New ‘Apprentice’ book portrays Trump as injured and forgetful

NEW YORK >> It was May 2021, and Donald Trump was wounded. Four months earlier, his supporters had ransacked the Capitol. He had left Washington, disgraced, defeated and twice impeached. His party had abandoned him, if only temporarily, and he had been banned from his social media accounts. He holed up in Trump Tower, seething with rage.

An entertainment journalist named Ramin Setoodeh came knocking. He told Trump he wanted to write a book, not about the unpleasantness of the past four years, but about the time before the Fall, before Trump entered politics. Back then, he was just the star of “The Apprentice,” a reality TV show that aired on NBC starting in 2004 and “changed television,” as Setoodeh put it to the former president.

Trump was convinced. He gave the reporter several long, recorded interviews. “He was at his lowest point at the time,” Setoodeh, 42, said Friday over lunch in Manhattan’s West Village. “I think he found comfort in talking about ‘The Apprentice.'”

Trump was so excited about the book that he offered to promote it at his rallies. He promised that the vendors who accompany his roadshow would help sell it. “You’ll sell 10,000 books at one rally,” he told Setoodeh. “Let’s see how that works out.”

Not well, as it turns out — at least for Trump. “Apprentice in Wonderland,” released Tuesday, portrays its subject as a lonely and sometimes mad man who longs for the days when he was accepted by his celebrity peers, even as he seems to yearn for political power.

One moment he’s bragging about Joan Rivers voting for him in 2016 (she died in 2014); the next he’s excusing himself to deal with “the whole Afghanistan thing,” as he told Setoodeh, who happened to be interviewing him the week President Joe Biden withdrew U.S. troops from the country. It was unclear what Trump meant by that.

Setoodeh spent three afternoons at Trump Tower and one at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, and interviewed the former president twice by phone. He made his last visit in November. He said he was convinced that Trump, now 78, was on the decline.

“Trump was certainly much sharper when he hosted ‘The Apprentice’ in his 60s, and he actually had short-term memory issues,” Setoodeh said. When the author showed up for his second interview, the former president did not seem to remember giving a first one, Setoodeh said, even though nearly three months had passed.

“President Trump was aware of who this person was throughout the interview process, but this ‘author’ is a nobody and insignificant, so of course he never made an impression,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said, adding that Setoodeh “has now chosen to allow Trump Derangement Syndrome to rot his brain, like so many other losers whose entire existence revolves around President Trump.”

The campaign went on the attack on social media, threatening to release audio clips of Setoodeh’s interviews with Trump in which the journalist spoke positively about his reputation as an entertainer.

Setoodeh said Trump prefers to discuss “The Apprentice” rather than anything related to his presidency. “He compares himself to Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando and sees himself in many ways as an actor and a famous person,” Setoodeh said. The 45th president gossiped about Khloe Kardashian (“I never got along very well with Khloe. Khloe was arrested for drunk driving, did you know that?”); disgraced former CBS chief Leslie Moonves (“Now he’s sitting in the Bel-Air Club and nobody cares”); Bette Midler (“I had her in my apartment and now she’s saying the meanest things”); Dennis Rodman (“Pretty cool guy in many ways… Kim Jong Un really liked him, really”); and Taylor Swift (“I think she’s very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. Probably doesn’t like Trump”).

“I was really surprised by how fixated he was still on celebrity culture and how much celebrity still means to him,” Setoodeh said, noting that Trump was “most agitated” when talking about his theory that famous people who live in Beverly Hills, California, vote for him but don’t want to admit it.

“What’s the benefit of secret voters in Beverly Hills?” Setoodeh wondered. “Wouldn’t you want secret voters in Ohio or Pennsylvania? But he wants secret voters in Beverly Hills because he associates that with show business, and that’s the most important thing to him.”

But there was one person Trump did not want to gossip about: Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” even though Burnett had condemned Trump’s candidacy in 2016 for sowing “hatred, division and misogyny.”

“It’s interesting,” Setoodeh said, “because when someone says something against Trump publicly, they hold a grudge against him forever, and Mark disowned Trump after the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. But Trump credits Mark with ‘The Apprentice,’ and he loves ‘The Apprentice,’ and so he’s never said anything remotely negative about Mark Burnett.” (Burnett did not give an interview for the book.)

Setoodeh’s interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year happened to fall on the day Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, died. Setoodeh had expected the interview to be canceled; instead, it was postponed for an hour. Trump recalled that day that even his sister, who had been a tough federal judge, loved “The Apprentice.”

At Trump Tower, Setoodeh played Trump a montage of scenes from the show, including the three times over the years Trump “fired” Omarosa Manigault Newman, the show’s recurring villain. He later hired her to work in the White House, but she secretly recorded and later publicly distanced herself from him as a racist and published a book about her time in his administration called “Unhinged.”

Trump sounded almost amused by all this when he told Setoodeh: “When we hired her, I told people, ‘If we fire her, we’ll have nothing but trouble.’ But that’s OK. That’s life.”

Former First Lady Melania Trump appears in the book when Trump recalls firing Rodman for misspelling her name as “Milania” on a poster for her new skincare line during one of the show’s challenges. Melania Trump had spoken out in that episode, complaining, “They misspelled my name, it’s all over the place and nobody even noticed.”

Setoodeh said the former president relived the exchange with great joy, saying: “I mean, how good is this television? I can’t believe it.”

When speaking of those simpler times, Trump lapsed into something bordering on self-reflection for a few moments, such as when he accidentally admitted that he “lost the election” (though he quickly reversed himself and said, “when they said we lost”). He once asked Setoodeh, “So do you think I would have become president without ‘The Apprentice’? I say yes. But some people say no. A lot of smart people say no.”

Trump said that in his years in the entertainment industry, he ultimately learned this about show business: “It’s all about one thing: ratings. If you have ratings, you can be the meanest, most horrible person in the world.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.