The five criteria were established at the beginning of the challenge. Trump specifically said that if Annie raised more money than Joan (which was pretty much a given) that it would help her, but not guarantee a win. Both teams knew the criteria and took them into account when planning their events. For instance, they both had the “oh shit, we don’t have any celebrities!” moment. Annie complimented herself on “playing the game” throughout the competition, but I think focused on raising money to the detriment of the rest of her challenge, even though Trump warned her not to.
Annie spent the entire second half of the season going on and on about how much more money she had raised than anyone else, and seemed to think that if she raised a butt-load of money she would automatically win. Trump called her on it during the penultimate board room when he said “what if it’s not a money raising challenge?” Annie seemed a bit gobsmacked and responded with something like “well, I’m an awesome game player and I’m a great leader. The peoplez love me.”
I thought the challenge was a nice compromise between the “deep pockets” challenges and the “actually do something” challenges. They basically ran a “do something” challenge that happened to involve raising money. Unlike all the other money-raising challenges in the season, having a bunch of rich friends didn’t translate into automatic victory. Personally, I like that, because watching people try to get shit done is way more fun than watching them have conversations on their cell phones.
I don’t see why you think that Joan Rivers’ selection had to be a fix. Were the other contestants all in on it, too? Because none of them seemed to be that impressed with Annie. Well, except Brande. But that’s just because hanging out with Annie makes her feel smart and useful.
Yes, at the beginning of the last challenge AFTER Joan and Annie were picked. To be fair the criteria should’ve been set at the beginning of the entire competition independent of who were the finalists. As others have pointed out it sure looked like the criteria were cooked up to give Joan a fighting chance in the last task, especially with most of the criteria being subjective. If they had followed precedent for the winning criteria she was cooked, so the Donald had to devise a way to justify giving Joan the win. Also note the total silence from Trump and Joan since the show aired. They know that people smell a rat. The fix was on, I tell 'ya.
Because it would have been an interesting show if it had been another fund-raising challenge where the only thing that mattered was whose rolodex had the deepest pockets?
Half the challenges were “do something” challenges that had nothing to do with raising money. Annie kept on harping on how awesome she was at raising money, at least in part, because it was the thing she was best at. In what sense would the fix not have been in had it been a money-raising challenge? There would have been no point, and it would be boring, to boot.
Also, Annie won more challenges than anyone else, because she won three. I understand that last year Piers won 9? That’s quite a bit more impressive.
Again, the show was edited to portray the events in a certain light. It is not like there were equal over-head and hand-held shots, or equal shots at the beginning, middle, end. Over an hour was edited down to 2-3 minutes, and we saw what they wanted us to see… didn’t Clint comment on the editing? Most reality TV shows are edited to promote the dramatic theme the producers want to emphasize.
In this case, I think Trump lied. Piers said that they must already have a winner because Joan won 3 of the 5 events. What help did Annie get for crushing Joan in fundraising?
If you look at the whole show, then Annie should have won. If you look at that individual task, Joan should have won. However, I think the real determinant was that Trump felt Annie’s charity had already recieved enough bread and he thought the fair thing to do was to spread the wealth (if I may get a tad bit socialist here, for a second).
However, the problem here is the problem with the show. Annie was absolutely right, you can say whatever you want about your co-workers in private, but you cannot bring that shit to work. You do not have to like the people you work with. However, this is not a business this is a game/reality show and there really is no business, they aren’t co-workers, etc. So I think Annie was a bit to pedantic in her insistence on how she acted more professionally, while Joan was in the opposite direction.
But Saint Joan was dead to me when she compared Annie to Hitler and then started making jokes about it.
Right. Not to mention that there’s a huge difference between saying that the success of the task would be judged based on those five bullet points and saying that the final selection of the winner would be judged on those points alone.
Piers said that Joan should clearly be the winner because she won on three out of those five points. This is equivalent to saying that it didn’t matter how the rest of the season played out. For this particular episode, they were to ignore all of the season’s history and use those five criteria alone. How is that anything less than capricious? How is this anything other than a shameless attempt to justify hiring Joan Rivers – especially after all of Trump’s pontificating in times past about the essential qualities of a good manager?
nivlac is absolutely right. The criteria were cooked in order to make the selection of Joan Rivers sound credible. Even by that questionable standard though, the decision rang hollow. It rang hollow because it was simply declared that she won three of those five points, with virtually nothing show to support those claims.
Unless abundant footage of cross-dressing celebrity impersonators counts as evidence, that is.
Tenebras, your powers of analysis and articulation are far better than mine. I agree with everything you’ve said, and definitely could not have come anywhere near saying it as well.