It’s not just Donald Trump versus Martha Stewart. It turns out The Apprentice front man has yet another enemy in the TV business.
Veteran producer Chuck Lorre has a beef with Trump and last week used his CBS comedy Two and Half Men to rip the helmet-headed one for something that happened years ago. Specifically, Lorre’s slap came in a “vanity card,” a 200- to 300-word text rant that Lorre slips into the credits after every episode of his sitcom. It’s devised so only those who record the show can read it—and then only if they notice it. On March 6, Lorre used the card to gleefully point out Men crushed The Apprentice in the Nielsens the first time the shows went head-to-head the week before.
But this was no mere victory. For Lorre, it was payback for an incident 15 years earlier, when the two men literally bumped into each other. Lorre says Trump just frowned at him and dismissively waved him off. Lorre hated how low the billionaire made him feel.
“After all these years, the memory that lingers, the image that haunts is of his smug pout and condescending hand gesture that somehow caused me to feel utterly insignificant,” Lorre wrote on his on-screen screed.
“I was reminded of all this when I looked at the ratings of Two and a Half Men versus the ratings of The Apprentice. Hey, Donald, I just bumped into you again!” Men snagged 17 million viewers; Trump, 9.8 million.
Lorre has been posting vanity cards—they’re all compiled at at ChuckLorrre.com—since his Dharma and Greg days. His first ever, in 1997, seems to sum up his Trump sentiment: “I believe what doesn’t kill us makes us bitter.”
