The New Yorker Radio Hour - How “The Apprentice” Made Donald Trump, and a Boondoggle in Wisconsin

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

The staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has reported on “The Apprentice” and its impact on Donald Trump—on how America saw Trump, and how Trump saw himself. Keefe spoke with Jonathon Braun, who was a supervising producer on “The Apprentice,” about how the show’s team reshaped Trump’s image, and how the news media are doing that same work for him now that he is President. Dan Kaufman, the author of “The Fall of Wisconsin,” explains how a deal to bring manufacturing jobs to an industrial town in Wisconsin became a boondoggle of national proportions. And Terrance Hayes, the author of “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” reads a poem for the New Year.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country-city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. American Sonnet for the New Year, Terence Hayes. things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly things got ugly embarrassingly quickly actually things got ugly unbelievably quickly honestly

things got ugly seemingly infrequently initially things got ugly ironically usually awfully carefully things got ugly unsuccessfully occasionally occasionally. Things got ugly mostly painstakingly, quietly, seemingly. Things got ugly beautifully infrequently. Things got ugly sadly, especially frequently, unfortunately. Things got ugly increasingly, obviously. Things got ugly suddenly, embarrassingly, forcefully. Things got really ugly, regularly, truly quickly.

Things got really incredibly ugly. Things will get less ugly, inevitably, hopefully. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Terence Hayes is a winner of the National Book Award in Poetry, and the poem we just heard American Sonnet for the New Year was recently published in The New Yorker. Last year, Hayes published a collection called

American Sonuts for My Past and Future Assassin. 70 poems all describing what it feels like to be a black man in America today. I started writing these sonnets right after the 2016 election, and I was essentially writing one a day just to cope with the noise, the political noise, the cultural noise, America as it stands. This poem predominantly feels a little bit shocked by the shift in, again, the country, and what we think the country is. But I do believe that the turn, you know,

that always has to happen in the sonnet, that Volta is really the last line, perhaps even the last word. So, I mean, I think I was probably around line 10 or 11 and still thinking, I don't know how I'm going to get out of this thing. And, you know, when I came upon inevitably, hopefully I thought, well, there it is. And so I felt like this was maybe the last one, you know,

because something about the end of this year and some shifts in all kinds of ways made me feel like, oh, maybe we're having a turning point here. Maybe something's going to change for the country in this new year. So this is me thinking differently, really, feeling and hoping that something's about to shift here. That would be what would be American about this thing, I think, is always to kind of hope for some better future or some kind of transformation out of even our least attractive positions in the world, I guess.

Terence Hayes. You can find American Sonnet for the New Year and other works by Hayes at New Year. Yorker.com. And this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. There have been a lot of names attached to the rise of Donald Trump. Roy Cohn comes to mind, or Roger Stone, Steve Bannon. But the most influential figure on the 45th president has quite likely been a guy named Mark Burnett. And if you don't know that name, you're probably familiar with his work. Burnett is the English-born TV producer who helped bring reality TV into our lives, producing Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank, and many other programs including The Apprentice.

It's Burnett's work on The Apprentice that conceivably changed the world. Staff writer Patrick Radenkeef recently profiled Mark Burnett, and he wrote in depth about The Apprentice and its impact on Donald Trump, on how America saw Donald Trump and how Donald Trump saw himself. Patrick, in your piece, you write about a moment in 2016, and Jimmy Kimmel was hosting the Emmys, and this was right before the election, and Kimmel did something which at that time was pretty unorthodox. He called out Mark Burnett, a name most people didn't know,

who was sitting in the audience, and he called him out for creating Donald Trump. Here's a clip of that. Many have asked who is the blame for Donald Trump, the Donald Trump phenomenon, and I'll tell you who, because he's sitting right there. That's right. That guy. Mark Burnett, the man who brought him.

