Trump Pitched a Season of The Apprentice with All-White and All-Black Teams

The president has long contended that racial division is a sure bet for mass popularity.

If it weren't for his reality TV show, The Apprentice, there's a strong chance that Donald Trump wouldn't be president today. It made the real estate tycoon a household name and helped him sell himself as a savvy businessman, despite his history of bankruptcy and debt. And some of the behind-the-scenes stories offer a window into Trump's thinking about race. As The New York Times detailed in a story on Saturday, Trump once pitched an idea for the show's fourth season with teams of all-white (specifically, all blonds) and all-black contestants competing against each other.

"Do you like it?" he asked, previewing the concept on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2005. "Yes," Mr. Stern said. "Do you like it?" Mr. Trump asked Robin Quivers, the African-American co-host. "Well," she said, "I think you’re going to have a riot." That gave Mr. Trump no pause. "It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he exulted.

It's a preview of a strategy that Trump has relied on heavily since he entered politics, exploiting racial divisions for personal gain. His latest targets are four minority congresswomen—Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—saying they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." At a recent rally in North Carolina, Trump said, "Obviously and importantly, Omar has a history of launching vicious, anti-Semitic screeds," inspiring the crowd to start chanting, "Send her back".

The Times cited defenses of Trump from Ben Carson, the only black member of Trump's cabinet, and Lynne Patton, a member of the administration and former Trump family event planner, though it characterized them as Trump's "black friends," despite the fact that employees may be a more technically accurate term. "Trump sees success and failure, not color, not race, not gender, not religion," Patton said. It's not entirely clear how someone who "doesn't see race" would come up with a race-based game show and expect it to be a ratings smash.

People who no longer work with or for Trump report things differently. One such person is former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Jack O’Donnell. "He genuinely believes things like white people are smarter. And black people don’t want to live next to white, and white people don’t want to live next to black people," O’Donnell told the Times. "And he rationalizes that as, everybody thinks that, so it’s not racist."

But however he rationalizes it, Trump knows that stoking racism is an effective way to hold people's attention. In 2016, he told The New York Times, "You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, 'We will build the wall!' and they go nuts."

Running a race-based campaign—leaning on birtherism, demonizing immigrants, and vowing to ban Muslims—helped Trump secure the White House in 2016, and he seems to think it will pay off again. He's doubling down on portraying Omar and the other congresswomen as alien and dangerous. Over the weekend, he tweeted, "I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country."