It’s not a good week for Donald Trump. In addition to making history as the first former U.S. president to be convicted of felonies, he is now being accused of using racial slurs while working on his hit reality television show, “The Apprentice.”
The same day the Republican frontrunner was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records, one of his former producers, Bill Pruitt, penned a detailed article for Slate painting Trump as a racist, incompetent adulterer.
Among the many allegations is that Trump called Kwame Jackson, a then-Goldman Sachs broker who was competing on the show, the N-word, during the show’s debut season in 2004.
According to Pruitt, Trump was responding to one of his aides’ advice to select Jackson, who was one of the two last contestants competing for a job at Trump’s company. Jackson is Black, and the other contestant is white.
At one point during the season, Pruitt says Trump’s staffer Carolyn Kepcher told him, “I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organization,” and said he was the most impressive candidate.
To this, Pruitt says the current Republican front-runner responded, “But I mean, would America buy a [N-word] winning?” at which point Kepcher turned “bright red.”
“Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson,” Pruitt continued.
Pruitt later added, “There is no discussion about what Trump said in the boardroom, about how the damning evidence was caught on tape.”
Published on May 30, the article is titled “The Donald Trump I Saw on ‘The Apprentice.’” He said he broke his silence 20 years after his “expansive non-disclosure agreement” – that would cost him $5 million or even jail time – expired.
It isn’t the first time people who worked for Trump have accused him of bigotry. Omarosa Manigault Newman, who also competed on The Apprentice and briefly worked in Trump’s White House, also said he used racist language. She, too, said there were tapes to prove it.
Trump denied the allegations in a tweet on what was then Twitter in 2018.
Referring to producer Mark Burnett by his user handle, Trump said Burnett “called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have. She made it up.”
Jasmine Harris, the director of Black media for President Joe Biden’s campaign, described Trump to Politico as a “textbook racist” after Pruitt’s allegations came out.
Many on social media also responded to the revelation.
“No one’s surprised, though,” one X user wrote, echoing the sentiment of many others. “I mean, he got sued for refusing to rent to black people, called for the execution of the Central Park Five, and forced the first black president to prove his citizenship, so this tracks,” another user wrote.
