How ‘The Apprentice’ Explains Trump's VP Playbook
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. On this show, I have the editor-in-chief of Variety, Ramin Satuta. He wrote a book called Apprentice in Wonderland, and it basically argues that Trump would have never been elected if not for that reality show that aired for almost 15 years. Trump came off as successful, decisive. He was seen as a mogul with a helicopter, a

a gilded apartment, a beautiful wife, golf courses. He went on and on about his success. When actually when the show was filmed, he had just come off his sixth bankruptcy and he was sort of looking like a cartoon character in the tabloids. So clearly the show first introduced the rest of America, middle America to Donald Trump and cemented the view that he is very successful and capable of running a business, even if it was just reality TV and not the actual truth.

Romina has a ton of great reporting. He had unprecedented access to Trump, mainly because Trump looks at The Apprentice as possibly a part of his legacy that he's more proud of than Trump.

the presidency. He had six different interviews with Donald Trump, including after January 6th. So he was really with him when he was in exile and their conversations are incredible. Definitely worth reading the book and we'll go into a lot of them on this show. Ramin also talks to the contestants and the producers.

Is there really a holy grail of oppo outtakes? What was Trump really saying when the cameras weren't rolling? We go into all of it and more. And then at the end, we talk about the veep stakes. We know that Trump will choose his running mate in the next few weeks ahead of the Republican National Convention. And Ramin thinks he'll assess the potential candidates for his running mate in the same way he looked at Apprentice contestants.

that he frequently chose the most vanilla contestant, the one who didn't upstage him. And speaking of Trump choosing a vanilla candidate to be his running mate, I've got a story on puck.news called The Doug Bug. It's about Doug Burgum. You probably haven't thought about him in a while. He was on stage for the Republican primary debates, but only for the first two. And he was off to the left or off to the right because he just wasn't polling enough to really be center stage.

And he had that scheme where if you donated a dollar to his campaign, he gave you a $20 gift card for Amazon because he needed more individual donations to even get on the stage. He's a rich guy. He's worth a few hundred million dollars so he could pull that off. But yeah, he was mainly complaining that he wasn't getting enough time to talk. And of course, he had his little pocket constitution. Well, it turns out that Doug Burgum, a guy who I saw as a potential secretary of energy, is now up at the top of the shortlist for vice president.

mainly because he's a lot like Pence in the sense that he is deferential to Trump, a bit submissive. He and his wife, Catherine, get along really well with Trump and Melania. Melania likes him. That goes a long way. He's like a Yellowstone character, governor of North Dakota, mild-mannered,

Trump always cares about central casting. He's looking for his Cary Grant. And Burgum kind of fits the bill. I mean, he's got this thick head of hair, Lincoln-esque looks, you could say. And Trump is sort of taken with him. I'm sure the fact that he's rich helps as well.

But at the same time, there are a few others who are still at the top of the list, like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. J.D. Vance is 39. He wrote The Hillbilly Elegy, and he's a senator from Ohio, and he's being pushed by the president's son, Don Jr. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio is being pushed by the president's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, a few of Trump's other aides like Kellyanne Conway. And they

sort of the younger next generation leaders of the Republican Party who would probably carry on the mantle, but that might not actually work in their favor since Trump really doesn't like people who upstage him. In fact, he told an advisor, who cares about legacy if you're dead? I know. Okay.

crazy. But if you want all the juicy details and more about what Trump is thinking behind the scenes at Mar-a-Lago, you should really sign up for Puck. Go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri. In my column, I even write about how he's been asking people, what type of jail do you think they'll send me to?

