I’ve been very successful and people are starting to find out I’ve been much more successful than people even admit. People are starting to figure that out. Much more successful. You’re not covering economics or finances, I guess, but I’m much richer than people understand.
—DONALD TRUMP
At five feet eleven inches, Melania Knauss was thin enough to satisfy the modern standard for fashion models, which meant that three of her wouldn’t push the needle on a scale to the four-hundred mark.
An immigrant from Slovenia, Knauss had made her debut as Trump’s romantic partner in 1998, when he was not quite divorced from Marla Maples. Knauss was twenty-eight years old. He was fifty-two. The two were present at a gala marking the completed renovation of Grand Central Terminal. A month later the Daily News reported that Knauss—“Donald Trump’s latest model”—had been hired to appear in ads for BMW cars.
Although Knauss matched the previous Mrs. Trumps when it came to beauty, she was different in one essential way. She wasn’t much interested in being his partner outside of marriage. Ivana had run the Plaza. Marla had hoped to push him into active philanthropy, which she would help direct. Knauss had no such ambitions. As a friend said, “For Melania it’s never, ‘Ask what The Donald can do for you.’ It’s ‘Ask what you can do for The Donald.’”
On the day they became engaged. Donald gave Melania a $1.5 million ring, which he had obtained at half price because the jeweler, Graff, appreciated the value of the publicity that came with selling a diamond to Trump. The wedding, which took place on January 22, 2005, came in the couple’s seventh year together. Among the 350 guests who attended the ceremony at a Palm Beach church and the reception at Mar-a-Lago were many present and former public officials and celebrities, including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Shaquille O’Neal, and Rudy Giuliani. A press agent, and the man who whitened the groom’s teeth, were also in attendance.
According to Tina Brown, herself a celebrity, at least a few of the guests had attended in hopes of witnessing Trump’s trademark “over-the-topness.” Except for the decorations placed on the reception tables—six-foot-tall candelabra draped in flowers—they were disappointed. Trump: The Wedding III was a mostly elegant affair. He even declined an offer to broadcast the event on TV.1
In marriage, Melania Trump would continue to work a bit as a model, and devoted herself to her son, who would be born in 2006 and named Barron William. His name recalled the “John Baron” whom Trump invented to say certain things to the press, and the famous William Barron Hilton, whom Trump had once described as a product of the Lucky Sperm Club. In the years since Trump had issued this judgment, the holdings managed by Mr. Hilton had grown to include twenty-eight hundred hotels worth $26 billion. He had also won Trump’s esteem.
In many ways, Hilton could be seen as a quieter and more successful version of Donald Trump. Like Trump, he had purchased a landmark property from Penn Central at fire-sale prices. Hilton’s $35 million investment in the Waldorf-Astoria would one day be valued at $1 billion. Like Trump, Hilton had gone into the casino business, although none of his casinos went bankrupt. Hilton had thrived with a conservative financial strategy. Beginning in the 1970s, for example, his company entered into a variety of arrangements that put the Hilton name and management to work for investors who owned hotel buildings. Trump followed the same strategy, but went beyond hotels to put his name on a remarkable variety of products and services.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Americans could buy a home with a Trump loan, dine on Trump steaks, and book travel at a Web site called GoTrump.com. For the true Trump loyalists he offered a Trump University, which, promotional materials promised, “will deliver the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of Donald Trump himself.” The mortgage, steak, and travel endeavors were short-lived, but after it was formed in 2005, Trump U persisted for years. Students paid for access to a Web site where they could see videos and read articles about such topics as salesmanship and coping with failure. They could also learn what Trump thought about the pop singer Britney Spears, who, he wrote, “has seen better days. She performed four or five years ago at the Trump Taj Mahal and she was great. Now it seems as if everything’s slipping away from her. Britney, don’t let that happen. Don’t let it slip away. Keep your head on straight.”
Trump U’s offerings varied widely in price and content and included “retreats” covering subjects such as “wealth preservation” and “creative financing” at $5,000 each. Students could also purchase one-on-one instruction with a Trump U mentor and even a Gold Elite program, which would include the mentoring plus five retreats—a $50,000 value—for just $34,995.
