The reality is Donald Trump had a vision for “The Apprentice” that would have seen daughter Ivanka replace him on the hit NBC series, which aired from 2004 to 2017.
The 77-year-old former president expressed his hope for the Emmy-nominated show in Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh’s “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass,” hitting shelves June 18.
“I said, ‘The best person to hire would be Ivanka Trump,’” the reality personality-turned-polarizing politician shared in the new book, which centers on how “The Apprentice” paved the way to Trump winning the presidential election in 2016.
“NBC didn’t like it, because it became like a family thing,” he recalled. “But I said, ‘There’s nobody you’re going to hire that will even come close to Ivanka.’ They said, ‘Huh…’ And then they came back with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
The 76-year-old “Terminator” star — whose pivot from screen to politics preceded that of Trump’s, with the former serving as the governor of California from 2003 to 2011 — replaced him on the short-lived “New Celebrity Apprentice” in early 2017.
But it wasn’t just the network that thought “The Apprentice” would turn into a family affair. That seems to have been Trump’s goal, as his vision for the show would have featured Eric and Donald Trump Jr. as boardroom advisers. The siblings had a history of appearing on the show in its original incarnation.
“It was going to be the three of us,” Eric Trump, 40, is quoted in the book. “There were talks for a little while about it.”
Now that the Trump family is more closely associated with politics — and legal troubles — than reality TV, Eric told Setoodeh he’s “not sure the two could have worked in tandem.”
“I think it’s pretty hard to say we’re going to run with reality TV in a time when you’re talking about ending nuclear proliferation around the world,” he said.
