Clay Aiken: 'Trump didn't decide who got fired on "Apprentice"'
Clay Aiken, a former "Celebrity Apprentice" contestant, contends President Trump, famous for his "You're fired!" catchphrase, wasn't the one making the big decisions on the series.
"Trump didn't decide who got fired on 'Apprentice,' I mean, NBC made those decisions," Aiken, who competed on the then-Trump-hosted "Celebrity Apprentice" in 2012, recently told Domecast, a podcast from North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper.
"There used to be a little thing right on his desk that looked like a phone - he pretended it was a phone - but it was actually a teleprompter where the producers were sending him notes," said Aiken, who launched a failed House bid in North Carolina as a Democrat in 2014.
"He didn't know that people were getting in fights during the week while we were doing these tasks, the producers did.
And they'd send him notes and he'd say, 'Oh you two didn't get along.'"
Aiken says, "It was very much, 'I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.'"
Saying he thinks Trump is actually a "nice guy," Aiken maintained he's "probably leading the country in the same way that he did 'The Apprentice.'
"I think to myself, the man as president definitely has a teleprompter sitting on his desk right now with people telling him, 'Well such and such is in the healthcare bill, don't say this.'
I feel like half the time his teleprompter has broken down as president and he doesn't know what's going on," the singer and former "American Idol" runner-up said.