For 20 Years, I Couldn’t Say What Donald Trump Did on the Set of The Apprentice. Now I Can.
slate.com
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
In a sane world, a draft dodger saying he 'liked soldiers who didn't get captured' would have been enough.
The people who vote for him know what he is, they just don't care.
I think in a sane world, after the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape came out we'd have never heard from him again.
I've posted this story many times.
After the 'pussy grabber' tape came out, a conservative woman went on the TV show The View to defend Donald.
One of the other panelists kept repeating the word 'pussy' over and over. The Trump defender asked her to stop using that offensive word.
Cognitive dissonance does not exist for conservatives.
A reminder that there was a candidate who got too excited and yelled in a weird way then got erased because of it. Now we have Robert "brainworm" Kennedy still on people's radar sounding like he's gargled gravel everyday since he was 12.
Poor Howard Dean, we could use that enthusiasm now.
Not to mention someone misspelled potato once, and his political career got torched from it.
His son is an ex-Congressman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Quayle
Little swine was about 25 in 2001, and somehow decided he didn't need to join the military. Later he talked about saving the country from Obama
Apples and trees...
Iirc he didn't even get 'too excited' he just had the mic too close to his mouth.
That was after losing Iowa, it likely wasn't the deciding factor on its own.
In a sane world, yes.
In the real world, the people who support him are the ones who identify with him, and the ones who identify with him think that sexual assault is the pinnacle of masculinity.
As god as my witness I don't know why this wasn't the end of it
Upvoted before I clicked it because I knew exactly what you were talking about. Only clicked to verify.
I appreciate your thoroughness
For sure
Why is everyone talking about a hypothetical sane world? It's not. Maybe it never was. It's a mad mad mad mad world.
(No conscious reference to the movie, it's just a title that seems apt.)
I didn't get the reference. All I could think of was mad mad mad mad mad Madam Mim from Sword in the Stone.
https://youtu.be/i415QwSj0Og
One scene from a great movie
Now I have another movie on my list. That pilot is a man after my own heart.
The actor or the stuntman, or both?
FYI, it's a 1960s movie and runs long. You might want to break it into chunks.
Both, but mostly Thurston Howell III. I'd also like an old fashioned.
A man ahead of his time!
It's been said the pain of the bamboozle is too much for most to acknowledge so they continue to double down on it. The great grifters and conmen know this and use it to their advantage.
Many think it's only the stupid and uneducated that are taken in by these scams. At times it's the tribal nature that we can get caught up in.
Often the educated are worse off as they know better and the grave injury to their egos won't allow them to announce to others they have fallen victim as it's pretty embarrassing. They take their lumps and move on with their lives if they do recognize they have fallen into these traps.
It's going to be many years before we get to the other side and then I wonder if it will be like what the Spanish referred to as the Miracle that occurred when Franco died.
After decades in power, the citizens that fought for Franco and supported him ceased to exist. When asked everyone fought against Franco in the civil war and they secretly fought against him at every level of society, government, and the military. It was miracle how he came to power and won a war with no support from anyone at any level within Spain.
If we ever get past the identity association of team Orange it will be interesting who is found to still be supporting this current day madness especially among the religious groups that support a man that displays so many of the things many of the regular members would be chastised for...
In the 1960 election Kennedy beat Richard Nixon with something like 52% of the vote.
In 1980, they polled a bunch of people who had voted in that election and somehow 99% of them had voted for Kennedy.
Politics has become teams winning and losing, and a lot of people don’t like to “admit to supporting the losers”
People in the UFO scene do the same with their grifters.
I recall reading the Sagan's Demon Haunted World and the section dedicated to this "phenomenon". The self convincing and conviction to these events was pretty amazing to read about from a curiosity prospective. The letters he would receive were pretty far out there.
My matter of fact father swears late one night while grading logging roads in a remote area in the 70s, he saw a big bright light in the sky that he couldn't explain and it moved in ways he didn't expect.
Being out in the wilderness I'm sure it wasn't a comfortable situation for him. I still wonder what he saw but thankfully there was no accompanying abduction story to go with it in his case. These types of stories and shows did get his a attention forever after as a result.
I personally think there must be some truth to the phenomenon as a whole. But I can’t stand the grifters who sidle up seeking attention or money after a time.
"Dr Steven Greer"
While I'm not sure about the lights alone, I've read that more often than not those that claim to have been abducted recently had surgery where they were "put under." The idea is that they're "remembering" the lights and shapes of the doctors being over them while they dream, but because they already had the surgery some time ago they believe this is a new event that just happened to them.
"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
Attributed (but debated) to Samuel Clemens.
And it’s even easier to convince them that everyone else has been fooled.
This! We don't need to call people out or harass them for being stupid. We just need for them to drift away from the cult. The constant publicity and chatter just feeds it.