For what it's worth, Ellie Honig, our favorite legal eagle, does not think he'll be sent to prison. But still, it's interesting to hear what Trump is thinking and getting inside of his mind, which you will certainly get into in that column. Ramin, thanks so much for coming on the show. I

I loved your book. Read it in two days. It's a nonfiction fun summer read, weirdly. Lots of juicy anecdotes. I could see our listeners reading it at the beach, learning a lot about who could be our next president and our prior president and what led him to this moment. But the one thing I loved about the first page is that you dedicate the book to your dad, who you said is voting for Donald Trump. Yes. And he, so I read the dedication to him over the phone. The dedication is to my dad who is voting for him.

my dad initially was like, that's great. And then as it was closer to coming out, he's like, maybe you should just say to my dad, who's great. And I was like, no, I think we have to explain what's happening because I do want to, and I went into do this book with open eyes. I interviewed Donald Trump six times for the book. I tried to be as open-minded as possible, but there is millions of people who still love Donald Trump, right? And they still don't care what's happened to him legally. They don't care that he was convicted.

of felonies. They don't care that he is accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault. They still think that Donald Trump is a good leader, a good man, a family man, a smart man. And so I really did want to try to investigate why is that? And the answer that I came up with in this book is that it is because of reality TV. It's because of this image that he created with the help of Mark Burnett.

reinventing himself and creating this mirage that millions of people watch for 15 years on TV, watching The Apprentice and believing that Donald Trump was the man he played in the boardroom. So my dad is also voting for Trump, as in the past, loves Trump. He's always been a hardcore Republican, though. He was like listening to Hannity and Combs forever.

I don't know that my dad fell in love with Trump via The Apprentice. I grew up in the tri-state area also. So I think we already knew about Trump because of the tabloids and the buildings. And, you know, Trump was in Atlantic City. And so maybe we had a different exposure. But I agree with you that the rest of the world got exposure to Trump

through The Apprentice and he came off. And I actually, after I read your book, I watched the first episode of the first season because I just felt like I hadn't really remembered it and remembered how Trump came off. And you go into such detail about how he came up with the idea to say, you're fired. And they were like, okay, he's our guy. Because they originally wanted to use a rotating cast of entrepreneurs, you're right. But he created that moment and they were like, he's our guy. We can't really replace him.

It was going to be like The Voice because Mark Burnett, you know, in his other reality shows like Survivor, they change islands every season. And on The Voice, you know, it's Adam Levine and then it's Shakira and then it's Christina Aguilera. Like he mixes it up because he knows that audience habits are, you know, finicky and people will get bored. And so Mark Burnett...

I had an idea that every season there'd be a different mogul, but Donald Trump became so associated with the show and he was really the only person they brought in Martha Stewart. They tried to kind of wrangle it away from him and she failed badly at the show. Yeah. Too stiff. But I think the point, so your dad may not have loved him because of The Apprentice, but I think the character that he played, he realized that he was hitting a nerve and this brash character,

ridiculous, over-the-top character. Yes, Donald Trump has always been those things, but The Apprentice really cemented his mythology, his origin story, the way he interacts with people, the way he debates as a politician, the way he says rude, crazy things. He says what's on his mind.

He's not a regular politician. It also gave him exposure to like a national media, gets to go on Fox News every day and spout whatever he wants, Twitter. It made him more famous. It extended him beyond like a tabloid caricature and like kind of failing businessman that we all knew before.

into something way bigger. Much bigger. But I really appreciate you saying this is a fun beach read and it's a summer read because there have been so many Trump books and I know that and I know people's eyes kind of glaze over when they hear that, oh, there's another Trump book coming out. But what makes this different, really, it's...

origin story in his own words, in his own memory, in his own recollection. And it's a dual narrative because it's also a president in exile who is fuming and angry. We sat down together for the first time in May 2021. And so, and that's,

talked a number of times for the last two years. So it really is a portrait of Trump post-presidency that no one else has. It's funny that you said that, a president in exile, because that was my first question, was that what was Trump like after January 6th since you spent time with him? And then you were also with him during the Afghanistan withdrawal. I was. So we spent, we did three interview sessions that summer. The

the first one is, it was in May and I write in the book that Trump tower felt very much like gray gardens without the cats. Yes. I love that analogy. It was deserted. It was a little creepy, uh, very still, um,

There was hardly any security because no one in New York City or really anyone, no one knew that Donald Trump was here in the city. They assumed he was either in New Jersey or Mar-a-Lago. And he had a very bare bones staff, small group of people that he would vent at. He seemed to have a relatively open schedule. I read about how we were watching clips of The Apprentice one day and his tech support couldn't figure out how to sync my screen.

