Opinion | Trump Isn’t Choosing a V.P. He’s Casting a Reality Show.

It’s a mentality I came to understand intimately while interviewing him, starting in 2021 after he’d left the White House, for a book on “The Apprentice.” Mr. Trump gave me hours of his time, often extending our scheduled meetings at Trump Tower as we watched clips of the show together. I discerned that, in many ways, Mr. Trump sees his runs for president and his time in the White House as extensions of his reality show. In our conversations, he seemed engrossed by his own image and the minutiae of his TV career, far more than by anything he achieved as leader of the free world.

His experience hosting “The Apprentice” informs how he views the world and how he makes his decisions. He often talked about job applicants in terms of “central casting,” channeling the spirit of a producer assembling a movie cast. For the show, Mr. Trump would stop by casting calls to meet thousands of contestants, and he told me he believed that he could identify star power simply by the way someone looked. That attitude helps explain what he’s looking for in a V.P.: the ability to generate headlines and prompt the kind of drama that ensures his audience won’t look away.

In this worldview, loyalty is everything. Mr. Trump loved talking to me about Joan Rivers, one of his favorite “Celebrity Apprentice” winners, who publicly spoke of him fondly and credited him with reviving her career after her time on the show in 2009. Celebrity is also a fundamental qualification. He told me that in the White House he considered calling on Dennis Rodman, the former N.B.A. star and “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant, for help in navigating foreign diplomacy, as he admired how Mr. Rodman had built a close relationship with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator. Mr. Trump also brought the “Apprentice” contestant and notorious onscreen troublemaker Omarosa Manigault Newman with him to D.C. as a political adviser. “A lot of things I do in life, I do as an experiment,” he told me, when explaining the Omarosa decision. “I mean, I do it out of human interest — just to see who’s loyal, who’s not loyal.”

The “experiment” Mr. Trump is conducting is how he can hold our attention. He was taught by Hollywood that one sure way to get renewed is to keep viewers guessing and stir up drama. That mentality is evident in his search for a vice president. It’s been reported that Marco Rubio, who’s spent his national political career representing Florida in the Senate, would be asked to move out of state largely as a gesture to prove his loyalty to Mr. Trump. There’s some debate over whether the Constitution bars both members of the ticket from being registered to vote in the same state, and while Mr. Trump could easily change his residence to Trump Tower or Bedminster, N.J., pressuring Mr. Rubio to relocate would be the ultimate loyalty test.

Then again, to students of “The Apprentice,” it might seem unlikely he’d pick the man he once derided as “Little Marco.” Mr. Trump often seemed to purposefully string along a candidate as a red herring in some of the show’s seasons, as when he kept Gary Busey hanging around the boardroom past the point of plausibility.