A former executive on Donald Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” says he feels ashamed for his role in mythologizing a man he now says “would like to be a dictator.”
Earlier this month, former NBC marketing executive John Miller wrote an opinion piece for U.S. News & World Report in which he apologized to the country for helping to “create a monster.”
Now he’s told Vanity Fair just how effective the show was in making Trump seem like a viable presidential candidate despite evidence to the contrary being in plain sight.
“He didn’t have a real company” at the time the show premiered in 2004, Miller said. “It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They’d been bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. ′The Apprentice’ helped him survive that. People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”
Miller said that part of the deal to get Trump to participate was to rent two floors at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
“One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower,” Miller explained. “So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist.”
Miller said the show had to build its own boardroom because the one Trump really used was so “shabby” that no one would think it looked like “a big-time businessman’s boardroom.”
Although Trump could be charming, Miller said, he was also very easy to manipulate.
“If you wanted him to do something, all you have to do is just compliment him in ways that would make most people blush,” Miller said.
As the show became a hit, Trump started having ideas of how to get more viewers to watch, including one that, in retrospect, seems both racist and on brand for the former president.
At the wrap party for the show’s third season at Lincoln Center, Trump came up to Miller with “a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.”
Miller said his first thought was “What the fuck. Are you crazy?”
However, he didn’t say that out loud because he said Trump ”doesn’t react well when people say his ideas are bad.”
Instead, Miller tried a different approach.
“So I said, ‘I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.’”
Trump didn’t seem to understand why people would have a problem with an “Apprentice” season pitting white contestants against Black contestants and insisted, “The ratings would be huge!”
When Miller’s wife told Trump the concept was “a terrible idea,” the reality show star and then-future president walked away in a huff.
“The fact that he didn’t understand why having Black people compete against white people would be problematic spoke to racist tendencies,” Miller said.
When Trump announced his first presidential run in 2015, Miller said, he was of two minds.
“I thought, Has there ever been somebody who is less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anybody that’s more telegenic and understands how to manipulate the media more than Trump?” Miller told Vanity Fair.
“The Apprentice” ran on NBC from 2004 to February 2017 (including episodes filmed before Trump won the 2016 election). The unscripted series was briefly revived in 2017 with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the “boss.”
Miller thinks that if Trump is reelected next week, once in office, he’d want to take CBS, NBC and ABC off the air.
“Anybody other than Fox News who says anything bad about him he wants off the air,” he said, adding, “I do think he would like to be a dictator.”
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Miller said that if Trump gets back in office, the country at best “will function badly, and at worst, he will do his best to make it authoritarian.”
He added: “And the worst thing is that we could have the America that [we know] go away.”