What’s a polite way of saying that sometimes Donald Trump can be a little insensitive or oblivious to major currents in the culture? How about he can be tone deaf? Yeah, okay, tone deaf; let’s go with that. Well, Trump was all kinds of tone deaf on last night’s Celebrity Apprentice when one of the contestants refused to reach out to “that gentleman” Bill Cosby to raise funds for a bake sale. The contestant in question was Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played adorable little Rudy on The Cosby Show. Although her team-mates urged her to get Cosby on the phone, she resisted, arguing that she hadn’t seen him in years; instead she chose to contact “people I felt can deliver the quickest.”
Trump, however, was unimpressed. In the Boardroom he said “I really believe, if you’d called that gentleman, he would’ve helped you, even if you hadn’t spoken to him in years because you were an amazing team with one of the most successful shows ever. So I think it would’ve been a very good call to make for charity. But you have to take responsibility. I think you agree with that.” Then he fired Pulliam. If memory serves, Trump once fired a Playboy model in similar circumstances after she didn’t ask her friend Hugh Hefner for cash. In fairness to Trump and the producers, the season premiere of the show was filmed long before the Cosby rape allegations, but it certainly made for awkward television, and you have to wonder why the episode wasn’t edited or tagged with some sort of explanation. As Vulture‘s Abraham Riesman puts it, “it’s kind of insane to have an extended sequence where a female acquaintance of Bill Cosby’s gets fired from a job because she didn’t beg Bill Cosby to help her get ahead.”