Sunk cost fallacy with voting, ugh
The thing that makes this somewhat relevant is how close the election is. If those tapes exist, and you can get them to the right social media accounts, it might make 0.5 percent of his voters reconsider (and that might be sufficient).
A Trump voter quote that always live rent free in my head is "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting".
It tells you everything they need to know about them. They have a shit life, and they want to make damn sure everyone else has a shit life too.
Before Trump I could pretend I lived in a world where the great majority of people were reasonably intelligent and kind.
Everyone stopped masking post 2016.
Figuratively and literally.
There's an internet joke that the Mayans were right about the world ending in 2012; we just didn't realize that the collapse would be gradual.
It's still true. It's not that the majority of these people are actually thinking, "How can I make the world worse and make the greatest number of people's lives bad?" Rather, they're under the impression that others (probably you) are saying that, and worse, that Trump is somehow their best defense against it.
It's a bully mentality. I don't want to make things better for anyone, I want to make things worse for them. Literal playground bully.
Donald Trump taught the worst of us that it not only is okay to be a bigoted racist, but that it is okay to be that in public.
Only because they have a misguided sense of revenge and want to blame the libs for their truncated life expectations when in fact they’ve been supporting and voting for the very politicians most likely to keep pushing their heads under water.
They want to hurt their opponents. They don’t care what the price is.
Every single time he opens his mouth would be enough.
No, they do care. They think the same way.
A lot of them care, they just like that he does it. It legitimizes their own shittiness.
I think they care that he's relatable to them.
They relate to the hatred.
If this tape got leaked, it would literally help his candidacy. The hatred, cruelty, misogyny - it's a feature, not a bug. There was already a tape of this guy bragging about sexually assaulting women, and it didn't make a lick of difference. I can see his rabid followers salivating at the idea of hearing him say the N word on tape.
It might hamper his apparent surging popularity among black voters
A lot of people only care about things when they’re impacted
Wtf is this true?
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/20/an-early-look-at-black-voters-views-on-biden-trump-and-election-2024/
No. It is not accurate to say his popularity with black voters is "surging".
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/20/an-early-look-at-black-voters-views-on-biden-trump-and-election-2024/
I've seen some decent conversations over on Mastodon about how the democrats taking the black vote for granted is causing real damage. Not criticise or focus on you personally at all, but your response kinda backs up the point.
In a hard two party system, what else was going to happen?
Keep in mind that if you ask a random sample of people who they will vote for and ask a sample of people who they will vote for and throw out all the people who didn't bother to vote in either of 2020 or 2022 you get a different answer.
He'd play the tape at campaign events just to rile them up.
Wouldn't that be straight hate speech?
Is that not a crime, or am I misinformed?
He's not getting punished for incitement for his speech on Jan 6, why would he get punished for this?
But, yes, if it led to violence it would be considered inciting violence which is technically a crime.
He's been found guilty of all 34 felonies in New York, so far.
Hate speech in the United States
It's not a crime on its own in the US, but if it incites imminent lawless action that can be a crime.
Depends on what you mean. Is it hate speech from a court of public opinion standpoint? Probably. Is it from a legal one? The US doesn't have a hate speech law on the books just "Obscenity law" which allows things to be censored.
Canadian law has hate speech but it might not fit that either as to legally be chargable as hate speech it needs to fit the criteria. In this instance it could be argued use of an N slur is Denying, minimizing or celebrating past persecution or tragedies that happened to group members... but it would ALSO need be performative in a public space, intended and performed for a large group. If it's basically in the scope of him having a private conversation with individuals it isn't a chargeable offence to public order. If he was shouting it in the street sure but consequences wise it's analogous to someone shouting "The Duck army is coming!" over and over again outside your house 3am. It's a public nuisance ordinance. If you call the cops will come over and stop it only if someone complains and at worst they will escort you away and issue a fine but nobody is going to do hard time for heralding the Duck army's arrival or hate speech.
So like is it hate speech? Maybe. Is he a racist dick who deserves condemnation for being a hateful racist dick? Yes.
The N word on its own is simply vulgarity. I think hate speech relies on the content of the message.
For instance.
What's up my n****? - Not hate speech.
Spoiler contains an example of hate speech. It does not represent an actual view that I hold, and it's one of the worst things I've ever written, and should not be read by anyone.
::: spoiler spoiler I chickened out an deleted it. No one needs to read that shit. Just imagine someone expressing a racist sentiment without using the N-word here. ::: -Definitetly hate speech without using the N word.
Thanks.
Lordy, I hope there are tapes!
Good news: There are tapes!
Bad news: He will face absolutely no consequences from them.
Amazon owns the show now so they have the tapes if they still exist.
Billionaires stand to gain from Trump getting elected again. Don't count on those tapes coming to light.
