The Apprentice was an exquisite work of video chicanery, repackaging an inept scion as the preeminent business genius of our time. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” the show’s editor, Jonathan Braun, told The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, in a 2019 profile of Burnett. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”
