Donald Trump Once Wondered If He Needed ‘Jewish Agent’ for TV Gig
Image by Getty Images
Donald Trump, negotiating his reality TV show, reportedly wondered whether a Jewish agent could get him a better deal.
“Don’t you think I should get a Jewish agent, so he can negotiate better for me?” Trump asked, according to an unnamed Jewish executive present at talks between NBC and Trump about his hit show, “The Apprentice.”
The executive’s account was quoted in The New York Times on Saturday in an account of Trump’s years as the star of “The Apprentice.”
The Trump campaign would not comment to the Times about the exchange.
Last year, appearing at a Republican Jewish Coalition candidates forum, Trump told the room, “I’m a negotiator like you folks.”
He also told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”
A disgruntled former employee once wrote that Trump, while running casinos in New Jersey in the early 1990s, once said, “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
Trump’s daughter Ivanka had an Orthodox conversion to Judaism before she married Jared Kushner, who now serves as a close adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
