Magician and former Celebrity Apprentice star Penn Jillette slammed Donald Trump on Michael Cohen’s new podcast, telling the president’s former lawyer: ‘God damn him to hell’.
Jillette, who spent two seasons on Celebrity Apprentice with Trump, said he was ‘probably responsible for around 100,000 deaths from Covid’ and was a ‘clear villain’.
Jillette was thrust into a divisive debate around the president in 2018 when his fellow former contestant and Trump’s White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed to have tapes of the commander-in-chief using the N-word on the NBC show set.
At the time Jillette agreed he heard Trump make many ‘racially insensitive’ remarks.
In this week’s podcast interview the Vegas-based magician told Cohen that Trump’s legacy is so abysmal no further evidence was necessary to damn him.
‘You might be wrong, but you can argue that when Donald Trump was on Celebrity Apprentice he was playing a character,’ Jillette said on the podcast, Mea Culpa.
‘So when you’re working in an improvisational comedy drama show, a reality show, doing improvisation, that is not your true self. You’re aware there’s a camera on, you’re aware of your job. You do not need anything Donald Trump said on NBC to damn him. God damn him to hell for what he did as himself as President of the United States of America and when running for that position. God damn him to hell for all of that.
‘It’s on record, we know it. We do not need to sneak around and pull tapes that might not be fair. Completely fair and dead to rights we have him as the worst President of the United States we have ever had and he’s probably responsible for around 100,000 deaths from COVID.
‘He is a clear villain with what is right in front of our eyes. We do not need to sneak around, we do not need to cheat. We can be fair and honest and kind and still realize he is a fucking loser who did true damage to his country and everything that I love.’
Jillette was a contestant on season five and six of Celebrity Apprentice.
He starred in the latter alongside Newman.
In further biting comments, Jillette said contestants were forced to sit still in front of the cameras while Trump would go on two-hour rambling rants, just so producers could capture a few minutes of usable footage.
‘Watching somebody as crazy as Donald Trump incompetently pontificating…. They would have him speak in the boardroom set for two hours and 15 minutes to get three minutes that were usable,’ the magician said.
‘He would do these crazy things like pulling stuff from the internet written by a 15-year-old child in his basement saying that he had made a bad real estate deal and would say stuff like, ”Dennis Rodman, what do you think about what he said?” Just these long ranting, rambling things.
‘I just thought I was seeing a glimpse of a side of humanity I’d never seen. For two years I was homeless, I was hitchhiking around the country, and I never saw the kind of craziness that I saw in Donald Trump up close.’
He told Cohen that Trump should be ‘damned to hell’ in the podcast interview, despite describing his sole purpose on the reality show was to present a softer side to atheism.
‘Andi Duke, the great poker player, was on Celebrity Apprentice. She’s a good friend of mine. I said to Andi ”Why am I going on Celebrity Apprentice?” She said ”You’re going on to show that atheists can be kind. That’s your only job.” That was my focus the whole show,’ Jillette told Cohen.
Cohen, 54, started his podcast in September on the heels of his book ‘Disloyal: A Memoir’.
Staunch Trump critics Rosie O’Donnell, former White House Director of Communications, Anthony Scaramucci and Trump’s fired aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, among others, have appeared on his show which is run in a partnership between Audio Up Media and MeidasTouch.