Donald Trump hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice, including seven seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice. When he finally left the reality show (a.k.a. was fired for making “derogatory statements”), he had only one pick to replace him: his daughter, Tiffany. JK, it’s never Tiffany. It was Ivanka.
In author Ramin Setoodeh’s new book, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, the former president revealed that he wanted for NBC to swap one Trump for another. “I said, ‘The best person to hire would be Ivanka Trump.’ I didn’t press it,” he said. “But I felt Ivanka would have been by far the best person you could hire.”
Variety has more:
As part of Trump’s pitch for an Ivanka version of The Apprentice, Eric and Don Trump Jr. would have joined their sister on TV as boardroom advisers. The trio had been a regular presence on the show for years, appearing by their father’s side in later seasons to help him evaluate the contestants.
“It was going to be the three of us,” Eric Trump says in the book. “There were talks for a little while about it.”
Trump’s suggestion didn’t go over well. “NBC didn’t like it, because it became like a family thing,” he said. “But I said, ‘There’s nobody you’re going to hire that will come even close to Ivanka.’ They said, ‘Huh…’ And then they came back with Arnold Schwarzenegger.” This was the first time that Schwarzenegger and Trump were at odds with each other, but not the last.
(Via Variety)