Emmy nominated producer Bill Pruitt used to work on The Apprentice
with Donald Trump, of course, and now that his 20 year nondisclosure
agreement has expired, he's ready to tell all about the former president
and what he was like behind the scenes.
Now, he wrote about this in a piece over at slate titled The Donald Trump I saw
on The Apprentice for 20 years.
I couldn't say what I watched the former president do on the set of the show.
That changed everything now I can.
And so he kind of sets up the story by giving the context.
And then he talks about very specific examples of Trump being
incredibly misogynistic and sexist on set, while also saying deeply racist things.
So we'll get to that in a moment, he says.
I was one of four producers involved in the first two seasons.
During that time, I signed an expansive non-disclosure agreement
that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were
to ever divulge what actually happened.
It expired this year.
No one involved in The Apprentice from the production company
or the network to the cast and crew was involved in a con with malicious intent.
It was a TV show and it was made for entertainment.
I still believe that, but we played fast and loose with the facts,
particularly regarding Trump.
And if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned.
And so we've heard some of these allegations before
that Trump wasn't really, like, as successful as he claimed to be.
But let's get into the details about the sexism and racism
after Jake makes a very concise point.
That's funny, pausing here to deliver some honest truth,
as we do in our news coverage as well.
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So guys I also know someone that worked at The Apprentice and I want
to get into not just the racist stuff, but how they built up this con together.
NBC and Trump together decided to con the American people into believing
that he was a successful businessman.
I think that tells you more about the media than it does about Donald Trump,
and I don't want you to miss that part of the story.
- So we'll get to it in a second. - Definitely.
So let's start with the alleged sexism on on set, Bill Pruitt writes
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.
So. This is very similar to what he would say about Miss America contestants
if he believed that they were overweight.
And then after he was accused of that, he would double down on it
kind of shamelessly.
So that's part of the reason why I don't think that these allegations
are really going to make a difference at all, certainly not with the voters
and who they're currently supporting in this election.
It's because a lot of this stuff is stuff that we already knew about Trump.
But let me give you more.
Another female camera operator writes Pruitt, 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 ten different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower.
One day, that's all I want to look at.
And then finally, this part stood out to me the most.
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 hand, cupping them or his hands, cupping them to his chest.
You mean the one with the basically talking about her?
Her breasts? Yeah.
He doesn't know the contestants name. Trump eventually fires her.
I mean, I have to I have to admit, I'm not surprised by any of this.
Trump is openly misogynistic.
It's just who he is. Yeah.
And what's really surprising to me is how in previous election cycles prior to
Trump running in 2016, like the smallest
misstep, misstep would destroy a campaign.
But with Trump, I mean, this kind of stuff keeps coming out and no one seems to.
I mean, the Democrats care, but the Democrats weren't going
to vote for him anyway.
Yeah.
So first of all, the misogyny is over the top.
But he's already been convicted in a civil trial of sexual assault.
And it didn't change anybody's vote on the Republican side.
Right.
We all, of course, heard the legendary Hollywood access tape about
grabbing them by the P. That his, like, dismissal of anyone based on looks of.
Oh, she's fat. I don't I don't like her.
It's really disgusting.
And he actually picks his cabinet members based on that,
and he says it says, oh, I picked him because he was out of central casting.
I didn't like his mustache. Chris Christie's too fat.
I mean, this guy's a moron who makes the decisions that affect the country and
your lives based on this kind of stuff.
Now we got the N-word coming up, and then I'll tell you about the media.
Okay, so this is the part that Pruitt claims there is footage of, and he is
demanding that the footage be released.
So let me give you the incident and then we'll talk about
the existence of that footage.
So basically, Pruitt details one discussion about who should win the season
as it came down to the two final contestants.
Okay, one of those final contestants was a gentleman named Bill Rancic.
As you can tell, I never watched the show, but there was Bill Rancic,
who, by the way, eventually won and earned a job at the Trump Organization.
But the other contestant other finalist was a black contestant
by the name of Kwame Jackson.
Now, here's how the conversation went down when they were trying to decide
who to eliminate and who would win.
