Richard Hatch, winner of the debut season of “Survivor,” stressed why he’s not so fond of Donald Trump and his “100% self-dealing” ways after his time competing on “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
Hatch, who took part in the fourth season of the Trump-hosted show, told Tim Murphy’s The Caftan Chronicles that he spent “a lot of time” with Trump, and knew Trump for three years before joining the NBC reality competition.
“He is probably the worst human being I’ve ever met in my life,” said Hatch, who once accused Trump of making “sexual comments” to “all of the women” competitors — and in front of his daughter Ivanka Trump — during the 2011 season. (Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign called Hatch’s accusation “completely false” at the time.)
Hatch, when asked what Trump was like “one-on-one,” described him as “grotesquely manipulative.”
“It’s all about what he can get out of any situation,” he explained.
“I would stare at him and watch him use the room to his desperate need for attention, and how he would play people, talk to this one person and then turn around and tear them down to the next person. He’s really awful.”
Richard Hatch, seen here, lounges in a hammock during the first season of “Survivor.” Hatch ultimately won the competition and was awarded $1 million. In 2006, he was sentenced to 51 months in prison after he failed, in part, to report his winnings from the show. He later appeared on “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
Photo by Monty Brinton/CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
Trump has faced a number of allegations regarding his behavior on the NBC program and its predecessor, “The Apprentice,” over the years. He has also been accused of using the N-word on camera to refer to “The Apprentice” runner-up from its 2004 season, Kwame Jackson.
Jackson told CNN’s Abby Phillip in 2024 that the president never used the N-word to his face but didn’t question the possibility that he may have said it, noting he’s “never known Mr. Trump to be comfortable around Black people.”
A spokesperson for Trump responded to allegations that the president used the racist slur, calling it a “completely fabricated and bullshit story” in a 2024 statement.
Former crew members on “The Apprentice” also charged the president with openly remarking on women’s bodies and their breast sizes.
The president once claimed in his 2004 book “How to Get Rich” that all the women on the show flirted with him “consciously or unconsciously.”
“That’s to be expected. A sexual dynamic is always present between people, unless you are asexual,” he wrote at the time.
NBC fired Trump in 2015 over his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail. The network, which took a shot at replacing the president with ex-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as host of “The New Celebrity Apprentice” in 2017, effectively pulled the plug on all iterations of the show.