For months, it felt easier to avoid watching Donald Trump on television. It was like sniffing spoiled milk: you didn’t need a sip to know it was bad. Then, in June, the President held the first meeting of his complete Cabinet. It aired live, as Trump’s early campaign rallies had, in full and without commentary, on CNN.

Wearing a striped tie that rhymed with the flag behind him, Trump sat at a massive table, smiling. “Mike?” Trump said, and Vice-President Pence took the cue. “Thank you, Mr. President. It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice-President to a President who is keeping his word to the American people.” As cameras clicked like cicadas, each appointee offered up an homage; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, thanked Trump for the “opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”

Many compared the spectacle to something out of North Korea. But it was also a near-replica of a production closer to home. It’s become a wearying, ugly observation, a media truism at once superficial and deep: if “The Apprentice” didn’t get Trump elected, it is surely what made him electable. Over fourteen seasons, the television producer Mark Burnett helped turn the Donald Trump of the late nineties—the disgraced huckster who had trashed Atlantic City; a tabloid pariah to whom no bank would lend—into a titan of industry, nationally admired for being, in his own words, “the highest-quality brand.” And here we were again, at the boardroom table, listening to the compliments to the boss, suspended in that eerie, unstable blend of improvisation and scripting. It was enough to make a television critic nostalgic.

As it happens, most episodes of Trump on “The Apprentice” are curiously hard to find: they’re not available to stream or download. Only first-season DVDs are for sale, legally, online—and only used ones. The show is not at the Paley Center for Media’s research library, either. (M-G-M, which owns the rights, declined to comment.) To watch, you’ll need occult methods. But at the Paley you can catch something nearly as illuminating: a video of a panel discussion about the show, from 2004, following its first season. It was filmed the day after “The Apprentice” lost the Emmy for best reality show to “The Amazing Race.” The moderator is the “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush, who, a year later, played Trump’s wingman in the pussy-grabbing tape.

Trump, in a dark suit, leans forward in his chair, hands clasped. Mark Burnett, wearing jeans and a shell necklace, lounges next to him. Both are aglow. A year earlier, NBC, whose TV programming was then run by Jeff Zucker, had been in free fall, with the hit sitcom “Friends” about to end and nothing to replace it. Burnett and Trump had provided Zucker with a hat trick: the network’s first strong reality franchise; a solution for its Must-See TV Thursday slot; and a lure for ads from corporations like Pepsi and Microsoft.

Bush asks surprisingly tough questions: he wonders whether Burnett softened Trump with an image “makeover”; he talks about whether reality television is a fad, and whether it’s cruel; and he asks what it felt like to lose the Emmy. As the drip of praise slows, Trump shows flashes of sourness, griping about old enemies, like the host of “The View”—“this fat slob Joy Behar who can’t stand me.”

Burnett never wavers. A brilliant entrepreneur, and one of the most powerful men in television, he had produced “Survivor,” on CBS, which exploded the economics and aesthetics of television, launching a transformative new genre. “The Apprentice” was the savvy workplace variation that he pitched to Trump in 2002. And yet Burnett presents himself, whether humbly or cannily, as Trump’s acolyte: Robin to Trump’s Batman, he insists.

Then he casts Trump in a fresh light, years before the 2016 campaign. Trump, Burnett explains, struck him as “a real American maverick tycoon.” Donald “will say whatever he wants.” He “takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. He’s like the guys who built the West. America is the one country that supports the entire world—because of guys like Donald, who create jobs and a tax base that can support the entire planet.” That’s what “The Apprentice” means to him, the producer concludes, with a grin: it’s “a love letter from me to America, and to New York City, because we chose New York City, about what makes America great.”

In a 1981 segment of “Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich,” the gossip columnist asks the thirty-four-year-old Trump if he’d consider a run for President. Trump laments that television has ruined politics, to the extent that Abraham Lincoln could no longer get elected: “He was not a handsome man and he did not smile at all.” He skirts questions about his political pull, his controversial tax abatements. With his cold eyes, baby cheeks, and rosebud mouth, he resembles James Spader—silky and guarded, a Master of the Universe in a boxy brown suit.

Throughout the eighties, as Trump built Trump Tower, then the Javits Center, helping to make Manhattan into a luxury playground, he played himself on television. He was omnipresent in pop culture, often as a punch line. He was the “short-fingered vulgarian” of Spy and the inspiration for the bully-villain of “Back to the Future Part II.” But on TV he had swagger: in 1985, he feuded with Mayor Ed Koch on “60 Minutes”; he was a sharp-dressed landlord on the Judith Krantz miniseries “I’ll Take Manhattan”; he appeared briefly in a 1983 “This Old House” episode about Trump Tower. There were numerous appearances on David Letterman, and the time when he asked Larry King, “Do you mind if I sit back a little bit, because your breath is very bad. . . . Has this ever been told to you before?” (King laughed, shocked, and then analyzed Trump’s neg: “That’s how you get the edge.”)

Early on, Trump had greater self-control than he had as a candidate, but he couldn’t quite crack the likability factor—and, maybe, he didn’t want to. Long before Tony Soprano launched the anti-hero drama, Trump was that guy. He was a handsome go-getter, but also an arrogant self-promoter, proud of his toughness, a flirt with a fat wallet. On “60 Minutes,” he complains about media coverage. “I believe they like to make me out as somebody a little more sinister than I really am,” he tells Mike Wallace. “I don’t look at myself, necessarily, as being sinister.”

In 1990, Trump appeared on a game show called “Trump Card,” set at Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City. As his life became unstable, rocked by divorces and bankruptcies, his TV persona stayed flush. He made cameos on sitcoms: on a 1994 episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” (Carlton faints in admiration); on a 1996 episode of “The Nanny” (he dates Fran). In 1999, he ruined a perfectly good episode of “Sex and the City.” In these incarnations, Trump is a Manhattan fixture. And yet it feels as though he’s shrunk to a fun-size Trump: red tie, yellow hair, “the Donald.” He’s less an icon than he is a retro cartoon.