“The casinos looked kind of run down, they had seen better days,” Maggie Haberman told Kaitlan Collins, describing what Apprentice producers found at Trump’s real properties, which one of them called a “sagging Empire.” The Trump Tower boardroom “wasn’t quite right, so they built a set,” Haberman said, and viewers “believed it was real.” Years later at a Dubuque rally, she asked voters if they were just there for the spectacle, and one man “looked at me like I had eight heads” and said, “I watched him run his business,” meaning the show.
When “The Apprentice” producers first walked through Donald Trump’s actual casinos and offices in the early 2000s, one person involved called what they found a “sagging empire” that had seen better days. So they cleaned the properties up and built a boardroom set that looked the part. The businessman audiences met on screen was a production choice.
Maggie Haberman, the New York Times reporter who wrote the 2022 book “Confidence Man,” laid this out in a conversation with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Mark Burnett, who created the show, was a superfan of Trump’s 1987 book “The Art of the Deal” and shaped a character to match it.
Haberman didn’t grasp how deep the effect ran until she covered a 2016 rally in Dubuque, Iowa, when Trump was slipping in the polls behind Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. She asked voters whether they were just there for the spectacle. One man looked at her like she had eight heads and said, “I watched him run his business.” He meant the TV show.
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