Exclusive (except for four camera crews) with Trump!

Orange you glad Trump will be back?

I go up to the 25th floor of Trump Tower on Thursday--that iconic building on Fifth Avenue you see on The Apprentice--for a noon meeting with Donald Trump. Four camera crews are already setting up in the four corners of this large conference room whose centerpiece is a gargantuan table--maybe 20 feet long and six feet wide--assembled from three slabs of black granite.

Access Hollywood, Extra, and Inside Edition were there, plus a crew from Kodak's marketing department, which is sponsoring this Sunday's challenge on the three-hour (oy!) season finale of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC. They said they were there to make a video for Kodak's Facebook page.

I was invited by Trump's publicist to tag along, which would bring me face-to-face with "Mr. Trump" (as he prefers to be called) for the first time since I labeled Mr. Trump a "Neanderthal" and a "mudslinging bully" in a column in January 2007 in the New York Post in the wake of his then-feud with Barbara Walters and Rosie O'Donnell of The View.

(Just this week, Trump went on The View for the first time since that feud--a détente that began to be negotiated last October at Howard Stern's wedding, Trump says.)

Trump arrived late, striding off the elevator in a dark suit, white shirt, and one of his monochromatic ties, and gave off an orange glow from his hair and TV makeup. He saw me, gave me a hearty hello and handshake and never mentioned the column from two years ago.

We walked around a corner to a group of offices--two of which belonged to Trump's children, Donald Jr., who was not there, and Ivanka, who was on the telephone and waved vaguely to us when her father poked his head in to say hello. In a cubicle outside was Amanda Miller, the "receptionist" on The Apprentice who is indeed a real receptionist/assistant in the Trump family offices.

"Mr. Trump" led me into Donald Jr.'s office, which--like his father's and sister's, had a collection of framed magazine covers on which Jr. has appeared--and we sat at a small round table to talk about the second edition of The Celebrity Apprentice (the eighth season overall of The Apprentice), ending this Sunday with a full-out grudge match (or so The Donald insisted) between the two finalists, comedian Joan Rivers and poker ace Annie Duke, whom everybody claims hate each other's guts.

"It's pretty sad: When you don't have fighting, who cares, right?" said Trump, who wasn't really sad at all over a prime-time cat fight that has the potential to boost the audience for this weekend's epic finale.

Trump said NBC has already asked for another Celebrity Apprentice, which an NBC spokeswoman confirmed. He also said there will be a new non-celebrity The Apprentice next season, the first one since 2007.

Oops. Mr. Trump might be mistaken. "It was being discussed, but they determined just to do Celeb Apprentice for next spring," the spokeswoman told me later in an e-mail.

Sunday's final episode airs at 8-11 p.m. on NBC.