Although he generally didn’t appear at classes in person, Trump’s face was on the cover of the book, called Trump 101, that was handed out as a pimary text for students and his name was on every piece of paper in sight. At one seminar, the room was decorated with a life-size cardboard cutout of Trump, dressed in one of his fine suits, and students were encouraged to have their photos taken standing next to it. It was the next best thing to an actual photo with the man himself.2
Trump U received little press coverage in its early days, but in 2008 the Tampa Bay Times reported on instructor James Harris’s free presentation in Florida. The event was preceded by advertisements trumpeting, “Unheard of Real Estate Market Factors Have Created A PERFECT STORM of Profit Opportunity!” (In fact at the time Tampa real estate prices were plunging and wouldn’t hit bottom for another four years). In the ballroom of a Marriott hotel Harris offered personal testimony of how real estate transformed him from a teen who slept on the New York City subways into a successful man.
Despite the exciting prospect of a PERFECT STORM advised his students to buy low and sell high and to content themselves with modest gains. At the end of his talk Harris noted that he could only share so much information in a single session and then explained that Trump U was offering far more at an upcoming three-day seminar that cost $1,495.
“There are three groups of people,” Harris told the students. “People who make things happen, people who wait for things to happen, and people who wonder, ‘What happened?’ Which one are you?” He also said, “There are gonna-bes and wannabes. And I want to talk to the gonna-bes when we’re done.”3
Two years after the Tampa Bay Times feature, the Daily News in New York reported that complaints were being voiced by Trump U students around the country. In 2010, a group of students filed a lawsuit against Trump and Trump U in a California Court. Attorneys general in six states reported they had received complaints about the company. Among them were seven students who said they were pressured to use all the credit available on their bank cards to buy Trump University’s offerings. Others complained of internships that never materialized and of promised connections to powerful contacts that were never made. That same year, under pressure from the State of New York, which required accreditation for any institution offering itself as a “university” to state residents, Trump U changed its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.
In court, Trump and Trump U denied the allegations and mounted a vigorous defense. In his public comments about the controversy, Trump stressed the high number of participants who said they had a good experience—he said 98 percent fell into this category—and he told the Daily News, “There are plenty of people who went to Harvard and did very poorly, and there are plenty of people who went to Trump University and did very well.”
In the summer of 2013 New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump and Trump U for $40 million, alleging that the university defrauded students. The court papers alleged a number of deceptive practices, including claiming that prospective students would be taught by successful real estate “experts” who were “handpicked” by Donald Trump. In fact, Schneiderman alleged, none of the instructors had been “handpicked” and some were actually bankrupt real estate entrepreneurs. In a press release Schneiderman said, “Mr. Trump uses his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got.”
Included in the court papers was a Trump University document, prepared for its staff in Texas, which served as a kind of playbook. As reported by the Atlantic Monthly, this document encouraged them to use free lectures to “Sell, Sell, Sell!” the fee-based Trump U programs. The playbook instructed staff to observe those in attendance for changes in body language that might indicate they were becoming receptive and outlined the duties of workers identified as sales coordinators. These people were to be armed with “objection rebuttals” for those who resisted a sale pitch. The Atlantic article detailed how the playbook addressed everything at the lectures from the room temperature (“no more than sixty-eight degrees”) to the space between the chairs (“bringing attendees out of their comfort zone”). The “Minimum Sales Goal” per seminar was $72,500. This goal would be reached, in part, by channeling people past a sales table as they left the conference room. The playbook further advised Trump U staff to avoid reporters because they “are rarely on your side and they are not sympathetic,” and they were advised that “If a district attorney arrives on the scene, contact the appropriate media spokesperson immediately.”4
Besides fighting back in court, Trump responded to the New York AG’s lawsuit by developing a Web site—98percentapproval.com—where his defense was made in documents and videos that stressed the high ratings students gave Trump U in the surveys they filled out at the end of their seminars. The Web site also presented tabloid-style news articles that depicted the attorney general as a “dirty” political “hit man” with allegedly corrupt ties. Trump also went on Fox News to call the attorney general a “lightweight” who was “respected by nobody.” Then he suggested that Schneiderman had, perhaps, acted at the behest of President Barack Obama.
