‘TRUE CELEBRITY’
How Donald Trump paved the way for businessmen to find TV fame.
Stuart Coxe remembers bringing Donald Trump on a CBC business show in the early 1990s, back when the redhaired business mogul was trying to open a casino in Windsor, Ont.
It was more than a decade before Trump became a television celebrity for his role on The Apprentice, or a headlinegrabbing serial presidential candidate. But Coxe said he was already acting like a star.
“He was shaking every- body’s hand, you know, ‘ Good to meet ya!’ ” Coxe said. “That kind of weird cross of dealmaker and charismatic reality distortion field-wielder.”
Trump’s star has recently lost some of its shine. After Trump described Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists in a speech announcing his bid for the Republican presidential candidacy, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision dropped his Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants.
NBC followed suit on Monday, announcing it was also dropping the pageants it coowned in a joint venture with Trump and confirming Trump will no longer host The Apprentice. On Tuesday, Mexico announced it would not send a contestant to this year’s Miss Universe contest, and on Wednesday, retailer Macy’s Inc. announced it would phase out Trump’s line of menswear.
But Trump remains, as he loves to remind us, “really rich” — as does the legacy he’s left in television. In his role on The Apprentice, Trump became the first celebrity television businessman, paving the way for stars like Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec and Kevin O’Leary.
In 2006, Coxe launched Dragon’s Den, which was the most successful Canadian-produced show for years and propelled Herjavec and O’Leary to stardom. Trump demonstrated that entrepreneurs and reality television are made for each other, Coxe said.
“If you’re really good at business, you’re good at a lot of things,” he said. “You are part politician, you are part actor, you’re part speech-maker. You’re an artist. At their best, these people show us possibilities.”
The Apprentice borrowed heavily from its reality-television predecessor Survivor when it launched in 2004, but Trump was a brand-new type of character. There had been plenty of depictions of businessmen on scripted television before — usually as villains — but this was the first time viewers were exposed to one being, supposedly, his real self.
Robert Passikoff, president of the New York-based customer loyalty research firm Brand Keys, said that’s the secret to Trump’s success as a public figure and a brand. “He’s exactly what people expect him to be, whether you agree with him or not. You don’t have to agree with the statements, you don’t have to buy the shirts, you don’t have to watch the shows — but there are a lot of people who do.”
The Apprentice and its successor The Celebrity Apprentice aren’t the ratings giants they once were, with Season 14 of The Celebrity Apprentice pulling in an average of 7.6 million viewers, com- pared with 20.7 million for The Apprentice Season 1. But the franchise spawned an entire genre of business reality television that remains very popular, from professional competition shows like Project Runway to entrepreneur pitch shows like Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den.
The risk for television business celebrities is that bad publicity will have an effect on their real-life business interests, as Trump is experiencing now. But Robert Thompson, a television and popular culture expert at Syracuse University, said the allure is easy to understand.
“Trump is worth a lot of money — as he told us when he made his announcement, as he constantly reminds us,” Thompson said. “But there are certain things that being really rich doesn’t bring you. And one of the things that a lot of people desire is the attention and all the other things that go along with real, true celebrity.”
One of the things people desire is the attention of true celebrity