Donald Trump reacted to the news that Amazon is having early talks about rebooting his reality show, The Apprentice, with his son Don Jr. as host, by praising his son’s “little” bit of charisma.
Trump was asked by Fox reporter Peter Doocy on Thursday for his take on the reported development.
“I’ve been hearing it,” Trump said, “Look, we’ve had a great success, 14 seasons, and The Apprentice was a tremendous success, so I’ve been hearing that, a little bit. So we’ll see what happens,” he said. As for his eldest son, Don Jr., taking over as host, Trump said it was “probably” a good choice.
“He’s good, he’s a good guy, he’s probably good, he’s got a little charisma going, you need a little charisma for this, so we’ll see what happens. Yeah, they told me about it, we’ll see.”
Notably, on Thursday morning, New York Magazine’s Vulture ran a piece reacting to Don Jr.’s selection with the headline, “Isn’t the Host of The Apprentice Supposed to Be Charismatic?”
Trump revealed in the book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass that his wish—at least in 2015, before he was fired from the network—was for his daughter Ivanka to be his successor as host.
“I said, ‘The best person to hire would be Ivanka Trump,’” Trump says in the book, which is out on June 18. “I didn’t press it. But I felt Ivanka would have been by far the best person you could hire.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that internal conversations amongst Amazon executives about potentially bringing the series back to life included Don Jr. as the reboot’s host.
A source close to the eldest Trump told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday that he hadn’t been aware that those conversations were happening until he’d read about it in the paper. A spokesperson for Amazon told THR that the discussions were only “preliminary” and that “The show is not in active development.”
They added, “Reporting on details of the show or names of potential hosts would be purely speculative.”
