In Trump’s ‘Apprentice’ run, reality wasn’t what it seemed
The skyline shimmers, the music pulses and Donald Trump’s helicopter swoops in for a landing.
Oozing authority, the billionaire strides purposefully — in slow-motion, for added impact — toward some important matter of business in “New York, my city,” as Trump calls it.
Week by week, year by year, 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” or “Celebrity Apprentice” served as a grand homage to all things Trump, running from 2004 to 2015.
Donald Trump the actor made Donald Trump the businessman seem pretty fabulous. Americans never saw what was taking place behind the scenes.
The show offered Trump the ultimate opportunity for product placement: Contestants fawned over Trump’s gilded-to-excess Fifth Avenue apartment, his casinos, golf courses, even his girlfriend and later wife Melania. They promoted his modeling company, his water bottles and other Trump-branded businesses, as the man himself spun out bits of business advice known as “Donaldisms” and bemoaned the daunting task of telling eager young dreamers, “You’re fired.”
This picture of Trump as smart, decisive, blunt, benevolent, rich — really rich — and never wrong turned out to be the ideal launching pad for his improbable presidential campaign.
That it didn’t always jibe with reality didn’t seem to matter to the millions of Americans who turned “The Apprentice” into a national phenomenon. Or to NBC, which reveled in the show’s sky-high ratings early on, and kept tinkering with the formula in an effort to revive them in later years.
It turns out that the unseen side of “The Apprentice” was darker : Show insiders have told the AP that in his years as a reality TV boss, Trump repeatedly demeaned women with sexist language, rating female contestants by the size of their breasts and talking about which ones he’d like to have sex with.
And one former contestant, Summer Zervos, said Friday that Trump made unwanted sexual advances toward her in 2007 when she met with him at a Beverly Hills hotel to talk about a potential job. Zervos, who had competed on the show in 2006, said Trump became sexually aggressive during their meeting at the hotel, kissing her open-mouthed and touching her breasts.
Speculation about what kind of Trump conduct might be lurking in video out-takes from the show has swirled in recent days, since the release of “Access Hollywood” footage showing Trump joking about grabbing women by the genitals and kissing them without asking. But the owners of the “Apprentice” production company say they cannot legally release footage from the show.