Few catchphrases compare to: “You’re fired!”
Those two words crushed many TV contestants’ dreams, but paved the way for Donald Trump to become a national sensation via “The Apprentice.”
He claims the whole of Trump Tower – where the first series of the show was filmed – shook the first time he uttered the line during filming in 2004.
“Everybody, because they have so many screens, they saw what was going on in the boardroom. The place just reverberated. People were screaming. They were shouting,” he recalled to author Ramin Setoodeh for his new book, with perhaps a touch of hyperbole.
“Apprentice in Wonderland,” examines the reality TV rise of the man who went on to be 45th president and the cultural impact of the show — with plenty of celebrity anecdotes along the way.
Much of the book’s commentary comes from the man himself, taken from interviews between May 2021 and November 2023 and including Trump’s often cutting verdicts on former contestants and hosts, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (“slow”) and Martha Stewart (“failed miserably”).
“The Apprentice” undoubtedly helped build Trump’s cachet, positioning him as a no-nonsense negotiator and America’s most famous businessman.
“The Apprentice normalized him,” says Sam Solovey, who appeared as a contestant on the show in that first 2004 season. “It made him almost like the personification of the American dream. He was an aspirational character for Middle America.
“It was just perfectly packaged on television in a very black-and-white way; he was the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
“And then you’ve got these younger people, looking at this god like character, elevating him,” Solovey told Setoodeh who covered “The Apprentice” from the beginning as a 22-year-old reporter at Newsweek.
Here are the best bits from the book:
Trump falsely claimed ‘The Apprentice’ topped ‘Friends’ ratings – than asked for their combined $6 million salary
Trump, who was getting paid what he deemed a paltry $25,000-per-episode for the first season of “The Apprentice,” carried out the art of dealmaking with Jeff Zucker when negotiating with NBC for the second season.
At first Trump felt he was worth the same $1m each of the six lead cast members were getting per episode – combined – due to the ratings “The Apprentice” was getting in its first season, which averaged 20 million viewers per episode.
“I said, ‘You should pay me $6 million an episode,’” Trump recalls.
“They went f—king crazy,” Trump says of Zucker, whom Sethoodeh writes became “vocally angry” that Trump asked for the payday.
Zucker, according to the book, called Trump saying they were getting someone else to replace him, then later admitted NBC needed him for the ratings boost.
“I agreed to a fortune,” Trump says, without divulging exactly how much he got paid per episode.
Setoodeh also claims Trump’s ratings calculations were a little off, as reruns of “Friends” were averaging 25.49 million viewers at the time.
Trump snubs Kardashians, denies knowing Caitlyn Jenner
Trump felt snubbed after he helped Kim Kardashian in 2018 with a criminal justice advocacy project, granting clemency to Alice Marie Johnson — who was serving life in prison for trafficking cocaine — only for her to then celebrate Joe Biden’s 2020 election win on Twitter.
“I was disappointed in Kim,” Trump tells Setoodeh, of Kardashian.
“I get along with her fine. I got along with her then husband,” he says of his infamous friendship with Kanye West. “In fact, he endorsed me,” he said, despite West later saying he didn’t vote.
“But with Kim I did a lot of prison reform that she couldn’t get done with anyone else. Then, in order to be accepted by Hollywood, she didn’t endorse me … She went for Sleepy Joe!”
Meanwhile, when asked about his relationship with outspoken Republican Caitlyn Jenner, Trump, who, as Setoodeh points out, has appeared in photographs with Jenner even after she transitioned to a woman says: “I don’t know her. I knew Bruce. But I don’t know Caitlyn.”
Zucker becomes enemy, branded ‘human scum’
Although they had got along for years, Trump told NBC executives he “didn’t trust” Zucker, following his “Apprentice” salary negotiations.
“He’s human scum,” Trump now says.
The former POTUS claims he saved Zucker by getting him the job at CNN, a claim the network has denied, only for them to turn on him.
“By the way, when I was running [for president], I said, ‘CNN is going to treat me great.’ It’s called loyalty. I got the guy the job. And as I was campaigning, people would come and say, ‘Sir, CNN is hitting you a little hard!’ I would say, ‘That’s not possible. Go back and check.’ And I’d call Jeff,” Trump says.
