The journalist who has interviewed Donald Trump more than any other since Trump left office isn’t Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or that guy who’s dating Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s Ramin Setoodeh, the co-editor-in-chief of Variety and the author of Apprentice in Wonderland, which comes out on Tuesday. Setoodeh’s book is a deep dive into The Apprentice, which ran for 14 seasons from 2004 to 2015 and repackaged and reintroduced Trump to a national audience. The show portrayed him not as a failed businessman and philandering D-list celebrity the way many New Yorkers saw him, but instead as a capitalist hero. It also may have been what got us here.
What Setoodeh instantly found most remarkable was how obsessive Trump himself was about the show and how eager he was to talk about it: Setoodeh would end up doing six interviews with Trump about The Apprentice, interviews that typically went for hours with Trump watching and narrating old clips deep into the night. “He is never happier than when he talks about that show,” Setoodeh told me. “He is only dark and angry when politics comes up.”
I spoke with Setoodeh about his time with Trump, the history of The Apprentice, and how reality television is the only prism through which Trump can truly be understood.
Donald Trump has obviously always been good at media and driving his own news cycles after years in the New York tabloid world. But your book argues he truly weaponized this on The Apprentice.
The Apprentice taught him almost all of his tricks. You have to remember, before The Apprentice, Donald Trump was doing cameos in Home Alone 2 and The Nanny. He wanted exposure. He wanted to be in front of cameras. He wanted people to like him, but he was mostly known as a New York celebrity. Sure, people in America vaguely had an idea of Donald Trump, but they didn’t really have a strong sense of who he was. The Apprentice is the reason Donald Trump became president.. He conducts himself through the lessons that he learned on the show.
You first started interviewing him in the summer of 2021, when he was essentially isolated, out of power and at the nadir of his influence and public ubiquity. Was it hard to get through to him?
No. This was months after he’d left the White House, and no one even knew he was in New York City. He was giving me access at a time when people just assumed he had left New York and was in Florida hiding somewhere.
You make Trump Tower seem abandoned then — I think you compare it to Grey Gardens. Did he feel defeated?
He was more deflated. He did feel like his political career was over, although I could tell he wanted it not to be. In the book, I compare him to a football coach lounging in a diner in the middle of the day, thinking about his old plays. He wasn’t the Donald Trump who had been President of the United States. He wasn’t in control. He wasn’t feeding off all the press and all the attention. It did seem like the arc of his political career looked like it could be over.
But this is why you have to look at him through the lens of reality television. TV stars don’t go away. They just try to reinvent themselves and come back in a new shape, in a new form. So we go from Keeping Up With the Kardashians on E to The Kardashians on Hulu. He needed the time to reinvent himself and come back. Now he has.
There’s a relentlessness to him that feels very “reality-television character.”
He’s driven more than anything else by the desire for fame, the desire to be on camera, the desire to be known, to have people talk about him, to create buzz, to be controversial. He thrives on controversy, on reliving his feuds — and on being a winner. It’s all about fame, but it’s also about revenge for him. Running against Biden will allow him to get revenge.
What was it specifically about The Apprentice that allowed him to create this character?
I was a young reporter in 2004, and all of my friends really loved the show because it felt like it was a smart version of reality TV. On Survivor, you were on an island trying to survive. There was Fear Factor, which no one wanted to go on because who wants to eat worms and all that stuff? The Apprentice was something aspirational. People were like, “Okay, I have a job. I want to succeed in my job. Let me watch the show that teaches you how to be successful in business.”
It positioned him as a strong, smart, funny, capable leader for millions of people who watched 14 seasons of The Apprentice over a decade. It sold this image of Trump that was totally different than what many New Yorkers knew just from the tabloids.
It’s remarkable how much he loves, and caters to, celebrities. At one point, [former NBC head] Ben Silverman persuades him to do The Celebrity Apprentice by telling him he’ll be “king of the celebrities.” He even, deep down, respects celebrities who hate him. But reading your book, I wonder if one of his superpowers as a politician is that he doesn’t respect other politicians at all. He can treat them like shit because he doesn’t care at all what they think about him, the way he does with celebrities.
That’s exactly right. It’s almost as if we transported George Clooney to Washington, D.C. — what would it be like? There would be this spotlight on him because he’s a figure of Hollywood. Donald Trump is obviously very different from George Clooney. But he’s also a creation of Hollywood. That gives him the upper hand in D.C., where they don’t understand star power in the same way.
Everything that Trump does is driven by what he learned as a reality star. So he’s interested in star power. He’s interested in trading in star power. He wants to be surrounded by stars and to cultivate stardom. And it’s all about that. When you look at Trump through that lens — I know a lot of people are confused by his comments and what he does — but when you look at him through that lens, it becomes a lot less mysterious.
I get a sense from his interviews with you that the only thing he cares about is celebrity, that he wants their affection more than anything else.
He wants famous people to like him. We saw that this week with Taylor Swift when it leaked from my book that he described her as being very beautiful, and then the news came out that he told Republicans in D.C. that he couldn’t see why Taylor Swift wouldn’t endorse him. He is a star, and therefore other stars should like him. That is the guiding principle. But there is always this sense when you talk to him that there could be reconciliation. I think Donald Trump, with all his breakups and feuds and fights with famous people, also secretly hopes that maybe there could be some reconciliation and they could turn around and end up liking him.
