TV producers cobbled together footage to make 'overwhelmed' Trump 'sound sharp'
A producer who helped former President Donald Trump become a reality TV star back in 2008 claims he's coming clean about what he saw after helping elevate him from New York real estate developer to reality TV star.
Former "Apprentice" producer Bill Pruitt, now free from an expired non-disclosure agreement (NDA), says that producers created the fiction of a prepared, coherent Donald Trump, despite the fact that at times he "could barely put a sentence together." Instead of depicting reality, he writes, they fashioned an organized Trump who "sounded articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand."
In a tell-all for Slate, Pruitt also alleged Trump called a contestant the n-word and demeaned women on the set — including ordering a female camera operator off the set after complaining she was "too heavy” — before noting that Trump struggled to remember contestant's names.
A Trump spokesman, Steven Cheung, denied the claims in the piece, telling Slate, “This is a completely fabricated and bullshit story that was already peddled in 2016.”
“Nobody took it seriously then, and they won’t now, because it’s fake news," Cheung added, in a statement to CNN. "Now that Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the election, they are bringing up old fake stories from the past because they are desperate.”
Trump previously denied he'd used the n-word on set in 2018, tweeting, “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” A former Trump aide and former "Apprentice" contestant, Omarosa Manigault Newman, has also said she heard a recording of Trump using the racist epithet.
Pruitt alleges that "The Apprentice," while a genuine reality competition show bound by certain laws, smoothed Trump's rough edges. For example, he says Trump's actual offices were "less than telegenic," "cramped," and "a lot of the wood furniture is chipped or peeling."
"None of it is suitable to appear on camera," Pruitt writes. Instead, the production used vacant retail space where they created a "reception area" "with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling 'boardroom.'"
While generally painting Trump with an unflattering brush, Pruitt does present Trump as genuinely confident.
"I watch as Trump shakes hands with everyone," he says of their first meeting. "I’d been told he would never do this, something about fearing unwanted germs. When it is my turn, I decide on the convivial two-hander and place my right hand into his and my left onto his wrist as we shake. His eye contact is limited but thorough. He is sizing me up. He looks like a wolf about to rip my throat out before turning away, offering me my first glimpse at the superstructure—his hairstyle—buttressed atop his head with what must be gallons of Aqua Net."
But despite his confidence, Pruitt asserted that Trump was "overwhelmed" when it came to on-set dialogue.
"Without a doubt, the hardest decisions we faced in postproduction were how to edit together sequences involving Trump. We needed him to sound sharp, dignified, and clear on what he was looking for and not as if he was yelling at people," he wrote before adding, "While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items. But as he became more comfortable with filming, Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing—some of them misogynistic as well as racist. We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today and you can hear many of them."
Despite the editing, Pruitt acknowledged, it is easy to hear today "you will notice clearly altered dialogue from Trump in both the task delivery and the boardroom."
As he explained, "Trump was overwhelmed with remembering the contestants’ names, the way they would ride the elevator back upstairs or down to the street, the mechanics of what he needed to convey. [Showrunner Jay] Bienstock instigated additional dialogue recording that came late in the edit phase. We set Trump up in the soundproof boardroom set and fed him lines he would read into a microphone with Bienstock on the phone, directing from L.A. And suddenly Trump knows the names of every one of the contestants and says them while the camera cuts to each of their faces."
"Listen now, and he speaks directly to what needs to happen while the camera conveniently cuts away to the contestants, who are listening and nodding. He sounds articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand," he added.
Trump has previously contested allegations that he has a poor memory. In 2017, he said that he had "one of the great memories of all time."