The forthcoming book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass (Harper, June 18), examines how The Apprentice cemented Donald Trump’s image, and eventually catapulted him to the White House. On his NBC reality show, Trump played the ultimate in-control boss, a persona superproducer Mark Burnett helped craft. After 14 seasons, Trump treated the debate stage like the boardroom, using the tricks he’d learned on The Apprentice’s set to get the voting public hooked on the Trump show.

Ramin Setoodeh, the co-editor-in-chief of Variety, interviewed Trump six times for his book, from May 2021 through November 2023. (All interviews were conducted prior to the former president being found guilty of 34 charges of falsifying business records in his hush money trial.) In the excerpt that follows, Trump recalls his long and tumultuous relationship with Jeff Zucker—the man who, as the chair of NBC during The Apprentice’s boom years, helped make Trump a TV star, and who later clashed with him while running CNN.

When it came time to negotiate with Jeff Zucker for the second season of The Apprentice, Donald Trump was determined to get a real payday from NBC. And as an outsider to Hollywood, he saw no need to comply with the standard showbiz rituals. Having proven his agent wrong by making The Apprentice into a massive hit, he decided to steer the deal making on his own.

Just the memory of it makes him come alive in conversation. He sparks with vim and energy in our conversation at his office at Trump Tower as he narrates the art of his deal with NBC. Reflecting on his rise from mere Manhattan tycoon to that wondrous thing—a television star—Trump can’t help waxing rhapsodic about his own unique power. “When you’re successful, you negotiate your own contract,” Trump says. He sits back in his chair, flashing a mischievous grin. He’s about to weave a tale that will show me—years after NBC fired him—just how irreplaceable he was to the network.

These are blissful memories for him. In our days together, Trump is happiest when he talks about The Apprentice and crankiest when he relives his years as the commander in chief. The stark difference in his temperament, as Trump shuffles through his recollections of his two major public jobs—hosting a reality show, running the country—reveals a man who believes he was only really in charge in one of these scenarios.

But it makes sense. For Trump, image is all that matters. Playing an authoritative person was so much more fulfilling than the burdensome weight of executing his responsibilities as the nation’s most powerful official. And besides, getting rehired as chief in the boardroom turned out to be substantially easier than getting swing voters in the Rust Belt to approve him for four more years. NBC “offered me a lot,” Trump says. “They offered me five years. They don’t do that!” (In fact, they do; it’s common practice for a TV network to lock down talent for as long as possible.)

“So anyway,” Trump says, practically salivating as he gets the chance to talk about something that interests him, “here’s the story.”

The $25,000 an episode that Trump earned for the first season of The Apprentice was humiliating. It wasn’t that he needed the TV money to live off, and the free advertising the Trump Organization got from the series was likely better than any pay package. But it was a status thing: bigger, according to Trump math, was always better. Trump felt that NBC had no choice but to multiply that number by a number so huge it would make him one of the wealthiest men in entertainment.

His negotiations for a second season took place as NBC’s biggest hit, Friends, was ending after ten seasons. Trump says that he knew the network was desperate to keep him. “They were really in the basement, and we brought them back—big league!” While Friends still outperformed The Apprentice overall that season, Trump gleefully noted that some weeks his show did better. This wasn’t a fair comparison: the final season of Friends was only eighteen episodes—six episodes fewer than the previous few seasons had been. As a result, NBC aired Friends reruns for seven weeks in the spring of 2004 in the lead-up to the show’s grand finale, while The Apprentice was new each week. In other words, new episodes of The Apprentice outperformed reruns of Friends. But for Trump, a win is a win, no matter what the circumstances.

And these wins were potentially very valuable. It was widely known that Jennifer Aniston and her quintet of TV besties were raking in a staggering $1 million each per episode from NBC for that last season.

So what was the logical thing to do? Getting paid $1 million an episode was, to anyone reasonably versed in how the business worked, out of the question. It had taken years of massive ratings, as well as a collective bargaining push by all six stars, to negotiate the Friends paycheck, and besides, reality TV salaries were much smaller. It wasn’t clear yet whether the genre had real staying power, and the network was still toying with the idea of swapping out The Apprentice’s star every season, a maneuver it couldn’t easily have pulled with Lisa Kudrow or Matt LeBlanc.

