NBC has cut ties with business mogul Donald Trump, whose show The Apprentice has aired on the network since 2004, over Trump’s recent derogatory statements about immigrants.
According to a statement, the network is ‘ending its business relationship’ with Trump, noting the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants and The Apprentice will no longer air on NBC.
Trump responded to NBC Monday, saying he’d ‘probably’ sue the network, according to Mediate and Fox.
(Huffington Post, June 29, 2015)
By the way, Trump has a better chance of becoming president of the United States than he has of winning any lawsuit against NBC (i.e., zero to none). More to the point, though, he must be sweating bullets over what this firing will do to his brand; although, with his preternatural bravado, you’ll never see him sweat.
In the Trump Organization’s eyes, its most valuable asset is the Trump name itself.
For decades, Donald Trump has diligently cultivated his brand, and he’s now a TV star in his own right due to the ongoing success of The Apprentice, which is now in its 13th season…
Trump has found numerous ways to monetize his brand [licensing] his name to no less than 17 different kinds of products, from clothing and perfume to vodka and mattresses, as well as glassy high-rise towers as far afield as Istanbul and the Philippines.
(New York Real Estate News, July 1, 2013)
This is why having so many companies, including Macy’s NASCAR, and Serta, follow NBC’s lead by cutting ties in his case is even more consequential than having so many, including Walt Disney, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and BET, do so in Bill Cosby’s.
After all, Trump is predicating his brand-building presidential campaign on patently specious claims about how he mastered The Art of the Deal to amass a real-estate fortune of $9 billion. But, given that he owns so little of so much that bears his name, it’s only a matter of time before his real net worth is exposed as a fraction of that amount and people begin dismissing him as nothing more than the Kim Kardashian of real estate.
That said, I see no point in commenting too much on this latest episode in the clownish life of Donald Trump, beyond asking NBC, What took you so long?
After all, here is how I previewed this spectacle over four years ago in “Trump for President? Don’t Be a Sucker,” April 8, 2011.
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Donald Trump is nothing more than the P.T. Barnum of business: a huckster who thrives on the maxim that ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’…
We all knew that Trump was a self-aggrandizing buffoon. But he has now exposed himself as a self-deluding racist as well.
This is why I urge all of the rich folks he depends on to patronize his eponymous resorts and buy up his eponymous condominiums to begin shunning him – just as they would a two-bit racist like David Duke. I urge this especially of the Black entertainment and sports stars he likes to feature as extras in his one-man freak show.
Trump is entitled to say whatever he likes. But, at the very least, he should suffer truth and consequences for accusing this country’s first Black president of being a Kenyan Muslim – who has perpetrated ‘the biggest con in U.S. history.’
CBS fired Charlie Sheen from One and a Half Men for hurling anti-Semitic remarks at a TV producer; NBC should feel even more compelled to fire Trump from The Apprentice for hurling racist remarks at the president of the United States.
So, here’s to this fiendishly thin-skinned huckster having his trademark words thrown back in his face: Trump, you’re fired!
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Still, NBC has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Because I don’t understand why calling Mexicans a border-crossing menace of drug dealers, rapists and thieves is a firing offense but calling Obama a Kenyan-born fraudster whose presidency may be the greatest scam in the history of the United States is not.
Meanwhile, I can think of no better move for Trump, on the rebound, than to strike a Tinder match with FOX News. No two public spectacles are more deserving of each other….
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