Trump isn’t catching a break, is he? He always seems to land in the tabloids with some controversy, so it’s no surprise when, even fresh off his whole “lewd” scandal against women, he found himself in the midst of another one.

Allegedly, three staffers have said on Trump’s show “The Apprentice,” which is going into its thirteenth season, that during shooting he reportedly referred to rapper and contestant Lil Jon as “Uncle Tom,” even after several producers urged him to stop.  

If this is true, I’m disgusted but not shocked.  Trump has a big mouth which gets himself into trouble. How dare Trump use any sort of racially insulting language? Just because he’s running for president doesn’t give him free range to do and say whatever he pleases.

There’d be no question if President Barack Obama said half the offensive things Trump has said in these past few weeks about women and minorities. His naysayers would never let him live it down. What makes Trump any different?

As a citizen of this country, hearing this also makes me sad, and I wonder if this is as far as we have fallen as a society. Are we in the slave-trade days, where using racial epithets rolled off tongues on a daily basis is normal?  The answer should be no, no matter how divided this country gets.

Lil Jon, along with the other celebrity contenders, was tasked to promote hair-care products, so he bought and donned an Uncle Sam costume to help advertise the “beautiful” hair product. Trump caught word of this gimmick and began referring to Lil Jon around “The Apprentice” staff as “Uncle Tom.”

One longtime staffer recalled Trump blurting out the derogatory term at least twice. The staffer said Trump was utterly tone-deaf to the racially charged history of the term, which is used to mock a black man deemed to be obedient to white people.

Multiple producers attempted to get Trump to stop calling Lil Jon “Uncle Tom.”   

“We kept trying to explain to Trump that that’s not a word you can use, that it’s offensive,” one “Apprentice” employee told The Daily Beast. “One of the executive producers had to call him up directly to plead with him not to say it, and Trump was like, ‘No, that’s a saying, it’s Uncle Tom.’”

The staffer said there were several takes in the footage of the dailies that shows Trump trying to differentiate between “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Sam.” The staffer added it was like he couldn’t grasp that it was offensive. None of what they were saying to him stuck.

“When Trump decides he wants to do something, that’s his way,” the staffer said.

It irks me to my core that Trump is oblivious to the history behind the term “Uncle Tom.” Then again there’s another part of me that questions how Trump couldn’t know what it meant.

I’ve never met anyone in my lifetime who didn’t know what “Uncle Tom” stood for. Trump can’t think I’m going to take his word for it. It’s not like Trump isn’t educated enough to know what is and isn’t acceptable to say under a microscope.

A part of me thinks he used his “so-called” amnesia or ignorance (call it what you will,) as an excuse to say the word and get away with it. Unless he fell asleep in history class, there’s no way I’ll believe someone as smart and educated as him is that naïve.

“It was not like he was saying the n-word, or anything,” the staffer said. “But I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just realize he was being offensive with that particular term!”

This was, by the way, the same season of “The Apprentice” during which Trump told female contestant Brande Roderick that it “must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

I have no respect for someone, like Trump, who doesn’t have respect for others.

The Daily Beast reached out to the Trump campaign for comment and campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks emailed back, “This is simply untrue.” However, on Friday evening Lil Jon tweeted a statement confirming the report.

“When this ‘Uncle Tom’ incident happened on “Celebrity Apprentice” in the boardroom several of my cast mates and I addressed Mr. Trump immediately when we heard the comment,” Lil Jon wrote on Twitter. “I can’t say if he knew what he was actually saying or not, but he did stop using that term once we explained [its] offensiveness.”

Why did he have to explain it to him in the first place? It should be common sense to anyone with a brain not to use the phrase.  It’s no surprise Trump handled race issues so poorly since he his entire campaign has failed its black-voter outreach. An instance of this would be when he condescendingly asked black voters in August to vote Republican.

“What do you have to lose?” Trump said. “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Trump’s patronizing and skewed tone is the perfect example of him biting off the hands that feed him, because whether he wants to admit it or not, he needs the minority and women’s vote if he wants to win. With his mouth I don’t know if this is even a possibility.

“I also want to be clear that I don’t agree with many of the statements Mr. Trump has said during his current run for President,” Lil Jon said.

Hopefully, but unlikely, Trump’s tune can change for the betterment of his reputation amongst women and minorities, but only time will tell.