Bezos has been targeted by Trump before and could afford to pull off the biggest troll move right before the election
He could, but ultimately he's another evil psychopath who will protect his oen kind.
So the reason he lost in 2020 is...? Those same billionaires all existed then too, you know. Clearly they don't have as much influence on Presidential elections as you imply.
According to Wikipedia MGM owns the show. Even they might not own the n-word tapes.
I’d bet that Mark Burnett owns them. And, I don’t think that he’d release them.
Ugh I don’t miss that fool. He’s apparently writing fiction now…
So bonus points for his followers?
So ridiculous that an NDA would cover something like this.
I mean... I regularly work under NDAs in tv and they are usually pretty mild but I did one season of... Something that came out inside the past 10 years...and the entire thing was mad brained including the NDA. Production wise these sleazy reality tv things are grifts. If the core reality of them is questioned then it hurts the "integrity" of the brand and ultimately the production company's bottom dollar. If you don't buy into the reality aspects those shows lose most of their appeal.
I can't even begin to say how weird it was to be crew. There's like this whole fast-track culture where if you're a little competent they will invite you onto the next project with basically the same responsibilities but a jacked up important sounding title. From a technical standpoint I've seen more discipline and good practice on film student projects. They are their own little worlds inside film and if they don't work more reality tv they don't have recognized transferable skills that easily ports to other positions in the industry, so if they want to switch you become a person who has a bunch of entrenched bad habits you have to be trained out of and rehumbled before you can reliably get jobs. The people who get sucked into that world basically live in golden handcuffs.
I can't believe anyone thinks any "reality tv" show is real. The majority of them are all bullshit. Oh, sure, there may be some genuine moments in there, but those are scattered among the scripted and edited garbage.
But that's the thing isn't it. People cling to the idea that in that trash heap is a sparkle of the genuine even as the recognize the garbageness of the garbage pile. There's layers to the onion. As long as there's something that reads convincingly as genuine people will clap themselves on the back for spotting the contrivance while still at some minute level still buying into the perceived core aspect of the show.
Also let's not forget that Hugh Laurie receives tons of letters from fans in desperate undiagnosed medical situations on a regular basis. Just because you aren't fooled doesn't mean that's a universal.
My ides for a reality.show.is kind of like.a game show. You give people a bunch of cocaine and then send then to work in some sort of quarry breaking rocks. Whoever does the best gets a bunch more cocaine, while the loser just gets a little bit of.cocaine. They'll work in the quarry for 8 hours a day with their off time spent however they'd like in a group living situation. Probably doing their cocaine. At the end of every week the person with the least amount of cocaine is disqualified. The prize for winning is a shit load of cocaine.
That's it. That's the show. It would be important to select.people that would actually do the cocaine. No teetotalers. Also: open bar.
What difference does this make now? Racism isn’t a republican secret, neither is supporting white supremacy. The few bipoc supporters will minimize it.
You're 100% spot on. In 2015 Donald Trump was literally being endorsed by KKK Wizards and when pressed to admonish/censure them he refused.
This is literally not news.
So where are these tapes? We need them because, thanks to the cognitive dissonance enforced on everybody by white liberalism, a blatantly obvious white supremacist will only be seen as a blatantly obvious white supremacist as soon as they hear him use racial slurs.
Does he have the tapes?
Fucking seriously. Put up or shut up. Where's all the shit that Tom Arnold said he had too?
Especially now that Trump is actively courting "the black vote" I would think now is a better time than any to release those tapes. I'm sure the parent company owns them and has $ome deal to keep them under wraps though...
While this was an interesting read over all, I suspect what I'll remember most from it is the origin of the expression "a pig in a poke".
Heat of the Moment by Asia plays
Tuesday! Pig in a poke!
Who owns MGM?
Amazon
Now he's been found guilty, I wonder if more and more will dare to come forward. This isn't that, it is just a NDA running out.
Ohhh you just know it was a hard R too....what a piece of scum.
To be fair there is something hilarious imagining him using "nigga" in any context... particularly how he'd stretch the corners of his mouth back and over pronounce it
Also, this is the least surprising "news" I've ever heard
Meaningless in a time when people can just say something was AI generated.
And where the fuck were these people and evidence back in 2015/2016?
Under an NDA.
And? Seems far more important to release that information on a presidential nominee than it is to not break an NDA
That's easy for you to say when it's not your millions of dollars, professional reputation and according to this author, prison time on the line.
Do not show those tapes. It'll just empower assholes further.
There are still people that think Trump is a suave businessman that speaks his mind. Never underestimate how uninformed some people are.
Let's be honest, no one that still believes that will have this news penetrate their propaganda silos, and what bits do get through will just be ignored or dismissed. They need to believe what they do, and will bend over backwards to justify those beliefs.
Maybe there are some of those people. I still doubt they (or anyone voting for him) is going to be swayed by his use of the N-word.