But NBC was in a hurry. In the early spring of 2004, with season 1 still airing, the network had begun scouting contestants for a second season of their newest TV phenomenon so they could quickly bring The Apprentice back in the fall. And Trump sought to take advantage, with a proposal that was the equivalent of holding Zucker at gunpoint.

“Friends had six people,” Trump explains to me. “They’re getting $1 million an episode each. That’s $6 million. So if they’re getting $6 million, and I have higher ratings than they do—because this is the end of Friends, and they were fading out—I said, ‘You should pay me $6 million an episode.’” The recollection of this big ask seems to make Trump physically swell; he stretches out his shoulders and arms, as if trying to reach around the pile of money he feels he’d earned from the series.

It was not to be, Trump says. “They went fucking crazy.” Zucker, specifically, became vocally angry that Trump would even consider asking for such an unfeasible payday. (Some non-Trump math, which is to say a type of arithmetic rooted in business realities: The second season of The Apprentice had fifteen episodes. If the network had met Trump’s demands, he would have made $90 million for three months of playing himself in the boardroom.)

“And they said, ‘We’re not going to do it. It’s over.’” Then Trump counteroffered his own offer. After he kicked off the conversation with a stratospheric number, his strategy was to leave the door open to see what NBC would bring back to the negotiating table. “I said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Give me something less than six. If you’re paying Friends six, and I have higher ratings than Friends, you should pay me six! But give me something less than that. I’m reasonable!’”

Reasonable or not, Trump’s erratic maneuvering didn’t sit well with Zucker, an executive who could seem cool on the surface but had an explosive temper when he didn’t get his way. “And they went nuts,” Trump says. “They said, ‘We’re going to get someone else.’” Trump knew that he could be a perennial annoyance. But he also knew that he’d truly alienated Zucker when the NBC boss—flexing his own deal-making chops—had called him personally to tell him to get lost. “We’re not doing it,” Zucker hissed to him on the phone. “We already have someone else lined up.” (Zucker declined to comment, but other sources who were at NBC during that time period confirm Trump’s recollections.)

Pretending a star can be easily replaced in order to scare him into reducing his demand is a classic Hollywood negotiating ploy. Still, Trump started to wonder whether he’d overplayed his hand. “I thought the deal was dead,” he says. “I thought I just killed myself.” At the time, The Apprentice was just new and fun; he didn’t view it as a career-changing enterprise yet. “They walked out—they were so angry. I said, ‘That’s all right! Get somebody else.’”

Not surprisingly, in Trump’s retelling of these negotiations, he emerges victorious: he claims that Zucker caved. Trump says he got what he wanted—not $6 million an episode, but at least Zucker’s admission that he needed Trump to give NBC a continued ratings boost. “The end result is Jeff called back like a day later, and said, ‘We got to make a deal.’ I said, ‘Why? You couldn’t get somebody else?’ He said, ‘No. We’ve got to make a deal.’ And I agreed to a fortune. You know, they paid a lot of money. A lot! It was a great experience.”

Trump’s final salary on The Apprentice involved more complicated math than he’s inclined to share. To ensure Trump’s participation on the show, Burnett, who was talking to both sides in these negotiations, had already agreed to a costly concession. As the show’s creator, Burnett told Trump they’d split all the product placement revenue they’d generate after Zucker hadn’t asked for this stream of income when NBC bought the show.

“It was part of Mark’s shrewd producing, which is sort of like, ‘I’m going to do these little deals, and don’t worry about that,’” says Kevin Reilly, who served as NBC’s president of primetime development. “Some of these deals had been struck on lesser unscripted shows.” In the early days of reality TV, networks didn’t always own the revenue from product integration; that money could go to the production company, which would negotiate with brands directly for on-camera product placement. “As the network was hemorrhaging money, I don’t think they even knew the extent to do the math,” Reilly says. “Certainly, a few years later, they were aware it was really significant.”

