Where Is the Footage of Donald Trump Acting Like an Ass on the Set of the The Apprentice?
Back in September, the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf called for NBC to release raw footage of Donald Trump on the set of The Apprentice. His reasoning was sound:
In the interest of giving the public as accurate an understanding as possible of a leading presidential candidate, NBC’s news division should upload all of the raw footage from The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice to the web. Let voters see what Trump was really like while the show was being filmed, for better or worse; let them judge if the hours that they spent with the billionaire left an accurate impression or constituted a false portrayal of someone less presidential than he seemed.
NBC unsurprisingly did not follow Friedersdorf’s lead, but thanks to Slate we now have a good idea of the sort of stuff NBC is probably hiding, and it sounds illuminating.
For instance, Donald Trump has claimed many times over that he is not a sexist, even as he answered questions about sexism with more blatant sexism. An ex-Apprentice contractor who spoke with Slate offered that Trump is instead your everyday shitty sexist:
“He would talk about the female contestants’ bodies a lot from the control room,” recalls one midlevel producer. “We shot in Trump Tower, the control room was on the seventh floor, and he walked in one day and was talking about a contestant, saying, ‘Her breasts were so much bigger at the casting. Maybe she had her period then.’ He knows he’s mic’d and that 30 people are hearing this, but he didn’t care. That’s kind of him. During the campaign, when he was talking about Megyn Kelly, I thought: He’s obsessed with menstruation.”
Another revealed that Trump, like many a rich person, is actually just a cheapskate. But he’s not one of those rich people (like Warren Buffett) who is proud to be a cheapskate. We know this intuitively, of course—Trump’s entire persona as a politician is a puffed-up version of his actual self, inflated net worth and all. But reading about it in practice fleshes out the Trump character:
“At a wrap party at the end of one season,” recalls a crew member, “he gave a speech to all the crew. And at the end of it, he rolled out a couple dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon for us to drink. We all applauded. It seemed really generous. I’d never had Dom before. But later we found out from the people on the production side that he’d forced them to pay for that, so his gesture really came out of the show’s budget.”
These anecdotes tell simple truths about Donald Trump that he has gone to great lengths to obscure. Nonetheless, reading is one thing; seeing is another. Donald Trump can say that these stories are false and inflammatory and irresponsible and the work of a liberal media attempting to cover up for our loser candidate Crooked Hillary.
But if we had video of Donald Trump’s latent assholery, well, that would be far better. So if you’re a person—maybe a former NBC employee or contractor—who held onto such video in the event that it one day might be useful to the public, please send it to us. We may even pay for it.