After saying, “I’m not a very paranoid person,” Trump added, “When he meets with the president and then files a suit, like, twenty-four hours later, I think yes, I think I’ve been targeted. And I think it’s a big problem and I think people ought to look into it.”
A channel surfer who landed on Trump’s words might have been puzzled by the suggestion that the president of the United States had Donald Trump in mind when he met with the attorney general for the State of New York. Eric Schneiderman said he and Obama had “more important stuff to talk about than Donald Trump.” But among those who depended on the highly partisan Fox cable-TV channel to inform their political views, Trump’s words rang with a familiar tone. In many of their minds, Donald Trump had good reason to worry about a conspiracy. He was one of a handful of people leading an effort to determine whether the president was a foreigner who had somehow concealed that he was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to hold the highest office in the land. In time, great numbers of people joined him to challenge the first black president’s legitimacy. They were called the birthers.
* * *
The idea that Barack Obama was not whom he seemed to be can be traced at least as far back as 2004 and a lawyer named Andrew Martin. Early in his career Martin had been denied permission to practice in Illinois under a state Supreme Court ruling that he lacked “responsibility, candor, fairness, self-restraint, objectivity and respect for the judicial system.” (The court cited the US Selective Service, which had found he suffered from “well documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”) Martin had been a perennial losing candidate for office and once registered to campaign under the banner of the Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America. In 2004 he had given the press a statement claiming Obama was not a Christian but “a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”
Coming in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks by Islamic terrorists who had killed thousands of Americans, Martin’s charge seemed designed to play on fear and prejudice to harm Obama, but it was not widely published. This was probably because the year before, Martin had claimed he knew the whereabouts of fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when a vast American army in Iraq was unable to locate him. Eventually Martin would explain that he had promoted his theory about Obama in part “to put some sizzle on the plate” of one of his failing political campaigns.5
Martin’s explanation did not diminish the power of his claim. Loose on the Internet, his theories resonated with those who hated Obama and did not trust mainstream sources of information. As an unlimited resource for connection, the World Wide Web has made it easy for isolated paranoid people to come together and reinforce their beliefs. The process is usually marked by a language of suspicion, as participants insist they are only “raising questions” that deserve a hearing. With this rhetorical trick, doubts can be raised about settled issues, such as evolution, by fringe figures demanding fair treatment. The discussion arising from Andrew Martin’s claims was laced with insinuations that Obama could not be trusted, and the suggestion that he deserved to be investigated. In 2008 supporters of Hillary Clinton, who was then running against Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, circulated an e-mail that said, in part, “Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.”
Suddenly bipartisan, the rumor mongering had escalated grown to include a challenge to Obama’s status as a US citizen qualified to run for president. At one campaign event a voter publicly challenged Republican candidate John McCain to demand Obama present proof of his citizenship. McCain refused and then pointedly rebuked a woman who insisted his opponent was secretly “Arab.”
After the election, groups including ResistNet Tea Party paid for an ad in the Chicago Tribune that said that if the president-elect failed to meet certain demands, he should be considered a “usurper” not deserving “support from the People.” In 2009 Mark Williams of the group Tea Party Express included the claim that Obama was “improbably a native-born citizen” in a published attack on the president, which also compared him with Hitler. From talk-radio hosts, members of Congress, and Tea Party activists came a chorus of suspicion that Obama was not truly and properly American. These rumors would persist and reverberate on Fox News and in other right-wing media outlets throughout his presidency. By February 2011, 51 percent of Republicans surveyed by Public Policy Polling said they believed the president was foreign-born and therefore ineligible for the office he held.6
“Questions” about Obama’s birth, and his claim to Americanness, circulated with the power of a Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn Red Scare smear. Just as Roy Cohn used doctored photos in the McCarthy era, birther Orly Taitz presented a faked Kenyan birth certificate to bolster the Obama-as-foreigner meme. Like McCarthy and Cohn, Obama’s antagonists said they were merely seeking answers to questions, while ignoring the evidence. That evidence included a copy of his “certificate of live birth” issued by the State of Hawaii and made public during the campaign, and contemporaneous announcements published in Honolulu newspapers. Any sophisticated consideration of the birther campaign had to consider that Obama was the first black president, and the first with a Muslim parent. Racial prejudice and religious fear lurked in the background of the birther movement. Hence the cartoon, circulated online, that showed the Obama family as chimps above the caption “Now you know why—No birth certificate!”7
As a man who craved attention and often made bold statements to get it, Donald Trump was drawn to the birther cause as he once again dabbled in presidential politics. His previous flirtations—1987, 1999—had coincided with the publication of Trump books. This time he had an entire backlist of titles and a TV show to promote. In early 2011 Michael Cohen, an aide to Trump, explained that his boss was “seriously considering” a campaign because “he’s disgusted with how the country is being run.” A number of prominent Republicans had expressed an interest in challenging Obama, and Trump edged toward the scrum when he accepted an invitation to speak at the February 2011 gathering called CPAC, or the Conservative Political Action Conference.
