By Ben SmithIn December 2015, after the demagoguery of Donald Trumps presidential campaign became clear, I asked CNNs president, Jeff Zucker, if he regretted his role in Trumps rise.

First Zucker who put The Apprentice on NBC in 2004 and made Trump a household name laughed uproariously, if a bit nervously. Then he said, I have no regrets about the part that I played in his career.

I was thinking about that exchange when Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently gleefully aired recordings of conversations with Zucker that Trumps fixer, Michael Cohen, had deviously taped in March 2016.

Zucker is heard speaking in flattering and friendly terms about Trump, or, as he called him, the boss.

You guys have had great instincts, great guts and great understanding of everything, Zucker says to Cohen of Trumps campaign.

You may have missed the recordings CNN didnt cover them, nor did The New York Times but if you can filter out Carlsons spin and Foxs campaign against CNN, theyre still revealing.

Of course TV executives work for access behind the scenes; of course, under the stirring mood music that fills CNN hour after hour, an old bond thrived between cable televisions defining executive and the president of the United States.

But the story of Trump and Zucker is a kind of Frankenstein tale for the late television age, about a brilliant TV executive who lost control of his creation. And it illustrates the extent to which this American moment is still shaped not by the hard logic of politics or the fragmented reality of new media, but by the ineluctable power of TV.

Zucker made his bones as a wunderkind producer for the Today show. He took over NBCs entertainment group in 2000, as the Friends era was ending and reality TV was beginning. The network desperately needed a new kind of hit, and Zucker found it in The Apprentice a corporate boardroom version of Survivor, the blockbuster at rival CBS. That show transformed Trump from a local blowhard into a national figure, and laid the groundwork for his presidential campaign.

When Trump ran for president, Zucker briefly dismissed him as a sideshow in an early 2015 email to his political team, according to one of its recipients. But as soon as he saw the ratings his old star could still deliver, he spent 2015 and 2016 turning CNN into a platform for his ambitions. He went so far as to turn the camera to the empty podium before Trumps rallies, while other presidential candidates seethed and suspected accurately, it turns out that the two men maintained a cozy back channel.

When the folks over there at CNN get all high and mighty about their journalistic integrity thats just not real, said Terry Sullivan, who managed Sen. Marco Rubios campaign and said he laughed out loud when he heard the recording. Theyre running a reality TV show. Thats what Zuckers good at.

The story is not, of course, quite that simple. CNN retains much of its straight news DNA and its tough Washington interview machine, and is indispensable in moments of big breaking news like Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death. But the company had hired Zucker in 2013 to restore its relevance at a moment when the internet had replaced TV as a source of the newest information. Now its signature prime-time broadcasts, from Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, are nightly cris de coeur, featuring monologues about Trumps misdeeds, competing with MSNBC for the same enraged American audience. They feature the occasional true reality TV flourish notably, the duet between Cuomo and his brother, the New York governor, and the highly staged exit of the anchor from his basement, where he had isolated himself when he contracted the coronavirus.

In speaking to dozens of people who know Zucker over the past few weeks, I heard two distinct theories of what is going on now: One is the current version of CNN amped up outrage and righteousness is just Zuckers latest reflexive adaptation in search of ratings. The other is that Zucker, TVs Dr. Frankenstein, has been willing to dent his networks nonpartisan brand in order to kill his runaway monster, Trump.

Preston Beckman, who was NBCs executive vice president for program planning and scheduling just before Zuckers ascendancy there, said Zuckers thirst for ratings blinded him to the damage he was doing by offering saturation Trump coverage.

Hes a ratings whore and Im telling you that as a ratings whore, Beckman told me. But its one thing to be a ratings whore in prime time but its another thing to be a ratings whore when it comes to news.

Zuckers friends see a redemption story.

As a journalist, he has a conscience, a sincere commitment to the First Amendment and a deep sense of citizenship, said Ben Sherwood, another top morning show producer who went on to lead the Disney-ABC Television Group, and who has known Zucker since they worked on The Harvard Crimson together 35 years ago.

Zucker admits he isnt the most introspective person, Sherwood wrote in a book called The Survivors Club. The CNN chief is a survivor of two bouts of colon cancer in his 30s and heart surgery in 2018.

