Donald Trump is reportedly obsessed over his rivalry with the star of Rocky and Rambo, telling a journalist he is “better than Sylvester Stallone at being a reality star.”
Author Ramin Setoodeh interviewed Trump several times for his book, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, which originally hit shelves on June 18.
According to Variety, Setoodeh discussed the Republican presidential nominee while speaking at TV market event Mipcom. He explained that Trump was hosting Mark Burnett’s business-themed reality show, The Apprentice, the same time as Stallone was working with the television producer on the boxing reality show, The Contender.
Setoodeh claimed that Trump became extremely jealous, telling those around him that “Sylvester Stallone wasn’t as good at making TV” and that he “couldn’t remember his lines, couldn’t deliver the words to the prompter.”
Even when being interviewed in the years following his presidency, Trump would repeatedly tell Setoodeh: “Sylvester Stallone wasn’t as good as me; Mark Burnett said I was better than Sylvester Stallone at being a reality star.”
“I just think we need to let this sink in,” the journalist and author said. “Donald Trump has been president for four years, he’s been leader of the free world for those four years, and what he’s still fixated on was the fact that he was a better reality star than Sylvester Stallone.”
Setoodeh also claimed that “Donald Trump views the world through the lens of reality TV.”
He added: “He’s a reality TV star, not a politician, and he sees the entire landscape of the White House, of the political world, essentially as a reality TV set where he can get attention, he can generate drama and he can get ratings, which is very, very important to him.”
While serving as president in 2019, Trump posted an image of his face superimposed onto a picture of Stallone’s shirtless body from Rocky III. The bizarre post came shortly after Trump said during a wild Florida campaign rally that a doctor told him to show his “gorgeous chest” during an exam.
“Take off your shirt, sir, and show us that gorgeous chest. We’ve never seen a chest quite like it,” Trump said, quoting his doctor, at rally in Sunrise, Florida.
Elsewhere in Setoodeh’s book, Trump discussed his relationship with Joan Rivers, who won the second season of Celebrity Apprentice in 2009. “I thought she might have been a Republican,” Trump said. “I know one thing: she voted for me, according to what she said.”
However, his claim is impossible as Trump first stood for election on November 8, 2016. Rivers died on September 4, 2014 at the age of 81.
