Without The Apprentice, there would likely be no President Trump. And without Mark Burnett, there would be no Apprentice.

Burnett was the show's executive producer for its entire 14-season run, turning the "floundering D-lister" that was Trump into "the ultimate titan," The New Yorker documents in a new profile. Beneath the surface, showrunners knew Trump "was a fake," Apprentice editor Jonathan Braun said. But it was "our job ... to make it seem otherwise," Braun added.

The Apprentice featured 16 competitors who worked to complete a "weekly series of business challenges," with Trump firing the worst performer each week, The New Yorker writes. But Trump usually had "little grasp of who had performed well" and fired the wrong candidates, as The New Yorker explains below.

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 Trump's 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, you're editing in reverse." [The New Yorker]

Braun went on to compare this to now-President Trump's constant firings and resignations, and how Trump often highlights staffers' flaws once they've departed. "I find it strangely validating to hear that they're doing the same thing in the White House," Braun said. Read more at The New Yorker. Kathryn Krawczyk