From 2004 to 2015, Trump was the star and executive producer (and, coincidentally, majority owner) of a reality show on NBC called The Apprentice, whose episodes feature a dozen businesspeople competing to be hired for a one-year contract to manage either one of Trump's un-reality real-estate companies or his fantasy football team in the defunct U.S. Football League. Each show ends with Trump uttering his signature phrase, "You're fired," to one of the competitors, who of course had not yet been hired.

Camera crews follow the competitors as they wait in line to get building permits, insult the slum-dwellers who will be displaced by the proposed luxury condominiums, and bark orders to construction crews. In the final segments of the episode, viewers see into the board room and get an imitation glimpse of the skullduggery with which real corporations make their most important personnel decisions. Losers have to sleep in tents pitched out behind Trump's Servants' Residence. During the seventh season only, losers had to clean Trump's toilet with a toothbrush, which they often had to go on to employ in its more typical use.

Spin-offs

It is a tenet of American business to slap the name of any good product onto several other products of lower quality. Thus, in 2005, Trump created the spin-off series The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. He hired self-made billionaire and self-made jailbird Stewart to interview "candidates" who would assist her in everything from laundering intimate apparel to laundering money. Trump and Stewart had a falling-out during the year, based on Nielsen ratings and on Stewart's notorious arrest and trial, in which clips from the spin-off were key pieces of evidence, and the show was not renewed. Stewart, however, has undergone the most spectacular rehabilitation of any person outside Communist China and has returned to chair Omnimedia.

In 2007, the series was renewed for a seventh season, but retitled The Celebrity Apprentice. Instead of competent individuals vying for a job in a nonexistent organization, stage actors competed to win money for charity. This was the key to the rise in influence in America of Piers Morgan, who won the initial series by tapping his competitors' cell phones. Morgan distinguished himself as the most competent in a competition where no competence was necessary, and was thus a lock to go on to anchor the CBS Evening News.

In 2010, a spin-off entitled Donald J. Trump Presents The Ultimate Merger gave "candidates" the chance to become Trump's newest trophy wife. Following in the path of industry giants Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who have jumped at the chance for broadcasting outlets with potentially higher audiences than the gigantic U.S. television networks, Trump aired the new spin-off on a nascent webcast outlet called The Spunk Channel. Thankfully, the individual "competitions" are shown outside the "family viewing hour."