You don't touch the hand. That is one of the first things you learn if you endeavor to learn anything about Donald Trump. Despite his reputation as America's most public--and publicized--billionaire, the germ-phobic Trump hates to shake hands. So I am taken aback when, in the reception room of his Trump Tower office, he proffers his mitt. "You look like a clean guy," he says. (Little does he know I have a 2-year-old at home sneezing up a day-care center's worth of cold viruses. Sorry, Donald!)
This seems like a different man from the real estate and casino tycoon who tried to avoid the "barbaric" flesh-on-flesh greeting even when in 2000 he considered a Reform Party run for President. But that was just politics. Today he has a reality-TV show to promote, a show that--like his luxury high-rises encrusted in marble and gilt and christened with big gold Ts--he promises will be bigger and badder, brassier yet classier, altogether Donald Trumpier, than anything else out there. In The Apprentice (NBC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.; premieres Thursday, Jan. 8, 8:30 p.m. E.T.), 16 aspiring businesspeople arrive in Manhattan to compete in teams (men vs. women) for the chance to become Trump's protege at a salary of $250,000. Each week, the teams complete a challenge (from selling lemonade on the street to designing an ad campaign). Trump "fires" one member of the losing team.
Sixteen contestants? Two teams? Cut-throat competition? On an island? Any resemblance to Survivor is intentional. The Apprentice is produced by Survivor's Mark Burnett, who met Trump in 2002 when he leased Central Park's skating rink from Trump for the show's live finale. "He told me all the right things," says Trump--among them, that the tycoon had been Burnett's idol ever since Burnett read Trump's The Art of the Deal when the then aspiring producer was selling T shirts in Venice Beach, Calif.
Burnett's fandom is apt. As much salesman as entertainer, he turned reality-TV product placements into an art form (there are, he says, some 40 in The Apprentice). At heart, The Apprentice is a love letter from Burnett--a naturalized American from Britain--to Yankee capitalism. "The whole world takes America's charity," he says, "and that money is created through entrepreneurs." Survivor, with its tension between group effort and look-out-for-number-onemanship, has always been a metaphor for the corporate jungle. The Apprentice uses the business world as a metaphor for that metaphor. (Lest anyone miss the comparison, Trump says ad nauseam on the show and in our interview that New York City is "the real jungle.")