No story illustrates so succinctly the mainstream media’s dive deep into the tank for Hillary Clinton than the year-long Easter Egg hunt for supposed outtakes from The Apprentice that would sink the presidential candidacy of its 11-year host, Donald Trump.
In the end, though, after months and months of journalistic frenzy, it has proved impossible to say whether the “Worse Than Access Hollywood” outtake tapes actually exist, or if they do, where they could possibly be. The closest that anyone has gone on the record to claim to possessing one of the elusive tapes is comedian and onetime Roseanne Barr spouse Tom Arnold, who told a Seattle radio-show host that he actually owns an outtake, put together long before Trump began his presidential race in 2015, in which “he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever. . . . It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children.”
According to Arnold, the tape was made by Apprentice employees as a kind of humorous Christmas video viewed by “hundreds of people.” Asked why he hadn’t released the tape before Trump’s nomination, Arnold replied: “Because when the people sent it to me, it was funny.” And indeed, Arnold still thinks that the tape wouldn’t have made a difference in the election’s outcome: “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter-of-factly in front of there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter-of-factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people. For being politically incorrect.”
So far, despite pressure from Wonkette and other Trump-hating media to unveil the “Whitey tape” right now, Arnold has been cagey, citing the possibility that he might expose his friends on the show to breach-of-contract lawsuits for leaking. Most recently, CBS has reported, he tweeted that his current wife (not Roseanne) had received a voicemail from the “Trump camp” threatening a defamation suit, so “it’s on!”—indicating a possible change of heart.
But some skeptics—cited by Variety editor Tim Johnson—continue to doubt whether Arnold actually possesses the tape in question:
Meanwhile, Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair narrates the hilarious story of the race to find the tape—or tapes—that began at Clinton’s hipster headquarters in Brooklyn a full year ago as the Clintonians pored over their oppo-research file on the Apprentice host, who had made a double-entendre about a contestant:
As might be expected, the scouring Clinton staffers were quickly joined by their best friends, journalists.
Nonetheless, the hunt for the Trump-sinking tapes proved to be something like the hunt for Bigfoot: many distant sightings of the elusive hominid monster, but nothing that the intrepid journalists could actually get their hands onto:
Over the course of the year, I would hear incredible allegations. But nothing ever materialized. I was told that any footage would be difficult to get hold of. The putative “tapes,” a source said, actually referred to mere moments within an almost incomprehensibly large volume of footage—larger than anyone likely could have fathomed.
Meanwhile, some 18,000 frenzied Trump opponents signed online petitions demanding the release of the outtakes.
Right now Bilton concedes that their obsession with Apprentice outtakes might have distracted the media—and their pals in Brooklyn—from their actual job: accurately accessing a wellspring of grassroots support for the Apprentice host’s presidential aspirations:
As much as the tapes may have become a fixation for political operatives, journalists, and so many people in Hollywood, they may have also become a white whale during the campaign. Without the prospect of the tapes, maybe Clinton’s campaign would have arranged more rallies in the Rust Belt. News outlets may have focused more on understanding why so many Americans had stuck Trump-Pence signs on their lawns.
But with Arnold’s recent revelations, who knows? Maybe it’s not too late for his claimed tape to function for diehard Clinton fans as the new vote recount or the new Electoral College.
