The year 2005 was a much different time in America. Michael Jackson was alive and found not guilty. YouTube had just been founded. Donald Trump, well, he was still very preoccupied by race stuff.
The Donald wasn't involved in presidential politics back then, he was mostly just a rich real estate guy with a reality TV show. And when he decided he needed a way to make the upcoming season of The Apprentice better, he started pitching an idea that sounds almost too incredibly controversial to be true: an entire season that would pit white people against black people.
Here's what Trump said on his short-lived radio show, according to an Entertainment Weekly story from back then.
"To be honest, I wasn't particularly happy with the most recent season," he said on his syndicated radio show yesterday. "So this time around, I wanted to do the casting myself." Among the team templates he's mulling is "an idea that is fairly controversial -- creating a team of successful African-Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world."
Tara Dowdell, a black communications consultant who appeared on The Apprentice in the early 2000s jokingly dubbed Trump's idea "The Apprentice: Race War" in an interview with Buzzfeed, saying the idea showcased Trump's "willingness to exploit race and be divisive."
Trump seemed pretty serious about the idea, bringing it up publicly more than once back then, including during an appearance on The Howard Stern Show earlier in the year.
Trump's "obsession" with race has been a topic for debate throughout his candidacy for president, from his early refusal to correct his own bitherism claims that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S., to his comments about Mexicans, to that time he retweeted fake statistics about black on white crime that were made up by white supremacists.
