‘The Apprentice’ Premiered 15 Years Ago, Turning Donald Trump Into an Avatar for American Success

It’s a story that’s been told again and again since Donald Trump was elected president: this is a man who may not have been invented by the reality television genre, but he was most certainly groomed for the American public by reality television. Without The Apprentice, which premiered on NBC on January 8, 2004, exactly 15 years ago today, Donald Trump would likely have not been able to sell himself as effectively to the American public. It’s a truth that the television industry in general, and superstar producer Mark Burnett has had to sit with for a while.

Burnett was already a mega-hyped and hugely successful producer by the time he put The Apprentice on the air. With Survivor nearly four years earlier, Burnett had essentially invented “reality TV” as a thriving genre, and the cockiness of a producer who had been credited for changing the face of TV is all over the Apprentice premiere. Trump began the first episode with an extended narration about his personal success story, how New York is the urban jungle where these 16 contestants will battle it out for his favor, how the challenges will be yooge and the reward — a year’s salaried position in the upper ranks of one of Trump’s companies — would be vast.

While any TV viewer with a modicum of media literacy could spot the hyperbole in both Trump and Burnett’s game, it would be false to say that this version of Donald Trump didn’t captivate the TV-viewing public. And while that shine didn’t last through the show’s entire 15-season run (7 with regular contestants, another 8 with celebrity contestants), for at least the first few seasons, Trump was at the very least America’s harmless avatar for business excess.

Watching the premiere episode back again — NBC isn’t streaming the episodes in any official capacity, as you might imagine, but a YouTube search yields surprisingly flush results — it’s surreal that this man with his horribly awkward speaking patterns and monstrously tacky gold-plated Manhattan penthouse apartment would end up elected president in a dozen years. Then again, it’s surreal now to imagine that. But you can see where, right from the break, The Apprentice gets to the work of smoothing out Trump’s past — the infidelities, the tabloid scandals, the history of racism, even the bankruptcies are papered over as more generic tough times — so that the incoming 16 contestants can more freely idolize his wealth and grovel at his feet.

That’s the most striking thing about watching The Apprentice 15 years later, is how abjectly its contestants bought into the idea of Trump as capitalist avatar and aspirational wonder as a baked-in condition of the show. Just as Survivor required that everybody buy into the conceit that a majority vote means one player has to leave the island, The Apprentice only required that Donald Trump’s judgment be the one unassailable truth. “Mr. Trump” was right, and everybody else was fired.