‘It Stinks’: Trump Tell-All Authors Reveal Brutal Trump Tower Conditions That Greeted ‘Apprentice’ Team
Trump book authors and New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner revealed the sad condition producers found at Trump Tower when they showed up to start making former President Donald Trump’s reality TV hit The Apprentice.
The pair were guests on this week’s edition of Mediaite’s new Press Club podcast, hosted by Aidan McLaughlin, to discuss their new book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
McLaughlin asked Buettner and Craig what they learned about the state producer Mark Burnett and his team found Trump Tower in, and got shocking details:
Mark Burnett and his team were a little bit underwhelmed by Trump Tower when they first came to visit it. Could you tell us about that?Buettner: It’s a pretty amazing moment. So these people had been filming in jungles and they had very well-trained eyes to find things that would evoke a certain emotion in the jungles. That was always fear, because the whole thing of Survivor was that people were facing life-threatening things, snakes and spiders. So they walk into Trump Tower thinking, now we’re going to need this central figure of the show, who’s going to be the prize of the show, someone who’s so wealthy and successful and knowledgeable that all these smart people will beat themselves to death to try to get a one-year internship.Grovel at his feet for just the
chance to work for him.Buettner: And so they think when they walk in here, this is what they’re going to see. They’re just going to see wealth and prosperity and a humming, buzzing, thriving worldwide enterprise. And they step off the elevator and the first thing you notice is it stinks. Just smells bad. The carpet smells like it’s full of mold. And they look across the furniture and it’s all chipped and there’s nicks out of everything. And they go into the Master of the Universe’s office expecting, again, this hub of worldwide activity. And there’s no computer. There are no blueprints. There’s no file there. There’s just piles, very orderly piles of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about one subject. Donald Trump. So they realize they have this very huge bar to get over. The first is this guy is not what they’re going to bill him as. And so they’re going to have to invent that person. But they’re also going to have to invent a place that looks like a successful office place. So they hire someone to be a set designer and rent space from Donald Trump in one of the vacant floors of Trump Tower to build a boardroom and to build suites that would look like fancy places for the contestants.