On Survivor, and especially The Apprentice, Burnett had realized that these deals could be profoundly lucrative. Given that Trump and Burnett were running dual businesses—they were making a TV show and essentially overseeing an advertising agency—it’s no surprise that The Apprentice pushed product placement further than any reality TV show had at the time. Each episode involved a new task, usually in the realm of marketing or promoting an existing product. So there was always a natural entry point for companies to appear on the series, and their executives’ appearances didn’t necessarily feel like blatant advertising, even as Trump promoted Mattel toys, Crest toothpaste, Levi’s jeans, Pepsi, and M&M’s.

All of those brands participated in the second season, after the show had been proven a ratings machine. But in the first season, because no brands had seen the show yet, Burnett’s producers had mostly designed the task around Trump companies, giving him all the free publicity. The business leaders who appeared on season 1—such as George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the New York Yankees—participated as a personal favor to Trump.

“We had a great sponsor, a very high-end sponsor,” Trump recalls of shooting the first season. “They canceled right before the show. They said, ‘We don’t want to have a problem with a failed show.’ I said, ‘That’s a bitch.’ So I got Steinbrenner. We went over to Yankee Stadium. It was going to be for fifteen minutes, and he went on for two hours about winning, and it was incredible television. I’m telling you!” Trump takes a moment to eulogize his friend, who died in 2010, but not without acknowledging, in his characteristic way with a vague euphemism, that Steinbrenner had been a convicted felon. “George was great. For me, he was. For other people, not so good.”

But in season 2, Trump didn’t need to call in favors from pals. In its sophomore season, The Apprentice was massive, averaging more than sixteen million viewers an episode. Burnett demanded that brands fork over millions of dollars to be part of one of the most innovative and talked-about shows on TV. For example, just a few months before Christmas, the second season’s premier episode, “Toying with Disaster,” had the two teams duking it out to invent a toy for Mattel.

In the brand-integration scenes, executives would appear briefly to explain the identity of their company and how the contestants’ work would need to cohere with their objective. They’d usually also judge the final product, although they never made it into the final boardroom; Trump was still the only one with the power to fire contestants. For Trump, this scenario proved to be all upside—with only more upside. On The Apprentice, seeing Trump rub shoulders with business leaders only added to his clout, reinforcing his image as a globally connected boss. “It was such an experience,” says Carolyn Kepcher, one of Trump’s associates who served as a boardroom adviser on the show. “Because you were able to meet executives and learn how they work—Mattel and these other big companies. We got a lot of background.”

Unlike Kepcher, Trump was so set in his ways that he’d never take a lesson from a peer. But in performing curiosity about how other companies functioned, he, along with Burnett, laughed all the way to the bank. “We had a unique thing on The Apprentice,” Trump says. “Mark and I, we were equals. I got a star fee. But then we were allowed to keep the advertising dollars. General Motors would come along and pay us $5 million to do an advertising campaign for their new car, and so on and so on.”

Suddenly we feel far from both the Oval Office and the soundproof soundstage of the TV boardroom; a construction crew outside Trump’s New York office makes themselves known with the racket of jackhammers. For today, the former president is just like any other New Yorker, straining to be heard over the relentless hum of the city. But the ease with which he trudges along, without even noticing the loud drilling outside his window, confirms that this man is a creature of Manhattan at heart, finally free from the constraints of Washington, D.C.

Pitching his voice up slightly, he goes on. “So we would have eighteen— or whatever the number was—people doing advertising campaigns for the new car of General Motors. And they would pay us a lot of money. The network got none of it. We kept 100 percent of the money. There’s never been a show that’s probably made more money.”

Just how much money did Trump make from NBC on his fourteen seasons of The Apprentice? “It’s got to be over $500 million,” Trump insists. (In 2015, in a filing with the Federal Election Commission, Trump self-disclosed his total income from the show to be $213,606,575, which includes both his hosting salary and his product placement checks.) Trump’s memories of The Apprentice tend to come down less to what was learned than what was earned. It’s not about the contestants or the show’s influence in the culture. It’s about the profits he made. Consider a special cable news debate that’s cemented in his brain—one that he loves to tell so much he repeated it to me on two separate occasions.

