“Holy mother of DVD extras! The private footage of a TV billionaire is going to belong to an actual billionaire!” In the wake of Amazon’s $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM, Stephen Colbert urged Jeff Bezos to release outtakes from Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”
“Someday soon, Bezos may release the most racist thing in the MGM catalog, other than ‘Gone With the Wind,’” Colbert joked last night on “The Late Show.”
For years, allegations have surfaced about Trump’s inappropriate behavior while on set of the show. In 2016 and 2018, actor and “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant Tom Arnold said he saw a compilation of outtakes in which Trump says the N-word and C-word and called his son Eric Trump “retarded.”
“He says every bad thing ever — every dirty, every offensive, racist thing ever,” Arnold said while on the Dori Monson Show.
While these tapes have never been made public, Bezos’ long-running feud with the former president leads Colbert to suggest that the Amazon founder may release the infamous outtakes. However, it’s still not entirely clear whether Bezos could release cut footage from “The Apprentice.” In 2016, MGM and “Apprentice” creator and producer Mark Burnett said that neither MGM nor Burnett had the right to release footage from the show. Last year, The New York Times reported that Trump owned a 50% share of the series.
Trump and Bezos’ rivalry goes back years, with Trump tweeting in 2018 that Amazon pays “little or no taxes to state & local governments,” uses the USPS as its “delivery boy” and puts thousands of retailers out of business. He has also referred to Bezos as “Jeff Bozo” and Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.”
Responding to a tweet in which Trump took a dig at the Bezos-owned “Fake News Washington Post,” Bezos wrote, “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #SendDonaldToSpace.”