brought us celebrity apprentice. Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don't have to watch reality shows anymore because we're living in one. Thank you, Mark. I'm going on the record right now. He's responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected

and he builds that wall, the first person we're throwing over it is Mark Burnett. Is Jimmy Kimmel right? Did Mark Burnett create Donald Trump? I think he is. I mean, look, Trump created Trump. There was a Trump persona

that Donald Trump invented for himself long before the show. But I interviewed a whole bunch of people who worked on The Apprentice over the years. And what they told me was he was kind of a punchline in the tabloids. He was a kind of joke figure. He absolutely was a joke. Yes. And so what the folks who worked on the show said

was that was the guy who we found. And our whole job was to reinvent him as this master of the universe who's always, you know, riding around Manhattan in helicopters and broadcast that to tens of millions of people across the country. Now, tell us a little bit about Mark Burnett. He was born in England, was he not? Yeah, so he grew up in East London watching Bonanza and other American TV shows. So how did he get into TV himself?

He ends up coming to Los Angeles in the early 80s. And by his own admission, he starts working almost immediately without a green card. And after working a few different. jobs. So just to be clear here, he's an illegal, as they say. He has certainly in the Trump administration definition. Yeah, Mark Burnett would be, you know, could be sent home today. So he comes out, he starts working various jobs, but eventually finds his way into the very early days of reality TV. And from there, he goes on to have a tremendous success, his first really huge success with the show Survivor.

The winner of the first Survivor competition is Rich. Congratulations, Rich. So after Survivor, Burnett pitches the apprentice and he plucks Donald Trump out of the tabloids, puts him on the show, and it all turns out to be incredibly successful for both of them. What was the relationship personally

between Burnett and Donald Trump like? It was fascinating. They were very tight and remained very close to this day. Burnett loves to tell people that one of his two sons was the ringbearer when Trump married Melania at Mar-a-Lago. And it's interesting, though, in those early days because Burnett is a guy who, to the extent that he had a belief system back then, it seems to have been very shaped by the kind of culture of American self-help.

How do you mean? Well, the kind of, you know, he really believed he actually said at one point, you know, There's a few things that Americans really believe in. You know, they'll pay to figure out how to grow hair. They'll pay to have sex. And they'll pay to have somebody tell them how to get rich. And it's this weird thing, which I think he shares with Trump, where he's both kind of really cynical about how gullible Americans are,

but also really excited about how you can sell them stuff. So how did he and the staff around him, how'd they go about creating this character on television? called Donald Trump. So you talk to people who worked on the show and they'll say, God, you know, he was such a hustler. When we first got started, we needed, we were looking for a studio space where we could have the boardroom and we propose a place in Chelsea and we propose a place downtown. And Trump keeps vetoing everything. We can't figure out why.

And then finally says, well, you know, as it just so happens, I have an empty floor on Trump Tower. What's the rent money? I could lease to you at a reasonable rate. And then they agree that they're going to do that and they have to furnish the place. And so this is what they experienced. They told me we walked through the offices, we saw chipped furniture, you really saw the kind of, you know, somebody who described it as kind of an empire and decline at that point. And their whole job was to make it seem slick to make Trump seem like he was on the ascendant. They would film these very dramatic entrances for him all the time with dramatic music and he would kind of stride out.

And they made him seem very decisive as though he was a guy with unimpeachable judgment. One of the things that Trump was known for before The Apprentice was not only how much money he had made, but how much money he had lost, the bankruptcies and all the rest. Now, The Apprentice recasts him as this wildly successful tycoon. How did that affect public perception of Donald Trump? Did it work? It did. And it really affected it dramatically. If you go back, as I did, to the interviews that Trump did just before the apprentice and then just after it starts coming out, you see that even. Even he is kind of surprised.

I found this quote where he said, this is right after the show aired. He said, you know, people like me now and they think I'm great. Whereas before, they thought I was a bit of an ogre. Even by his own admission, he had become something of a punchline. So he would tell a story that, you know, page 6 in the New York Post, they don't buy that story anymore. But suddenly he's on NBC on national TV with tens of millions of people, and they bought it. But it wasn't always so easy. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble.

