Joe Scarborough closed out the last Friday of 2018 by expressing his doubts that any tape exists of Donald Trump saying the N-word, saying that the Trump he knew before the presidency did not make racially insensitive comments.
“He did not say racially insensitive things, at least around us, behind closed doors. In fact, if you just look at the women who he dated and continued to date, it certainly goes against that,” Scarborough said on set. “That was not a part of Donald Trump’s personality.”
Scarborough cited more than a decade of personal experience he and “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski had with the billionaire before his rise to the White House and said racially divisive politics were a new feature of Trump’s persona.
Scarborough’s comments came during an interview with New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, whose latest story devotes more than 12,000 words to the history of Trump, Mark Burnett and “The Apprentice.”
Keefe said his interviews with former show insiders led him to believe that, while there may be thousands of hours of unseen “Apprentice” footage, the N-word tape is probably a myth.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about Trump using the N-Word,” Keefe told Scarborough. “I don’t know what I don’t know but having talked to a whole bunch of people about this, but I came out believing that tape doesn’t exist.”
Former White House aide and “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault said in her most recent book “Unhinged” that the N-word tape was real and that Trump said the word “multiple times” while on set. Many reporters have sought tapes of anything newsworthy Trump may have said in never-released outtakes from the show.
In 2016, Burnett and MGM, which owns his production company, released a joint statement saying in part that Burnett “does not have the ability nor the right to release footage or other material from ‘The Apprentice.’Various contractual and legal requirements also restrict MGM’s ability to release such material.”