He has this bit where he is fixated on a secret vote, that he’ll actually win Beverly Hills, which obviously isn’t going to happen. He’s not that interested in the swing states, Ohio, Florida, middle America. He really wanted me to believe that Beverly Hills is secretly voting for him. Why Beverly Hills? Because that’s where all the rich and famous people in Hollywood live. Those are the people that didn’t vote for him for an Emmy, which he’s still upset about.
There was a part of me, reading this, that wondered if we could just build him a fake Oval Office set and let him pretend to be president, that that would be enough for him.
It wouldn’t even have to be a White House set. I think that if he ran and he was able to keep The Apprentice and was able to go back to The Apprentice, he would be very, very happy to do that. It would be exciting for him. The reason he sat down with me, the reason he did more interviews than he did with any other journalist since he left the White House, is because he loves The Apprentice. He’s happiest when he’s talking about it. I don’t even think you need a set of the White House. If you had brought the set of The Apprentice back, and it was in a boardroom and he got to do the show again, I think he’d be pretty content.
He doesn’t even seem to care about any of the actual duties of being president.
He likes to make decisions. He was decisive in the boardroom, and he made decisions. But I think when it comes to legislation and the intricacies of D.C. and passing a bill, I don’t think he’s intellectually interested in any of that. We were talking about how he tweeted a clip of himself singing at the Emmys in 2018 when he passed a historic farm bill. But he didn’t go into the specifics of the Farm Bill. I’m not even sure if he remembers the Farm Bill or what was in it. But he did remember the fact that he tweeted a clip of himself singing the theme song to Green Acres, and it was a very proud moment for him because he was able to remember what it was like to stand on the Emmy stage and receive that kind of ovation and applause from Hollywood.
I have to ask about the tapes of him supposedly using the N-word. Are there tapes? Does it even matter if there are?
I think it would be very hard to find something that would end his candidacy in 2024. On the subject of the tapes, he brought them up unprompted. I was going to ask him about it, but before I had a chance to, he did. He, of course, denied them to me, as he’s denied them before, but what he said to me was interesting in that he thinks that if the tapes did exist, they would have come out because there are so many journalists who have been searching for them. Which I think is an interesting and valid way of assessing the situation. But in my reporting and in all the work that I did, I was not able to find evidence of the tapes.
Are there ways he acted on the show that directly cross over to the way he governs or campaigns?
He would always try to divide the teams. He would try to divide them against each other, he would try to stoke controversy, he tried to get people to turn on each other with him being the ultimate ringleader. And that is of course the exact same template that he used in the debates. That’s the exact same template he uses on the campaign trail. That’s the exact same template he used in the White House.
He is essentially using the same playbook that he used on the show. If you aren’t familiar with the show and you didn’t watch the show, it does seem like, Oh, he’s a very unconventional politician. But if you’ve seen the way Trump conducts himself or conducted himself on television, you realize that this is just the same version in a different setting and in a different job. Unfortunately, it’s the most powerful job in the world.
As lost as he seemed when you first interviewed him in 2021, he seems closer to the White House than ever — close to unstoppable.
The only way to stop him is that we have to stop watching. We are still continuing to watch. I talked to him throughout the summer of 2021 and then I went back to Mar-a-Lago and talked to him in November 2023. In my head, I was expecting him to be in a worse place than he was, given all the legal issues he was having, given all the court cases that were stacked up against him, given the speculation that he was going to go to jail. But the reverse was true. He was in a much better place. He was happy. He was excited.
He was back in the conversation. He was talking about his polls and how he was going to defeat Joe Biden. He was talking about all the stations talking about him. So all this energy and all this attention that we give him, he just feeds off of it. Donald Trump is very, very happy for this attention, whether it’s good or bad. He’s in the center of the media right now and in the center of a media firestorm. And that’s where he thrives.
And that’s the fundamental skill of reality television. There’s always the potential to have a comeback and to continue marching forward for more episodes and more seasons. On multiple occasions, he referred to this White House run as “No. 3.” As in, the first season was in 2016, No. 2 was in 2020, and this is No. 3. He’s even speaking about his presidency in terms of seasons. There’s no distinction for him.
You dedicated your book to “my dad, who is voting for him.” You have spent as much time with Trump over the past four years as any journalist, and probably not that many regular humans have been around him more. How alarmed are you about that guy, the guy you’ve been talking to, potentially being the leader of the free world in seven months?
When you spend time with him, he is incredibly charming and incredibly interesting to be around. I didn’t spend time with him and think Donald Trump is a bad person or I have to get away from Donald Trump. He’s entertaining, he’s funny, he’s over the top. He can be a bit ridiculous, but in spending time with him, I do understand why he can win again because there is a very, very large part of this country that is enamored by him and like him and think he’s great.
And I think the only way in which we can understand the results of the election is to understand how he came to be Donald Trump and how he came to be so powerful and successful in politics. And that’s why I wanted to write this book.
But as a citizen, how alarmed are you?
I am hopeful that there is a system in place, in terms of preserving the democracy of the United States of America, that is bigger than one person and one man. Although it did get very scary during COVID when he was president. As a person who spent time with him, I mean, I don’t want to give away the end of the book, but I do write in the book what reality TV has done to this country and to this world and the effects of having a reality-TV contestant running the country and what that means for all of us.
I’m taking that as alarm.
Most people are alarmed by Donald Trump. How alarmed should they be? We have lived through it already. It’s not like this is a new candidate who hasn’t been president before. He was president for four years, and we saw what happened to the country during those four years. If I learned anything from our conversations, it’s that he is remarkably consistent. He is the same person he was on The Apprentice. And seemingly always will be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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