I never watched the show, but staff from The Apprentice say it took a lot to make Don the Con into executive material.
“He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the show, said, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”
He never read anything for the show, either. He didn’t know the script for the episode, stumbled over his words, and frequently made mistakes that sent the producers scrambling. Sounds depressingly familiar.
Trump often was unprepared for the “board room” sessions and fired people “on a whim.” That sometimes meant he got rid of people who had done a good job in the challenge, so editors would go back and “reverse engineer” the episode.
They say in a democracy, you get the government you deserve, but I cannot fathom how anyone deserves this.