Donald Trump didn’t always make the best decisions as head of the reality series “The Apprentice,” CNN anchor Erin Burnett said during her discussion with the authors of “Lucky Loser” on Tuesday night. “I remember judging some of these tasks, you know,” she explained. “It was supposed to be who did the worst on the tasks. But that he sometimes would be so bad about his choice about who he fired that they’d have to go back and edit it to make that person look bad.”
“Lucky Loser” co-author Russ Buettner confirmed the story and used the experience of “Apprentice” contestant David Gould as an example. “A lot of the producers thought he was going to win that whole series that season, he would just run the whole gauntlet,” Buettner said, “But Trump fired him on the very first episode. And people in the control room, the producers were like, ‘Oh my God, what do we do with this now?’”
“But they had this other moment because it was entertainment, not reality. ‘Oh my gosh, this is really great because this is so unpredictable,’” Buettner continued. “So that quality that was really bad for him in business was solid gold on the show. And then they would just re-edit everything to make David Gould look [bad].”
Buettner’s co-author Susanna Craig talked about the fact that Trump used the fake name “John Barron” to plant media stories for years. Burnett agreed with how wild this fact is, telling her, “This is something I’ve been just fascinated by for years.”
“This kind of alter ego bizarre thing,” Burnett continued. “He would pretend to be a guy named John Barron. And he would do it when he was talking about affairs or about, you know, how rich he was. Because he wanted people to think he was richer than he was and get put on the Forbes list and all of these things. He pretended to be this guy, John Barron.”
Burnett then played a clip from a conversation in which Trump took on the role of “John Barron.” “I mean, they didn’t even try to use a voice changer, which a 6-year-old would try to do,” Burnett said, before Craig cut in to add, “He even named his son Barron… I don’t even want to go there.”
Craig noted that the pair have always wondered why Trump chose that particular name — and they eventually found a trail that provided an origin for where “John Barron” came from. “We’ve always sort of wondered why John Barron … we went back to old newspapers and we found the name John Barron where there were classified ads where he would be selling things.”
“And it went back to the exchange number for the Trump house. So it was Donald, he was using it as a pseudonym either because they wanted to hire a maintenance worker,” she continued. “So it was just this crazy origin story of John Barron that we’ve always wondered where it came from. And we found it in the classified ads of old newspapers in New York. I mean, it is really incredible.”
You can watch the interview with Buettner and Craig in the video above.