I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back and I won. Big League. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills. You actually spoke to someone who was intimately involved in the production of the apprentice. Who is he and what did he do? So I spoke to a guy named Jonathan Braun,

who had a long history with Burnett, actually going back as far as Eco Challenge. He'd worked on Survivor, and then he was one of the first people in on The Apprentice. And Braun was the supervising editor over the first six seasons of The Apprentice. The show was an immediate hit, you know, which supported Trump's ballooned ego because the numbers were good, not ever as good as he said they were, but they were very good. So you sign on to The Apprentice at a point where you don't know who the host is going to be, but you know it's a business show. And then you find out the host is Donald Trump.

What were your impressions of Trump at the time? My impression of Donald Trump at the time, and again, this is 2004, 2003, I think, is when we shot it, he had just come out of, I don't know how many bankruptcies. His reputation had sunk quite low. You know, he was known amongst me and my friends and my peers and everybody that I'd talked to. is kind of an oddball celebrity for being a loser, for building a tall building, but not being able to rent it out. Tell me, how would you describe the role of an editor in a reality TV show?

The simple answer is that we scour through hours and hours of material that's shot and look for stories that we can relate. to the theme of the show. We showed everything that happened the way it happened. But, you know, like anything, you know, you can't show the entire 300 or 400 hours. You have to show the representative portions of it. And, yeah, there are techniques that we use to enhance that.

For example, the first day of shooting was individually shooting every contestant leaving as if they've been fired. Is that right? So, yeah, the very first thing they shot was people leaving the front of the building with their rolling suitcase and the suit, you know, that they would wear. They all have to enact their own death before they even get started. Yeah. Because you just didn't know who was going to be. Amazing.

And can you tell me just a little bit about the ways in which, in terms of the creation of the Trump persona, the things that the show did to make him out to be. this master of the universe? Well, the famous one is that, you know, that he can make decisions, that he can, you know, make sober, thoughtful decisions, you know, that seemed like they were actually thought out. But I got to tell you, I don't know that they were. He reacted a lot very instinctually to things. He didn't always make sense.

We reversed-engineered the show in that, you know, You know, we could never count on Donald making what would seem like a logical choice in who the winner and loser would be. So we would sometimes have to go back after he would choose which one won and which one lost, and we'd have to amp up or accentuate more the basis for that decision. We had to kind of present him in the best light possible. You know, editors go through and make sure he take out people's ums, ahas, and false starts and things like that, you do that with people, you know,

if they say something dumb. You don't show that part, you know. If majority of what they're saying is pretty smart or fits what the story is, you know, you keep that part and you get rid of the part that doesn't follow that. And I think is super fascinating and very gratifying and validating

is that this is what the White House has to do with Trump. You know, you can watch him any day of the week when he's live in front of a, you know, a press group, and he'll just start rambling on about something. Most of the time he doesn't even make sense. But when he does find something he wants to say, he'll say it five or six times over and over again, but slightly differently. And if you hear it all together unedited, it's like, what? But, you know, when we would cut it down to the salient parts or when the, News media, you know, pulls out a bite or pulls out a clip.

You know, it kind of makes sense. I mean, you know, people get behind it. That's fascinating. So you think, so when you watch him today, you feel as though the news media, weirdly enough, ends up doing exactly what you and your colleagues used to do, which is pulling out the one salient soundbite from the kind of the whole maw of free association. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, it's a technique that we all use in whatever communications media we're in. You know, you need to present the most clear argument for something.

But somebody who is a good speaker, a good orator, can say it without stumbling, without backing up and reversing himself and saying something crazy. I think that's part of the reason why we have these two completely different ecosystems of people who say, no, what he's saying makes total sense. And other people saying, what he's saying is completely crazy or is completely wrong or bad because you can pull whatever you want from there.

You can pull the good one, the one where it sounds like he makes sense, or you can pull the one that, you know, that doesn't... Yeah. I spoke to you and I spoke to others who were involved in the show. And a number of people told me, yeah, you know, it was all a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

So I went back and I watched a bunch of episodes. Right. I just, I didn't see it. I didn't see the wink. Yes, obviously it was not something that we overtly did. We didn't parody Donald Trump. So you can't, you know, you can't be, you know, you can sort of sneak a few things in. Well, can you give an example?