Carolyn Kepcher, who runs Trump's hospitality units and one of his golf
clubs, expresses how she observed Jackson at the casino, overcoming more obstacles
than Rancic, particularly with the way he managed the troublesome Omarosa.
Jackson, Kepcher maintains, handled the calamity with grace.
So obviously someone who works for Trump looks at the two final contestants
and says, no, no, Kwame Jackson, which is the black contestant?
He did a masterful job with this one incident.
I think he should win.
Okay, I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organization,
she says to Trump, who winces while his
head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting.
Why didn't he just fire her? Meaning fire?
Omarosa? Trump asks.
It's a reasonable question, Pruitt says. But then here's where things get bad.
That's not his job.
Jay Bienstock, the show runner, says to Trump, that's yours.
Trump. Trump's head continues to Bob.
I don't think he knew he had the ability to do that, Kepcher says.
And then at that point, Trump weighs in and says, yeah, but I
mean, would America by a N-word winning?
So this is the moment or the exchange that Pruitt says there's a video of,
and he's demanding that the video be released by Mark Burnett.
So Burnett allegedly told Trump that, no, the footage doesn't exist,
but who knows what's true?
Yeah.
Trump tweeted about I talked to Burnett and he says in caps, no tapes.
That's kind of an admission.
That's saying I double checked to make sure that they didn't
have me saying it on tape.
I know because I definitely said it. And Mark confirmed that there's no tapes.
Hugh, you idiot, you're admitting it. It's just.
So he's so does not think before he tweets.
Okay? And he doesn't think.
Period. Yeah.
Before, during or after.
So now look guys, to the point I was making about the media.
So this producer says, look, this is in essence what we do in all reality shows.
Not that they're all fake, but what we do is we just do sleight of hand.
We. And he uses a magician as an example.
Our job is to trick you into looking at it from a different perspective.
That isn't exactly true.
So, for example, with Donald Trump, we knew that he had
an endless string of bankruptcies.
He was a terrible businessman, but we didn't have any other choices
because they had apparently already asked actual successful businessmen.
And he names a couple in media, Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, etc.
And they wouldn't do it.
The only one who would do it was Donald Trump.
Of course, he loves the cameras, and he's like, we're going to pretend
that I'm a successful businessman.
He's like, I love it. I'm in, right?
And he got an enormous amount of money from NBC for doing this.
So he steps in and they're like, so what we would do is we would just
show you different angles so we wouldn't talk about his bankruptcies.
We'd talk about how great he was for recovering from his bankruptcies.
It was many years.
And by the way, Pruitt seems to acknowledge this in his piece,
but it was many years of positive, manufactured and inaccurate PR
on behalf of Donald Trump, which certainly helped him win the 2016 election 100%.
And he said, look, and then the bankruptcies.
Okay, well, he recovered from them. How?
Well, then Pruitt gets into well, we knew all the people he was ripping off,
but we covered that up too.
So we knew he was ripping off people.
By the time that apprentice got to the second season or so with Trump University
later, Trump had to pay a $25 million fine because he was just robbing people.
He would pretend to teach them about real estate and take up
to $35,000 from them, and then give them almost nothing in return.
So disgusting. Okay, he's a legendary con man.
That's what he's mainly known for.
Now that what con stands for is going to be really relevant here.
But he said in one particular case, they went to the Trump National Golf Club and,
and that Bill Pruitt, the producer, happened to run into, the guy who actually
designed the course, the architect.
And he said, oh, this is look, I got to be honest with you,
this is a beautiful course.
Nice job.
He's like, I know, but I only got paid half.
And he's like, why? He's like, well, this is what Trump does.
Every time he says, I'll pay you half up front
and I'll pay you half when it's finished.
Which is, by the way, a normal business deal.
Right?
But he the unnormal part is he never pays the second half.
So he's like, by the time we finish the thing and I'm supposed to give him a half.
He then gives me a speech about, you know, you're going to have to sue me,
and your lawyers are going to cost more than the second half of the payment.
So why don't you take a lot less?
Give me a new number, which is almost nothing.
And then the guy's like, damn it, I'm screwed.
So he gives him a new number and Trump doesn't pay that,
so he just never paid the second half.
That's what he does every time.
I've told you many stories about this from other business contacts,
he'll get booked at a convention.
