In June, Sarah Ellison, writing for Vanity Fair, posited that people around Donald Trump were thinking of using the massive number of Trump supporters to launch a new media platform and cable channel, adding that Trump himself was considering creating his own media business. She wrote that he had talked about launching a “mini-media conglomerate” with his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns The New York Observer.
Ellison quoted a source who was privy to the workings of the Trump campaign who said Trump’s rationale was “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.”
Within the article was a reference to Trump’s irritation at creating revenue for media organizations while he didn’t get a cut, and most provocatively, a story about how Trump and Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, had a conversation in 2011 in which they discussed the possibility of Trump continuing to star in The Apprentice even if he ran for the presidency and won.
The idea Ellison reported went largely unnoticed, as it seemed so preposterous. But last week Ellison appeared at WNYC on The Takeaway and doubled down that Trump might well parlay a successful run for the presidency into a renewal of his role on The Apprentice.
Ellison stated of Trump’s desire to form his own network:
There have been discussions about this. So it’s not just something that we have all been thinking about in the media … what struck me when I was doing the reporting the first time around was they talked about the electorate as if it was an audience. And I think that is the main takeaway here, is that Trump doesn’t actually distinguish between what an audience would be that you could actually monetize, and what the political electorate is …
“We really would be living in a sort of Truman Show reality.”
Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Sarah Ellison
When Ellison was asked if the seemingly fantastical supposition that Trump would actually film The Apprentice from the White House had been seriously considered, especially because he has now hired Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, as his campaign chairman, a man who had no experience running a political campaign but knew media well, she answered:
The idea was that you couldn’t do it during the campaign because of the equal time laws, but once you were in the White House, it’s a possibility. You could certainly do it from there. So then we really would be living in a sort of Truman Show reality.
The Apprentice and its spin-off The Celebrity Apprentice have appeared on NBC since 2004; Trump served as the host from 2004-2007.