I’ll admit that my particular brand of trashy TV is the elimination-style reality show. American Idol, Amazing Race, Project Runway, Drag Race - give me anything where people do a thing and one person at a time gets sent home for failing. And so back in the day, despite my already thorough dislike for Donald Trump, I tuned in and enjoyed The Apprentice. The actual writers and producers (i.e., not DJT) turned out some compellingly trashy television.
There was one particular episode I remember vividly to this day. The premise of the show, if you mercifully never watched it, was that a couple dozen aspiring executives get divided into two teams and are given some sort of business task - open a bridal shop, sell Trump-branded bottled water, manage a motel, brand a product, etc. - and one team wins and gets a reward, the other team gets called into the “boardroom” where they’re excoriated by Trump and his advisors, and at the end he “fires” one of the contestants.
One person on each team is designated the Project Manager of each task, and bears the bulk of the responsibility. Oftentimes the PM of the winning team gets immunity, so they cannot be fired on the next task even if their team loses. And sometimes he shuffles up the teams.
Such was the situation where a gentleman named Bradford had been the winning PM the previous week, and was sent over to the other team, the women’s team, to help the ladyfolk get it together. Alas his new team lost the task but he had immunity and couldn’t be “fired”.
In the boardroom, Trump was doing his scripted “I can’t believe how worthless and stupid you all were!” schtick, and Bradford jumped in and said that he was so confident about his performance, that he’d be willing to give up his immunity because he knew he wouldn’t be fired. DJT pondered for a moment and said, “Okay, I’ll accept that. You no longer have immunity and you can be fired tonight”, to which he replied, “I am confident in my performance.”
When the time came to do the firing, he railed on the poor women who hadn’t lived up to his standards but then turned to Bradford. “But you, Bradford. You did the stupidest thing of all. You gave up an advantage for no reason. You gained nothing. You could have walked out of here safe but you gave up an advantage for nothing in return. You never do that! When you have an advantage, you use it, you don’t give it up. And that, to me, is an unforgivable mistake. You don’t give away an advantage. Bradford, you’re fired.”
It was some damn good television and I remember it all these years later. And you know what? I agree. I’ve thought about that a lot. I have no doubt that the entire speech was written by a writer and given to him and the decision was made by the Executive Producers and everyone, so I’m not giving DJT any credit for it, he just read the lines. But it stuck with me.
Don’t give away an advantage. When you get a break, use it. The Convalescent-in-Chief would have it no other way.
In other questions, if this all goes South for the reds could a President Pelosi withdraw the Barrett nomination?