Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Setoodeh review - how Donald Trump’s big break changed America

Every time someone complains that our new prime minister is boring, I rue the day that politics became a performing art. The degradation began, as the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh relates, when Donald Trump was catapulted into power by The Apprentice, a reality/talent/gameshow over which he presided on NBC from 2004 until 2017. Before this, Trump was best known as a loud-mouthed, laughable vulgarian, a fixture in tabloid gossip columns whose business career mostly consisted of bankruptcies. The British producer Mark Burnett endowed him with a new persona as a charismatic leader, a "godlike character" worshipped by teams of ruthless young entrepreneurs who fought for the chance to serve as apprentices in his property company. It was in this phoney guise that Trump won the election in 2016; installed in Washington, he nationalised the show's cut-throat scenario by stoking social and ideological feuds, then sat back to enjoy the mayhem that ensued.

Trump's rabid animosity energised The Apprentice. The show's ethos was supposedly aspirational, but success proved less telegenic than the gloating spectacle of failure: at the climax of every episode Trump eliminated losers by abusively booming: "You're fired!" This catchphrase became a clarion call. "When I said it," he boasts to Setoodeh, "the whole building shook. The place just reverberated. People were screaming, they went crazy." Was their reaction ecstasy or hysterical alarm? Either way, they heard a megaphonic deity trumpeting doom.

As president, Trump shrank from recreating that eschatological reign of terror. Afraid of real-life confrontations, he sacked chiefs of staff and cabinet members remotely, in small-voiced tweets, not thundering public denunciations. But in interviews with Setoodeh after he was voted out of office in 2020, this hunched, dejected "shadow of a famous man" physically bulks up again as he recalls a time when he was judge, jury and executioner. Play-acting authority on television was his forte; by contrast, running the country turned out to be both a chore and a bore.

On The Apprentice, as in the White House, Trump disdained preparation and refused to read briefs, "purely focused on maximising his screen time". The only protege to whom he paid attention was the back-stabbing diva Omarosa Manigault Newman, who saw herself as a female Trump. He subsequently eased her into a job at the White House, where what Setoodeh calls her "weaponised incompetence" soon caused her to be marched off the premises in disgrace. Although she then underwent a "total Trump detox", he still speaks of Manigault Newman admiringly. He tells Setoodeh that in her first season on the show "she was evil", which from him is high praise, then adds that the next year "she tried to be evil - and when you try it doesn't work". It's a revealingly self-reflexive remark: is Trump himself authentically malign, or just pretending to be? He probably doesn't know. As one would-be apprentice puts it, "Trump conducts himself like an actor playing Trump"; to further complicate matters, he plays the part badly.

Listening as he rants and rambles, Setoodeh likens him to "a novelty talking Trump doll, its battery on the fritz". But that battery has recently been recharged: he now resembles a dummy perched on a ventriloquist's knee, compliantly voicing the diatribes of the homegrown fascists who are his handlers. He has also revived the demeaningly competitive format of the show that launched him, and at a rally this July he claimed to be remaking The Apprentice by goading JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott to outdo one another in sycophancy as they vied to become his vice-presidential running mate.

The framing conceit of Setoodeh's book comes from Alice in Wonderland. Trump, he argues, "took America through the looking glass" and warped government into nonsensical farce. Other literary antecedents cast darker shadows. Burnett "envisioned a Lord of the Flies society" and devised initiatic trials as exercises in psychological torture. Auditions even included invasive STD tests. One male competitor shudders as he describes "a funnel that they stuck in there"; scraping his urethra, it extracted a sample that somehow testified to his aptitude for a business career. The ritualised firings were brutal, "carried out like public floggings".

The show's title had an equally sinister provenance. Burnett chose it as a homage to The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Goethe's ballad about a trainee magus who runs amok with his master's spells. In the poem, acted out by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's Fantasia, the absent sorcerer returns to chasten the apprentice and immobilise all those strutting broomsticks and sloshing pails of water. Trump's mischief-making, however, has continued unchecked, and his current wheeze is to pretend that the burgeoning crowds at Kamala Harris's rallies are conjured up by AI, like a digital version of Mickey Mouse's phantasmagoric broomsticks.

Setoodeh - whose parents emigrated from Iran in the 1970s to live the American dream - seems so resigned to Trump's victory in November that he raises a white flag in the book's dedication. Choking on the fatal name in disgust or dismay, he offers it "To my dad, who is voting for him". Sticking to pronouns, let's hope that more Americans vote for her.