• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, September 25, 2024

It’s hard to separate Donald J. Trump from his reality TV show image.

Certainly, after 15 seasons of "The Apprentice," viewers who’d never heard of him previously had learned to respect and feel comfortable with him as their billionaire, a superstar guest in their own living rooms.

Prior to that, the myth of him as a young, brilliant real estate developer was popularized by his frequent appearances on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” for which he was the perfect walking embodiment.

The former president has always had a unique ability to understand that surface spectacle -- the outward appearance of a thing -- was more important than the thing itself. He also had an uncanny capacity to multiply and parlay those burnished images.

Among a spate of books about Trump lately, "Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success," was published this week.  It’s the work of Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, who’ve been looking into Trump’s business dealings and finances ever since he announced his campaign for the presidency in 2016.

It started one morning nine years ago when Craig, who’d previously reported on Wall Street, found an unfamiliar manila envelope in her Times mailbox.  It turned out to hold several pages of xeroxed Trump tax documents, leaked to her by a secret source.

On his tax return in 2004, Trump had declared $89.9 million in net losses from core businesses the previous year, and the book does indeed uncover the “illusion of success” that he has always stuck by in his bio. The massive losses in his core businesses continued.

What struck me most about the book was the revelation that the DJT  “fortune”  basically came from two places: his inheritance from his father, builder Fred Trump, whose real estate holdings Donald had from early adulthood on appropriated as his own; and what the authors call an equally big  “second inheritance” from the hundreds of millions he earned from "The Apprentice," starting when he was 57.

The reality money and fame, by now well known, helped propel him into a successful run for the White House. 

Among other things, "The Apprentice" experience proved that Trump was far more adept at -- and made his only real money by -- playing a business mogul on TV, with all the attendant trappings of wealth and power, rather than actually being one in real life.

Over the years, Fred’s son’s dramatic investments in buildings, hotels and Atlantic City gambling casinos had left him with multiple bankruptcies.

His fortunes turned thanks to British TV producer and reality savant Mark Burnett -- who invented the mega-hit “Survivor,” which survives to this day.

He gave DJT a bigger cut of everything than ever before seen in the genre.

In addition to the NBC network paying Trump the highest salary for a reality show, Burnett’s production company forked over half a million dollars a year in rent to Trump Tower for the floor on which they built the conference room and the rest of the "Apprentice" set, and gave it an aura of holy ground.

The authors quote a producer who, now that his 20-year NDA has expired, said the actual Trump offices were surprisingly small and down-at-the-heels, with smelly carpet and out-of-date, dinged-up furniture, all of which was inadequate for shooting.

“We were making him out to be royalty in almost every opportunity,” another “Apprentice” producer told the authors. “It was our mission to make sure that everybody watching understood that to work for him would be a big deal.”

Then, when the show started getting popular and attracting sponsors, Burnett also agreed to give Trump an unheard-of 50% of the money from sponsorships, product integrations and ancillary licensing deals -- for which some brands, even back then, were shelling out over $1 million.

That paved the way for the Golden Sneaker and Trump Bible deals of today.

Burnett knew how to put on a show, and Trump seemed credible and even entertaining.

Certainly, the trademark opening aerial montages, showing a golden Trump descending from the heavens, like a god in his chopper, were powerfully symbolic. Then the show would cut to him making careful, Solomonic decisions in the boardroom, seated in the middle of a table set up to look like the 20^th century corporate version of The Last Supper, with Trump as Jesus.

He was also great at embroidering the script. I remember an episode in which he invited the Apprentices to his overgilded apartment in Trump Tower, and told them his residential space was “usually reserved for meetings with kings and world leaders.” The contestants all bought it, and felt more important.

Two takeaways from the book, which we kind of already knew, but got reinforced:

1)Product integration on a popular network reality show is amazingly lucrative.

2) Show up, play-act, and repeat anything often enough from an enormous platform, and artfully created fiction becomes way more comforting, appealing and real to millions of Americans than the truth.

(For the record, Trump's campaign communications director, Steven Cheung, denounced the book, saying it "either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.")