NBC Marketing Chief Admits The Apprentice Made Trump a “Monster”

The former head of marketing for NBC is apologizing for “creating a monster” in Donald Trump through the production of his reality TV show The Apprentice.

John D. Miller wrote a column for U.S. News and World Report, published Wednesday, about how he helped to market Trump as “a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty,” creating “a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.”

For example, Miller wrote, the boardroom that viewers saw was a set, because Trump’s actual boardroom was deemed to be in poor shape and too old to show on TV. Miller also wrote that more successful CEOs were too busy. According to a New York Times article from September, Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, and Richard Branson were also contacted by producers but didn’t make the cut due to a lack of time or the “necessary charisma.”

Trump, unlike those other business leaders, “had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true,” wrote Miller. Trump’s availability was due to the fact that, when the show first went to air in 2004, he wasn’t particularly busy: His business “empire” had been decimated by multiple bankruptcies, and he was no longer doing much at all. The show’s promotion would blanket NBC’s programming and create an exaggerated image of the real estate investor.

“The image of Trump that we promoted was highly exaggerated. In its own way, it was ‘fake news’ that we spread over America like a heavy snowstorm,” Miller wrote. “I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.”

In his interactions with Trump, Miller found that he was both “manipulative, yet extraordinarily easy to manipulate,” foreshadowing his dealings with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He also noticed that Trump was thin-skinned and quick to seek retribution.

Miller, who calls himself a “born-and-bred Republican,” closed his article by urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, saying that he and others “did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”

Miller joins many others who worked with Trump, either in his business or the White House, who now regret their efforts and are urging people to vote against him.

On a podcast released Thursday morning, Donald Trump said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “should never have let that war start,” referring to Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, which began when Russia invaded the country in February 2022. It was the latest of Trump’s many statements absolving Russia—and its murderous leader, Vladimir Putin—of blame for the invasion.  

Throughout the nearly 90-minute interview with Patrick Bet-David on the PBD Podcast, Trump continued to slam Zelenskiy, facetiously calling him “one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever seen.” 

“Who else got that kind of money in history? There’s never been. And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. That war is a loser,” said Trump. 

Trump also focused on the “beautiful golden domes”—referring to the numerous Orthodox churches, many hundreds of years old—destroyed by the Russian army, rather than the one million dead or injured in the conflict. (Trump loves a good dome.) And then, he attempted to paint President Joe Biden as the instigator of the war, rather than Putin. 

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s blaming Biden,’” said Trump, who then clarified that he is in fact blaming Biden, adding that “he instigated that war.” 

Trump has come under fire this month over rumors that he continued his relationship with Russian autocrat Putin after leaving the Oval Office. As president, Trump sent Putin Covid tests; out of office, the two have reportedly talked on the phone on numerous occasions, though both deny this (not always convincingly). On Tuesday, the former president did very little to deny those allegations, stating in an interview with Bloomberg that it would have been “a smart thing.”

JD Vance would not stop complaining Thursday about having been “censored,” when what he was actually describing was being corrected.

During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh—a publicized event with a large crowd, hardly censorship—Vance transformed a speech meant to be about economic issues into a diatribe about free speech. He repeatedly claimed that Kamala Harris wanted to censor Americans’ speech—without providing any actual instances where she had done so.

“We have leaders who would rather censor their fellow citizens than listen to them and persuade them,” Vance said.

He referred to his previous, and fully debunked, claims alleging that illegal immigrants had taken over the cities of Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

“We are seeing all across this country that criminal gangs, sometimes, are moving into our communities and making it unsafe for American citizens,” Vance said. He immediately tried to walk back his gross generalization. “And even if it’s not criminal gangs, sometimes it’s people moving into our communities who have no legal right to be there.”

However, the groups that Vance has discussed, Haitian immigrants in Springfield and Charleroi, do have a legal right to be there. They are in the United States under temporary protected status, a legitimate legal status that Vance has conveniently decided he doesn’t believe in.

As for Aurora, Vance and Donald Trump have pushed claims that Venezuelan gangs have laid claim to apartment buildings in the area, an allegation that has been challenged by both residents and law enforcement.

Vance blamed the “thousands upon thousands of children” of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education, and blamed immigrants for long wait times in emergency rooms.

At no point did he actually detail any supposed “censorship” of his words, but Vance’s statements about these immigrants have been subject to thorough fact-checks because they were all, in reality, untrue. Despite all the supposed government censorship, he did manage to get the words out without being arrested, which must have been a relief.

Later, Vance turned back to the subject, claiming that he and Trump would “always fight for your right to speak your mind.”

“The genius of the First Amendment is that when we debate our ideas, rather than censor one another, we can actually come to the table. We can disagree but still share a meal with one another afterwards,” he said.

