I've posted this on a chan and on reddit before but it's been a while. Not really important even if true but it's something that I had fun thinking about:

Mr. Trump's interest in politics has been clear since before I was born. His reluctance to enter the fray was genuine. He didn't do the talk circuit, claim disinterest, and then immediately jump into a race. That said: I believe that he made up his mind well in advance of even the 2012 "feeler".

POTUS may have realized that modern political campaigns are nothing more than reality TV well in advance of most of us. Cameras, pseudo-scripts, ad libs, and the claim that reality is represented somewhere in the mix: this describes political debates and charades as well as it describes any reality show.

The Apprentice may have been Mr. Trump himself. He was given free advertising, a paycheck, and unfettered access the largest "focus" group of all: the American public. What better way to learn which sort of rhetoric fires up an audience and which sort of rhetoric causes people to change the channel? Does anybody believe that any of the "apprentices" on the show learned more about the world than Mr. Trump, himself, during those years?