The Apprentice was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be fired. But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to reverse engineer the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trumps shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of The Apprentice, Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, youre editing in reverse. Braun noted that President Trumps staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, I find it strangely validating to hear that theyre doing the same thing in the White House.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success