Donald Trump had a successor in mind when he left The Apprentice—and despite Amazon’s reportedly current discussions about rebooting the reality show with Don Jr. as host, it wasn’t the president’s eldest.
In the 2024 book, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, Trump revealed that he wanted his daughter, Ivanka, to take over the show. “I said, ‘The best person to hire would be Ivanka Trump,’” Trump said in the book. “I didn’t press it. But I felt Ivanka would have been by far the best person you could hire.”
The network ultimately didn’t go for it, even before they fired Trump in 2015.
“NBC didn’t like it, because it became like a family thing,” Trump explains in Apprentice in Wonderland, “But I said, ‘There’s nobody you’re going to hire that will come even close to Ivanka.’ They said, ‘Huh…’ And then they came back with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Schwarzenegger’s tepid reception in 2017 led to the show’s cancellation after one season.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is having early discussions about bringing back the show that made Trump a household name.
Amazon’s Prime Video began streaming the series last year, after it acquired the rights in its acquisition of MGM.
According to The Hollywood Reporter’s review of Trump’s 2024 financial records, Trump still earns six-figure royalties from the series on streaming and in syndication. After Amazon shelled out $70 million on the first lady’s vanity documentary, Melania, rebooting The Apprentice is the latest way Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is contributing to the Trump fortune.
Trump’s pitch to have Ivanka host the show in 2015 did not fully exclude his other children, who regularly appeared on the series and its celebrity spinoff. Don Jr. and Eric Trump would have joined the series as boardroom advisers, Variety reported. “It was going to be the three of us,” Eric Trump said in the book.