Yeah. I mean, the theme song itself was a kind of disco funk kind of like New York. Money, money, money. Yeah. And it was, I mean, that had it in a lot of. of itself was funny. I mean, because, you know, the song itself kind of puts down the idea of having a lot of money is going to make you happy.

And we would use that kind of music, especially when Donald would show up. But it's interesting you should mention his entrances because, so, you know, 2015, Trump announces his candidacy for president. And he does it in the at Trump Tower. And he starts out at the top of that gold escalator. he rides down, actually kind of facing out, and there's all these people standing around watching him. And I wonder, I mean, you've surely seen that footage.

Did it remind you of anything? Absolutely. You know, we used that exact type of footage in the show many times when he would, if he were to assign a task, he would, you know, gather both teams together and say, okay, here's your task, your task was going to do this or do that. and his entrances, they were designed, you know, whether it was coming in through closed doors or coming in on a helicopter, or in this case, you know, if it was done inside the Trump Tower of him coming down the escalator. Good morning. Morning, Mr. Trump.

What I am. We're in the lobby of Trump Tower. It's big. I think big. I want you to think big, too. That's Jonathan Braun, who is the supervising editor on The Apprentice. We heard a clip of Donald Trump descending the golden escalator in season two of The Apprentice in a shot that's reminiscent to say the least of Trump's dissent on that escalator

when he announced his 2016 campaign. Braun spoke with the New Yorkers Patrick Keefe. Now, Patrick, we tend to think of Hollywood dominated by left-leaning people, liberals. The people who worked on the apprentice are from that very same world. Did they feel bad about the role they might have played in Trump's rise to power? Yeah, so the first thing to understand is that the people who are involved with that show, with the big exception of Mark Burnett, tend not to like Donald Trump. They didn't like him when they were making the show. Why not? Because he was, he could turn on, what I kept hearing was he was somebody who could turn on the charm when he felt as though it behooved him to do so, but was generally not a likable person to work. with and was kind of increasingly ridiculous with every passing year. He would often suggest

he was going to run for president. Even when he announced in 2015, all of the people who were involved in the apprentice at that point privately say, this will play itself out pretty quickly. Donald would be back to a point where much of the country thought that. They did. But to a point where they were actively casting the next season of the apprentice, even as Donald Trump was running for president, because they all felt as though, look, at a certain point, he's going to come back, and then we'll just go right back into business, and we don't want to not have a cast at that stage. Why didn't Mark Brunette want to talk to you?

That's a good question. He does continue to talk to journalists to promote his shows. He won't answer questions about Trump. And to me, this is really interesting, because I think this is a guy who's in a, futile race, you know, with his own legacy. He's trying to kind of run away from his own legacy. He doesn't want to address it. He'd rather just keep focusing on the shows. But the reality is he's still close with Trump. They still talk. He was involved in helping produce the inauguration.

And, you know, I think the first line of this guy's obituary is going to be that he helped put Donald Trump into the White House. You can run from that, but I don't think you can hide. Patrick, thank you so much. Thank you. Patrick Raddenkeef is a staff writer, and you can find his article about Mark Burnett and The Rise of Donald Trump at New Yorker.com. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Denise Ho was big, really big, one of the major stars in the Cantonese pop music world of China. Ho played stadiums. She was in movies. she advertised Levi's, Lancombe, Eve San Laurent.

Then she joined a political protest, the so-called umbrella protest of 2014, and now Beijing branded her poison. You know, somehow at that point, having reached that, you know, so-called peak of awards and all that, I was starting to get onto that path of thinking, is that all?

