A former director of Donald Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” says he is ashamed of his role in mythologizing a man he now says “would like to be a dictator.”

Earlier this month, former NBC marketing director John Miller wrote an op-ed for US News & World Report apologizing to the country for helping him “create a monster.”

Now he has told Vanity Fair how effective the show was in making Trump seem like a viable presidential candidate, despite evidence to the contrary being plainly visible.

“He had no real company” when the show premiered in 2004, Miller said. “It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They had gone bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. ‘The student’ helped him survive that. People thought he would be a good president because I gave him the impression that he was a legitimate businessman.”

Miller said part of the deal to get Trump to participate was hiring two floors of Trump Tower in Manhattan.

“One of the floors was used to create a false gateway into Trump Tower,” Miller explained. “So when you came out of the elevator, there was a big, fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist.”

Miller said the show had to build its own boardroom because the room Trump actually used was so “shabby” that no one would think it looked like “a big businessman’s boardroom.”

Although Trump could be charming, Miller said, he was very easy to manipulate.

“If you want him to do something, all you have to do is compliment him in a way that would make most people blush,” Miller said.

As the show became a hit, Trump began to have ideas about how to get more viewers to watch, including one that, in retrospect, seems both racist and on brand for the former president.

At the wrap party before the show third season at Lincoln Center, Trump came to Miller with “a great idea for season four: blacks versus whites.”

Miller said his first thought was, “What the fuck. Are you crazy?”

However, he didn’t say that out loud, because he said Trump”doesn’t respond well when people say his ideas are bad.”

Instead, Miller tried a different approach.

“So I said, ‘I understand why you think that’s a great idea, because that would be a very loud idea. The headlines would appear everywhere. Everyone would talk about that, but you make most of your money from the (product) integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to participate in that, so this is going to be a big blow to your wallet.’”

Trump didn’t seem to understand why people would have a problem with an “apprentice season” pitting white contestants against black contestants, and he insisted: “The ratings would be huge!”

When Miller’s wife told Trump the concept was “a terrible idea,” the reality show star and then-future president walked away in a huff.

“The fact that he didn’t understand why it would be problematic to have black people compete with white people spoke to racist tendencies,” Miller said.

When Trump announced his first presidential run in 2015, Miller says he was in two minds.

“I thought, has there ever been anyone less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anyone more telegenic and better at understanding how to manipulate the media than Trump?” Miller told Vanity Fair.

“The Apprentice” aired on NBC from 2004 to February 2017 (including episodes filmed before Trump won the 2016 election). The unscripted series was briefly revived in 2017 with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the “boss.”

Miller thinks that if Trump is re-elected next week, once he is in power, that will be the case wants to take CBS, NBC and ABC off the air.

“Anyone other than Fox News who says anything bad about him, he wants to take them off the air,” he said, adding, “I I think he would like to become a dictator.”

Miller said that if Trump returns to power, the country will at best “perform poorly, and at worst it will do its best to become authoritarian.”

He added: “And the worst part is that the America we know is disappearing.”