Hes constantly in motion, most at home in the control room, directing shots and popping into his hosts ears to suggest aggressive lines of questioning, suggesting stories to his digital team. People who wonder at his professional survival and resilience sometimes miss what an effective leader JZ, as hes known internally, has been at CNN, winning the deep loyalty of many of his staff with the blend of obsessiveness, decisiveness and loyalty that you need in a news leader.

Jeff is the most decisive and self-assured media executive Ive ever worked for or covered as a reporter, said NBCs Dylan Byers, a former CNN reporter, adding: But he has a North Star. The North Star is ratings.

Zuckers professional passion has never been hard news: Its been ratings, corporate success and winning at every game. His most legendary moments have dramatic tactical thrusts like his poaching of Meredith Vieira from The View on ABC for the Today show in 2006. And his relationship with Trump reflects a certain New York social world that has always blended friendship, talent management and philanthropy. Zuckers then-wife, Caryn, lunched with Melania Trump, a mutual friend said, and raised money for the private school both families children attended; Donald Trump wrote a check.

Zuckers falling-out with his old star came late. Even in the spring of 2017 after a presidency that kicked off with an attempt to ban Muslims from traveling to America he told my colleague Jonathan Mahler, I like Donald.

But the tensions were growing. Trump had chosen Fox over CNN as the main home of his rolling talk show, giving the conservative network constant access and interviews. His powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was rising inside the administration, lacked Trumps affection for Zucker and pushed the president away from him.

When AT&T moved to buy CNNs parent company, Time Warner, in 2016, Trump began attacking his old friend. He did it in public, on Twitter. He also raised Zucker in a private meeting with AT&Ts then-CEO, Randall Stephenson, in early 2017, a comment that hasnt been previously reported.

The presidents campaign against Zucker was interpreted reasonably by Zucker as an attempt to get him fired as a condition of the merger, according to three people who spoke to AT&T and Time Warner executives at the time. But Time Warner stood by him, and Trumps Justice Department sued to stop the merger. When Stephenson finally took control of the company in 2018, he didnt fire the CNN president.

Mahlers piece noted that CNN had become more focused on American politics, an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations in other words, it had become Trumpier. He also noted Zuckers strange symbiosis with Trump. But that summer, CNN fired Jeffrey Lord, a genial, silver-haired former aide to Ronald Reagan who had been Trumps most stalwart defender on the network.

And by the end of that year, the lure of ratings pulled the network in a new direction: resistance. Trumps own political theater featured regular televised confrontations with CNNs White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, a different kind of win-win. But if Trump and Zucker sometimes still seemed to be winking, their audiences arent in on the joke, and the deadly serious stakes became clear when a deranged Trump supporter mailed a bomb to CNNs New York headquarters in October 2018.

Zucker didnt respond through a spokeswoman when I asked again, five years later, whether he now regrets his role in Trumps career.

But this run, too, may be coming to an end. When I spoke to former NBC colleagues of Zucker about his tenure there, the show they brought up most often wasnt The Apprentice; it was Fear Factor, in which contestants were tossed in their underwear into a pit full of rats, among other grotesque stunts. USA Today described it as perhaps the most vile program ever to air on a major network.

Fear Factor didnt age well. The show lasted six seasons, and a revival was cut short by public backlash to a stunt in which competing sets of identical twins drank donkey semen. The public got tired of it (and that donkey stunt didnt air).

After a while it was like, Jesus Christ, the host, Joe Rogan, recalled in a 2019 interview. How many times can you throw them off buildings?

Consuming the news of the last four years has felt at times like watching Fear Factor and its cruel and violent strain of reality television. Thats the sensation of doomscrolling on Twitter late at night, the unending outrage cycle that has propelled cable news to its current strong and steady ratings.

When I spoke to people at CNN, they made the point that ultimately they cover and react to the news, they dont make it. Zucker may be in the control room, and when we look back at this disorienting era, media leaders will be important, secondary figures. But this isnt reality TV, its reality, and the shows executive producer is Donald Trump.

And the part of the American electorate that was enjoying the show may get tired of this too. If Donald Trump loses in November, that may also mark the end of this era of cable television, which he had fed and fed off, and which has left its audience divided and exhausted.

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Jeff Zucker helped create Donald Trump. That show may be ending - Economic Times