An Insider from “The Apprentice” on How the Show Made Donald Trump
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2019
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A number of people have been credited with the political rise of Donald Trump—Roger Stone and Steve Bannon among them—but perhaps the most influential is Mark Burnett, the English reality-TV producer. After the massive success of his show “Survivor,” Burnett could have made virtually anything, and he chose “The Apprentice.” His task was to make a New York real-estate developer who was a fixture in the tabloids into a national celebrity, a tycoon, and a decisive leader with unerring judgment. The staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed a number of people who worked on shaping Trump’s image on “The Apprentice,” including the supervising producer Jonathon Braun. Braun told Keefe that Trump’s quick, instinctual decisions complicated the work of the show’s editors, who would often have to recut the episodes to find material that seemed to justify those decisions. And Braun argues that the White House and the news media now often play the same role that the “Apprentice” crew did: isolating Trump’s most coherent statement within a long string of improvised iterations.
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| 0:51.4 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Patrick Radden-Keefe talks with television producer and editor Jonathan Braun. |
| 1:00.1 | Braun discusses his time working on NBC's The Apprentice and how that show helped shape the image of Donald Trump. |
| 1:10.7 | There have been a lot of names attached to the rise of Donald Trump. |
| 1:14.6 | Roy Cohn comes to mind, or Roger Stone, Steve Bannon. |
| 1:18.4 | But the most influential figure on the 45th president has quite likely been a guy named Mark Burnett. |
| 1:25.5 | And if you don't know that name, you're probably familiar with his work. |
| 1:28.7 | Burnett is the English-born TV producer who helped bring reality TV into our lives, producing |
| 1:34.6 | Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank, and many other programs including The Apprentice. |
| 1:40.2 | It's Burnett's work on The Apprentice that conceivably changed the world. |
| 1:45.2 | Staff writer Patrick Radinkeef recently profiled Mark Burnett, and he wrote in depth about |
| 1:50.3 | The Apprentice and its impact on Donald Trump, on how America saw Donald Trump and how |
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