Newly resurfaced audio shows Donald Trump pitching the idea of a season of The Apprentice that would pit a team of all-black contestants versus an all-white group, which re-emerges as Trump faces widespread allegations of racism for a Twitter attack on a group of Democratic congresswomen.
The audio from 2005 shows Trump bragging to Howard Stern about the idea he developed for the reality television show, saying it would get the highest ratings for the network. The clip was included in a story from The New York Times about the allegations of racism being leveled at Trump, showing African-American co-host Robin Quivers expressing some doubt about whether Trump’s plan for The Apprentice was a good idea.
“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.”
Trump went on to say that the black team would have a mix of dark-skinned and light-skinned contestants, while the white team would be made up of all blond-haired people. As the report noted, NBC rejected Trump’s idea for a race-based season.
Trump has come under fire this week after launching an attack on Twitter against four Democratic congresswomen of color, telling them to go back to their “original” countries. Three of the four were born in the United States, while the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is a naturalized citizen who emigrated to the United States from Somalia.
Trump found even deeper controversy this week when he laid into Omar at a campaign rally, prompting the crowd to break into a chant of “Send her back!” Trump later tried to disavow the chant, claiming that he tried to get the crowd to stop by speaking quickly again when the chant started, but video from the event showed that Trump fell silent when the chant started and did not start speaking again until they were done.
This is not the first time that Donald Trump’s time on The Apprentice has reignited controversy. Last year, Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, said that Trump was against allowing black Harvard graduate Kwame Jackson to win because he was an openly gay black man.
Trump proposed a ‘white vs black contestants’ season of ‘The Apprentice’ in a recently resurfaced recording https://t.co/hEHfN42UkH via @businessinsider #trumpisaracist #trump #complicitGOP
— BritMitty (@BritMitty) July 21, 2019
“Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” Cohen told Vanity Fair , via the Associated Press . “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’”
As The Inquisitr had reported, former Apprentice contestant-turned-White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman also accused Trump of repeatedly using the N-word while on the show.