Several minutes into Donald Trump’s dark Madison Square Garden rally speech on Sunday, the former president fired up his MAGA loyalists with the signature phrase from his NBC reality series The Apprentice. “Next Tuesday, you have to stand up and you have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve done a terrible job,” Trump declared. “Kamala, you’re fired!” The crowd’s thunderous response was yet another reminder that The Apprentice remains central to Trump’s political appeal.
For former NBC chief marketing officer John Miller, this is a source of deep shame. His department created the advertorial myth of Trump’s business prowess and promoted it to millions of Americans. The truth was that Trump went through multiple bankruptcies despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of his father’s money. Miller believes that without The Apprentice, Trump would never have been in a position to run for president. “He didn’t have a real company. 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,” Miller told me. “People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”
The specter of a second Trump administration motivated Miller to speak out. He wrote an op-ed for US News and World Report published on October 16, titled “We Created a Monster,” that apologized for his role in turning Trump into a reality TV star. With a week to go before the election, I spoke to Miller about the 14 years he spent working with Trump on The Apprentice, why he thinks Trump is a lying racist, and what he sees as the danger of a second Trump term. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Vanity Fair: Let’s start out talking about how you marketed The Apprentice.
John Miller: Initially, we leaned into the idea that it was a show from Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. But when we saw some early takes, we realized Trump was going to be a big character. So we created the title sequence with the theme music of the show, which was For the Love of Money by the O’Jays. We shot the promos with Trump in his limousine, in his helicopter, in his jet, and at Trump Tower. We created the sense of an American royalty. We kept pounding that message over and over again. I called it “ruthless consistency.”
So you sold a phony image of him as a successful businessman?
Yeah. Trump made Mark Burnett rent two floors in the Trump Tower. One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower. So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist. And then another part of that floor was the boardroom that was entirely created to make it look like it was a big, important boardroom. Because Trump’s real boardroom was shabby. You would never think of it as a big-time businessman’s boardroom.
Why did you decide to speak out now?
When I retired in 2022, I started writing a book called How I Ruined American Culture. And at a certain point, it was clear I wasn’t going to get the book done before the election. So it wasn’t until two weeks ago that I said, I have to get part of the story out, and if it kills the book, so be it. What if my little story could mean the difference of a tenth of a rating point in three battleground states that could win the election for Harris?