laptop to their screen because they didn't have Apple TV and Trump Tower because it didn't seem like they had any new technology. And, you know, they just extended the time. There were no other didn't seem like there were any other appointments on his calendar. But he was very deflated. It's interesting because a lot of presidents post-presidency start to look at life and their legacy and what they want to do next.

beyond the office. But for him, it was all about vendettas, how Hollywood betrayed him, how people didn't like him. And there was a lot going on in his head in terms of people living rent-free in his head and him being very upset at Deborah Messing, him being very upset at Lawrence O'Donnell, him being very upset at Omarosa. There was a long list of enemies that he had. And we went through the rotation of all these people that Jeff Zucker was one of them. And it was...

a very odd experience talking to him that summer. Yeah. And I remember you were saying that one of his handlers, Jason Miller was like,

listen, if you want to get him to talk about The Apprentice, do not bring any small talk up. Go straight into it or you're going to be on a winding path. You spent hours with him to the point where you were like, Mr. Trump, I have to leave. Like he just loved talking to you. Well, I would try to say to him, I just want to talk about The Apprentice because then he'd start talking about how in Arizona there's all these secret ballots or in Georgia there's all these secret ballots and talk about election law.

and all the different things that he always loves to talk about that we know have been debunked and aren't true. But Jason Miller did call me before my first interview with him. And he said that a lot of journalists struggle because they come in and they say, oh, have you seen the stock market? And then Donald Trump talks at them for a very long time about the stock market. And then their time's up. So they don't actually get to ask him questions. It's

really, really hard to interview Donald Trump because he doesn't listen and he doesn't stay on topic. You can't control it. You could spend hours talking to him and you don't get any information parsing out the truth and the facts. It can kind of turn into this wild. It's actually probably easier to write about him in print because you get to filter it all out.

Broadcast seems hard. Broadcast seems very, very hard because I read in the book, there's really no reasonable way you can interview him as a politician because he doesn't crack. He invents things. He creates alternate realities. Um,

And then even when you're talking to him, he'll say things like how Joan Rivers supported him and voted for him. And as I'm fact checking or going through the transcript, I realize, well, Joan Rivers had died in 2016. I actually wrote that down. There's no way that Joan Rivers could have voted for him. It's physically impossible. But he has so many stories and so many different things. And it's kind of like being in the eye of a storm where it's like swirling, swirling, swirling, swirling. And you really just try to...

keep things on track when you talk to him, but it's challenging.

Very challenging. Yeah. So he says Joan Rivers voted for him. You write this. Joan Rivers died in 2015. He talks to you during the Afghanistan withdrawal and he's acting like he's actually a part of it. Right. Or like he has some sort of power over what's going on. Isn't that the vibe you got while you were with him? It was. It was strange because his memory is foggy and he has he has a clearer memory of things that happened during the apprentice years than he does of what happened during the White House.

He was talking to me as if he were still president and he was receiving the intelligence briefings and he had to personally deal with Afghanistan himself.

but it was also confusing because we were on that day watching clips of the show together. So I would play a clip of him firing, you know, someone in Joan Rivers was, you know, Melissa Rivers was screaming at Joan Rivers because there was a very contentious episode. And then he talked about that and then he talked about Afghanistan and then he'd go back and forth. But, you know, it's part of the character he also plays. So I think that he, by pretending he had to do something with Afghanistan, I think it allowed him to sort of

feel like he was presidential again. Regain control. I love how he says he believes that deep down Taylor Swift supports him. Because how could a country music artist not support him? Then he goes, but Garth Brooks, do you believe he's a Democrat? I

But also, you know that Taylor Swift, the most famous musician and maybe person living right now, she's no longer a country star. She's a pop star and he's so fixated on fame. But he also just wants the support of famous people. He's upset that Bette Midler doesn't like him. He's upset that Debra Messing doesn't like him. He's very, very resentful of

that Hollywood isn't supportive of him. And for him, the most important thing is Hollywood. He's not as interested in DC. He's not as interested in governing. He wants the acceptance of famous people because fame is the most important thing to Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. There was a great line in there that I loved. He said, I wanted to be a movie maker. I didn't want to be in real estate. I mean, I think that tells you everything. And he learned a lot about

the business from Mark Burnett because Mark Burnett manufactured this image of him on reality TV. And they have a very complicated relationship in this book, which I write about. But he learned through Mark and Jeff Zucker what he needed to do to be famous. And that's why he's fixated on crowd sizes, on numbers, on ratings, on...

