Prime Video To Stream 'The Apprentice,' But Not Those Embarrassing Trump Outtakes

(A version of this first appeared in the TooMuchTV newsletter)

Amazon's Prime Video announced Monday morning it will stream Seasons 1-7 of President Donald Trump‘s competition show The Apprentice.

I have no idea how many people will watch this. Aside from the political passions associated with the show in 2025, the format just feels dated (although I realize a UK version of The Apprentice is still on the air after 19 seasons).

If you wonder why the show ended up on Prime Video, it's because MGM owned producer Mark Burnett's production company and Amazon acquired it with the rest of MGM in 2021.

The news reminded me of this piece I wrote back in 2016. There had been rumors that during the run of The Apprentice, Donald Trump had engaged in behavior many participants felt was sexual harassment. And several crew members alleged that they had heard use the "N" word, most notably in relations to Kwame Jackson, who was the runner-up on season one of the show:

So what would they have discussed if they weren't facing the prospects of a court battle? Sources claim that each of the six contestants had personally heard Donald Trump use "troubling" sexual banter with female contestants and one source claims to have heard the billionaire off-handily describe a female contestant as having a "nice big black ass." Another source claims to have heard Donald Trump refer to season one runner-up Kwame Jackson as "a Ni**er."

I also spoke with two people who worked on the production of later seasons of The Apprentice and in both cases they reported hearing Donald Trump discuss the breasts of contestants during and before "board meetings" on the show. One former crew member recounted a discussion in which Donald Trump was overheard having a discussion with a show's producer about whether one male contestant had come across as "manly enough" in a previous scene. This crew member also recounted Trump telling a camera person who had trouble getting a shot that "I could be fucking X right now."

There were also several examples of Donald Trump making multiple inappropriate comments about crew members, including what one source described to me as a "near obsession" with one female crew member, who was reportedly ultimately transferred away from direct contact with him after he made several comments about her rear end.

At the time, my reporting didn't get a lot of attention. I think in large part because they were potentially serious charges, and no one was willing to talk on the record.

But as years have passed - and some NDAs have expired - some participants on the show have begun to speak out, often confirming things I had previously reported.

In 2024, Slate published a piece by Bill Pruitt, who was one of four producers who worked on The Apprentice for the first two seasons. His non-disclose agreement had expired after 20 years, and recounted a number of problematic interactions by Donald Trump. 

And in October of that year, Vanity Fair published an interview with former NBC chief marketing officer John Miller, who told the magazine he regretted "mythologizing Trump’s business savvy and recalls the host’s “racist tendencies,” creepy pageant behavior, and how he could be manipulated with compliments:"

Tell me about his racist idea to do a season of The Apprentice where Black contestants would compete against white contestants.

We had a wrap party after the third season at Lincoln Center. I was at the bar waiting to get a drink for my wife, and Trump came up to me and said, “John, I’ve got a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.” So, in an instant, I’m thinking I can’t say what I really think, which is: What the fuck. Are you crazy? Because he doesn’t react well when people say his ideas are bad. So I said, “I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.”

In May, Slate published an essay by former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt that alleged a tape exists of Trump saying the N-word on camera. Do you think Trump said the N-word?

He did, and quite honestly, he probably said it more than once.

How do you know?

I heard from one of the executives who used to work on the show.

This is one of those stories that has never really reached any real cultural resonance, in large part because many people won't believe it until they would hear the excerpt itself - and many probably not even then.

I've also heard there are plenty of disturbing outtakes from the show, and when Donald Trump officially announced his first presidential run, producer Mark Burnett ordered the server where the outtakes of the show locked down. Presumably, at least some of the outtakes are still sitting on a server somewhere, now owned by Amazon.

And given Amazon's recent conciliatory moves towards Donald Trump - including a $40 documentary featuring wife Melania and another documentary recounting his moves in the Middle East - my guess is that those pesky outtakes will never be made public.