Trump wanted Ivanka to take over The Apprentice but NBC ignored him: new book
A new book is revealing the "drama" and debate Donald Trump had with NBC when he decided to run for president and leave his show "The Apprentice."
Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh's book, “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass,” drops June 18 and claims to reveal the "untold story" of the former reality star.
According to the details reported by Variety, Trump argued that his daughter should take over the show, but he said, "NBC didn’t like it, because it became like a family thing."
“But I said, ‘There’s nobody you’re going to hire that will come even close to Ivanka,'" he told the book's author. "They said, ‘Huh…’ And then they came back with Arnold Schwarzenegger."
It was canceled after one season due to low ratings.
“It was going to be the three of us,” Trump's son Eric said about the new season after Trump. “There were talks for a little while about it.”
However, the younger Trump explained, the takeover by the heirs was never going to work.
“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 says in the book. “I’m not sure the two could have worked in tandem.”
While Trump's show started with a bang, pulling in more than 20 million viewers weekly, over the years viewer numbers began to slump. As New York Magazine reported in 2017, before Schwarzenegger took over, "ratings haven't been great for a long, long time."
"No matter how much Trump tries to gaslight the country on this matter, the fact is The Apprentice — with or without “DJT”— hasn’t been a ratings hit for many, many years," the report said at the time.
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"Per Nielsen, the show averaged 7.6 million viewers over the course of its run during the winter of 2015, including people who watched via DVR."
It fell to 67th in the broadcast series' final year with Trump, between 2014 and 2015. The report contrasted it with another celebrity-focused reality show, "Dancing with the Stars," which scored an average of 15 million viewers at the same time.
The book's description purports an inside look at "Trump’s dramatic tenure as New York’s ultimate boss in the boardroom, a mirage created by Survivor producer Mark Burnett and NBC boss Jeff Zucker."
It goes on to promise "unprecedented access, including hours of interviews with Trump, his boardroom advisers George Ross and Carolyn Kepcher, Eric Trump, and some of the most memorable contestants."