We Can Find the Tape of Trump Saying the N-Word (2024)

We all have our lasting memories of the 2016 election. One of my most vivid happened in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, as I was standing on the lawn of one of the producers of The Apprentice near a beach in Southern California. I had for weeks been on the hunt for a tape that was said to include Trump making racist and misogynistic remarks while filming on the set of the reality TV series that launched him to the next level of fame.

On Thursday, Slate published an essay by former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt describing his time on the show and alleging the existence of such a tape. Pruitt says that in this one, Donald Trump is justifying not selecting Kwame Jackson as the winner on the first season of the hit show, and he asks his producers, “Would America buy a n— winning?” Pruitt’s description of the moment—and the way in which the set of The Apprentice accepted this kind of behavior—is horrifying. It’s just one more reason why Donald Trump never should have been president—and cannot be president again.

Back to that lawn, though. I had been led to believe that this producer (who was not Pruitt) might have details about that tape. I hadn’t been able to get him on the phone, so I had shown up at his doorstep, as I had done with many former Apprentice employees in those weeks. There were only a handful of days until voters would elect the next president of the United States, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. At first the producer seemed very angry at me showing up where he lived with his wife and his children to ask him questions that might destroy his career or disrupt his life if he answered them.

But as I tried to pester, cajole, and play to what I thought were his sympathies to convince him to speak with me, he quickly stopped being mad. He became bemused. It was clearly a joke to him that I thought any information he might reveal about Donald Trump could sway the election one way or the other. “He’s either going to win, or he’s going to lose,” I remember the producer telling me. “Nothing is going to change that now.”

This was the attitude so many of us had in 2016, though most of us were working under the assumption that Trump would lose (and none of us really grasped what his winning might mean). Those fall-of-2016 vibes were illustrated again these past few weeks, at a key point in Trump’s hush money trial: The defense played an audio recording of Stormy Daniels’ attorney Keith Davidson describing what he said were his client’s views on why she needed to sign a nondisclosure agreement with Trump before Election Day 2016. “If he loses his election, and he’s going to lose, if he loses this election, we lose all f*cking leverage, this case is worth zero,” Davidson said, claiming to convey his client’s views on Trump’s electoral chances.

By late October, after the infamous Access Hollywood tape had leaked and Trump remained the nominee, it felt like there was little that we in the press, or the scores of people who had stories about Trump’s racism, misogyny, and outright sexual assault, could do to change anybody’s mind. As Trump said himself, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Heading into another hotly contested election this November, it feels like voters, members of the press, and even Democratic politicians are acting the same way all over again: as if either some deus ex machina is going to swoop in and save the country from Trump—and so nobody need work to combat his candidacy themselves—or whatever happens will happen, he’ll win or lose, no matter what anybody does, even now as a convicted felon.

Once again, so many of us are behaving as if we are not active players in this story of our democracy, but just pawns of forces greater than ourselves.

Except, Bill Pruitt isn’t. He has come forward with a story that could truly upend the future of our country, at possible personal risk. As he told Mary Harris, the host of Slate’s daily podcast, What Next, he’s scared, and he knows he’s standing up alone. But he decided to share this story anyway, because his NDA was up and because “Trump is making a second attempt to be president of the United States, and he’s leading in some of the polls,” which led Pruitt “to think almost desperately about trying to remind people what a con The Apprentice was.”

Here is the thing: Pruitt is very clear that such a tape, at least at one time, existed. He explains that showrunner Jay Bienstock recorded off-camera briefings before Trump made his “boardroom” decisions about who would be advancing in The Apprentice, in order to protect against accusations of game show tampering by the Federal Communications Commission. (The FCC was empowered by Congress to enforce regulations around such tampering in the wake of the 1950s quiz show scandals.) He also says that multiple people were in the room to hear the damning moment, which was also captured on video.

It’s unclear who has the tapes now. Pruitt said he’s come to believe the tapes “will never be found.” But if they do exist? They would be in the archives of Mark Burnett’s production company, now owned by Jeff Bezos and Amazon. The owners of the tapes have purportedly been under legal obligation not to publicize them, which is why they’ve never seen the light of day.

So far, anyway. But we are not passive actors. We can ask to see these tapes. We can even demand it.

Specifically, our elected representatives can request that Amazon turn over those tapes, perhaps to see if they demonstrate a violation of the federal Communications Act of 1934 as amended in 1960. If the tapes are not turned over, those elected officials can then subpoena said tapes as part of a duty to patrol our airwaves.

“If there is a tape in the Mark Burnett archives now owned by Amazon of Trump using the ‘N-word,’ it’s a matter of the utmost public importance that that be revealed,” former congressional investigator Norm Eisen told me. “Federal and state government authorities, both legislative and executive, have the power to subpoena that material. I think it’s imperative that one or more of those authorities exercise their ability to request the material, and if it is not forthcoming, to subpoena it and to enforce their subpoenas with all deliberate speed. The public interest demands nothing less.”

In the Senate, Maria Cantwell is the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee that regulates federal communications. Her committee has the authority to investigate this and potentially to subpoena the tapes if necessary. (I emailed Cantwell’s Commerce Committee staff on Thursday to ask if she would consider investigating—I hadn’t received a response as of publication time.)

The Federal Communications Commission, which has an investigative department, could also look into acquiring the tapes.

Before Pruitt’s piece published, I asked Sanford Williams, the deputy chief of staff for FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, generally if the FCC had the power to investigate racism and outcome fixing in reality TV shows. Without knowing the details of this specific story, he said yes.

“That is something we can definitely look at for game shows and reality TV shows as it pertains to them,” Williams told me. Using the statute name for the portion of the federal Communications Act that covers this, 47 U.S. Code § 509, he noted that “47509 talks about intellectual knowledge and skill.”

Which means the FCC can and should investigate this issue.

There’s no need to be passive players here. Trump, for his part, has surely never been one. Having sat through the last one and a half months of Trump’s hush money case, the evidence demonstrates he was not a passive player in 2016. He went through significant hurdles to make sure the Stormy Daniels story never saw the light of day before that election. And for all we know, Daniels’ story could have been the thing that tilted the balance of an election that was decided by less than 100,000 voters in the Rust Belt. As Daniels’ attorney, Keith Davidson, texted National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard as the votes were being counted and as it was becoming clear that Trump would win: “What have we done?”

And for all we know, the tape surfacing—alongside whatever else was caught on camera during those Apprentice years—could be the thing that changes the outcome of the upcoming election. The least we can do is try.