It's all through the apprentice. It's the training that he got to get renewed. You have to be very, very popular and have the biggest audience possible. I mean, it's network television. It doesn't get bigger than that. The audiences were insane. And he kept bringing that up to you as well. He kept trying to point to the Nielsen ratings, but he was not able to actually decipher them, which in fairness, it's not the easiest to decipher a Nielsen rating. But if you're obsessed with that,

It's the same sheet of paper that's been, it was both in his office and at Mar-a-Lago. He was hanging the variety from 2004 when The Apprentice was the biggest show on TV that week. So you would think that after all these years, he would have gotten that number right. Yeah. On page 191, you write that he admitted he lost the election. It like slipped out of his mouth. What was that like? It was interesting because when he said it,

My initial inclination and still now that I think back at it is that he does realize that he lost election. And again, his memory is foggy and he does have trouble in terms of chronology of recent events. But I do think that the election denials that he lost

is part of an act. It's part of a character that he plays in the same way that he learned how to play this tough guy in the boardroom by denying the election. He's able to be this character that creates confusion and takes away the legitimacy of what Joe Biden accomplished and how Joe Biden defeated him. And so it was it was in the context of him. He was very worked up about this

feud that he had with Geraldo Rivera and how Geraldo betrayed him when he was at Fox because he went on TV. He had a private conversation with Donald Trump on the phone shortly after the election and then went on TV and said the president will accept the results of the election. And so Donald felt very betrayed by that. And so he said, when I lost the election and then

caught himself and then spun it around and said, when people said I lost election, but he did admit it. And when it came out of his mouth, it did feel very honest and authentic. And I think, I think deep down, he knows that he lost, but he's playing this character, uh,

so that he can energize his base and get people worked up and upset that there was some injustice committed against him. Yeah, I often at times wonder if he actually even knows the difference between the lies and reality and like the character he's playing and what's real. Because people often just believe their own bullshit after a while, right? One of the executives I talked to, Jeff Gaspin, talked about, he brought up the example of Austin Butler when he played Elvis and how Austin Butler was,

then started sounding like Elvis and people can differentiate the two. And so he compared Trump as a character on The Apprentice to the real Trump and that that personality started to sift in his real life personality. And he stopped there stopped being a distinction between the two. And so to that point, yes, you're right. I do think there are times when he can't tell the difference. And there are also times when he and I were talking where he was conducting himself as if he should be on camera.

very dramatic, theatrical, saying things just for the sake of saying it. But I think, again, that's the training he received on being on reality TV, being miked for endless hours at a time and just being

that's now his default it's almost like he always thinks he's on tv it's like the truman show but it's the trump show and he's playing to the audience in this case the audience is the electorate the electorate but even if it was an audience of just me a journalist who he doesn't like the media but it was just me he was projecting and playing to an audience of one in the room in the same way that he would if there were cameras capturing him for an audience of millions it's now sort

sort of the personality that he has. He actually took on the persona and even in his business, in the way he handled his work and the way he presented himself, like he actually learned how to become better at presenting himself as a businessman through the job. On our first session together, he had a call that came in and he had to take it. And he was talking to someone who was supposedly a lawyer.

He was negotiating a deal in front of me, but it didn't make any sense to the point where I truly was started to wonder, is this all part? Cause we've heard stories about him pretending to be his own publicist where he used to call people up. And, but it, again, it felt like he was acting, he was acting out the part of the mogul. And when, when I did my reporting and went back, he wasn't so intimately involved in a lot of aspects of his business. Someone described him as kind of a figurehead of the Trump organization. So I,

He spent so much of his time on The Apprentice. It's all he had for many years. He was so devoted that he would befriend the contestants, hang out with them, invite them over to Trump Tower, give him his advice. Like when Tyra Banks does America's Next Top Model, she's not hanging out with the models behind the scenes on her evenings. But Donald Trump really, this became his entire life. He wanted to actually be the master to The Apprentice.

