Fox News rejected an ad for the controversial Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice that its distributor tried to purchase to run during the network’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris set to air Wednesday evening, a source close to the film’s production team told The Daily Beast.
A source at Fox News, however, said that’s wildly misleading. They said, because of the high profile nature of the interview with Harris, the network chose to enact a policy to show no campaign, political, or political action committee ads, or ads that depict likenesses of any candidates, during the broadcast.
That final criteria, they noted, is what ruled out the ad for The Apprentice, which stars Sebastian Stan as Trump.
The film’s producers, the source added, were offered an ad slot on The Five, a cable news juggernaut and the network’s most watched show, leading into the Harris interview. They were also offered a slot during The Ingraham Angle. CBS and ABC similarly rejected ads for the movie during presidential and vice presidential debates.
The source said Fox News enacted the same policy—which is similar to how it treats political debates—when it aired a sit-down with former president Donald Trump on this past weekend’s edition of Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.
The Daily Beast reviewed a recording of the broadcast of Trump’s interview and of the 30 ads that were shown in the course of the hour, all but one were for consumer products, entertainment, or charitable foundations. The one notable ad was for Truth Social, the online platform majority owned by Trump—it does not feature any explicit political messaging and mostly shows B-roll of generic scenes of Americana before very briefly flashing to a mobile phone screen that shows both the Trump and Harris campaign’s profile pictures on the site.
Meanwhile, the source close to The Apprentice crew, who is familiar with the attempted ad buy, said production company Briarcliff Entertainment used an agency to try and secure the spot for a 15 second trailer. “We are unable to accommodate this in the interview,” the network replied in writing, the source said.
They further claimed that, when Fox News was asked to explain their decision by phone, the conservative network—which is dedicated to round-the-clock politics and news coverage—claimed something to the effect of “this is too political for us.”
The Apprentice depicts Trump’s years as a New York City real estate mogul in the 1970s and 1980s and has raised ire from the MAGA set for showing him popping “diet pills,” and getting liposuction and scalp-reduction surgery.
The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the trailer that was intended for air. It contains no controversial or incendiary content. In fact, six of the 15 seconds—accounting for more than a third of the runtime—are devoted to Trump procuring a cheeseball from a food buffet.
The rest of the trailer consists of a tightly edited montage of Stan as Trump with text from reviews for the film overlaid. Critical reception for The Apprentice has been mostly positive.
Former President Trump, whose lawyers tried to stop the release of the film earlier this year, has bellowed with rage at the film in recent days on his money-losing Truth Social platform.
“It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’” he wrote, earlier this week.
He called the film’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, “a lowlife and talentless hack” and the makers of the film “HUMAN SCUM.”
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