Bill Pruitt’s description of his time producing the NBC show “The Apprentice” reads like a confessional.
Newly released from his nondisclosure agreement, Pruitt wrote an essay for Slate that frames his efforts steering the reality show explicitly in terms of a con artist running a con. Pruitt describes choices about scripts and editing and challenges as efforts to present a particular, inaccurate image: the show’s star, Donald Trump, as an omniscient business leader. Looking back across the decades since the first season of the show was filmed, Pruitt clearly regrets having helped foster that perception.
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He describes feedback from the network demanding that Trump appear more frequently in the episodes (given how much he was being paid). So the show added segments in which Trump presented his assessment of how the challenges might go for the contestants vying for a position with his organization — assessments taped after the challenges were completed.
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“The net effect is not only that Trump appears once more in each episode but that he also now seems prophetic in how he just knows the way things will go right or wrong with each individual task,” Pruitt writes. “He comes off as all-seeing and all-knowing. We are led to believe that Donald Trump is a natural-born leader.”
At the same time, to foster the perception that Trump was the pinnacle of success, his flaws were kept off-screen. Taping a Jessica Simpson concert at his branded casino in New Jersey, for example, posed particular challenges, according to Pruitt: “The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place — Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best.”
The solution: “We shoot around all that.”
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Trump’s initial awkwardness in the final, dramatic boardroom scenes of each show was smoothed out as taping progressed. But a new problem arose, according to Pruitt.
“Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing — some of them misogynistic as well as racist,” he claims in the essay. “We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today, and you can hear many of them.”
He also alleges Trump used a racist slur in a planning session for one episode, a comment recorded by other participants in the meeting. In a statement to The Washington Post, Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, without providing evidence, called Pruitt’s essay “fabricated” and “fake news.”
Pruitt suggests that all this — the creation of the infallible Trump, the perfect leader — aided Trump’s 2016 election. He notes that Trump parlayed his new success into “Trump University,” real estate classes that were announced soon after the second season of the show aired and resulted in multiple claims of fraud. (Trump settled those cases soon after the 2016 election.) If Trump’s new persona could persuade people to hand over money, why wouldn’t we assume it could persuade people to hand over votes?
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As it happens, there is new research strongly suggesting that it did. A paper from Columbia University’s Eunji Kim and Shawn Patterson Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center uses statistical tools and analyses to assess the effects of the show on Republican primary voters.
“As most voters lack personal interactions with politicians, the candidate-voter connections are primarily parasocial,” they write, referring to a phenomenon in which people build perceived, one-way relationships with celebrities. The research notes that early seasons of “The Apprentice” earned more viewers than NBC’s nightly news broadcast, which reinforces the scale at which Pruitt’s deceptions were consumed by Americans.
“Using a survey of white voters conducted before the 2016 presidential election, we find that regular viewers of the program were more likely to trust Trump, feel a personal connection to him, and reject information critical of his candidacy,” Kim and Patterson write. “Open-ended answers further reveal that avid Apprentice viewers were explicitly relying on aspects of his television persona, such as his business experience and leadership potential, to explain their support. In contrast, non-viewers supporting Trump were more likely to evaluate his campaign along more typical partisan dimensions.”
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This is partly a function of the media; news reports about Trump regularly featured — and reinforced — his role on “The Apprentice.” Trump’s candidacy quickly centered around immigration; Kim and Patterson’s research determined that there was one article mentioning his show for every three that mentioned Trump and immigration.
That Trump emerged from the world of reality television, they argue, also helps explain his politics.
“Relying on public support unmediated by traditional political institutions,” they write, leaders who emerged as Trump did “can drive dramatic, heterodox shifts in mass opinion and public policy.”
Trump’s success in 2016 was not solely a function of that show. He also had a recurring gig on Fox News, appearing as a commentator on its morning show each week for years before announcing his candidacy in 2015. That focus on immigration, first presented during his presidential campaign announcement, spurred enormous news coverage and a backlash that raised his profile with Republican voters. But Pruitt and the researchers offer convincing arguments that the show played a significant role: Pruitt in how it presented Trump and the research in how that presentation was received.
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“The presumption is that reality TV is scripted,” Pruitt writes. “What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop.”
In the case of “The Apprentice,” that illusion convinced a lot of people, helping to propel Trump to the Republican nomination. Then he became president and sloughed off the perceptions created by the TV show. A constructed reality elevated him to the point that he could change actual reality. Trump was once the outsider viewed as unusually capable, thanks to his public persona. Now he is an insider who defines what being an insider on the right means. He’s no longer the exception; he’s made his exception the norm.
Pruitt, very clearly, regrets whatever role he might have had in making that possible.
