Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for hanging out a bit this morning, Friends! I Sideshow Bob’d myself with a rake in the garden yesterday, in case you were wondering how that’s going.

Once again, I’m sitting down at the end of the day to try to make sense of what’s happening in our world — specifically, what’s happening between the US and Iran. Once again, I’m having trouble sorting it out. That, in turn, led me to think about Mark Burnett.

Mark Burnett, as you probably know, is the creator of some of the world’s best-loved competition reality shows, like Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank, and, notably, The Apprentice. He’s also the CEO of MGM Studios, which is something I learned a second ago while Googling him. And he’s married to Touched By An Angel’s Roma Downey, if that does anything for you. He also, in my opinion, bears a lot of the blame for the situation we currently find ourselves in. I’ll explain.

I’m old enough to remember when The Art of the Deal came out, and everyone thought Donald Trump was hot shit. He was swinging around Manhattan with his first wife, Ivana, on his arm, and he was building skyscrapers and casinos all over the place. He was a pop culture icon, showing up in Home Alone 2 and trying to buy an NFL team.

Then, in 1991, Trump declared bankruptcy for the first time over the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which he had financed via junk bonds. In 1989, Trump bought the iconic Plaza Hotel in NYC. By 1992, he had accumulated $550 million in debt and was forced to declare bankruptcy again. In 2004, Trump Hotels and Casinos filed for protection under Chapter 11. By the way, I got all this information via a press release Marco Rubio released in 2016. The internet never forgets, Marco! In total, Trump would file for Chapter 11 six times.

By 2004, Trump had filed for bankruptcy five times and was generally regarded as a cautionary tale about the inherent risks of high-stakes/semi-shady financial deals. He certainly wasn’t seen as the genius real estate mogul he was in the late 80s and early 90s.

While Trump may have once been viewed as a titan of industry by the general public, his many bankruptcies were common knowledge by 2004, as was his womanizing. The entire country had watched him ditch Ivana for a younger woman, Marla Maples, in 1993, and then ditch her for Melania (whom he met in 1998), in 1999. The bloom, as they say, was off the rose.

Enter Mark Burnett. In 2004, Burnett came up with the idea for The Apprentice, a business-centric reality show in which contestants competed for a job in Trump’s organization. I remember Bill Rancic, the eventual winner of Season One, being around Chicago then, and the common refrain amongst the regular folk was, “Ugh, why would anyone want to work for Donald Trump?”

For some reason, though, people bought the schtick. Burnett’s reality show managed to reestablish Trump as a wheeler-dealer, mostly by beating the audience over the head with the claim, and America ate it up. The title of the first episode of The Apprentice was “Meet the Billionaire,” and other episodes of Season 1 had names like “Trading Places,”“Wheeling and Dealing,” “Ethics, Smethics.” All of it was designed to portray Trump as a billionaire who was willing to take risks to make a deal. Trump went on to host The Apprentice for 14 seasons over 11 years. By the time the show was over, Trump’s image was once again that of the big man in the boardroom. Apparently, no one ever stopped to wonder why someone who was ostensibly so successful in business was available to host a reality show for 11 years.

But giving lie to the truth that Trump sucked at business wasn’t Burnett’s worst crime. In the months and years after the infamous Access Hollywood tapes came out (otherwise known as the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tapes) in 2016, multiple former contestants and producers of The Apprentice came forward and claimed that Trump had used racial slurs and sexually harassed contestants on the show. It wasn’t long before media outlets started pointing the finger at Burnett, claiming he had the tapes that would expose Trump and was refusing to release them.

Burnett claimed that he didn’t have access to the tapes or the rights to release them, as they were owned by MGM. But as Burnett was named President of MGM’s Television and Digital Group in 2015, I can’t help but feel that he could have found a way if it had really been important to him. Burnett claims to be “apolitical” and attempted to distance himself from Trump in 2016.

Does Trump even run for President, much less win, without The Apprentice? Does he win again in 2024 if those Apprentice tapes are released and people can hear the sexism and racism for themselves? We’ll never know. And yes, it’s true that Trump’s bigotry and cruelty seem to be a feature, rather than a bug, when it comes to the support of the MAGA crowd. But I can’t help but think that, had Mark Burnett never come up with The Apprentice, this whole timeline might have worked out differently.

All of that is to say that Mark Burnett sold us a bill of goods when he positioned Trump as the consumate business man. Here’s how his “negotiations” with the Iranians are going. All of this happened yesterday.

Ah yes, the tried and true strategy of “winning” delicate negotiations by publicly calling the other side “LUNATICS” and then threatening to “knock them out … a lot more violently” if they don’t give in to your demands ASAP. Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat have nothing on Trump.

Trump being a great deal-maker is the biggest lie we've ever been told.

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In other news: Marco Rubio tries to woo the Pope; RFK Jr wants teens back in tanning beds; What to know about the Hantavirus cruise (not its real name); and The High Note.

Let’s go.

Not really. I kid. No one is impressed with Marco Rubio. Still, Trump sent him off to Rome to try to make nice. It did not go great.

Savage.

As for Rubio’s gift for Leo, it was a bust.

It doesn’t even say “Bears” on it.

Rubio: “Here’s a State Dep’t football!”

Pope Leo: “Wow, okay. Here’s a symbol of peace, you war-mongering dick.”

And…scene.

This is one of those stories that I heard about and thought to myself, “That can’t be true.” Yet here we are. RFK Jr. wants to allow teens into tanning beds again.

This is dumb, not only because teens aren’t known for their restraint when it comes to, well… anything, but also because tanning beds emit 15 times more concentrated UV rays than the actual sun. I lived through the 1980s and 90s. There are girls from my hometown who looked like beef jerky by the age of 25. This is a terrible idea — just get a spray tan, kids! (Shout out to my parents, who never let me go to a tanning bed, but did allow me to “lay out” in the backyard on a black towel while covered in copious amounts of baby oil.)

The MV Hondius is currently drifting around the Atlantic Ocean while health officials around the world try to figure out how to contain the spread of the Andes strain of hantavirus, which has already killed three people on board, and possibly five more. The ship left port from Argentina back on April 1st. These people have been stuck on the ship for a month! I love a good (read: not crowded) cruise, but that’s a little much.

Some passengers disembarked to a “remote” island in the Atlantic on April 24, but the rest of the cruise-enjoyers are just stuck. So far, eight people have tested positive for the disease. It strikes me that this would be a great time to have a functioning CDC not run by a bunch of anti-vaxxer morons.

But fear not, over on Bluesky, Your Local Epidemiologist has info and answers for you in an important thread, because God knows the CDC is no longer capable of communicating with the masses like this.

Keep in mind that hantaviruses typically aren’t passed from human to human; the Andes strain is the only one we know of capable of doing that. Still, it doesn’t spread as easily as COVID or the flu; it takes close contact with an infected person over time to contract it.

Still, the decimation of America’s health infrastructure by the Trump administration makes this a suboptimal time for an outbreak in the US. Really looking forward to RFK’s claims that imbibing raw milk infused with hantavirus makes men more virile, or some shit.

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

Tennessee has become the latest state to redraw its congressional map, gerrymandering its districts to practically ensure an all-GOP congressional delegation. If you think the good people of Tennessee are taking this lying down, think again.

Here’s how protestors in Memphis expressed their displeasure:

And here’s the protest at the state capital yesterday:

Not only does the new map strip Black voters of representation, but a new bill in TN does away with the requirement that voters be notified when their polling place changes.

I’ll leave you with this iconic moment from Rep. Justin Jones (D-TN).

We Will Not Go Back!

Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Follow Julie on Bluesky and Instagram so she can get another book contract.