Once upon a time, Donald Trump’s talents as a TV personality and pitchman were obvious to everyone—most of all himself.
When he launched his 2016 presidential run, millions of Americans knew him best not from his bankrupt casinos or the gossip pages of the New York Post but as the swaggering host of NBC’s The Apprentice, in which aspiring entrepreneurs competed for a full-time job in his real estate empire.
Trump routinely overstated the primetime dominance of The Apprentice, which was a breakout hit in its debut 2003–2004 season but saw its ratings steadily decline over subsequent years. Nonetheless, his rise as a candidate, propelled by his willingness to say anything to stay in the news cycle, seemed to affirm his on-camera star quality (even if it was actually people behind the scenes of The Apprentice who had edited his unscripted and less-than-coherent bluster to make him sound like a straight-talking businessman).
But where is Trump’s TV firepower today? His latest press secretary, Katie Zacharia, lasted a mere five days in the job, ousted following a disastrous on-camera performance at her first briefing just weeks before crucial midterm elections. Trump’s own media appearances are unhinged and embarrassing even by his standards; when he’s not falling asleep at events or in meetings, he’s claiming that NATO “gave” Greenland to the US and telling rallygoers about how he checked out Senator Jon Husted’s ass.
During Trump’s second term, his administration has done what it can to circumvent existing media and bring its messaging directly to voters with broadcast content that resembles familiar TV formats. It’s not breaking through at all.
On Tuesday, for example, the US Small Business Administration streamed an hour-long special called the Million Dollar Pitch Competition. The premise was that five business owners would appear before three celebrity judges (property investor Grant Cardone, rapper Nicki Minaj, and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, whose credentials as a member of Elon Musk’s DOGE were not mentioned) to vie for the biggest chunk of a $1 million cash prize supplied by Clover Network, a fintech company that provides point-of-sale platforms.
While the show, hosted by actor Dean Cain, was styled as something like a hybrid of Shark Tank and American Idol, it amounted to an extraordinarily dull attempt to prove that the Trump administration is bringing factory jobs back to the US. For some reason, it featured a short video in which Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, talked to an animated strand of DNA, because “America’s DNA is small business.” The judges focused more on how animated the presenters were than the economic fundamentals of their pitch. When Marshall Sasse, the owner and CEO of a pressure valve company based in Wyoming, delivered a solid but subdued presentation, Minaj asked if he had access to any “cowgirls” who could’ve added “more punch to the pitch.”
While Trump himself was not on hand for the pitches, the show featured brief segments in which participants met with Trump in the Oval Office. When the judges asked the president for advice on picking a winner, Trump replied, “You know, it’s interesting, because with The Apprentice, I had a very good term that I used: ‘You’re fired.’”