The first time Donald Trump fired somebody on "The Apprentice," the Trump Tower shook, he told writer Ramin Setoodeh for a new book.
The publication, "Apprentice in Wonderland," is set to be released this week, and Setoodeh revealed more information from the pages with an excerpt in the Washington Post.
“When I said, ‘You’re fired!’ the whole building shook,” Trump told the author. “Everybody, because they have so many screens, they saw what was going on in the boardroom. The place just reverberated. People were screaming. They were shouting. The crew! The makeup people! Everyone was watching it. There were hundreds of them, and they went crazy.”
Setoodeh compared his brags during his interview to a high school football coach reliving his "glory days."
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“'In fact,' he says, “they had to stop the tape. They had to get them to shut up, because you can’t have that. Although' — Trump seems to imagine the sound of a crew cheering for him again, right now — 'they could have left it; it would have been interesting. But the people in their homes went crazy too! Because that first night, when it aired, that first show, I got calls from people that I hadn’t spoken to in years.'"
According to Trump, the praise was glowing, with people telling him, "That was the most unbelievable show!"
“So, it actually got very good reviews, which is hard for me, because they hate to give me good reviews,” Trump told the author. “I got unbelievable reviews. Now, that was before my political days, okay? You know.”
Speaking to "Morning Joe" on Monday, Setoodeh said that it was clear Trump's memory was lacking. The reporter first began covering the show in 2004, so he's been speaking to Trump for 20 years.
In fact, Setoodeh told MSNBC that he met Trump for the first of their six interviews in 2021. Just a few months later, however, Trump didn't even remember the writer.
“That was a long time ago,” Trump claimed.
Remembering "The Apprentice" seemed difficult for him too, Setoodeh said.
"As he crisscrosses through time, his brain misfires," the book says. "Even he can’t accept that a version of himself existed that was once broadly uncontroversial and popular."
