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| You’re hired: how The Apprentice led to President Trump | You’re hired: how The Apprentice led to President Trump |
| (about 4 hours later) | |
| The most unpleasant aspect of The Apprentice – worse than the boasting, the repetition or the intergalactic levels of rock-hard stupidity – has always been its response to humility. Year after year, the boardroom will always pounce on anyone foolish enough to own up to their mistakes. The smallest honest admission always ends in a firing. But if you can lie, and bluster, and cheat, and roar an engine jet of bullshit accusations at the fat-tied stooge to your left, chances are you’ll succeed. Everyone will know that you’re frantically saving your skin, but they’ll give you a pass anyway. This is what happened in America this week. | The most unpleasant aspect of The Apprentice – worse than the boasting, the repetition or the intergalactic levels of rock-hard stupidity – has always been its response to humility. Year after year, the boardroom will always pounce on anyone foolish enough to own up to their mistakes. The smallest honest admission always ends in a firing. But if you can lie, and bluster, and cheat, and roar an engine jet of bullshit accusations at the fat-tied stooge to your left, chances are you’ll succeed. Everyone will know that you’re frantically saving your skin, but they’ll give you a pass anyway. This is what happened in America this week. |
| You might think that it isn’t. You might think that the rise of president-elect Trump is down to sexism, or social media filter bubbles, or a country’s ability to put partisan politics ahead of personal judgment, or the dying roar of a frightened white majority. But it isn’t. It’s because of The Apprentice. | |
| The Apprentice, which favours aggression over thoughtfulness. The Apprentice, which teaches you to always turn on your teammates. The Apprentice, which mistakes 10 heavily edited minutes of pre-written insults with actual leadership. The Apprentice, whose witless win-at-all-costs aggression helped to cause the banking crisis a decade ago and still wasn’t hauled off air. The Apprentice. The bloody Apprentice. | The Apprentice, which favours aggression over thoughtfulness. The Apprentice, which teaches you to always turn on your teammates. The Apprentice, which mistakes 10 heavily edited minutes of pre-written insults with actual leadership. The Apprentice, whose witless win-at-all-costs aggression helped to cause the banking crisis a decade ago and still wasn’t hauled off air. The Apprentice. The bloody Apprentice. |
| Before The Apprentice, Donald Trump was just a cartoon blowhard, a broken 1980s throwback, a joke. It was The Apprentice, arguably more than The Art of The Deal, that put forward the idea that he was any sort of leader. Go back and watch any of his episodes. He’s no leader. He struts into a room at the start, barks “Go sell cookies” at the assembled array of sharp-suited cannibals, then disappears. An hour later, once they’ve torn themselves apart in a heartbreaking effort to win his approval, he’s given a bulletpoint list of who did what and then sacks someone. That’s all he does. That isn’t leadership. It’s empty hype and swagger masquerading as leadership. It’s Pin The Tail On The Donkey. | Before The Apprentice, Donald Trump was just a cartoon blowhard, a broken 1980s throwback, a joke. It was The Apprentice, arguably more than The Art of The Deal, that put forward the idea that he was any sort of leader. Go back and watch any of his episodes. He’s no leader. He struts into a room at the start, barks “Go sell cookies” at the assembled array of sharp-suited cannibals, then disappears. An hour later, once they’ve torn themselves apart in a heartbreaking effort to win his approval, he’s given a bulletpoint list of who did what and then sacks someone. That’s all he does. That isn’t leadership. It’s empty hype and swagger masquerading as leadership. It’s Pin The Tail On The Donkey. |
| And it fitted him. Look at any Apprentice candidate, breaking their neck to spit out the most self-aggrandising Trump-style word salad imaginable. They’re like sharks, they say. They talk the talk and dance the dance. They’re going to win so hard it hurts. Trump was the figurehead everyone aspired to be. They couldn’t have aped him any harder if they’d swan-dived into a barrel of Cheeto dust before entering the boardroom. The thrill of The Apprentice was getting to watch people climb the greasy ladder. The trouble is, it was so thrilling that people never worried about what would happen when anyone associated with it reached the top. | And it fitted him. Look at any Apprentice candidate, breaking their neck to spit out the most self-aggrandising Trump-style word salad imaginable. They’re like sharks, they say. They talk the talk and dance the dance. They’re going to win so hard it hurts. Trump was the figurehead everyone aspired to be. They couldn’t have aped him any harder if they’d swan-dived into a barrel of Cheeto dust before entering the boardroom. The thrill of The Apprentice was getting to watch people climb the greasy ladder. The trouble is, it was so thrilling that people never worried about what would happen when anyone associated with it reached the top. |
