Sunday, on yet another painful to watch shocking episode of “Celebrity Apprentice,” Donald Trump fired Khloe Kardashian.  But it wasn’t Kardashian’s firing that was surprising (no offense to the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians’” star) – rather, it was the reason for her firing. 

Usually contestants leave the show because they failed the week’s challenge, but Trump fired Kardashian supposedly because he discovered she had a previous DUI – a reason my co-worker, an overly enthusiastic “Apprentice” fan, believes is completely unwarranted (so much so that he asked me to blog about it so all the world might know of his ire).

Here’s what went down, as he tells it:

Both teams had to create a 60-second viral video for All‘s new detergent and direct traffic to its site. The executives from All hated both videos, so both teams lost, and Trump fired two people (one from each team).

Clint Black [the team's project manager] was the reason Khloe’s team lost, but Trump just focused on Khloe. Khloe missed part of last week’s task – she had to go to LA to get a leave of absence from a judge for a DUI program, and Trump didn’t find out she had a previous DUI until she got back. He said his staff probably knew she had a DUI, but he didn’t, and if he had known she would never have been on the show.

If it were a real workplace, you can’t fire someone because of something they did in the past that had nothing to do with the job.

I have to agree that Trump was wrong to fire her over this.  Had she tried to hide her DUI, it might be a different story.  But she didn’t.  She (or USMagazine.com…whoevs…) disclosed her DUI to the staff, served time in jail, and is taking court-ordered alcohol education classes (which caused her to miss part of the previous week’s task).

 Now, had Trump fired her because he believed that those classes were getting in the way of her job performance – or even because she failed to report her absenteeism – he would have been well within reason, but if either of those scenarios was the case, why did he wait so long to confront her? (Oh, yeah, ratings…). 

Ultimately, this seems to me like a failure on Trump’s staff for keeping the information from him – or even on Trump himself for not bothering to ask about his potential new hire’s background in the first place. 

How should Trump really have handled the situation? Trump said she never would have made it onto the show in the first place, but she did – even if by mistake – and stayed on up until this past week based on (and I use this word loosely) merit.  Does she still deserve to be fired for this mistake – one that she’s actively trying to correct - alone?

Frankly, if I were Kardashian – and any of this were actually real - I might be looking into getting a lawyer to question why it’s acceptable for fellow contestant Dennis Rodman to have DUI but not her…(Suspicious!)

Thoughts?