“You do not bring our fellow citizens together by trying to silence them. You bring our fellow citizens together by talking to them. And inviting the conversation about how we’re going to make this country better, and fix our problems.”

Of course, when Vance or Trump are invited to the table, they lose their minds at the slightest bit of correction, not censorship. Vance himself flew off the handle after the smallest fact-check during the vice presidential debate.

“We may not always agree with each other, but we will fight for your right to speak your mind because this is America, and we get to say whatever the hell we want to,” Vance concluded his speech Thursday. He has repeatedly proved that painfully clear.

It’s worth noting that Vance and Trump haven’t limited their misinformation campaigns to immigration but have also spent the better part of the last two weeks spreading false claims about federal hurricane relief efforts, all while the work was actually undercut by MAGA lawmakers who opposed emergency funding until they wanted it.

In any case, it seems that Vance should be more worried about self-censorship, as his running mate has started pulling out of interview after interview.

Oklahomans are turning to the legal system to fight back against Superintendent Ryan Walters’s Bible education mandate for public schools.

Dozens of parents, teachers, and religious leaders in the Sooner State collectively filed suit Thursday against Walters and the state’s Department of Education, calling on the Oklahoma Supreme Court to intervene in the mandate’s implementation. Walters announced in September that he intended to spend as much as $3 million on the purchase and intracurricular use of Bibles in Oklahoma public schools.

The plaintiffs in Thursday’s suit included 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders, all of whom torched the effort for seeking to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on what they described as an unethical, unconstitutional, and an illegal reallocation of resources. According to the suit, Walters’s plan would “unlawfully support an invalid rule” since “no statutory or other legislative authority exists” for him to spend state funds on specific curricular materials. Instead, the Department of Education is restricted to providing state funds to individual school districts, which are then mandated to “spend on texts of their own choice.”

“Respondents intend to spend on the Bibles funds that were designated for other purposes and have not been lawfully reallocated,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Curiously, once Oklahoma’s Department of Education opened bids to fill a 55,000 unit order of Bibles for classrooms across the state, Walters’s parameters for the eligible Bibles became eyebrow-raisingly specific.

Bid documents indicated that the Bible suddenly needed to meet strict expectations, including that the text itself be the King James version, that the copies include core, historical elements of the U.S. educational system, including the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the text be bound in leather or a leather-like material. That narrowed the pool of applicants down to just one apparent choice: Donald Trump’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Bible.

That detail didn’t pass muster with the suing Oklahomans, either, who wrote in their suit that it seemed “highly unlikely that anyone could fulfill the requirements” of the bid other than Trump’s version. Further still, the group criticized the state for proposing to spend as much as $54.55 a pop on the Trumpian Bibles—just a couple dollars cheaper than the text’s resale price—when other Bibles can be purchased for as little as $3 a piece.

“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” Erika Wright, the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We are devout Christians, but different Christian denominations have different theological beliefs and practices. It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.

“Oklahoma’s education system is already struggling, ranking nearly last in national standings,” Wright continued. “Mandating a Bible curriculum will not address our educational shortcomings.”

JD Vance’s poll numbers are back to abysmally low levels, two weeks after they spiked following his debate against Tim Walz.

A new poll from The Economist and YouGov from October 12 to 15 shows that after an initial jump in support for Vance following the debate on October 1, his favorability numbers have dropped to where they were before the debate, a historic low for a vice presidential candidate.

According to the poll, 9 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Vance on September 28, and that number improved to 2 percent on October 5. But as of October 12, 10 percent of respondents had negative opinions of the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Donald Trump’s decision to choose Vance as his running mate does not seem to have given his campaign a boost. Trump’s choice was made before President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and was meant to shore up support from the MAGA base instead of pulling in swing voters. When Kamala Harris succeeded Biden in July, Trump’s folly was quickly exposed, leading many Republicans to second-guess the decision.

Those Republicans had their fears validated in the following week, with sexist comments about “childless cat ladies” resurfacing from Vance’s past. The awkward Ohio senator did himself few favors while trying to ingratiate himself with the electorate, including making a bad joke about Diet Mountain Dew being considered “racist.”

Vance’s liabilities have subsequently piled up. He had previously suggested that Trump had committed serial sexual assault, was found to have promoted a right-wing conspiracy theorist’s book that called progressives “unhumans,” and The New Republic revealed that he wrote a favorable foreword for a book linked to Project 2025.

The debate gave Vance respite from the bad press, giving the public a brief impression that he was a normal person. But as the poll results show, that quickly faded, reminding the public all about his weird ideas. The fact that Vance spoke coherently and clearly in the debate and seemed relatively pleasant—as opposed to his normally awkward, off-putting demeanor—couldn’t make up for the fact that they share the same destructive ideas.