At CPAC, Trump was introduced via the strains of a hit song called “For the Love of Money.” (Its lyrics include “For the love of money, people don’t care who they hurt or beat.”) In his remarks he delivered the same economic jingoism he had offered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1987, before the publication of his first book. During that exercise he had railed against the oil producers of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and the Republican president Reagan’s trade policies. He had also speculated that Japanese businessmen secretly “laugh like hell” over their advantages. More than twenty years later, Japan was in its second decade of economic stagnation, which rendered Japanese businessmen inadequate as bogeymen. Instead Trump replaced Japan with China and “the Mexicans,” who “cannot believe what they are getting away with.” He predicted “seven-dollar, and eight-dollar, and nine-dollar” per gallon gasoline, “which believe me, a year or two from now you are going to be paying” because “we have nobody who calls up OPEC and says that price better get lower and it better get lower fast.”
The audience at CPAC greeted Trump’s policy thoughts warmly, but his main topic was his appeal as a candidate and how his wealth was “a scorecard and acknowledgment of my abilities” and that his competitiveness—“I’ve beaten many people”—made him the right man to run the country. He also signaled to the birthers in the crowd who viewed Obama as foreign and unworthy, saying, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further. The people that went to school with him never saw him; they don’t know who he is. Crazy.” In Trump’s eyes, the man who bested Hillary Clinton and others in Democratic Party primaries and then defeated John McCain in the general election had failed to demonstrate he was truly capable. However, he, Trump, was qualified to be president because he had succeeded in business.8
Although rabid birthers and Tea Party activists (often one and the same) represented a minority in the GOP, what they lacked in numbers they made up for in zeal. For them Obama represented a national existential threat—some even considered him the biblical Antichrist—and consequently, they would turn out in large numbers for someone who shared their views. In the early stages of the Republican Party’s nominating process, as candidates eyed the 2012 presidential primaries, this energy could be an advantage for the candidate who was willing to risk alienating voters, donors, and party leaders who considered birtherism an embarrassment. The risk would be too great for the likes of mainstream aspirant Mitt Romney. But someone who was more comfortable with extreme attention-seeking and less serious about actually becoming president might find the birthers/Tea Party fringe irresistible.
Donald Trump followed his CPAC performance with a birther blitz on Fox News, telling the audience of Bill O’Reilly’s nighttime program that he had once believed that Obama had been born in Hawaii but added, “I’ve seen too many things” and “come to have doubts.”
Under tough questioning from O’Reilly, who had dismissed the birther claims, Trump allowed that perhaps the president had a US birth certificate. But he added, “Now, he may have one, but there is something on that birth certificate—maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don’t know.” O’Reilly said, “You get a lot of attention raising the question, but I don’t think you believe it.”9
As the top star on Fox News, O’Reilly’s opinion carried weight on the political right, but the story intrigued the network’s rabid anti-Obama viewership. Despite O’Reilly’s efforts to knock down Trump’s argument, Trump was invited to repeat his “questions” on other Fox programs. One, a morning show, made him a regular weekly guest so that his political views could be aired.
