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Donald Trump fancied himself an expert on television long before parlaying his titan-of-industry image, forged by “The Apprentice,” into politics. But his “reality-TV presidency” — complete with cliffhangers, confrontations, and eliminations — increasingly resembles a once-popular show in its later seasons, resorting to gimmicks as it scrambles to sustain an audience.
As someone who chronicled Trump’s primetime success and absorbed his claims (invariably false) about titanic ratings long after “The Apprentice” slipped off its lofty perch, there’s an odd familiarity to the desperate push toward the 2026 midterms. Trump’s shtick mirrors the tricks and traps of an aging reality show, from poorly vetted, swing-for-the-fences casting decisions to escalating levels of violence and risk, to, finally, lavish cash giveaways. (The main difference, actually, is that TV shows have to make good on their payout promises.)
In just the last few weeks, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans for a live-streamed execution, only to see the president retreat from the idea, despite his initial endorsement of it; Trump chose Katie Zacharia as his press secretary with scant due diligence before firing her after a half-Scaramucci; and the president touted a variety of prize incentives to voters, including a $5,000 pledge to all adults — but only if the election results go his way — and to-be-determined cash awards to whistleblowers to advance his anti-fraud obsession.
Based on the polling, nothing really appears to be moving the needle. Among students of television, that really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since once a “show” enters this phase, there’s often not much that can be done to stave off the inevitable decline, as fickle viewers begin looking for something new, gravitating toward the next big thing.
Trump remains fond of pointing out when women are beautiful as an act of nose-thumbing rebellion against “woke” culture, but his recent gushing about the appearance of various men, and their bodies, has become a new source of fascination, as well as a gift to late-night comics. But it all fits the pattern of Trump as the producer of his own show, where he’s invariably the hero surrounded by enemies on all sides. Within that aura of showmanship, Trump also views himself as a casting genius uniquely able to identify star power, underscored by his repeated references going back years to “central casting.”
Although “Survivor” producer Mark Burnett was the ostensible mastermind behind “The Apprentice,” Trump clearly felt like he internalized the tools of the trade. But these recent examples underscore the challenges of such sleight of hand, as well as how trying to bend an existing format can blow up in one’s face.
To those who might see the reality-TV analogy as strained, remember how Trump got here. The way “The Apprentice” carefully crafted Trump’s persona through creative editing, which was necessary to make sense of his behavior, is a story that’s been told and retold, primarily marketing guru who helped launch the series
Bill Pruitt, an early “Apprentice” producer, acknowledged in a 2024 Slate piece that he and his colleagues “played fast and loose with the facts,” creating “the myth” of Trump, beginning with the glittering boardroom built to stand in for the rundown space in his real-life offices.
Nor should it come as a shock that Trump harbors an inflated sense of his reality-TV acumen. Another producer, Jonathon Braun, recalled how Trump would make out-of-left-field choices about who to fire, forcing the producers to retrofit the entire episode to justify his chosen outcome. “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” Braun told New York Times reporters Russ Beuttner and Susanne Craig for their book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.”
John Miller, the now-retired NBC executive, titled his 2024 essay/mea culpa “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice.'” As he told me in an interview in 2025, the qualities that Trump prized above all else were “loyalty and being telegenic,” adding, “Experience and competence are well down that list.” He also observed that Trump was both “manipulative,” and “extraordinarily easy to manipulate.”
Trump is gambling on a different, more serious playing field, but the inherent strategy is the same. For a president who sees himself as the ultimate showman, breathing life into a tiring act has notably led to some very rare backpedaling.
Zacharia offered a textbook illustration of those priorities, having effusively praised Trump on television — another attractive mouthpiece on the surface, appointed without evidence of the customary concerns about her qualifications or resume.
Such corner-cutting can be perilous, and again, reality TV provides ample precedent. Take “The Bachelorette,” which picked Frankie Taylor Paul for the last edition despite questions about off-screen issues, then wound up having to shelve the entire season after TMZ posted video pertaining to a 2023 domestic-assault allegation.
Television producers regularly talk about “raising the stakes,” and stoking conflict or the perceived threat of violence is a go-to means of seeking to juice ratings. That might explain Hegseth’s tough-guy talk about a live-streamed execution, before the collective disgust over what the Daily Kos called a government-sponsored “snuff film” prompted the White House to back down.
Still, as critic Matthew Gilbert pointed out, televised executions seem less far-fetched than when “Network” satirized them 50 years ago. While daredevil televised stunts are as old as Evel Knievel, the possibility of seeing someone die — live! — has become another threshold for standing out amid a sea of content, such as “Free Solo” free climber Alex Honnold’s January special scaling a Taiwan skyscraper live on Netflix.
A less bloodthirsty gambit involves simply throwing extra prize money around, as “Survivor” did by doubling the potential payout for its 50th edition. Like physical altercations and tossed wine glasses, that usually feels like an exercise prone to yielding diminishing returns, to be pursued after exhausting most other options.
Students of television, of course, will tell you that once a show enters this part of its lifecycle, there’s not much that can stave off the inevitable declines. Hit shows usually blaze hot, then fade, even if they endure for a long time like “Survivor,” like “The Apprentice” a Burnett production, or “Dancing With the Stars.” That explains why something like “The Bachelor” franchise would roll the dice by selecting a bachelorette that ended up costing ABC and parent Disney millions in unused (so far, anyway) episodes.
Trump is gambling on a different, more serious playing field, but the inherent strategy is the same. For a president who sees himself as the ultimate showman, breathing life into a tiring act has notably led to some very rare backpedaling. And despite how effective the maestros at “The Apprentice” were in stitching together a better Trump, facing an angry electorate, he might be confronting his limits, finally, in terms of shaping reality.
