Fresh allegations are surfacing about Donald Trump's disrespectful behavior toward Black contestants on “The Apprentice,” the reality TV show he hosted from 2004 to 2015.

Gene Folkes had just been jettisoned as a contestant on “The Apprentice” and was commiserating with a crew member at a bar inside the lobby of Trump Tower. He was indignant — and not just at having been kicked off the reality show after its star, Donald Trump, had delivered his catchphrase: “You’re fired.”

One of two Black contestants chosen for that season in 2010, Folkes was insulted that Trump had called him inarticulate and accused him of illiteracy in a lengthy boardroom tirade minutes earlier.

As the crew member, a Black woman who worked as a contestant manager, consoled him, Trump suddenly appeared at the bar.

“He came up and he asked me: ‘Is this your woman? Because you two would make a really great couple, you both have the same background,’” Folkes told The Associated Press.

The contestant manager quietly reminded Trump that she worked for him. Then, Trump made a comment similar to something he uttered in the boardroom that never aired on TV, Folkes said.

“He said again, ‘It’s not like I used the N-word,’ and then he walked off, and that was that,” said Folkes, a New York-based consultant, podcast host and U.S. Air Force veteran.

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    From The Reaction Mind- Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin:

    Republicans have learned to disguise their intentions so well, in other words, that the disguise has seeped into and transformed the intention.

    Even without directly engaging the progressive argument, conservatives may absorb, by some elusive osmnosis, the deeper categories and idioms of the left, even when those idioms run directly counter to their official stance. After years of opposing the women’s movement, for example, Phyllis Schlafly seemed genuinely incapable of conjuring the prefeminist view of women as deferential wives and mothers. Instead, she celebrated the activist “power of the positive woman.” And then, as if borrowing a page from The Feminine Mystique, she railed against the meaninglessness and lack of fulfillment among American women; the difference was that she blamed these ills on feminism rather than on sexism. When she spoke out against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), she didn’t claim that it introduceda radical new language of rights. Her argument was the opposite. The ERA, she told the Washington Star, “is a takeaway of women’s rights.” It will “take away the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the home.” Schlafly was obviously using the language of rights in a way that was opposed to the aims of the feminist movement; she was using rights talk to put women back into the home, to keep them as wives and mothers. But that is the point: conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

    This is the best book I’ve read for understanding conservatism.