Trump eventually stopped talking to Zucker when he realized he was “secretly driving the tough reporting about his campaign,” Setoodeh writes.
Getting the last word about Martha Stewart
Martha Stewart was cast on “The Apprentice,” in 2005, the year she was released from prison, and was hired as a host when the show’s ratings dipped in seasons 2 and 3, but the lifestyle guru’s aloof TV persona didn’t resonate with contestants or in the boardroom, former chairman of NBC Universal, Jeff Gaspin says.
“As soon as we saw the episodes, she wasn’t the dynamic reality star [Trump] was,” Gaspin says. “She was very low-key. She wasn’t in your face the way he was.”
Trump also canned her performance on the show.
“How can you get better than Martha? And it failed miserably,” Trump says in the book.
“Somebody said, ‘Are you happy she bombed?’ I said, ‘Probably.’”
Trump’s secret crush on Debra Messing
Despite his Twitter feuds with “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing, Trump admits he had a crush on the actress – who became one of his harshest critics, once calling him a “vindictive, narcissistic criminal” – in the early years of “The Apprentice.”
“Debra Messing, who I always thought was quite attractive – not that it matters, of course,” Trump says.
Dennis Rodman, foreign diplomatic ace
Trump admits in the book he almost sought foreign diplomacy advice from Dennis Rodman, who was a contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice 2,” when he flew to Singapore to meet with his pal, North Korea leader Kim Jong Un in 2018.
“I didn’t use Dennis for it, but I thought about it a couple times before I got to know Kim Jong Un,” Trump says.
“Dennis would have done a better job than your traditional Ivy League people that always do that stuff and have no personality.”
Former ‘Apprentice’ contestants saw Trump’s soft side
Alex Thomason recalls a moment in the boardroom in which Trump comforted then 21-year-old real estate investor Chris Shelton after he “burst into tears.”
“Mr. Trump changed and softened. He became who he was. From that moment, I realized that’s the true Donald Trump, and the exterior he projects is all for advertising,” he says.
Thomason says he believes the real Trump is “that caring, gentle father who covers up with an incredibly gruff exterior. Do I think he’s a good man? You’re damn right I do.”
Another former contestant from season 3, Stephanie Myers, then a twenty-nine-year-old consultant from San Diego — who later served on Trump’s National Diversity Coalition and campaigned for him in 2016 and 2020 — weighed in on his hair.
“I’m one of the rare people that has seen the roots of his hair,” she says, recalling a time she won a glam photo shoot with Trump after a task on the show.
Myers, who was fired on the show, says Trump let her spend three months shadowing Carolyn Kepcher at Trump National Gold Club in Briarcliff, Manor, New York where she saw a more human side of the boardroom boss.
“I got to see him having normal human interactions. He would drive up to the golf club—‘How are you ladies doing?’ It was a place where he could kind of unwind. He didn’t have to be the New York Donald Trump. He could be the golf aficionado. He was more laid-back.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘The New Celebrity Apprentice’ gets a scathing review
Trump admits he watched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s edition of “The New Celebrity Apprentice” in 2017, when it premiered less than three weeks before his inauguration.
“I said it was terrible. I just felt it had no energy whatsoever,” Trump says, calling his stint “ponderous,” and failing to execute the “You’re fired!” catchphrase, which he changed to “You’re terminated,” in reference to his most famous film role.
“Arnold couldn’t say it properly. Who would think Arnold would be bad? But he was slow.”
Trump’s pandemic leadership, takes shots at Fauci
Although the book is about “The Apprentice,” Trump manages to get a few comments about his other successes in, notably about when it came to tackling COVID-19.
“We did unbelievable, and then I came up with a vaccine. Then I bought $12 billion of the vaccine before we knew it was going to work,” he says.
“It was the greatest bet ever made in the history of the world. You wouldn’t have had the vaccines till October had I not bought it early. And if I didn’t do that, you wouldn’t have had yours. This would have been another Spanish flu,” Trump claimed.
“These two vaccines would have taken another president five years.
“[Dr. Anthony Fauci, Former Chief Medical Advisor] said, ‘You can’t do it, ’cause it’ll take too long.’ Fauci was wrong on everything.
“I closed up China. Then I closed up Europe. He said that won’t be necessary. Five months later, he said, ‘Trump did an amazing thing by doing that.’ ”
