Apprentice contestant reveals embarrassing truth about Trump’s role in the show

THINK Trump was calling the shots on The Apprentice? Think again — this former contestant has lifted the lid on what he was REALLY like.

Donald Trump was all talk no action on The Apprentice, says one former contestant. Picture: AP

DONALD Trump may have acted tough when he was on The Celebrity Apprentice, but he wasn’t the one calling the shots, according to former contestant Clay Aiken.

“Trump didn’t decide who got fired on Apprentice, I mean, NBC made those decisions,” the singer told Domecast (via The Hill) this weekend.

Aiken, 38, said that the president took pains to make it look as if he was the one deciding who would be on the receiving end of his “You’re fired!” catchphrase each week. But actually it was the producers off-screen who were pulling his strings.

Was Trump really calling the shots on The Apprentice? Picture: IMBD

“There used to be a little thing right on his desk that looked like a phone — he pretended it was a phone — but it was actually a teleprompter where the producers were sending him notes,” the 2003 American Idol runner-up said. “He didn’t know that people were getting in fights during the week while we were doing these tasks, the producers did. And they’d send him notes and he’d say, ‘Oh you two didn’t get along.’”

Aiken, who appeared on the long-running reality series in 2012, noted that Trump, 71, is actually a “nice guy” and that he was not pulling back the curtain on the behind-the-scene machinations of The Apprentice to be “incendiary,” rather he felt that the anecdote could provide insight into how the president’s time in office could be unfolding.

Former American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken went on to star in The Apprentice. Picture: AP

“I think to myself, the man as president definitely has a teleprompter sitting on his desk right now with people telling him, ‘Well such and such is in the healthcare bill, don’t say this.’ I feel like half the time his teleprompter has broken down as president and he doesn’t know what’s going on,” he said.

This story originally appeared on the New York Post and is republished here with permission.