Shortly after that filing, in 2015, the MSNBC anchor and host of The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell, was a guest on Morning Joe, where he sneered at Joe Scarborough for believing that Trump had made a fortune from hosting a reality TV show. “It’s a lie, Joe,” O’Donnell said at the time. “It’s a complete, total lie.” The two cable news pundits then engaged in a prolonged online feud about it. These were the days when a Donald Trump presidency seemed like alternative-reality fiction—a complete impossibility—so joking about the particulars of what it could mean was a fun parlor game.

Not to Trump. “Lawrence O’Donnell was always an enemy, because he’s a sick human being,” Trump says. “He was on Joe Scarborough saying I made no money on The Apprentice! Joe said, ‘That can’t be possible, because the show is so successful.’ This was when Joe Scarborough would do anything for me.” In Trump’s retelling, he adds new details that never happened. “And O’Donnell got on his show, and NBC made him apologize and he was crying,” Trump claims. “He actually broke down, and he was crying. It was one of the great moments, because he was such a prick!” (While Trump’s summary of the argument between the hosts is accurate, O’Donnell never backed down, nor did he cry on air. Through a representative, the network declined to comment.)

As we keep talking, Trump returns to how Zucker didn’t want to pay him his asking price of $6 million an episode, and he leans forward in his chair, blinking rapidly to convey his rage. “That was Jeff,” he says grumpily. He suddenly comes across as less of a real estate developer or a politician than an actor who can’t forgive bad blood with a studio head.

He looks past me to the suited, unobtrusive adviser seated behind me. “Can you believe I got that son of a bitch a job, Jason?”

Jason Miller, Trump’s longtime political adviser, simply nods.

In all of our meetings, just the mention of Zucker’s name would invariably lead to Trump’s telling a convoluted story about how he helped secure Zucker his job as the president of CNN in the winter of 2012. Small details would shift in the story: Trump was at a lunch or dinner when he met Phil Kent, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, overseeing networks like TNT, TBS, and CNN. And at that meal, according to Trump, he effusively praised Zucker and persuaded Kent to hire him to run CNN. After telling this story, Trump would fume about his onetime close confidant in the entertainment business.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Miller echoes back that day in Trump Tower. Perhaps the best way to stay in Trump’s good graces—as Miller had, in the early days of the post-presidency—is to never verge beyond the kind of soothing affirmation one would expect from a Magic 8 Ball.

“I always said there’s no way he’s doing bad about me, and he did. Because a lot of people are scum.” Trump pauses, as if he were about to conduct a firing. But the only power he has away from the Oval Office is the familiar intensity of his venomous contempt, now directed at Jeff Zucker.

“He’s human scum.”

Maybe you can’t rise to the top without a few past co-workers thinking you’re human scum, and few media-industry rises have been more dizzyingly rapid than Zucker’s. After graduating from Harvard in 1986, Jeff Zucker went to work at NBC, starting as a researcher in the network’s sports division. He ended up as a producer at Today, earning a reputation as a wunderkind; at twenty-six, when most people in TV are still working their way up from the entry level, Zucker was managing what would become the most profitable morning show on TV as executive producer. Today was emerging from a period of instability, after the controversial firing of the popular anchor Jane Pauley in favor of the young and less experienced Deborah Norville. Zucker’s watch began in 1992 with Katie Couric, a political correspondent who had taken over as morning TV’s new queen bee the previous year, sitting next to the mainstay Bryant Gumbel. With this team in place, Today dominated in the ratings, trouncing Good Morning America.

Outside Today, Zucker had battled colon cancer twice in his thirties, with the support of his wife, Caryn, whom he’d married in 1996. His ability to power through, taking brief leaves and returning to work while undergoing chemotherapy cemented his legacy as an unstoppable executive at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. “I don’t think people would describe me as laid-back, OK?” Zucker told The Washington Post’s Lloyd Grove in a 1998 profile. “I still want to win, but I don’t want to kill somebody or kill myself getting there.”

