Penn Jillette says it would be immoral to share the dirt he has on Donald Trump
Thanks to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s post-firing publicity tour, people can’t stop talking about the potential existence of a recording of Donald Trump using a racial epithet on the set of Celebrity Apprentice. The existence of said tape came up during the 2016 election but, after it failed to materialize, the news cycle moved on. Now, however, even magician Penn Jillette can’t get out of an interview about his career without discussing the Trump tape, though he’s a bit mum on the details.
Pretty early on in Jillette’s interview with Vulture, the conversation turned to politics, the magician’s own libertarian beliefs, and the effect of Trump on the discourse. As a former contestant on Celebrity Apprentice, Jillette was asked point blank if he thought producer Mark Burnett had a tape of Trump saying “damaging things,” to which Jillette responded, “Yeah, I was in the room.” But when pressed to divulge the specifics of what Trump said or didn’t say, the veteran performer cited a moral obligation to keep the story to himself.
If Donald Trump had not become president, I would tell you all the stories. But the stakes are now high and I am an unreliable narrator. What I do, as much as anything, is I’m a storyteller. And storytellers are liars. So I can emotionally tell you things that happened racially, sexually, and that showed stupidity and lack of compassion when I was in the room with Donald Trump and I guarantee you that I will get details wrong…And I will tell you things, but I will very conscientiously not give you quotations because I believe that would be morally wrong. I’m not trying to protect myself. This really is a moral thing.
Without going into specifics, Jillette does go on to paint a fairly believable picture of Trump on set of The Apprentice, “emotionally”: