• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 13, 2025

Remember when Donald Trump was the star of “The Apprentice” and everybody was OK with that?

Back then, he just fired one person a week and it was fun to watch, especially since the people he fired were able to return home and resume their lives and careers already in progress. 

They were fake-fired, but now Trump is firing thousands every day for real and that’s not OK. 

I wonder if in his head, he imagines himself pointing an index finger at all the federal workers now packing up their belongings and saying, “You’re fired!” in the manner he perfected on “The Apprentice.”

Now, those of us who subscribe to Amazon Prime (basically tens of millions) can relive the great TV heyday of Donald Trump.

This past Monday, Amazon posted the entire Season One of “The Apprentice” available to stream for “free” (other than the monthly Prime subscription). As a free attraction on Amazon Prime, “The Apprentice” is worth every penny. 

That season aired on NBC from January to April 2004. Plans call for Amazon to post subsequent seasons each week until all seven of the original shows are available for streaming.

After the 2004 inaugural season, “The Apprentice” had six subsequent seasons -- one in late 2004, two in 2005, and one each in 2006 and 2007. A seventh season aired in 2010.

The shows being introduced on Amazon this month are all from the original series, not “The Celebrity Apprentice,” which ran for eight seasons.

On the show, produced by reality-TV king Mark Burnett, Trump played the role of a super-rich New York City real estate developer who grew up in Queens, with a father who was also a real estate owner and developer.

It was a role Trump was literally born to play. He inhabited the role so completely that it was difficult to determine where the real Donald Trump left off and the fictional one began. And so, Donald Trump became a TV version of himself. 

In “The Apprentice,” he was the “CEO” who was considering the contestants for employment in his company, The Trump Organization, based in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

The contestants competed to complete various “business” tasks, after which Trump would judge their results and then point his famous finger at the would-be hiree who would be that night’s firee.

The grand prize was a position with the Trump company paying $250,000 a year. The winner would be assigned to manage one of Trump’s businesses, while also “apprenticing” with Trump himself.

The show was very successful, thanks in part to Trump’s outsized talent for promoting himself. To hear him tell it, every show was “amazing.” 

“We beat everyone,” he would say on the morning after, even if he didn’t. If memory serves, he may have even gloated that “The Apprentice” beat Angela Lansbury in the ratings, referring to her long-running CBS series “Murder, She Wrote,” but preferring to name her personally.

But there is a problem here. “Murder, She Wrote” ended its run in 1996, eight years before “The Apprentice.” 

Maybe my memory is inaccurate. Or maybe Donald Trump really thought “Murder, She Wrote” was still on TV.

Whatever the case, it’s all personal to Donald Trump, right? So much so, that he would even denigrate Angela Lansbury, who was beloved by all.

Some might wonder who would watch a 20-year-old reality show. Amazon must believe there are plenty who would watch.

After all, Trump was elected President by millions of voters. And some of those people might still love him, even after being whipsawed through the entirety of his first 50 days with no end in sight.

The fact is, Trump was a great reality-TV star. But as a reality-TV president, not so much.