Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump’

David Gould looked perplexed. Mr. Trump, during the first episode of “The Apprentice,” had just asked the losing contestants to name the worst leader on their team. Everyone said Sam Solovey. Except Mr. Solovey, who said Mr. Gould was the worst. The contestants had battled to make the most money selling lemonade on the streets of Manhattan. Mr. Solovey had decided that his bold stroke would be to sell one cup of lemonade for $1,000. He failed. Mr. Trump told him to “be careful” because “you’re a wild man.”

All that sounded as if Mr. Gould would be safe. But then Mr. Trump turned to him and uttered the words that would become his calling card: “You’re fired.”

The producers, watching in the windowless control room adjacent to the fake boardroom, were shocked. Mr. Gould was a licensed medical doctor with an M.B.A. who was then working as a venture capitalist; the producers thought he would be around for a long time. But the moment also brought a tingle of excitement.

“Right then we knew that we had a show, because this is not what you expected,” recalled Katherine Walker, one of the producers.

Mr. Trump’s unpredictability, a vice in business, proved to be a virtue in this new setting. The proclivities behind his worst failures — shutting down complicated discussions, ignoring written material, believing in his own genetic superiority — had found a perfect home in a pretend boardroom. He also was not around much. With no role in strategy, filming or production, Mr. Trump would not typically see the contestants “working” during the week.

“He would fire the absolute wrong person,” recalled Mr. Braun, who came to recognize the times when Mr. Trump “had no idea what was going on, and he would just make something up.”

“He just had to choose a name,” Mr. Braun said. “And maybe that was the only name he remembered of the people sitting around.”

For those moments when Mr. Trump’s choice threatened to reflect badly on him and the show, Mr. Burnett’s producers waved their magic wands in the editing bay. “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” Mr. Braun said. They would go back through the tape from the week and selectively choose snippets “to make the person who he fired look not as good,” he said.

The facts never really mattered. Drama mattered. Comedy mattered. Entertainment value mattered. Mr. Burnett liked to call it “dramality.” And Mr. Trump was dramatic, occasionally funny, and always entertaining.