Donald Trump, remade by reality TV

Before Donald Trump made great reality TV, before his campaign to make American reality great, he never watched any of the shows. He didn’t like the whole idea of reality TV. “That’s for the bottom feeders of society,” Trump told friends. Then, in 2002, “Survivor” creator Mark Burnett came to see him at Trump Tower. “The Apprentice” would star Trump as judge, jury and executioner in a weekly winnowing of young go-getters vying to run one of his businesses. Trump’s agent told him it was a terrible idea — business shows never work on TV, he said. Trump disagreed. Indeed, he fired the agent shortly thereafter. “If I would have listened to him,” Trump said, “I wouldn’t have done the show.”

"My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he told Jim Dowd, then NBC’s publicity director and now head of a PR firm, Dowd Ink. “Even if it doesn’t get ratings, it’s still going to be great for my brand.” The show’s instant success had a powerful impact on its star. “The Donald Trump I saw the day before ‘The Apprentice’ premiered was very different from the guy I walked to nine national interviews the first day after the show aired,” Dowd said. “People on the street embraced him. He was mobbed. All of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking, the old New York Post image of him with the wives and the parties. He was a hero, and he had not been one before. He told me, ‘I’ve got the name recognition, but I don’t have the love and respect of Middle America.’ Now he did. That was the bridge to the current campaign.”