Penn Jillette Trash-Talks Donald Trump In His New Book
Pinging around the blogs today is this Salon excerpt from Penn Jillette's new autobiography, Every Day Is An Atheist Holiday, in which he talks about his experiences shooting The Celebrity Apprentice earlier this year, and why wouldn't it? Donald Trump has spent the year straining for relevance with his birther agenda, causing a backlash that could, maybe, result in Macy's dropping his signature line of apparel and beauty products (but, probably not). So for Jillette to make this particular chapter of his book available as a teaser is smart marketing: Trump has turned himself into an object of schadenfreude, so bloggers are bound to spread this account of what he's really like from someone who's actually spent time with him. (Plus, focusing on the Trump content seems to have distracted attention from Jillette's prose, which is afflicted with a grating folksiness that would even annoy "your Uncle Stevie.")
Here's some of what Jillette blows the fucking roof off of:
- The reality TV genre has been quite degraded since the Louds starred in An American Family.
- The Celebrity Apprentice is not intellectually demanding.
- Clay Aiken once started a fake heart-to-heart with Jillette in order to get more camera time.
- People who suck up to Trump go further in the game than those who don't.
- Trump's hair is unsightly.
- Trump is vain.
- Trump was not a fan of the Occupy movement.
Though Jillette, to his credit, holds himself accountable for being on the show voluntarily as opposed to having been drafted as part of some kind of government program, he is unsparing in his description of the show and how miserable it is to do it: his co-stars are "full-tilt hormone-raging bugnutty," "venal people clawing at stupid, soulless shit in front of the modern-day Scrooge McDuck in order to stay famous." Producers would respond to contestants' temper tantrums by "reward[ing] the impropriety." Trump himself is a "whackjob" with "cotton candy piss hair." All of this, I'm sure, is very true.
But here's something Salon doesn't mention anywhere on what it terms its "'Celebrity Apprentice' tell-all": Penn Jillette is about to be on the show again. When The Celebrity Apprentice returns in March, it will be for an "All-Star" season featuring cast members from the first five Celebrity editions of the show. (Not only that, but the show is filming right now, so if Donald Trump really does compulsively Google himself, he's surely read the excerpt from Jillette's book, which could make for some awkward moments in the boardroom. He's probably already tweeted about it but, as I've previously mentioned, I blocked him.) Doesn't Jillette lose some of his credibility by spending a whole chapter of his book complaining about The Celebrity Apprentice, and then re-upping for another round?
Granted, there is a kind of nobility in Jillette's trying again with a project for which he has so much contempt: unlike Dancing With The Stars (which he also did), The Celebrity Apprentice is -- officially, at least -- for charity; Jillette will, once again, play for Opportunity Village, a very worthy organization in Las Vegas, where Jillette lives and works, that serves adults who have intellectual disabilities. But surely Jillette could do as much good for Opportunity Village by hosting fundraisers; the problem with that is, no one would put film him doing that and put it on primetime network TV.
Jillette has decided to have his Celebrity Apprentice cake and eat it too: to get all the career benefits of willingly participating in The Celebrity Apprentice, and to get all the cool points for shitting on it. But this up-close view of Jillette -- the vanity, the self-aggrandizement, the willingness to sell out the people he works with in a hot second -- kind of shows Jillette is no better than Trump. So let's quit acting like that "cotton candy piss hair" line makes him some kind of folk hero.