He'll charge like $1 million to show. Fine, he's a celebrity.
He charges that much? No problem.
Right.
And then they'll design the entire conference around him.
And then.
Right, like two days before the conference, he'll say, now it's 5 million.
Oh my God.
And they're like, well, we can't what I can't, we can't afford that.
You said it was a million. We have a contract.
He's like, I don't care.
You're going to ruin your whole conference unless you pay me this deal.
Now, some of you that are right wingers out there, you'll think, oh, I love that.
What a great business guy.
He loves to rip people off and rob them blind.
I love that guy. That's savvy, that's smart.
I mean, I don't think he's a good businessman.
And I will admit that all of this is super immoral.
But I mean, if you want to be immoral and, and basically get more money
out of an event, that is the way to do it after they've marketed it,
after they've like built a whole event around you, what are they going to do?
They're going to say no to giving you more money.
- Well, I hear you, and I wouldn't. - Do it, but I'm just saying like.
No, no, no.
Strategically, in the short term, I get it.
You're going to get more money.
In that particular conference, you did get more money.
I don't remember exactly how much, but he got way more money.
But it's a short term play. In the long run, you burn every contact.
He had six massive bankruptcies. He burned every finance.
It's not like the banks are soft hearted or anything like that.
It's like.
So they're like, no, we're not going to give you money, you idiot.
You stole the money we gave you every single time, right?
You never pay anyone back. That's why he had to go to the Russians.
That's why I thought he was connected to them, because his idiot sons were like,
oh, no, it's okay.
We got money.
We got all the money we need for the golf course from the Russians.
That's public. They admitted it, right?
Yeah. So then he has.
But why are the Russians giving him money?
Because they got to move a lot of money out of Russia, clean it up and then
get it back to them in a legal form.
So if you buy his condos, you buy his houses in Florida,
you invest in his golf courses.
Voila, clean money. And then the Saudis bought a lot from him.
And he remember he had the quote, he's like, what am I supposed to do?
Not like the Saudis.
They pay me $40 million for the apartments.
They're way over paying in order to clean the money.
And so he's a lifelong criminal.
But what's interesting about it is NBC made an active decision.
Yeah, we're going to support that con man. We're going to join his con.
You know what con stands for? It's short for confidence.
It's a confidence game.
So and the the main producer involved here, the Pruitt references
throughout the piece.
Bienstock says to everybody involved why want confidence.
And Trump is good at one thing projecting confidence.
That's true. Yeah.
And so he'll come in and he'll look down at you and he'll pretend that he's the guy
who knows everything and he's like, it's TV. He doesn't
actually have to know anything.
He just has to look like he knows things.
He just he doesn't have to be a good businessman.
He just has to look like he's a good businessman.
And he says the n word in private, and we have it on tape.
Who cares? We're making money.
He's a loser who's never made any money. In the long run, who cares?
We're making money from this. And so guys, last things.
Now the reason why again, it's a bad long term strategy is not only
do you burn all the people that you ever do business with, but he's when he goes
to run a business, he can't run it.
If his life depended on it. He had three casinos in Atlantic City.
Everybody that knows anything about business,
like they're going to cannibalize each other's customers and you're going
to they're all going to go bankrupt.
He's like, no.
And apparently, according to one of his executives, he did it because he
liked to see his name in lights.
And that way he could see in Atlantic City, Trump, Trump, Trump.
They cannibalize each other's customers. They all went bankrupt.
He's one of the dumbest people who's ever been involved in business.
So then you say, well, how is he? Rich?
His dad gave him $413 million. He lost it all.
And through the apprentice, he made $400 million doing the one thing he's
good at conning Americans into believing that he's something that he isn't.
And NBC helped him all along the way. And that's how the media tricks you.
And it's not just exclusive to Donald Trump.
The media is also tricked almost all Americans for my entire life
into believing that politicians are having debates about policy and issues,
when in reality, all the reporters know that they're taking millions of dollars
from donors and lobbyists and then doing exactly
what those donors and lobbyists want.
But they're running this amazing con on all of you guys.
Oh, Lindsey Graham thinks this, and the senator from Connecticut thinks that.
They think, where's the check? Just like Donald Trump.
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