Former president Donald Trump used a racist slur while discussing a contestant on “The Apprentice” during a recorded conversation two decades ago, a former producer for the show wrote in a new essay.
The producer, Bill Pruitt, said Trump made the comment while deciding between a Black finalist, Kwame Jackson, and a White finalist, Bill Rancic, in the finale of the show’s first season, which aired in 2004. As Trump adviser Carolyn Kepcher, who served as a judge on the show, began advocating for Jackson, Trump winced multiple times and questioned Jackson’s performance on the show, Pruitt wrote.
“I mean, would America buy a [n-word] winning?” Trump asked, according to Pruitt in his essay that Slate published Thursday.
Trump ultimately picked Rancic and awarded him a job at the Trump Organization. The reality competition series ran for 15 seasons, helping make Trump a household name before his first presidential campaign in 2016. Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024, again running against President Biden after losing to him in 2020.
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Trump’s campaign said Pruitt’s account was a “completely fabricated … story that was already peddled in 2016.”
“Nobody took it seriously then, and they won’t now, because it’s fake news,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to The Post. “Now that Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the election and Black voters are rejecting their policies, they are bringing up old fake stories from the past because they are desperate.”
Trump has a long history of espousing antagonistic views toward African Americans. He declined to apologize in 2019 for taking out ads in 1989 that targeted the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino men who were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in New York City. And Trump gained political notoriety during Barack Obama’s presidency by embracing the false claim that Obama — the nation’s first Black president — was ineligible to be president because he was not a natural-born citizen.
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During the first year of his presidency, Trump drew widespread condemnation when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a 2017 white nationalist and supremacist rally in Charlottesville that turned violent.
Despite his history, Trump has been making increasing appeals to Black voters in his race against Biden, including during a South Bronx rally last week.
Pruitt, one of four producers who worked on the show in its first two seasons, said he was bound by an “expansive nondisclosure agreement” that expired this year. He would have faced a $5 million fine or possibly jail time if he violated the agreement, he said.
Pruitt said the conversation was recorded as part of the show’s efforts to ensure such off-air deliberations did not run afoul of federal regulations for game shows.
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Jackson, the contestant Pruitt says Trump described using the slur, said in a 2016 interview with Salon that at the time he was on the show, he did not think race played a role in his loss to Rancic. But Jackson said he later came to believe race factored into the outcome.
Jackson spoke out against Trump’s 2016 candidacy in the interview, saying he has “no interest in supporting someone who I think is, at his core, racist.”
The essay also described multiple instances in which Trump made sexist remarks about the appearance of women working on the show. Trump once told a female camera operator to get off an elevator because she was “too heavy,” Pruitt recalled. Trump also told other people on the set that another female camera operator was a “beautiful woman” who is “all I want to look at,” according to the former producer.
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There has been intrigue for years surrounding possible unreleased tapes from “The Apprentice,” especially after the 2016 campaign. Weeks before that election, a recording surfaced from a 2005 hot-mic conversation with “Access Hollywood” co-anchor Billy Bush in which Trump boasted about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women.
The creator of “The Apprentice,” celebrity producer Mark Burnett, said at the time that he “does not have the ability nor the right to release footage or other material from ‘The Apprentice.’ ”
Trump said in a 2018 social media post that Burnett told him there were “NO TAPES of the Apprentice” where he used the same racist slur that Pruitt attributed to him. Trump called it a “terrible and disgusting word.” At the time, Trump was responding to claims by former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman — once a contestant on the show — that there was a tape of him using the slur during the show’s filming.
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Efforts to reach Burnett for comment Thursday through multiple publicly listed points of contact were unsuccessful.
Pruitt’s account comes as Biden is working to shore up his support among Black voters against Trump in their November election rematch. Biden and Vice President Harris, who is Black, visited Philadelphia on Wednesday to launch an initiative called “Black Voters for Biden-Harris.”
Responding to Pruitt’s essay, Biden’s campaign said it was more proof that Trump is a “textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets, and the most ignorant man to ever run for president.”
“No one is surprised that Donald Trump, who entered public life by falsely accusing Black men of murder and entered political life spreading lies about the first Black president, reportedly used the N-word to casually denigrate a successful Black man,” Biden campaign spokesperson Jasmine Harris said in a statement. “Anyone notice a pattern?”