| The stench of The Apprentice will permeate every aspect of the Trump presidency. It already permeated his campaign. He filled the thing with the candidates – the reality-show contestants – who proved most willing to prostrate themselves before him. | |
| One of his most ubiquitous campaign surrogates was Omarosa Manigault, shipped into any number of zero-sum TV debates to deploy her trademarked pro-Trump villainy. Another was Andrew Dean Litinsky, whose biggest post-Apprentice achievement involved publicly defending the man who punched a black septuagenarian during a Trump rally. One of the very few celebrities willing to openly endorse Trump was Stephen Baldwin, former Celebrity Apprentice candidate most notable for directing a 2004 Christian-themed skateboarding DVD called Livin’ It. | |
| Another, and one of the first people to tweet their congratulations to Trump yesterday, was Piers Morgan; winner of Celebrity Apprentice 2008 and a man who – to paraphrase Gary Lineker for a moment – lives so up Trump’s behind that he probably stinks of semi-digested taco bowls. | Another, and one of the first people to tweet their congratulations to Trump yesterday, was Piers Morgan; winner of Celebrity Apprentice 2008 and a man who – to paraphrase Gary Lineker for a moment – lives so up Trump’s behind that he probably stinks of semi-digested taco bowls. |
| Worse, though, Trump has inhabited the entire Apprentice aesthetic. It was less a campaign and more a cash grab for ratings. The more eyes on him the better, whatever it took. Unless he performs a drastic 180-degree turn on setting foot in the Oval Office, the big risk is that he’ll continue to treat the greatest country on Earth as the greatest show on Earth. | |
| This is the legacy of The Apprentice. This is what we’ve got for the next four years. A culture where volume is mistaken for decisiveness. A culture where culpability is never an option. A culture where everything is binary, and the only way to win is to choose the least bad option. A culture where you can get away with anything, so long as it has the surface sheen of spectacle. A culture propelled by an all-encompassing fear of being found out. A culture where the best anyone can hope to achieve is a career sitting at the knee of a godawful billionaire, feeding from whatever KFC scraps happen to fall from his permanently open mouth. | This is the legacy of The Apprentice. This is what we’ve got for the next four years. A culture where volume is mistaken for decisiveness. A culture where culpability is never an option. A culture where everything is binary, and the only way to win is to choose the least bad option. A culture where you can get away with anything, so long as it has the surface sheen of spectacle. A culture propelled by an all-encompassing fear of being found out. A culture where the best anyone can hope to achieve is a career sitting at the knee of a godawful billionaire, feeding from whatever KFC scraps happen to fall from his permanently open mouth. |
| For a while, back when Trump was simply a figure of amused curiosity, television was flooded with Apprentice ripoffs. My favourite of these was My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss. A short-lived parody, it tricked hungry young businesspeople into undergoing ridiculous tasks like selling hot soup in the summer or making adverts for breast milk, before one of them was arbitrarily fired by an unseen boss called Mr N Paul Todd. In the final episode, Mr N Paul Todd – an anagram of Donald Trump – was revealed to be a chimpanzee who made all his decisions by spinning a wheel. It seemed funnier at the time. | For a while, back when Trump was simply a figure of amused curiosity, television was flooded with Apprentice ripoffs. My favourite of these was My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss. A short-lived parody, it tricked hungry young businesspeople into undergoing ridiculous tasks like selling hot soup in the summer or making adverts for breast milk, before one of them was arbitrarily fired by an unseen boss called Mr N Paul Todd. In the final episode, Mr N Paul Todd – an anagram of Donald Trump – was revealed to be a chimpanzee who made all his decisions by spinning a wheel. It seemed funnier at the time. |