The world is “a reality TV set” and the American presidential election a “season 2” project: this is how Ramin Setoodeh, journalist and writer, presents Donald Trump, whose metamorphosis he has followed since his show The Apprenticesuccess of the 2000s.
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The current deputy editor-in-chief of VarietyAmerican cultural magazine, found attentive assistance on Wednesday by presenting its book Apprentice in Wonderland in a conference at Mipcom, a major global audiovisual event in Cannes, in the south of France.
The Apprenticea film about Trump, is first a reality TV program launched in 2004 in the United States on the NBC channel. Trump, a real estate mogul, plays his own role, submitting candidates to business-related elimination tests. The winner is offered a management position.
It was at this time that Ramin Setoodeh, a young journalist, made his first contacts with the entrepreneur.
“The first time I called his office, his secretary immediately gave it to me, I thought it would be more complicated and I didn’t even have time to turn on my recorder!”
The reporter then wrote numerous times behind the scenes of the TV show.
This long-term professional relationship has allowed him to interview Donald Trump “six times since he left the White House in 2020”. “That’s more interviews than any other journalist,” he smiles.
“Manufactured image”
“What I learned from writing this book and spending all this time with Donald Trump after he left the White House was that he hadn’t changed at all from his TV days, in terms of the desire for publicity, attention, interest in celebrities and the desire to be a star.
Star, Trump was on TV in the early 2000s with The Apprentice.
“I was in my twenties and all my friends were watching, it was captivating, you saw yourself participating in the show, more than those shows where you have to leave your family and go to a desert island and eat all kinds of food insects,” the author recalls.
Trump, before this NBC show, was “not really known in middle America.” “He was a New York celebrity who appeared, for example, in the series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (with Will Smith, editor’s note), he liked to play himself.”
The inaugural success of The Apprentice changes everything and Trump’s fuse is now known to an entire country. Ramin Setoodeh describes how this program shaped the Trump “character.”
“He was abrasive in the boardroom of the show. People perceived him as someone who was honest. But this is all just an image created in the editing room. Trump is a mirage that was created by reality TV. Trump has the aura of a born businessman, but history has shown that his business has not always been successful.
Ramin Setoodeh believes that candidate Trump would also need the supervisors of The Apprentice to make it better in the countryside. “In his first speech after the assassination attempt, the beginning is very powerful but the longer he goes on, the less of a narrative arc there is: the people in the room got bored.”
His book establishes, as he puts it, that Donald Trump “is a reality TV star, not a politician.” “He sees the world as a reality TV set, where he can get attention and ratings.”
“Running for the presidential election means wanting a season 2. In his head, it’s a bit like he was on reality TV and we were just watching.”