Yeah. Let's talk about the holy grail of oppo. And I mean, opposition, these off camera tapes that allegedly exist. Do you think that there is a tape of Trump saying the N word or derogatory comments about African-Americans? I know that every journalist has really tried to track this down. And I really did try to talk to various people. There are

small handful of producers who claim they've heard it, but none of them have been able to produce it. And Donald Trump actually, unprompted, brought it up in one of our conversations and said that if the tape existed where he said that, it would have come out by now. He was president of the United States for four years. Every investigative journalist tried to find it. He denied that there's some bunker where Mark Burnett's hiding all the audio footage from the show. Mark Burnett also denied that

you know, Trump ever said this on an audio recording. But what makes it hard to track down was that Donald Trump loved being on the show and he loved being in the boardroom. So what he'd do is he'd make them film him firing the contestants for hours at a time. First, it was like an hour, then it grew to two hours, then it grew to three or even sometimes four hours where he'd be interacting with the contestants because he loved to be off the cuff. And he thought, oh,

when he would have these unscripted moments and made for the best TV. It was a huge headache for his editors, but he really loved that. So I think one of the reasons why this hasn't gone away and we don't definitively know the answer is that there is so much audio footage of Donald Trump being mic'd for 14 seasons of The Apprentice. It's it's impossible to say that someone has sifted through all of that. But

But I do think that if it existed by now and people had heard it and it had been passed around, it would come out by now. But it's specifically about one of the contestants. So it wouldn't be that hard to go through that one season, right? And find the footage. And it was about season one, right? It was in season one, allegedly. And the circumstances have also slightly changed where the producer initially, I think, said that Trump was miked. And then in the retelling,

Now there's a different version where Trump may not have been miked, which may be the case. He may not have been miked, in which case the audio doesn't exist and it's someone's memory. But I do think if the audio existed by now, we would have heard it. And when you talk to producers, some of them actually still had footage. Like, did they even have the rights to hold on to that footage? Not really, right? When the Access Hollywood tape leaked, that's when Bill Prude, the producer, went on Twitter and said that there was much worse. And there were stories that...

this was going to come out. A lot of producers were talking to each other saying, this is about to come out. It exists. It's going to come out. And then later on Omarosa also claimed that she heard it at some point when she was promoting her book. But again, I do think if that many people heard this audio clip, that would mean that it was in possession of, in the hands of a number of people, in which case why hasn't it leaked to journalists yet? Like that doesn't, that seems a little suspicious that so many people have heard it and we haven't. The

gotten it. But that doesn't mean that Trump didn't necessarily say that. He may not have been mic'd at the time. You write about how he favored attractive women, and he may have crossed the line a few times in one point saying to one of the contestants, I'll show you my nine-inch power drill when they were in a Home Depot. That was in one of the boardrooms. And there was a story that he said that, again, the audio of that doesn't, no one knows if that audio exists.

But that was in the boardroom when he was kind of doing improv and he thought it was really funny. But the story that is in my book that actually takes up a significant chapter is Trump's obsession and fixation on a contestant named Jennifer Murphy, who was in season four.

who was a beauty pageant winner who actually Trump argued with Mark Burnett over whether or not to include her in the show. There was a period where the ratings were going down. They were trying to bring in contestants that had really strong credentials. And Donald Trump really liked this contestant. She thought she was maybe the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Brought her on the show, gave her special treatment and really want to fire her. And then invited her over to Trump Tower after she was fired to mentor her and kissed her in the elevator.

