, making the court jester the king.”
Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote Trump’s autobiography, The Art of the Deal, said, “Mark Burnett’s show was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Katherine Walker, a producer on The Apprentice, agreed. “Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”