Trump’s performances on Fox brought him attention from other networks. One interviewer from ABC TV introduced her report with a winking description of the five hours she spent with “The Donald,” which included a flight on his big jet, which she called “a sweet ride.” Under the warm, unblinking gaze of the TV camera’s eye, Trump told her that he resented the term birthers because it cast anyone who questioned the president’s origins as an “idiot” and added, “Let me tell you I’m a really smart guy who was a really good student at the best school in the country.” Trump also offered the claim, which was impossible to verify, that he had $600 million to spend on a presidential campaign. As Trump sat in a blue suit and red tie, with an impressionist painting behind him, the sound of jet engines hummed in the background. “Part of the beauty of me”—he opened his arms wide—“is that I’m very rich.”10
Days later, Trump upped the ante on the birther issue, saying, “I have investigators in Hawaii.… They cannot believe what they’re finding.” In the midst of the birther frenzy, as Trump and others demanded Obama make public his birth certificate, TV hosts occasionally mentioned that Obama’s “certificate of live birth” had been made public in 2008 and Hawaii state officials had repeatedly affirmed that he was born there. Despite this official documentary proof, Trump talked as if facts were being withheld. His wife, Melania, echoed him on a cable-TV talk show, adding, “It’s not him [Donald] that’s bringing it up. It’s the media all the time, all the time.”
In none of his statements did Trump offer any reliable sources, and in one case he seemed to ignore the actual record. This happened when he announced, “His grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.’ Now, she’s on tape and I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon.”
Already public, the tape in question was a recorded telephone interview of Obama’s stepmother, Sarah who was in Kenya. Sarah spoke Swahili. The interviewer was an English-speaking preacher named Ron McRae. In 2005, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had described McRae as a police officer turned street preacher and a “self-proclaimed bishop” of a sect of Anabaptists. A writer for the paper had interviewed McRae because he was protesting the design of a 9/11 memorial that he thought honored Islam in its use of red maple trees. His tiny denomination, called the Anabaptist Churches Worldwide, had established a branch in Kenya in 2007. In a photo on the church Web site, McRae is shown posing in a pith helmet.
An edited version of McRae’s conversation with Obama’s stepmother circulated among birthers. It included McRae’s question “Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to visit Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?” This was followed by the translator’s voice: “She says yes she was. She was present when Obama was born.”
The rest of the interview, missing from versions posted on some Internet sites, finds McRae saying, “Okay, when I come in December, I would like to go by the place, the hospital where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?” In response the translator says, “No. Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America.” McRae pressed Sarah on the issue, and the translator, after asking the question and waiting for the answer, replied, “Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii.”
If Trump couldn’t find the full interview online, he could have read Sarah Obama’s recollections of the circumstances of her famous relative’s birth in Hawaii, which were first published in the Chicago Tribune in 2007. This report was readily available to anyone willing to look for it. However Trump apparently relied, instead, on an author named Jerome Corsi, whose writings on politics were widely judged to be riddled with errors. Corsi had written that John McCain had received substantial support from a Muslim terrorist group and had at another time called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. (Among the conspiracy theories Corsi had promoted was that Bush supported a union of Canada, Mexico, and the United States that would replace the sovereign United States.)11
Despite his credibility problems, or perhaps because of them, Jerome Corsi was wildly popular among the millions of Americans who toyed with conspiracy theories. This audience had made two Corsi books into bestsellers and was eagerly awaiting the release of his next—Where’s the Birth Certificate?—which was due in May 2011. Items related to the book’s contents were published in the weeks prior to the book’s release. Among them were reports of Obama’s supposed foreign birth. On April 27 some of the steam was taken out of this publicity campaign when the White House released a “long form” birth certificate showing the president had been born at Hawaii’s Kapiolani Hospital. (Most states issue both short- and long-form birth certificates. Both are accepted by authorities for most uses, but the long form generally provides more information about a child’s parents. The type of information varies by jurisdiction.)
On the day after the president’s long-form birth certificate was released, Trump flew to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, his helicopter landing in the fog at the local airport. He walked from the chopper to a hangar where, through the big open door, he could see reporters gathered before a small podium where microphones were arranged like a bouquet. Trump claimed credit for the release of the document, which “nobody else has been able to accomplish.” With Yoken’s “Thar she blows!” restaurant closed and demolished, he then went to a diner to shake hands with voters, insisting, even though he had spoken of it himself, that reports of his germophobia, were “invented by my enemies.” Maggie Haberman of the Web site called Politico noted that Granite Staters were quite skeptical about his candidacy, and locals were put off when Trump interrupted a meeting to take a phone call.12
Soon Trump went right back to spinning conspiracy theories about the president’s birth. “We have to see, is it [the birth certificate] real? Is it proper? What’s on it?” In classic doublespeak he added, “I’m sure, I hope it’s the right deal.” He wasn’t sure the document was correct, only that he hoped it was. And even if the birth certificate were judged authentic, Trump added, the president should be forced to answer more questions.
