How NBC enabled Donald Trump's "serial bad behavior" while he was an Apprentice star

The Hollywood Reporter

With NBC under fire for scheduling a last-minute town hall for President Trump against Joe Biden's town hall on ABC, The Hollywood Reporter is exploring what it calls the "long-running, sometimes strained but mutually beneficial relationship between Trump and NBC that started with The Apprentice and finally ended when the network cut ties in June 2015." "In 2011, Donald Trump was toying with running for president and NBCUniversal was unhappy about it," write The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters and Lesley Goldberg. "By then, The Apprentice had been succeeded by Celebrity Apprentice, and while the show wasn’t doing especially well, neither was NBC. The network felt it needed to keep the show around with its original star. The task of convincing him to stay ultimately fell to Steve Burke, then CEO of network parent NBCUniversal, who according to sources made a deal that went beyond whatever compensation Trump and producer Mark Burnett had wrung from the company: NBCU also had to make a contribution to the Trump Foundation. The company coughed up $500,000, according to multiple sources. It wasn’t the first time Trump had demanded a little extra to do his job: NBC had gotten off the hook for a $10,000 donation to the same organization in 2007 to get him to show up for the network’s upfronts presentation, according to a former top exec." A top executive described it as "serial bad behavior. 'I may be your employee and I’m supposed to go (to the upfront presentation), but I'm going to leverage you.’"