She says, looking back, she wasn't offended by it. She appreciated the attention from Trump. It gave her confidence. And then they continued for years having this weird flirtation and relationship where they would talk over the years. When I mentioned her name to Trump because he would tell her that she was his favorite contestant, Trump said that she was just very beautiful and he liked that. He also liked there was another contestant in season one who he also commented favorably.

frequently on her looks. Her name was Christy Frank and said that if he were to choose one of the contestants to marry, she would be the one that he would have married. - Why? Why would he have married her? - She thought that she was the most beautiful of all the contestants. And in fact, she was engaged at the time and she said it to her fiance.

So his fixation on looks, on beauty, on women, saying inappropriate things, creepy things. He was even creepy in terms of like describing Taylor Swift as beautiful in a string of consecutive sentences to me. That is always been part of the Trump experience.

psychology. That's always been a behavior that he's had. We've seen it, obviously seen a number of women come forward, feeling uncomfortable and the allegations that have come forward against him. But on the show, if you go back and trace what his relationship to women, he was incredibly inappropriate to women, but some of the women didn't mind it at the time. Again, it was also a different time when sometimes, you know, women liked the attention and they wanted to become famous and they thought being on The Apprentice was really,

I mean, she was already a beauty pageant contestant in one of his... And not to say that beauty pageant contestants are okay with unwanted advances, but she had created a relationship with him. They had traded cards and he was already kind of coming on to her in a creepy way at that point. Steve Forbes, he accused him in 2000s off camera of being too pro-life to win in the presidential election. I thought that was interesting since obviously we know that Trump was pro-choice for a long time, but...

It was kind of another one of those flashbacks to the hypocritical thing he said in the past and where he stands now. Yeah. One of the contestants observed him saying that to Steve Forbes. But it also shows that Trump will say the thing that he used to say to win. And he's very good at taking whatever persona he thinks the room that he's in wants to see.

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I want to go to the Veep race because everyone says whenever Trump has some sort of choice and he's got maybe it's an aide or, you know, vice president, secretary of state, it's like the apprentice all over again. He lines them all up and he makes them do this dance and it's embarrassing. And one who shows the most fealty to him wins. You wrote that Bill Rancic in season one, the winner.

and Kelly Perdue in season two, who also won, were chosen because they were vanilla characters and they trailed behind Trump. Do you think that's how he'll pick his VP this time? Absolutely. He wants someone that's a yes man or yes woman. He doesn't want to be challenged. He doesn't want to be complimented. He doesn't want to have someone who...

makes up for the deficiencies that he has or that could actually lead in the event in which Donald Trump cannot serve as president of the United States. He's not interested in any of those things. And in every chance that he had to select a winner, he the first two winners, he looked back on very fondly because they weren't confrontational. They did whatever Donald Trump wanted. They were great spokespeople. They spoke highly, like highly of him for years. Even Bill Rancic now, all these years later, he's

Hasn't said anything negative about Donald Trump, still acts as if this show was a wonderful thing and that Donald Trump was a great boss. I wrote in my column that just came out on Thursday about the Veep race and how it's like sort of changed in a way that I didn't expect.

in the sense that Doug Burgum has suddenly risen to the top of the ranks with J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. And a big part of it is he's got this like Pence-like submission and he, you know, praises Trump, but he's also a centimillionaire. And he's just like a very kind of vanilla guy. Like if he wasn't vice president, he could be

secretary of energy. And it just feels like another Pence and like he'll go any, any praises Trump and he goes on TV and he sports him and he does all the things that the others will do. But,

Most notably, like he does not seem like the type of politician that will go on to lead the party after Trump because Trump can only serve one term. And I was asking some of the aides about it. And Trump has said in the past, who cares about legacy when you're dead? So clearly he's not thinking about setting up the party and creating like a new movement through whoever he picks. Picking someone like J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, they're younger, they're more vibrant. They might lead the Republican Party later.

forward, but that could be the biggest demerit for them. Absolutely. He doesn't want youth. He wants to seem like the younger person probably on the ticket. And I think that he also has included maybe Marco Rubio on the ticket in the same way that he would keep Gary Busey stringing him along on The Apprentice for the ratings. I think he really likes to tease our expectations, same way that he took a photo with Mitt Romney back in 2016 to make people think, oh, he might be considering him just to...

create drama, stir drama. It's good for ratings to make people think this feud that he once had is now being patched up. But I think given his insecurity about loyalty and his need to have someone be completely in the shadows and a clear number two, a distant number two, I don't see a scenario in which he will select Marco Rubio just based on everything I've learned about him and the time that we've spent together. But I really think secretly, I mean, the person he really would want to be VP would be Ivanka. Yeah.

