Trace Plays Trump Card on "Apprentice"

Trace Adkins photo courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

January 17, 2008 — Trace Adkins makes his third appearance tonight on Donald Trump's NBC reality series The Celebrity Apprentice, surviving on a men's' team that also features boxer Lennox Lewis, actor Stephen Baldwin and Kiss bass player Gene Simmons.

It didn't take much to persuade Trace to do Apprentice. For starters, he was doing it for charity. But the show also had some personal benefits he couldn't pass up.

"I just looked at it as an opportunity to be on network television," he tells Dial-Global. "A lot of times if that opportunity comes your way, you just have to look at it and go, 'Okay, is this gonna be something that's gonna paint me in a bad light?' or whatever. And I knew that in this situation that I would, to some extent, be able to control that — 'cause I can control my own actions and the things I say. There's no script or anything, so I was left to my own devices, and so I wasn't too concerned about tarnishing my reputation or anything by being on this show."

To date, the two people who've heard Trump's infamous "You're fired!" are from the women's team: gymnast Nadia Comaneci and Tiffany Fallon, the wife of Rascal Flatts' Joe Don Rooney. At least one country star thinks that firing Trace would not be easy.

"That's a big guy," Jason Michael Carroll tells Dial-Global. "I mean, if I were Donald I wouldn't wanna buck the system. I dang sure wouldn't point across the table and say, 'You're fired!' I'd get someone else to do it."

Thus far, the competition has involved selling hot dogs on the streets of Manhattan and putting together a commercial encouraging people to adopt homeless dogs. In tonight's episode, both teams compete in developing a mobile printing station for Kodak.