Former President Donald Trump claimed that the late comedian Joan Rivers voted for him even though she died in 2014, according to an upcoming book about The Apprentice.
In Apprentice Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking GlassVariety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh asked Trump about his relationship with Rivers, the winner of the show’s eighth season in 2009.
“I thought she might have been a Republican,” Trump said. “I know one thing: she voted for me, according to what she said.”
It is well documented that Rivers had a good relationship with both Trump and his 2016 rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton; However, there was a problem with the former president’s statement.
Rivers died in 2014, two years and two months before Election Day.
2016 was the first opportunity Americans had to vote for Trump at the polls.
The comment is all the more surprising considering that Setoodeh’s six interviews with Trump for the book came after the 2020 election, when Trump’s team attempted to push dead voters to illegally vote for President Joe Biden, claims that were debunked .
Donald Trump (left) poses with Joan Rivers (right) during the live season finale of Celebrity Apprentice in May 2010. He told the author of a new Apprentice book that Rivers voted for him in the 2016 election, despite that she died in September 2014.
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
Trump had addressed Rivers’ political leanings after speaking about the late comedian’s reaction to her daughter Melissa’s firing from that season of the show: Celebrity Apprentice 2.
Variety Co-Editor-in-Chief Ramin Setoodeh’s Apprentice in Wonderland Hits Bookstores Tuesday
The former president also made it clear that he didn’t mind The Apprentice being renamed Celebrity Apprentice in those final seasons.
‘I don’t even call him The Celebrity Apprentice, I just call him The Apprentice. I always called him The Apprentice on purpose, because he was The Apprentice. I thought he was a good name, but I just call him The Apprentice,” he said.
“I thought it was disrespectful,” Trump added.
Setoodeh interpreted this to mean that the former president “was concerned that the title change would erase the public’s memory of his years of success on television.”
Still, Trump promoted the celebrity version of his reality show.
‘I mean, I have the biggest stars to go on that show. It was very easy,” the presumptive Republican nominee said. ‘You know Joan Rivers wouldn’t normally put on a show like that, right?’
Setoodeh noted that Rivers had “built his career on a willingness to appear anywhere there were cameras.”
And Rivers was a natural reality TV star, and she had an epic tantrum, Trump recalled, when she found out that Melissa had been fired by the real estate mogul turned reality TV host.
“Joan was so angry,” Trump said. “She went crazy when I fired her daughter.”
‘Joan loved Melissa more than anything she had ever loved before. “She thought Melissa was the end of everything and she went totally crazy in defense of her daughter,” the former president continued. ‘Oh, they were both screaming. It was great television. But maybe Joan had more right to scream.
But that on-screen fight, Trump said, never diminished Rivers’ appreciation for him.
‘Despite the anger at Melissa, she was a big fan!’ she boasted. “She said, ‘No one else I’ve ever met could have done what you did.'” She meant it, too.
There is some evidence that Rivers may have voted for Trump.
On an episode of Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, Rivers gushed about Trump, telling the Bravo boss that Trump ‘would have been a great president’ after he teased a 2012 run.
Trump ultimately did not participate in that election, but was motivated, in part, to run four years later because President Barack Obama ridiculed the D-listers involved in Celebrity Apprentice at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“We all know his credentials and his extensive experience,” Obama said at the time. “For example, no seriously, recently on an episode of Celebrity Apprentice… the all-male kitchen team didn’t impress the Omaha Steaks judges.”
“And there was a lot of blame to go around,” Obama said. “But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership.”
And in the end you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meat Loaf. “You fired Gary Busey,” the Democratic president said. “And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.”
Donald Trump, Joan Rivers and Melania Trump attend the season finale of “The Celebrity Apprentice” at the American Museum of Natural History on May 10, 2009 in New York City
Joan Rivers and Melissa Rivers at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, California
After Clinton’s surprising defeat in 2016, Melissa Rivers told an audience in New York in October 2017 that her mother would have voted for the candidate instead of Trump.
“She knew them both,” Melissa told Whoopi Goldberg while promoting a book about her mother. according to the New York Post.
“Our families had a very long, out-of-the-spotlight relationship with the entire Trump family,” Melissa recalled. “I think at first she would have said, ‘Yeah, cool, cool, great,’ and then she would have said, ‘Oh, shit.’
Melissa added that her mother “felt for a long time that it was time to have a female president.”
“I think at the end of it all, she definitely would have been a Hillary supporter,” the comedian’s daughter said.
Apprentice in Wonderland hits bookstores on Tuesday.