“The word is, according to what I’ve read, that he was a terrible student when he went to Occidental [College]. Then he gets to Columbia. He then gets to Harvard … how do you get into Harvard if you’re not a good student?” These questions could be resolved, Trump said, if the president released all his educational records. Of course he didn’t promise that he wouldn’t then pose a new set of queries, perhaps about Obama’s golf handicap.13
Having made improbable claims about his own performance at Penn, where Trump had enrolled after two years at a less exclusive university, his focus on Obama’s academic record seemed, at best, ill considered. At worst it stirred animosity among whites who resented affirmative action laws, which had been enacted to redress centuries of discrimination, but which they believed were unfair. Political provocateur Patrick Buchanan, who no longer imagined himself a future president, put it directly as he asked how Obama could have been admitted to Colombia and Harvard law and then “suddenly he’s the editor of Harvard Law Review. We’ve never seen any grades of the guy. These are legitimate questions.… I think he’s affirmative action all the way!”
If Obama had benefited from affirmative action admissions, the policy would have had nothing to do with his magna cum laude honors at Harvard or his position on the prestigious law review. Indeed, the rise of an African-American child from a single-parent home to the White House may have pointed to the efficacy of affirmative action. But this was not the view that Buchanan and Trump would promote. In less than subtle terms they were signaling that Obama got special treatment, couldn’t have made it on his own, and was therefore illegitimate. In this line of questioning some saw a strain of racial insensitivity if not outright bigotry. David Remnick of The New Yorker said Trump had engaged in “a conscious form of race baiting.” Bob Schieffer of CBS News said Trump had engaged in “an ugly strain of racism.” These criticisms, which Trump disputed, resonated with some intellectuals, but it was the outrage of David Letterman, host of a nationally broadcast nighttime talk show, that brought it to a wider American public.
Letterman criticized Trump during an on-air chat with psychologist and talk-show host Phil McGraw. Known to the public as Dr. Phil, McGraw had once treated patients in a private practice. He then worked in a business that presented therapeutic seminars, which led to television appearances. Glib and folksy, he got his own gig starring in a syndicated show that offered case studies of people with social and psychological problems as entertainment. McGraw was, in essence, a reality-TV star like Trump, and he counted Trump as a friend. This relationship may have explained Letterman’s decision to make Trump a topic of conversation. “It’s all fun, it’s all a circus, it’s all a rodeo, until it starts to smack of racism,” said Letterman. “And then it’s no longer fun.”
Drawn into the issue, McGraw said he didn’t think Trump was a racist. He preferred to say Trump was rash: “I don’t think he always thinks everything through. I think sometimes he’s a little from the hip. I don’t think he has a racist bone in this body.” Letterman said, “If he comes back on this show, and I’m not sure we want him back under those circumstances, but he ought to be prepared to apologize just for that kind of behavior.”
After the broadcast Trump wrote to Letterman saying, “I was disappointed to hear the statements you made about me last night on your show that I was a ‘racist.’ In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth and there is nobody who is less of a racist than Donald Trump … Based upon your statements, and despite the fact that we have always done so well together, especially in your ratings, I am canceling my May 18th appearance on your show.”
Months later it would be Letterman and not Trump who apologized, albeit in a convoluted way. At the start of his broadcast he said of Trump, “maybe it’s not that he’s a racist” but rather “a guy that says stupid things periodically to get attention” which was a quality “we have in common.” It’s possible “that I was wrong,” Letterman continued, “that he’s not a racist, because we don’t want to think that of anyone, but he’s just a dope. How ‘bout that?”
Although Letterman did offer a kind of apology, he did not match Dr. Phil’s analysis, nor did he agree with Trump’s onetime bodyguard Robert Utsey, who was unequivocal in his view that Trump was without racial animus. But it’s hard to agree entirely with Utsey’s point of view. In his public life, beginning with his complaint about being required to rent to welfare recipients in the 1970s, Trump has exhibited what might be called insensitivity rather than bigotry. When he inserted himself into the Central Park jogger case, in which four of the accused were black and one was Hispanic, he added tension to a situation that was already fraught with racial overtones. In a TV interview he had said, “I would love to be a well-educated black because they have an actual advantage.”
