‘The Apprentice’ Producer Recalls Fixing Donald Trump’s Image on 2000s Show

From the moment producers arrived at Trump Tower in New York City in 2003 and found musty carpet, chipped furniture, dated decor, and fewer than 50 people working at the headquarters of Donald Trump’s company, they knew they had to work television magic to make The Apprentice seem like a big opportunity to contestants and viewers, as a new report in The New York Times tells it.

“We were making him out to be royalty in almost every opportunity,” Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of the NBC reality show, told the newspaper. “It was our mission to make sure that everybody watching understood that to work for him would be a big deal.”

And so the show projected an image of a successful billionaire — instead of focusing on, say, Trump’s bankrupt real estate properties and his failed product ideas.

“Our job was to make him look legitimate, to make him look like there was something behind it, even though we pretty much all knew that there wasn’t — but that was our job,” said producer Jonathon Braun. “We weren’t making a documentary. Richard Attenborough was not narrating this. This was an entertainment prime​time network show.”

Douglas Gorenstein/NBC

As producers created challenges for the contestants vying for a yearlong apprenticeship with Trump — one with a salary bankrolled by NBC — the businessman himself wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations and typically wouldn’t watch the contestants “working” during the week, The New York Times reports.

“He would fire the absolute wrong person,” Braun said. “[He] had no idea what was going on, and he would just make something up. … He just had to choose a name. And maybe that was the only name he remembered of the people sitting around.”

In one memorable challenge, Trump directed contestants to come up with a new Domino’s pizza with unconventional toppings, and he told them he liked meatballs. Both teams created meatball pizzas. But Trump made a side deal with Domino’s to be the spokesperson for their new cheeseburger pizza in commercials that would air during that episode, according to The New York Times. So in came a script that would cover up the incongruence.

“Speaking of last week’s task, here’s something you didn’t know,” Trump told the contestants. “Both teams created meatball pizza. But if you had done your market research like Domino’s did, you would have discovered that customers don’t want meatball pizza. What they want is cheeseburger pizza.”

Reflecting the legwork to fix Trump’s unpredictable and sometimes uninformed decisions, Braun recalled that the editors had to splice footage to make fired contestants not look good. “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” the producer said.