{"id":100503,"date":"2026-08-10T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/100503\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T06:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:00:14","slug":"the-tv-genius-who-turbocharged-trump-and-accidentally-wrecked-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/100503\/","title":{"rendered":"The TV genius who turbocharged Trump \u2013 and accidentally wrecked Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who broke Britain?<\/a>\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0You won\u2019t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert\u2026 who accidentally cost Britons billions<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Steven Bartlett: the glorified PR man quietly making Britain worse<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The Tory who sold off Britain\u2019s greatest assets \u2013 then told us to take back control<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Dua Lipa: the \u2018magical thinker\u2019 unwittingly making Britain\u2019s young women miserable<\/a>
\u2022 The podcast bro whose toxic slurry of sexism targets impressionable young men<\/a><\/p>\n

One spring day at an ice rink in New York\u2019s Central Park, a former British paratrooper from Essex spotted a famous figure in the crowd \u2013 and the world changed direction. <\/p>\n

Mark Burnett, who had come to America on a tourist visa and fashioned a shining career in television, was there on location, filming the finale of his hit show, Survivor. Sitting in the front row of the audience was the man whose company operated the ice rink, Donald J Trump<\/a>. In that moment, in May 2002, Burnett \u2013 impressed by the brash TRUMP branding plastered over the venue \u2013 had the notion that the flamboyant property magnate should be the star of his next TV experiment.<\/p>\n

Survivor had held the American public spellbound. The show marooned 16 strangers in remote spaces, starved of resources, and made them vote each other out until only the winner remained. Burnett now wanted to create an equally cut-throat format \u201cset in a different kind of jungle, made of asphalt\u201d. Two weeks later, he went to Trump Tower and pitched the idea for The Apprentice, offering the tycoon a role as \u201cjudge, jury and executioner\u201d. Against the advice of his agent, who noted the poor track record of business-based TV formats, a flattered Trump accepted the part. <\/p>\n

That encounter between Burnett and Trump was a monumental watershed, albeit little understood at the time. <\/p>\n

Burnett unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would upturn global politics for decades to come. He transformed Trump\u2019s public persona as a gaudy and reckless real estate developer with a track record of corporate bankruptcie,s and catapulted him into American living rooms as an oracle of capitalist success. He created the TV equivalent of Trump\u2019s self-serving memoir The Art of the Deal. In so doing, the son of a production line worker at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham created the pathway for Trump to become the leader of the free world.<\/p>\n

More than that, Burnett, as one of the pioneers of reality formats, revolutionised TV in the early 21st century, leading a shift away from costly scripted programmes towards a cheaper form of mass entertainment that relied on crude producer manipulation and strategic gameplay. The palates of audiences, and thereby voters, became accustomed to content that was intrusive and highly charged.<\/p>\n

As social media grew alongside reality TV, online content creators adopted similar production values, packaging their lives for public consumption and expressing extreme views to generate engagement. Today social media users routinely disregard calls to respect privacy or moderate their language. Through his founding role in reality TV, Burnett has corroded the way that society interacts. <\/p>\n

In Britain, the impact of these changes has been profound. Trump\u2019s political formula of marrying televisual skills with prolific use of social media has been a blueprint for Nigel Farage, who now uses TikTok and GB News to rally his electoral base and inject hate into our political discourse. Katie Hopkins, one of Farage\u2019s noisier supporters, built her public profile and media career on a spiteful and ruthless appearance in the UK edition of The Apprentice and now deploys similarly nasty and divisive language as an online political commentator.<\/p>\n

Burnett\u2019s zero-sum formats, such as Survivor and The Apprentice, inspired a gamut of winner-takes-all reality hits, including I\u2019m a Celebrity\u2026 Get Me Out of Here!, The Traitors and Love Island. While nice guys do not always come last in these shows, mendacity, backstabbing and toxic social interaction are rife.<\/p>\n

Some might say this is not Burnett\u2019s fault. A working-class lad who served in the Falklands War before heading to California, aged 22, and finding work as a nanny for a family in Beverly Hills, he is possessed of remarkable talents. He made it in TV after working without a green card, selling T-shirts on Venice Beach, then filming himself on extreme travel challenges. It can be argued that he should be celebrated as a genius of our creative industries who, like Simon Cowell (The X Factor, Got Talent) and Simon Fuller (American Idol), crossed the Atlantic and changed the face of entertainment. Millions still love watching his shows. <\/p>\n

But as a prime architect of the Age of Trump, Burnett has a case to answer. His shaping of the now-President\u2019s reputation was immeasurably damaging. A fake corporate boardroom was created to give an aura of success, in contrast to the cramped office in Trump Tower, that garish 58-storey monument of personal branding on Fifth Avenue, masquerading as a corporate HQ. Across 14 series, thousands of hours of raw footage were edited to present the host as an unfailingly astute businessman, coherent and decisive. When, in the wake of the Access Hollywood debacle<\/a>, calls were made for the Apprentice tapes to be released to address claims by producers and contestants that Trump had made offensive remarks, Burnett said he did \u201cnot have the ability nor the right\u201d to do so.<\/p>\n

In the decade since Trump first entered the White House, former colleagues on The Apprentice have expressed regret over the show\u2019s political repercussions. \u201cI helped create a monster,\u201d said one. Burnett, though he criticised the \u201chatred, division and misogyny\u201d of Trump\u2019s first presidential campaign, appears to sleep easily and remains friends with the President. In 2024, Trump \u2013 normally fiercely hostile to immigration \u2013 named Burnett as the White House\u2019s Special Envoy to the UK. Burnett said he was \u201cdeeply honoured\u201d but stepped away from the role within a year. The Apprentice creator is perhaps the one Trump hire who would not fear being told: \u201cYou\u2019re fired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than being a British success story, Burnett \u2013 who became a naturalised American citizen in 1990 \u2013 has inflicted great harm on the country of his birth. The omnipotent character he created has assailed the UK with trade tariffs and naked diplomatic interference, while publicly ridiculing its leaders and even its military, in which Burnett once proudly served. <\/p>\n

The circus that Trump has gone on to create in Washington brought down Keir Starmer, who supplicated himself before the President as if one of his apprentices. Starmer disastrously introduced Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador, in the mould of a scheming contestant arriving on the set of a ruthless reality show. And latterly Trump has sought to dictate UK energy policy, demanding new drilling in the North Sea, while undermining our oil supplies and our economy by his reckless and failed war on Iran. So, Mr Burnett, thanks a bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who broke Britain?\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,361,3053,2827,5722,336,37,5987],"class_list":["post-100503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-donald-trump","tag-media","tag-reality-tv","tag-the-apprentice","tag-tv","tag-usa","tag-who-broke-britain"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117069691528341447","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}