The potential set for “The Apprentice” just didn’t pass the smell test.
That’s according to producers on Donald Trump’s business reality show who have detailed the stale scent they encountered when they first checked out the 26th floor of Trump Tower in 2003, amid pre-production of the program.
“The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud,” New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig wrote in their new book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” The Times published an adapted excerpt on Saturday.
There were also “scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas” and “the décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame,” per the Times’ journalists.
“When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire,’ even ‘recovering billionaire,’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpet that needs to be refreshed in the worst, worst way,” said Bill Pruitt, one of the said producers. “The whole thing was absurd to all of us,” said fellow producer Alan Blum, per the Times article.
Mark Burnett, who created the show, ended up paying Trump (whose own body odor has been described by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) as “armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt”) almost half a million dollars per year for space on the fourth floor which he had revamped as a fake boardroom and the contestants’ apartments, per the book.
“Our job was to make him look legitimate, to make him look like there was something behind it,” said another producer, Jonathon Braun, “even though we pretty much all knew that there wasn’t.”
He added, “But that was our job.”