And he is an interest in his legacy because... And he thinks his legacy is The Apprentice. That is more important to him than...

anything he accomplished in the White House, clearly based on our time together. And that is why he gave me more time than any journalist since he left the White House. He really wanted to talk about how he made this great TV show. Yeah. And Ivanka, as I reported, is thinking about coming back into the fold as she sees her father getting closer and closer to the White House. And it looks like he's got a decent chance. But I agree. I mean, he's keeping everyone on their toes. It also helps

Because he gets them all on The Apprentice working for him, doing projects for him. So these guys are instead mining their donor bases, you know, telling them to donate to Donald Trump. It'll help them get on the ticket. They're working as surrogates. They're out there hustling for Trump, going to fundraisers. They really are the contestants in this fight.

donor game. And I think you're right. Having a future is probably a demerit for Trump at this point in the game, but we'll see what happens. He wants it to just be the Trump show. He's not interested in any and compete with him for the spotlight. Right. Which is why I think you land at Doug Burgum. But I have heard that like there are a lot of forces inside pushing for JD Vance and Marco Rubio, but we shall see. I also think

Thought it was interesting. You wrote that he kept the boardroom intact while he was campaigning in 2016, ready to go back to the show. You also write that Mark Burnett tried to convince him not to run in 2016 because they actually really wanted him to continue to host the show. They did because nobody at NBC actually thought that he was going to end up becoming president of the United States.

And so one of the things in this book that we have is a real tick tock of what happened, where he was interested in running. He initially wanted to run in 2012 to run against Obama. And he was talked out of it by Burnett then at the time. And then when he decided in 2016 that he was really going to do it.

Trump and I went through the chronology, the timeline. I talked to other sources who were around him at that time to piece together what exactly happened. And I don't think we knew in this great detail what was happening behind the scenes, but he was essentially bored with The Apprentice at that time because the ratings were so bad. It was very hard for him to spin the show as a success. And when

the Drudge Report started linking to polls that showed him as a front runner. It was very exciting for him. He was always driven by the numbers. And so as the ratings slumped, the poll numbers really were a shiny new object that he could fixate on without really processing what exactly being president of the United States would mean to his life, to his family, and to his day-to-day because he's not actually interested in governing or legislative processes. But he was excited by the poll numbers. It was really happy. It was a good thing for him to be

polls. And that's why he really decided to throw his hat in the ring. He had been flirting with running for president since the 80s. He wanted to run on the reform party, but he realized he couldn't win as a third party candidate. He's always looked at himself in the mirror and seen a president. And you're right. I mean, he's always had pollsters around him. He considered running against Andrew Cuomo for governor at one point. Do you believe he never would have run for president if not for The Apprentice? I do believe that he would not have run.

Because I don't think his polling would be as strong as it was. I don't think his national recognition would have been the same, the strong as it was. I know he had the art of the deal. I know he did cameos in Home Alone 2. Sex in the City. Don't forget about that. Pizza Hut. Macy's. You forget. He was everywhere. It was blink and you would miss him. He wasn't the star of any of these programs.

He wasn't or movies or shows. He was a background cameo that was kind of this architecture of New York that people were vaguely familiar with in middle America, but they didn't really know that much about him. Eric Trump also says that the show really was the blueprint for the campaign. It taught the entire family how to speak in front of the media, what fame meant, how to present their stories, how to be interesting and funny in a boardroom, how to be dramatic when they needed to be dramatic. It was, it was,

what they learned on the show that they took into the campaign with them. So I don't think that Donald Trump would have run for president if it wasn't for The Apprentice. Absolutely not. And he even admits that to me in one of our conversations that we had. Okay. This was really interesting. Love the book. Everyone should go out and get it. But one last question. If you were going to pick from the Veep