Like Trump, Zucker loved the thrill of spectacle—especially if he was at the center of it. The two men’s fortunes intersected once again in the summer of 2016, when Trump’s unlikely and tumultuous campaign for the presidency was an undeniable ratings booster for CNN, which Zucker was overseeing. When Zucker sat down to talk to me for a Variety cover story about his strategy for running a news network during an intensely fractured time in American history, it wasn’t lost on him that he’d had a major hand in bolstering the candidate who was already a destabilizing force in U.S. politics. But what Zucker took away from that was that CNN had an opportunity to keep on winning—even if democracy lost. “We’ve got our largest share of the prime-time audience in fifteen years,” Zucker told me, sounding not unlike the man he’d taught to become fixated on ratings. “We have 34 percent of the prime-time audience. We’re within two share points of Fox. They’re at 36. And we’ve got our largest advantage over MSNBC in prime demos in seventeen years.”

In the early days of his campaign, Trump would often ring up his old boss for gossip and guidance. This was before anyone took Trump seriously as a politician. The rest is well-known history, with Trump’s constant rallies being broadcast live on cable news, their backdrop becoming a sort of American wallpaper as he cruised to the nomination and then to a shock victory over Clinton in November 2016. Along the way, Trump’s and Zucker’s intertwined professional lives came to imitate the art they’d made together. Once inseparable in their shared quest for ratings, the two men—still in search of the highest possible number, be it viewers or electoral votes—found themselves squabbling like reality TV contestants once Trump began sweeping primaries. For any observer schooled in the tropes of the genre, this wasn’t a surprise. Zucker and Trump’s alliance worked for them when they both stood to profit. Using Trump as a free publicity machine and indulging his tendency to say whatever popped into his mind benefited Zucker and NBC. Yet in this new phase of Zucker’s career, Zucker could no longer protect Trump.

CNN’s coverage would inevitably get tougher as Trump closed in on the Republican nomination. And as the network started fact-checking his lies in real time, Trump felt that Zucker had betrayed him. “Trump talked very positively of Jeff right up until the point Jeff talked negatively of him,” says Piers Morgan, who won the first season of The Celebrity Apprentice in 2008 and took over for Larry King on CNN in 2011. “There’s no doubt that Zucker made Trump the TV superstar that he is, and it’s Trump’s stardom that won him the election because people were voting for a celebrity. I think Jeff knows he played a very big part. Once he realized that might happen, and he might get blamed for it, Jeff tried to perform a screeching U-turn. But by then, as Dr. Frankenstein had discovered, the monster had left the building.”

Back in 2007, Zucker was promoted again to president and CEO of NBC Universal, where he made a career as an executive. Zucker had two problems: NBC’s cupboard of hits was increasingly bare, and it was time to refresh The Tonight Show, even as the incumbent host, Jay Leno, wasn’t ready to leave. The executive tried to solve both at once, converting the 10:00 p.m. time slot, usually reserved for adult dramas, into a nightly Leno talk show while installing Conan O’Brien at Tonight. It was cheap to produce The Jay Leno Show, but a nightly dose of his comedy when viewers expected Law & Order: Special Victims Unit flopped, and hurt O’Brien when viewers turned their sets away from NBC before the late-night hour. It also alienated Zucker from top Hollywood agents who were furious that he was trying to block their actors from receiving scripted paychecks.

In 2010, as Comcast acquired a majority stake in NBC, Zucker left NBC with a huge payout—a reported $30 to $40 million—in disgrace. But he had an idea for redemption, to recapture the magic of Today’s 1990s by pairing Couric and Lauer as daytime talk show hosts. Lauer, still in his heyday at Today, didn’t bite. Couric, who’d been cut off from her genuine gift for connection to her audience as CBS’s evening news anchor, was floundering in the ratings and decided to take Zucker’s offer. So she hopped back to daytime with ABC’s Katie, debuting in the fall of 2012.

