Tag Archives: "The Apprentice"

Who Would Give This Guy a Dime, Much Less $500 Million?

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High up among the questions I’d like answered about this era is how and why so many people seized on Donald Trump as The Man with the Answer? As the guy who could get “it” done? Was it really because in their minds he already got it done? As the wildly successful and glamorous businessman, like the one he played on TV?

Was it really that simple (minded)?

In a culture that regards fame as an unalloyed virtue and keeps score based on the number of gold-plated toilets seen in your publicity photos, TV-created Trump and his repeated claims that, “I’m really, really rich” seem to have played like fentanyl-laced salted caramel candy to a certain type of brain configuration.

I believe there’s testing to prove that.

But if that’s true, what do those same people think now as they watch him flounder and squeal and rant trying to cover the half billion dollar tab on his New York fraud conviction?

Yes, yes, it’s all “the Deep State picking on him” for no reason at all other than they hate freedom. But it’s just a bond. He gets the money back if he wins his latest of hundreds of time-sucking appeals. Are any of his adoring mob asking themselves, “Why doesn’t he just write a check?”

I’m absolutely certain even Trump TV hosts and pundits on Fox and NewsMax have reported his inability to convince any bank or insurance company to give him a loan. So the “money problem” is “out there”, as the kids like to say.

As of this morning Team Trump is asking the judge (uh, excuse me, “liberal, biased New York judge”) to allow him — the “really, really rich guy” with the gold-plated toilets — to pay just 20% of his tab, much like a court would allow you or me to cough up $20 to cover a $100 parking ticket.

Maybe some of the folks who confused the opening credit sequence of “The Apprentice” with reality are wondering, “Why didn’t he set aside some dough just in case he lost — at the hands of that biased, uppity, colored babe?” Or maybe take out a revolving line of credit on one of those big New York ofice buildings he says are worth billions?

Most likely the gullible fans of famous and “really, really rich” aren’t wondering much at all. This is all just another liberal attack on the “one true real American.” A tycoon who is again turning to them and pleading for their money to save his ass. Not cash for bogus college courses, knock off vodka, tough steaks or gold-plated sneakers, but to cover his legal bills, “Right now … before Monday! Before thewy get their filthy hands on Trump Tower and those toilets.”

Why anyone making south of $100k a year (and much less) would send a “really, really rich” billionaire money for anything boggles my mind. But Trump’s celebrity-struck masses have and still are, although less and less as time (and repeated appeals for more) have gone on. I mean, they gave him over $200 million to fight the “rigged election” almost all of which he pocketed in (another) naked fraud that he is not being prosecuted for by the Deep State. But they Belivers gave it and few if any complained about getting ripped off.

That PAC, his Save America gimmick, is still up and running, and he now has full control of the Republican National Committee’s fund-raising as well as his own Trump 2024 campaign income. All of money sucked in by all three could … could … go to his legal bills and not to getting him or any other Republican elected. Does the Trump herd understand that? Or care?

If I were a betting man, based on Trump’s fifty-plus years of marketing himself as vastly richer than he really is and evading America’s sclerotic legal system all along the way, I’d say he’ll skate on this one, too. Either the system will give him some pennies-on-the-dollar relief, or he’ll suddenly come in to a windfall from an undisclosed benefactor.

He may not like the look of (yet another) bankruptcy, but there’s no way he says “No” if a Russian oligarch or Saudi prince bails him out … on the down low, of course. No names on anything. Just a gift out of left field to a “friend”. A gift to a friend … with an “understanding.”

(The fine point being, as many others have pointed out, a guy desperate for money is the classic mark to be converted to an intelligence asset. Or, put simply, money from Russia makes Trump Russia’s man, even more than he already has been. And that all the while he is legally entitled to regular top security briefings as the presumptive Republican candidate. Jesus christ … ).

The mentality of the average fame-struck Trump idolator would have a much harder time with bankruptcy than a half billion dollar “gift” from an undisclosed, mysterious source. Bankruptcy looks so, mm, “shabby”. So much like drunken cousin Ted after buying that $80,000 pickup. But hundreds of millions from some unnamed source would be to them just further proof that “he’s a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy” … even if the guy in question is currently slaughtering Ukrainians by the hundreds and/or chopping up up newspaper columnists.

But “The Apprentice’s” producers never showed them any of that.

“The Golden Bachelor” Meets Orange Jesus.

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How to watch 'The Golden Bachelor' premiere — now streaming

In a previous life I wrote about television for a local newspaper. A recurring source of conflict with my supervisors was so-called “reality TV” which had recently, um, blossomed, across all the networks. Being a cranky, disputatious bastard I thought the stuff was junk, plainly stage-managed and therefore worthy of derisive coverage, if any at all. The bosses thought differently. They loved it. And they were convinced “our readers” as they called them, loved it too. Especially the dating shows, and they resented my resistance to succumbing to abject fandom.

