While running NBC Entertainment, Jeff Zucker turned Donald Trump into a television superstar. While running CNN, Zucker turned him into a president. Now that the damage is done, Zucker has announced that he’ll step down from the network at the end of the year.
It’s far too little, far too late.
Under Zucker, CNN had turned into little more than an anti-Trump propaganda network by the end of Trump’s presidency. But Zucker is likely more responsible than any other person alive for making Trump president. And Trump was no Frankenstein’s monster who morphed into the antithesis of Zucker’s dream. No, Trump is, and always was, the paragon of it.
When Zucker decided to salvage Trump from the ash heap of history and turn him into an A-lister, the world already knew exactly who he was. By 2004, when Zucker greenlit The Apprentice, Trump had already called for the execution of the Central Park five, been taken to court for discriminating against black people in his business and real estate dealings, and was on wife number three after publicly cheating on his first one. Even though the slew of sexual harassment and assault allegations against him wouldn’t come until later, Trump had still publicly settled one sexual assault lawsuit, paying accuser Jill Harth something in the six figures.
Zucker didn’t care. Trump’s boorishness and womanizing and garish obsession with boasting of his wealth were actually assets in Zucker’s mind. I remember seeing The Apprentice as a 10-year-old and being baffled as to why this arrogant, tacky bully was considered some masterful businessman. But that was the show’s whole message — not just that Trump was a good businessman, but that good businessmen are like Trump.
When further allegations of sexual misconduct emerged at the 11th hour of the 2016 election, they weren’t that surprising, not just because of the Harth lawsuit, but also because Trump had already publicly admitted to some of them. In 2005, just one year into The Apprentice, Trump boasted on national radio that he regularly barged into dressing rooms at the Miss Universe pageants he owned.
By the time Zucker was at CNN, Trump had become a full-blown birther, publicly claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t actually born in America. When Trump announced his presidential run by claiming Mexico was sending us their “rapists and murderers,” that didn’t stop Zucker from airing empty podiums for ridiculous amounts of time in anticipation of Trump’s rallies, while the other Republicans in the primary begged for the media to stop giving him free airtime.
Not only did Zucker help Trump’s campaign. He also created his press secretary. Zucker plucked Kayleigh McEnany out of obscurity and turned her into television’s most prolific Trump defender.
“Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what?'” Zucker said to the New York Times in 2017. “They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.”
And now we know that Zucker was working just as hard behind the scenes. On tapes Tucker Carlson recently released, Zucker suggested to Michael Cohen that CNN adopt a weekly Trump show and give advice to the campaign.
After all of that, CNN then emerged as the most partisan and pathetic opposition to Trump of the entire media, further corroding the country’s trust in the press. At the beginning of Trump’s presidency, 60% of people, including a majority of Republicans, polled by Morning Consult said they considered CNN credible. By April of last year, just 49% of those polled overall say the same. Now, barely one-quarter of Republicans consider it credible.
Zucker succeeded in boosting ratings at NBC and did so again at CNN, both times making the calculated decision to boost Trump. Now the show is over, and with ratings at the network already tanking under President Biden, Zucker is ready to tap out. Hopefully the payday was worth it.