If this was something of a comedown for Couric, whose takeover as the first solo female anchor on a network evening news broadcast had given way to grinding disappointment when she couldn’t merge her personality with the culture of CBS News, it was a far more precipitous decline for Zucker. He’d gone from running a network to producing a syndicated daytime show. But at least he had a close friend’s support: one of the first guests Zucker booked for Katie was Donald Trump.

“Jeff Zucker said to me, ‘Could you do me a favor for Katie Couric’s opening show?’” Trump recalls. “‘Could you sit down with her right in New York City on top of a bus?’ So I rode in New York City on the top of the bus with Katie Couric. Remember the show she had? It wasn’t successful. Not great. But that was Jeff’s show, you know?”

Katie proved to be an expensive ratings misfire, because Couric once again failed to find the balance of hard news and soft lifestyle content that had defined her time with Zucker on Today. At CBS, she’d been perceived, if unfairly, as not serious enough to take on the stories of the day. Beaming into stay-at-home parents’ orbit every afternoon, she wasn’t quite credible doling out celebrity dish and makeover tips. The talk show’s dismal failure (canceled after two years) led to a falling-out between Couric and her longtime boss Zucker, who left before the show wrapped up. And as Zucker jumped ship (or was fired, according to Couric’s 2021 memoir, Going There), he aggressively lobbied to take the reins at CNN, which was looking for a new network president.

That’s when Trump claims he came to the rescue. (Insiders at CNN deny Trump had anything to do with Zucker’s hiring.) Trump is so convinced of this fact that he tells the same story to me on three different occasions.

“I’m sitting there at the Plaza hotel for two and a half hours,” Trump says. “The head of CNN Turkey, who is a friend of mine, is being honored. I was sitting next to one of the heads of Time Warner. I said, ‘What do you do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to hire the new head of CNN over the next week.’ I said, ‘Anyone I know?’ He gave me four names, and the last one was Jeff Zucker. He had no chance. I said, ‘What about Jeff Zucker?’ He said, ‘No, he didn’t do a good job at NBC.’ I said, ‘No—he did! He did The Today Show. He did The Apprentice.’”

The three times that Trump tells me this story, the details are always crisp and mostly the same. And for once, Trump admits to making a mistake. “And after an hour and a half, I convinced him to hire Jeff Zucker. How stupid of a move was that?” Sensing that we’ve gone way off subject, he clarifies that this story is still on the record. “You can use it if you want. I could care less.” After that meal at the Plaza, Trump says he called Zucker to fill him in. “I said, ‘Jeff, congratulations. You’re going to be the new president of CNN.’ He said, ‘No way.’ He told me the same names I’d been told by the gentleman on the left, who was a nice guy.”

Whatever happened that day, Trump credits himself. “So I gave Jeff a sell like few people can sell,” Trump says. “And by the end, I think the guy was going to put his hand over his ears and say, ‘Leave me alone!’ I convinced him that Jeff was the guy for the job. Jeff was told the next day he was the chosen one.” He can barely let this hang in the air for a moment before returning to dumping on Zucker. “This guy didn’t like him. He thought he was an impossible guy to get along with. And I got him the job.”

Trump concludes by spinning out the story of Zucker’s ultimate betrayal. “And by the way, when I was running, I said, ‘CNN is going to treat me great.’ It’s called loyalty. I got the guy the job. And as I was campaigning, people would come and say, ‘Sir, CNN is hitting you a little hard!’ I would say, ‘That’s not possible. Go back and check.’ And I’d call Jeff.” Trump imitates Zucker’s voice, adding a parodic layer of prissiness: “I’ll look into that. I’ll look into that.” Trump says he finally lost patience and stopped talking to Zucker, because he realized Zucker was secretly driving the tough reporting about his campaign.

From the forthcoming book APPRENTICE IN WONDERLAND: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass by Ramin Setoodeh. Copyright © 2024 by Ramin Setoodeh. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.