More than a decade after hearing Donald Trump’s signature catchphrase — “You’re fired!” — Lisa Rinna is revisiting her time in his orbit, and insisting she never saw the storm coming.
In her new memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, the former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star reflects on her appearances on Celebrity Apprentice in 2011 and the 2013 All-Stars season. At the time, Trump was a reality television boss, not yet a political figure reshaping American life.
Rinna, now 62, writes that her first stint on the NBC competition ended abruptly during week two. “The night I got Trump’s signature ‘You’re Fired!’ I called Harry sobbing from my room at 12:30 in the morning,” she recalled, referring to her husband, actor Harry Hamlin.
Her return for Celebrity Apprentice: All-Stars went more smoothly. She finished in fourth place — what she describes as something of a redemption tour.
But it’s her present-day assessment of Donald Trump that is drawing attention.
“Everyone always asks me to spill the tea on Trump, but I don’t have any,” Rinna writes. She refers to him elsewhere in the memoir as “our current Circus Peanut in Chief,” but insists that during filming, there were no warning signs.
“There were no signs back then that he’d become the monster he is today,” she writes. “Trump was a great entertainer. He would come out, say his lines, do his job, and move it along.”
It’s a striking claim, given Trump’s long, documented history of controversy that predated his political rise — including public feuds, lawsuits, and inflammatory rhetoric well before he entered the White House. Still, Rinna maintains that on set, he was “nice,” “professional,” and “on time.”
“That’s all you ever want on a set,” she writes.
Rinna’s memoir also describes interactions with members of the Trump family, who made appearances on the show. She characterizes Melania and Ivanka Trump as “robots” and “total Stepford Wives,” invoking the eerie conformity of the fictional suburban women. As for the sons, she is less restrained.
“And the sons Don Jr. and Eric were just as gross as they are now,” she writes.
Despite those impressions, Rinna says she did not see Trump himself as “gross” at the time — a realization she now finds unsettling.
“I do find it interesting that I didn’t think Trump was gross at the time,” she writes. “Flash forward to today, I really dislike him. I think he’s horrible and has ruined the world. I was as shocked as anybody at who he became. Maybe he’s always been that way and he finally took the mask off.”
Rinna’s political outspokenness, particularly her criticism of Trump, became a flashpoint during her final seasons on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She exited the franchise in 2023 after eight seasons, following a tumultuous twelfth year that unfolded under deeply personal strain.
When filming began for season 12, Rinna had just lost her mother, Lois, three days earlier. The grief, she writes, overwhelmed her.
“I had so much repressed anger from my mother’s death then, and the feeling that I was forced to go back to work too soon,” she says. “I really lost my mind.”
Viewers watched as Rinna lashed out at castmates and took to social media with increasingly combative posts. Among her targets was Trump.
“I even called Donald Trump out. I mean, who knows what I even did?” she writes. “I was in the fog of my own grief.”
The memoir paints a portrait of a woman reckoning not only with her behavior during a painful chapter, but also with the cultural shift that followed Trump’s political ascent. Rinna suggests that she, like many Americans, experienced a kind of delayed clarity.
Whether readers see that as honest reflection or convenient hindsight may depend on their own view of Trump — and of the years leading up to his presidency.