apprentices that are out there right now? Who do you think? I know you said Ivanka, but that's likely not going to happen. But who of the names that you have heard do you think will Trump pick as his vice president? You know, it's it's really tough because there's no one that I see right now that I think

they're going to get along and it's going to be great. And I think part of that is that I've spent so much time with Trump that I see that he is very insecure and he feels the need for so much affirmation. So I do think he's going to end up with the candidate who makes him feel the best, even though he is afraid of youth and he doesn't want to embrace youth. I also could see a scenario where he goes with JD Vance because I don't think he's, he,

is threatened by J.D. Vance. I don't think he thinks that J.D. Vance's star power would ever eclipse his own, and he could conceive of him as a sidekick and be comfortable with that. But I think it'll just be a matter of who doesn't undermine Trump or have any potential to eclipse him in any shape or form.

Yeah. The fact that he called Trump America's Hitler probably is going to come back to bite him. Did take him six weeks to endorse J.D. Vance and his son got involved toward the end to try to convince him. And this was in the Ohio Senate race. I've also heard like Doug Bergen, the fact that he maybe...

richer or more liquid than Trump might make him feel insecure. But there's no one that's really like an obvious match for him right now. And that's why I kind of wonder if there's a secret candidate that will emerge somehow that we don't know about. Bill Hagerty. That's the one I was told was a dark horse. Look out for Bill Hagerty from like deep inside the inner layer. He likes nothing more than keeping everyone guessing and then

you know, suddenly going with something that no one saw coming. So, but there's no one right now that really fits the mold of what he wants, which is someone who is central casting, camera ready, looks the job of the vice president, but then will hide in the shadows. Where's my Cary Grant, right? That's what he says when he's looking for his vice president. Where's his Bill Rancic? That's really, that's the answer. It's like, who is the Bill Rancic of the group? And there isn't really anyone at this time. I do wonder if he's going to be threatened by youth though.

He's interested in central casting. So remember in season one, he did have Carolyn because he knew he needed a younger woman next to him on the boardroom. So he is threatened by it. But if it's someone who he feels comfortable with, I think he'd go with it. He's probably thinking it all through right now. I mean, he did change his mind three times in 2016. It was Newt Gingrich and maybe Chris Christie.

And then it ended up being Mike Pence. But we knew it was Mike Pence in advance. Like there was a few weeks before where it was like pretty much known because he was visiting him again. Pence, some guy who wasn't going to win reelection in Indiana. And he ends up becoming the vice president. He was talked into Pence, right? Because he thought he needed the evangelical vote. Yeah. And that is also an interesting connection between Mark Burnett and Trump in that Mark Burnett has remade himself as an evangelical figure that is very close to

supposedly to, you know, religion and programming, religious, doing all this religious programming. And so I think this time he's not going to be talked into a VP candidate. I love how the through line in your story is Mark Burnett evading you at all costs. Sundance, you get him into a party and he won't even talk to you. Then it's like, can he won't talk to you? He's just like,

you text him. He's like, sorry, I'm with my family. He's just totally blowing you off at all costs, which I mean, I think it tells you a lot. He's still very close to Trump and wants to stay in Trump's good graces, but he also knows the second he starts talking about Trump, people in Hollywood don't like that. So he's trying to,

basically stay in where he's at in Hollywood, although he's not really doing anything right now in Hollywood. So he's trying to appease Hollywood and Trump at the same time, which is why he isn't public. That's the reason that why Mark Burnett isn't public, but he's also really helping Trump behind the scenes whenever he can. Although he did come out against Trump in 2016. And then I love how you write. It's like the last paragraph, basically, of the book. Burnett calls Trump to congratulate him on winning the presidency. And he says, hi, buddy.

And Trump responds, that's Mr. President. Don't call me buddy. That says it all, right? Yep. Fascinating. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Ramin. I'd love to have you back on. We can maybe digest the VP pick and size them up as contestants. You certainly piqued my interest again in The Apprentice and what it all means. So yeah, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Really love talking to you.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this show, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, the best and the brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20. I'll be back on Thursday.