I mention this because of last night’s the much-touted finale of “The Golden Bachelor”, a variation on the usual hunky/sexy twenty-somethings, in which viewers are presented hunky/sexy seventy-somethings cooing and trilling in hot tubs in search of, you know, real true love. Ratings for the variant have been through the roof, so we can expect a lot more of what this is all about.

This morning’s Star Tribune features what looks like the eighth update on “The Golden Bachelor” and its Minnesota bachelorette, the [correction: ex-wife] of a well-known local restaurateur. The story gives all-in, misty-eyed fans everything they want. The fashion choices, the heart break, a touch of recrimination. So much, you know, reality.

Everythihg real except the reality part, as reported in excruciating detail by the show biz trade paper, The Hollywood Reporter, the day before. That piece essentially vivisected the hunky golden widower bachelor, revealing him to be, while still hunky and dreamy, quite a bit the fraud, at least compared to how he was being packaged and sold on TV, and a bit of cad, as well.

Some key bits from that (actual) reporting:

“The idea that this guileless man was reawakening before our eyes to contemporary life — ‘I mean, I haven’t dated in 45 years’, he told Entertainment Tonight — made him a hugely compelling character. He seemed so wholesome and almost preacherly that, on The Daily Show, comedian Lewis Black joked, ‘This guy is like if the word ‘Gee Willikers’ became a person’. But even in this Golden variation, this is, at bottom, a reality show, a genre mostly known for its frequent disconnection with reality.”

And … “The Hollywood Reporter has discovered several inconsistencies regarding both his work history and recent romantic entanglements that contradict the received narrative.  Whether [the producers] never learned about these discrepancies or ignored them to sell a buffed-up, shinier storyline for greater impact, producers presented an incomplete and misleading image of [bachelor Gerry] Turner, which the bachelor helped perpetuate in personal remarks.

“He’s identified in chyrons throughout the show as a ‘retired restaurateur’, which is a fancy way to say he owns or owned a restaurant, with all of its attendant fun and glamour. But according to his profile on LinkedIn, Gerry last owned a restaurant in 1985, when he sold his Mr. Quick hamburger drive-in franchise in Iowa, where he’d worked his way up from high school.”

And … ” … he would come to know a woman (we’ll call her Carolyn) with whom he would go on to have a nearly three-year relationship, beginning innocently enough a month after his wife’s death.”

And … ” … his amorous activity certainly didn’t align with how he regularly yanked viewers’ heartstrings with on-air announcements about his lack of a love life since his wife died.”

And … ” … [a friend of the girlfriend] recalled watching the show and hearing Gerry say that line about not having been kissed in six years. ‘And I’m like, what? He’s got to know that people are paying attention to this show. I’m just flabbergasted’. (ABC and Turner declined to comment for this article.) At first, Carolyn [the girlfriend] tried to laugh it off. But then The Golden Bachelor became a ratings bonanza. The show was suddenly the talk of pop culture, considered a breakthrough for its positive portrayal of sexually active seniors. It bothered Carolyn that her ex was foisting lines and moves on the bachelorettes that he had used to seduce her.”

The story goes on to talk about the hunk finally talked Carolyn into quitting her job and moving five hous away from her home to his lake house, only to then present her with half the tab for his place’s monthly expenses, telling her he wasn’t going to take her to his high school reunion because she’d gained weight and then soon after that telling she had to be out by the first of the year, and making her stay at hotel the last two weeks before she moved.

My god, what a smoothy! What a heart throb! What woman’s heart wouldn’t go pitter patter for a real loving hunk like that?

Anyway, you can read the whole story, none … none … of which was mentioned in the Strib’s coverage. And maybe … perhaps … you and I and mainstream editors who should know better can reflect on how easy and irresponsible it is to give gullible audiences the story they want to believe as opposed to a story that is believable.

This though, being a blog for political ranting and raving, allow me to point out the stark parallels to the low information, gullible audiences who were sold Donald Trump as the infallible titan of finance on “The Apprentice.”

The heavily stage-managed “reality TV” Trump was for many viewers the first and certainly the most potent introduction to Trump, and no credible political analyst discounts the impact that that perception — of an astute, tough-minded, fabulously rich, more-cunning-than-the-other-rascals rascal — had on propelling him ahead of the hapless stiffs in the 2016 Republican primary and on into the White House, (thanks to the electoral college.) Never mind Trump’s “Apprentice” board room was a TV set and no producer ever mentioned his decades as a cartoonish fraud shunned by real titans of finance, swindling business partners, contractors and laborers.

Given “The Golden Bachelor’s” boffo box office, ABC will without a doubt spin this shtick ad nauseum. And that’s show biz.

But the so-called professional press has an obligation different than playing fan boy/girl to satisfy the most infantile and credulous yearnings of their readers.