Once again it needs to be asked: has Donald Trump ruined his brand by his involvement in the 2012 Republican nomination, championing of the bogus birther issue and comments suggesting that America’s first African-American President got into college and Harvard law school due to affirmative action? It looks that way. The Hollywood Reporter:
A supersized edition of Donald Trump’s competition series Celebrity Apprentice spanned three hours, going head-to-head against the rest of primetime on Sunday.
But, NBC’s three-hour telecast — which saw Star Jones and LaToya Jackson fired and NeNe Leakes quitting — didn’t fare so well: Celebrity Apprentice (7 million total viewers, 2.4 rating in the adults 18-49 demographic) was the lowest-rated spring telecast for the franchise, dipping 23 percent. Dateline (3.9 million, 0.8) served as a weak lead-in, down 33 percent. The Peacock placed fourth for the night in the key demo.
CBS won the night with 60 Minutes (13.8 million, 2.3) surging 43 percent, thanks to President Obama’s only televised interview about Osama bin Laden’s death. The two-hour finale of The Amazing Race (8.6 million, 2.5) was the lowest-rated in franchise history. CSI: Miami (9.7 million, 2.0), however, ended its season with a double-digit uptick, but still was one of the series’ lowest-rated episodes.
If this keeps up, NBC will say to Trump: “You’re fired!” But this is not surprising: it turned out that his show had one of the most Democratic party oriented audiences on the NBC sked. Trump was playing to the GOP’s far right base while taking his show’s base for granted. (Expect to see big discounts on Trump’s made-in-China clothing in the future.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.