President Donald Trump is pretty confident that son Donald Trump Jr. could host the rumored Apprentice revival.
“Look, we had a great success,” Trump, 79, said from the Oval Office on Thursday, April 30. “Fourteen seasons and The Apprentice was a tremendous success. So, I’ve been hearing that a little bit. So, we’ll see what happens.”
Trump called his eldest son “a good guy” who would “probably” be a good choice for the hosting gig.
“He’s got a little charisma going,” he added. “You need a little charisma for that sucker. So, we’ll see what happens.”
The Apprentice aired on NBC for 14 seasons from 2004 to 2015. Trump hosted the show, which spawned spinoffs like Celebrity Apprentice and The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Businesspeople were mentored by the host as they competed for the show’s $250,000 prize and one-year contract to promote one of Trump’s properties. When eliminated, Trump would notably say, “You’re fired,” taking them out of the competition.
Several outlets reported late last month that a revival of the reality show at Prime Video was in the works with Don Jr., 48, eyed to host.
“Since our acquisition of MGM, we have had preliminary internal discussions about what’s next for The Apprentice as a property,” an Amazon spokesperson told Variety on Thursday, April 30. “The show is not in active development, and any reporting on details of the show or names of potential hosts would be purely speculative.”
Previously, Trump said that he would look to daughter Ivanka Trump as his first choice to take over as The Apprentice host.
“I said, ‘The best person to hire would be Ivanka Trump,’” he said in the 2024 book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass. “I didn’t press it. But I felt Ivanka would have been by far the best person you could hire.”
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Trump stepped away from the show to launch his political career in 2015. When The Apprentice returned for its final celebrity season in 2017, Arnold Schwarzenegger took over the hosting gig. However, Trump was still involved as an executive producer.
Schwarzenegger speculated that Trump’s continued involvement led to the show’s poor ratings for that final season due to his controversial political run.
“It’s not about the show … because everyone I ran into came up to me and said, ‘I love the show … but I turned it off because as soon as I read Trump’s name, I’m outta there!’” Schwarzenegger told Empire in 2017. “It’s a very divisive period now and I think this show got caught up in all that division.”