You know, is that all that I can do with my, my songs, my career, you know, just for personal wealth and all that. And so, yeah, that was when I started to think, you know, should I be doing more? Denise Ho is now living in Hong Kong trying to remake her career as a kind of counterculture songwriter, an activist for democracy and LGBT rights, all under the close scrutiny of the authorities. We'll talk with her next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. months ago, this was a field. And now it's one of the most advanced places of any kind you'll see anywhere in the world. It's incredible. Last summer, Donald Trump was in Wisconsin to sing the praises

of a deal that he had made with Terry Goh. Terry Goh is the chairman of the Taiwanese electronics maker, Foxcon. And I want to be thanking Terry Go, chairman of Foxconn and a friend of mine, one of the most successful businessmen in the world. Very few people even close. And I want to thank him for investing in Wisconsin and investing in the United States. Trump came to the White House promising voters in the Midwest and other industrial parts of the country

that he'd reversed the trend of manufacturing jobs that have been going overseas for years. This is still a major theme of his trade wars. Recently, he was threatening Apple with tariffs on its phones, which were all made in China. So this Foxcon plant in Wisconsin was in, intended as a showpiece of the president's economic vision. How did it go so wrong?

Dan Kaufman is a Wisconsin native who's been reporting on the state's political battles for years. He's the author of a new book called The Fall of Wisconsin. Here's Dan. Racine, Wisconsin is an old manufacturing town. This is the home of the famous Johnson Wax headquarters, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Case tractors and Jacobson lawnmowers were made in Racine.

auto parts, Dremel tools, and the first garbage disposal, known as the Insincorator. A quarter of the jobs are still in manufacturing, but that's way down from where it used to be, according to Racine's mayor, Corey Mason. Still our biggest sector, but nowhere near the 85% of jobs that used to represent that sector. So we are a classic middle-class town that makes things, right? And certainly what I've heard from constituents in the 11, 12 years, I've been knocking on doors and running for offices, when are we going to bring good middle-class jobs back to Racine?

And just really this feeling that people in Wisconsin or Racine just can't make it if we don't make anything. Corey Mason was a Democratic state representative when the deal to bring Foxconn to Racine came to the legislature. And he voted for it. even though that meant bucking his own party and siding with the Republican governor, Scott Walker, a Tea Party hero who Mason bitterly opposed. My job is to see beyond that and look at what it means for residents here,

there was nothing else this big that had this much investment that was going to come to our area, certainly in my lifetime. And so it would be ashamed to let partisan politics trump that opportunity. Foxcon manufactures most of our iPhones.

Apple is its biggest client, but it also makes products from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. You might remember some years back in 2010, Foxcon had a notorious labor rights issue. Workers at a plant in China began committing suicide by throwing themselves off a high-rise company dormitory. Terry Go, the chairman, responded by putting up safety nets to catch them. In Wisconsin, Foxcon's initial agreement with the state

was to make enormous display panels for flat-screen TVs. This was going to be a state-of-the-art, 21-5 million square foot facility, and it would employ up to 13,000 workers. Then we get to the fine print. State and local municipalities will be giving the company more than $4.5 billion. That's the largest subsidy for a foreign corporation

in American history, and that works out to about $1,800 per household. And then there are the environmental issues. At Governor Walker's request, the EPA exempted most of southeastern Wisconsin from smog pollution limits. Foxcon is also exempt from state laws protecting wetlands, and the company can draw millions of gallons a day from Lake Michigan. I don't want them getting $4.5 billion or any dollars, not a single dime. I want them to obey our wetlands laws and file environmental impact statement. Matt Flynn is a lawyer and the former chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

he's been one of the most outspoken opponents of the Foxcon deal. And I want the 7 million gallons a day that they want to take out of Lake Michigan reviewed under the Great Lakes Compact. I also do not want them having a waiver of the clean air requirements in southeast in Wisconsin, which they got. Now, Walker is basically adopting a Chinese communist business model, and once a fair amount of money is given to them, they're too big to fail. And what if they come in five years from now and say,

now we have to go to a different model, but we need another $500 million. But the Foxcon deal gets worse, actually. Earlier this year, Foxcon announced that it will no longer be building this large plant, but a much smaller one. It will be highly automated. Most of the assembly work will be done by robots. This plant needs only 3,000 workers, not 13,000, and nearly all of them will be knowledge workers, engineers, programmers, and designers.

