Donald Trump really wanted Margaret Cho on The Apprentice, the comedian revealed.
During her appearance on The Julia Cunningham Show, the former ABC sitcom star said, “I was asked several times to be on it, season after season, and they kept saying, ‘Well, Donald Trump really loves you. Please come on.’”
Cho, who has appeared on a slew of reality competition series over the years as both contestant and host, including The Masked Singer, Dancing With the Stars, the Celebrity Dating Game, and many more, opted not to join the show.
“I just had a bad feeling about it,” she explained.
Trump hosted The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice for 14 seasons from 2004 to 2015. “
I never, you know, had any clue about really who he was. I think that he was just such a regional, kind of, phenomenon at that point. Nobody outside of New York really knew” who he was, the California native added. Cho, a self-described “life-long Democrat,” said her rejections were based on gut feeling rather than politics at the time.
Cho, 57, said she got a taste of the show when she briefly “helped out” on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2010.
“I did go on one of the challenges because my friend Cyndi Lauper was competing one year, and she did something at a diner. So I went, and I helped out. I was at the diner, so I was part of an episode, but I never actually was a contestant,” she explained. “But I was asked several times because Donald Trump was a fan.”
Cho is not a fan of Trump, however, since his move from TV host to politics. She regularly posts blistering takedowns of the president and those who support him on social media.
In August, she slammed ’90s Lois & Clark actor and MAGA supporter Dean Cain for becoming an “honorary” ICE agent.
“Why would you join ICE and encourage people to join ICE when your ancestors were interned in World War II?” she asked in an Instagram video. “You’re Japanese,” she continued, telling Cain, “You’ll never be white.”
Cho has been adamant about her dislike of Trump as far back as 2015, when she told the Daily Beast, “Trump is abhorrent.” That didn’t stop Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, from reaching out to Cho for her public support of him the following year.
“At the beginning of the campaign in 2016, Michael Cohen somehow got my email and was really begging me to become part of the campaign,” Cho said Thursday. “And I’m like, that’s insane. I’m a lifelong Democrat. Why would I?”
