So, the NDA signed by producers of The Apprentice just expired, and one of them has published a tell-all article. Most of the article is about how they used standard reality-TV tricks to portray Trump as being wealthy and intelligent, when in reality he was, and is, a deeply indebted buffoon.
The money shot, however, comes when Trump and the producers are preparing for climax of the final episode, when the winner will be decided.
Per the FCC's rules for game shows, producers could not be involved in deciding who would be fired each week, or who would ultimately win: it had to be Trump's decision alone, like contestants and viewers were told it was. The producers could, and did, give him a presentation about the strengths and weaknesses of the contestants each time he had to make a decision. These were recorded, in case questions ever arose about whether the producers had crossed the line.
So, for the final episode, there were two contestants remaining. Both were men, one white, the other Black. They'd both done well in the final challenge of the competition. As the producers were summarizing the points for an against each candidate, this happened:
“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”
Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.
In the finished program, Trump chose the white contestant as the winner.
(Four years later, Trump would propagate the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a native-born US citizen and therefore had not legitimately won the presidency.)
The article also describes how women working on the production faced discrimination based on whether or not Trump wanted to look at them while they did their jobs:
While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. “She’s too heavy,” I hear him say.
Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,” he says toward a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. “That’s all I want to look at.”
And there's a third anecdote where he pressures a woman producer to break the FCC rules, while being casually misogynistic toward a contestant:
Trump corners a female producer and asks her whom he should fire. She demurs, saying something about how one of the contestants blamed another for their team losing. Trump then raises his hands, cupping them to his chest: “You mean the one with the …?” He doesn’t know the contestant’s name. Trump eventually fires her.
This information is pretty unlikely to persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded by any of the other things Trump has done and said, which would for anyone else be a career-defining scandal. But it is a useful reminder of who we're dealing with.
(Link is to Slate, an x-number-of-free-articles-a-month site, but the incognito window trick works.)
