After Donald Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, parted ways with NBC last summer after declaring his run for office, NBC eventually announced actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the new host of the series.
If Trump loses his presidential bid, would NBC bring him back to host the Apprentice? Entertainment Weekly asked NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt that very question at the Television Critics Association tour in Beverly Hills on Tuesday.
“No,” Greenblatt said firmly. “He would never be back on Celebrity Apprentice, as long as I’m here.”
When asked recently about making sacrifices in his life, Trump noted he gave up two seasons of appearing on Apprentice to run for office.
However, Greenblatt’s entertainment president, asked the same question separately, was non-committal. ”I have no idea,” Jennifer Salke said. “I have no idea what our response would be. With him, we’re taking one day at a time and seeing where he ends up and watching this unfold like all of you. We’re not involved in his life.”
Greenblatt was also asked if exposure on the Apprentice may have helped Trump boost his profile, enabling his run for the presidency.
“I think it’s certainly interesting, and we do talk about it,” Greenblatt said. “Bedtime for Bonzo helped Reagan, sort of, become a national prominent figure. Gary Trudeau was predicting that Donald Trump would run for president 15 years ago, before he was on The Apprentice. So you know, we were happy to have a show that was doing really well with a guy who was a big TV star, and it’s impossible to predict where it goes from there. I think it’s surprised all of us that he would want to do this, but I guess that’s what ‘s great about this country. But I don’t think that there’s really that much of a correlation, one to the other. I think he’s been a prominent figure for so many years that it’s probably not surprising that he would embark on this kind of journey, but it is interesting that he was on the show for so long and now he’s sort of on the national stage the way he is.”
The Schwarzenegger-helmed version of Celebrity Apprentice is set to air in 2017.