These are not going to be blue-collar jobs. On top of that, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Foxcon would be bringing engineers from China to fill some of these jobs, although the company denies this. One thing that got a lot of attention in Wisconsin was the use of eminent domain to take people's homes for the Foxconn plant. I'll take you back to the entry area, the back entry. I recently went to see Kim Mahoney and her husband, Jim. They grew up in the Racine area. and they spent years planning to build their dream house in nearby Mount Pleasant. Unfortunately, their plot is exactly where the Foxcon plant is going up.

There's heavy construction equipment out of nearly every window. We pick this floor plan because we love to entertain, especially for Packer games and Wisconsin Badger games. They said they're going to start this. I think they're actually building this road right now. I think that's what these bulldozers are doing. getting ready to build. They're putting in the... All of their neighbors have

sold their homes to the village, and almost all of them have been demolished already. Kim and Jim are the last holdouts. They want to take our property and give it to Foxcon. They don't want to do anything else with it. They don't want it to be for a public road or utilities.

But if they could have found a public use for taking our property, that's what they should have done. They want these properties for Foxconn, because they've already promised to give them to them. Stories about people losing their homes don't look good on the news. And the legislative fiscal bureau, a nonpartisan state agency, said the project wouldn't pay for itself until 2042 at the earliest.

Instead of a campaign talking point for Governor Scott Walker, Foxconn may have contributed to his defeat. Walker lost in November to Tony Evers, a Democrat who was very critical of the deal. But in early December, the Republican legislature pushed through several bills, stripping the incoming governor of some of his power before Evers was sworn in. This became a huge national story.

It's been compared to a coup. One of those bills took away the new governor's control over the agency that manages the state's dealings with Foxcon. The Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Voss, was pretty blunt about it. We know that Tony Evers has said that he might go back and look at the Foxcon deal. Look, I represent the area where Foxconn is. I am not going to allow incoming Governor Ivers to screw up the largest economic opportunity

for the region that I represent in the state. So if the governor no longer has the power to influence the Foscon deal, Matt Flynn, the Democratic lawyer, may take it to court. He thinks that the contract violates the state's constitution. I've identified a top-notch litigator with experience in a top-notch firm, who has a draft of a complaint, and it would require some financial support. So, I mean, a lot of people are just very conservative on taxes, and they know this is going to come from somewhere.

We're being played for suckers, and I just wanted to kick over the whole apple card. Wisconsinites are going to be paying for Foxcon for decades. The billions that are being taken away from the budget might have been used to pay for other jobs, like hiring more teachers or fixing the state's crumbling roads. Any way you look at it, you have to use magical thinking to think that Foxcon is well.

So you might ask, why would the state make a deal like this? When Scott Walker first ran for governor, he said that tax cuts and deregulation would bring a boom to Wisconsin. He promised to create 250,000 jobs in his first term. But well into his second term, it was clear he wasn't going to get there, and his approval rating had fallen into the mid-30s. Walker became desperate to stay in the governor's mansion, and when he couldn't deliver enough jobs, he bought jobs at an astronomical cost. Here's a telling detail. In October, President Trump flew to Wisconsin for a Scott Walker rally, and he talked about walking through the Foxcon plant.

We're in the United States. One of the most incredible things I've ever seen. One of the most incredible thing. I'll never forget I'm going around with Scott. But there's the magical thinking, because the Foxcon plant hasn't been built yet. What the president visited was a kind of temporary demonstration the company had set up in a warehouse. The electronics plant, and the thousands of jobs it may one day offer is still just a construction site outside the Mahoney's window. And you come back three months later

they have a whole robot factory image. It's the most incredible thing. This is truly one of the great plants, certainly in this country. I don't think there's anything close. And in the world, it's right at the top. Dan Kaufman's recent book is called The Fall of Wisconsin.

I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour this week. Hope you enjoy the show. And I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon, Rianan and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Callalia, David Krasnow,

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