Get the latest gossip

‘Apprentice’ Producers Recall Particular Set ‘Stench’ They Just Couldn’t Shake Off

It “followed them like an invisible cloud,” per a new book from New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.

“The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud,” New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig wrote in their new book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” The Times published an adapted excerpt on Saturday. There were also “scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas” and “the décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame,” per the Times’ journalists. Mark Burnett, who created the show, ended up paying Trump (whose own body odor has been described by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) as “armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt”) almost half a million dollars per year for space on the fourth floor which he had revamped as a fake boardroom and the contestants’ apartments, per the book.

Get the Android app