New ‘Apprentice’ book portrays Trump as wounded and forgetful

NEW YORK >> It was May 2021 and Donald Trump was injured. Four months earlier, his supporters had plundered the Capitol. He had left Washington, disgraced, defeated, and twice impeached. His party had abandoned him, however temporarily, and he had been deleted from his social media accounts. He’s holed up in Trump Tower and cooking.

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 that prelapsarian period before Trump entered politics. 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 sold. He granted the reporter several lengthy recorded interviews. “He was at his lowest then,” Setoodeh, 42, said over lunch Friday in Manhattan’s West Village. “I think talking about ‘The Apprentice’ gave him comfort.”

Trump became so excited about the book that he offered to promote it at his rallies, saying the merchants who follow his traveling road show would help sell it. “You sell 10,000 books at one meeting,” he told Setoodeh. “Let’s see how this turns out.”

Not good, as it turns out – at least for Trump. “Apprentice in Wonderland,” published Tuesday, portrays its subject as a lonely and sometimes volatile man, who longs for the time when he was still accepted by his fellow celebrities, even as he appears to crave political power.

One minute he’s bragging that Joan Rivers voted for him in 2016 (she died in 2014); the next minute he’s excusing himself to deal with “the whole Afghanistan thing,” as he told Setoodeh, who happened to interview him the week President Joe Biden pulled U.S. troops out of the country. It was unclear what Trump meant.

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

“Trump was certainly much sharper in his 60s as host of ‘The Apprentice,’ and he struggled with his short-term memory,” Setoodeh said. When the author showed up for his second interview, the former president did not seem to remember giving an initial interview, Setoodeh said, even though just under three months had passed.

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

The campaign has gone 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 legacy as an entertainer.

Setoodeh said Trump was much happier discussing “The Apprentice” than anything related to his presidency. “He compares himself to Clint Eastwood and Marlon Brando, and sees himself as an actor and a famous person in many ways,” Setoodeh said. The 45th president gossiped about Khloe Kardashian (“I never got along with Khloe. Khloe got arrested for drunk driving, did you know?”); the disgraced former head of CBS, Leslie Moonves (“Now he’s in the Bel-Air club and no one cares”); Bette Midler (“I had her in my apartment and now she says the nastiest things”); Dennis Rodman (“A pretty cool cat in a lot of ways…Kim Jong Un really liked him, legit”); and Taylor Swift (“I think she’s very beautiful. I think she’s a liberal. Probably doesn’t like Trump”).

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

“What is the benefit of secret voters in Beverly Hills?” Setoodeh asked. “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.”

One person Trump refused to gossip about was Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” even as Burnett condemned Trump’s candidacy for sowing “hate, division and misogyny” in 2016.

“It’s interesting,” Setoodeh said, “because Trump, if anyone publicly says anything against him about him, he holds a grudge forever, and Mark disowned Trump after the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. But Trump credits Mark with ‘The Apprentice,’ and he loves ‘The Apprentice,’ which is why he’s never said anything about Mark Burnett that was even vaguely negative.” (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 expected the interview to be canceled; instead it was postponed by an hour. Trump reminisced that day about how 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 that Trump “fired” Omarosa Manigault Newman, the show’s recurring villain. He would then hire her to work in the White House, but she made secret recordings and then publicly disavowed him as a racist, publishing a book about her time in his administration titled “Unhinged.”

Trump sounded almost amused about all this, telling Setoodeh, “When we hired her, I told people, ‘If we fire her, we’ll only have problems.’ But that’s okay. That’s how life goes.”

Former first lady Melania Trump appears in the book when Trump reminisces about firing Rodman for misspelling her name as “Milania” on a poster for her new skin care line during one of the show’s challenges. Melania Trump had spoken out in that episode to complain: “They spelled my name wrong, it’s all over the place and no one even noticed.”

Setoodeh said the former president happily relived the exchange, saying, “I mean, how good is that television? I can not believe it.”

Speaking of those simpler times, Trump found himself in a few moments of something approaching introspection, like when he accidentally admitted that he “lost the election” (although he quickly turned around and said “when they said we lost”). At one point he asked Setoodeh: “So, do you think I would have been president without ‘The Apprentice’? I say yes. But some people say no. A lot of smart people say no.”

Trump said that what he ultimately learned about show business during his years on the show was this: “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.