Producers had to heavily edit The Apprentice to stop Trump from looking like a ‘complete moron’, authors claim

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Donald Trump was so bad at picking who to fire during his stint hosting The Apprentice that the producers of the show would retroactively edit the show to make him look better.

“Our job then was to reverse-engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” a member of the production team told the authors of new book Lucky Loser, New York Times journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.

The producers of the program would have to go back and edit the show to make the person who Trump chose to fire look bad, even if they had performed quite well during the tasks at hand.

Buettner noted that one of the unexpected firings was that of David Gould, a medical doctor with an MBA.

The co-author told CNN on Tuesday night that Gould was a “really amazing guy who a lot of the producers thought was going to win that whole series, that season. He would just run the whole gauntlet. But Trump fired him the very first episode.

“And people in the control and producers are like, ‘Oh, my God, what do we do with this now?’” he added. “But they had this other moment because it was entertainment, not reality, that ‘oh my gosh, this is really great because this is so unpredictable,’” he added. “So that quality that was really bad for him in business was solid gold on the show. Then they would just re-edit everything.”

Donald Trump became a television star in the US as host of The Apprentice ( AP )

The authors also addressed Trump’s use of the name “John Barron” to speak to the media to make himself look better and to make people think he was wealthier than he actually was in order to appear on the Forbes rich list.

“He even named his son Barron,” Craig noted, adding that Trump began using the name when he started working with his father Fred Trump after college.

“We went back to old newspapers and we found the name John Barron, where there [were] classified ads where he would be selling things and it went back to the exchange number for the Trump house. So it was Donald,” Craig said. “He was using it as a pseudonym.”

The success of the show, and its celebrity spin-off, is credited with burnishing Trump’s public image as a successful businessman ( Getty Images )

She added that Trump would use the name when he wanted to hire a maintenance worker or when selling his brother’s boat. Fred Trump Jr died at the age of 42.

“So it was just this crazy origin story of John Barron that we’ve always wondered where it came from,” Craig said. “And we found it in the classified ads of old newspapers in New York.”