None of his earlier comments and actions compared with his attacks on Obama as he questioned the president’s admission to Harvard and Columbia and repeatedly demanded proof of his birth in Hawaii, even after the proper record had been made public. For his part, Trump insisted that he was just asking questions about an issue that was, in his mind, unresolved. This shred-of-doubt strategy required Trump to ignore a reliable record and insult the president, but he was not alone as he flailed away. The election and reelection of America’s first black president caused some on the right to become so unhinged that they circulated racist cartoons about the Obama family and made repeated attempts to demonize him as strange and different and then denied the racist undertones in such statements. An example of this dynamic arose in 2015 when former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani declared, “He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of country.” When confronted over this statement, he explained that it couldn’t be considered racist because Obama “was brought up by a white mother.”
Anyone sensitive to the nation’s racial history would understand that challenging Obama’s status as a native-born citizen or as a man who loves his country was beyond the pale. These statements excited the small portion of the electorate that could not accept, for racist reasons, that an African-American was president. This corner of American politics was home for people such as the federal judge who circulated a racist joke about the president’s parents and an official of the California GOP who sent out a cartoon depicting the president as an ape. In these precincts people cheered the statements made by Giuliani and Trump as honest and brave and applauded when they refused to back down.
For a moment, the behavior Letterman deplored gained Trump a following, at least according to a Wall Street Journal poll. The survey, which was conducted in early April, found him running second to Romney among the subset of citizens who identified themselves as Republican primary voters. This result may have had something to do with his plain speaking—“China is raping this country,” he said—but was more likely the product of his visibility. As a celebrity of many years running and the star of a TV show, he was much better recognized than all the other candidates. Celebrity had brought attention to Trump’s political views, and it had made him the ideal foil as both comedian Seth Meyers and the president ridiculed him in a speech at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Meyers got a big laugh when he looked at the table where Trump sat as a guest of the Washington Post and said, “Donald Trump has been saying he would run for president as a Republican, which is surprising because I thought he would be running as a joke.” Unable to resist the target that was Trump’s hair, Meyers said, “Donald Trump often appears on Fox, which is ironic, because a fox often appears on Donald Trump’s head.” Meyers advised the people seated with Trump that if they were unable to finish their meals, “don’t worry, the fox will eat it.” Meyers mercilessly tweaked Trump for his role in the birth-certificate uproar and made fun of him for saying, “I have a great relationship with the blacks.” Meyers said this could not be true “unless the blacks are white people.”
Throughout the performance, viewers watching the event on the C-SPAN TV network were treated to occasional shots of Trump, who sat grim-faced throughout the monologue. A widened view showed writer/editor Graydon Carter, who had tormented Trump in various magazines, smiling just a few feet from Donald’s right shoulder. The look on Trump’s face made it seem as if he were enduring a terrible ordeal, rather than a roasting at the hands of a comedian. In contrast, President Obama smiled broadly as Meyers joked about how the Barack Obama of 2008 was so much better, and how he had aged terribly in office, adding, “Is this the change you were talking about?”
In his remarks later that night, the president also targeted Trump, which, considering the birther issue, may have brought him some personal satisfaction. He painted Trump as a conspiracy-theory extremist and then paused before adding, “All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice—at the steak house, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”
The president’s comments and the crowd’s laughter came as elite US Navy SEALs were on an extremely risky mission that would result in the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. When Obama appeared at the White House on the day after the correspondents’ dinner and revealed the death of the al-Qaeda leader, the news highlighted the grave issues a president must face and the frivolous quality of birtherism and its related “questions.” Soon Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham complained that Trump was a distraction who diverted attention from serious issues and serious candidates. A poll published May 10 showed Trump’s support evaporating as he fell to last among six likely GOP candidates, and the majority of Republican voters said they didn’t like him. Trump claimed to have decided “in my mind” to conduct a real campaign, but he took note of the TV schedule and said he wouldn’t make a final, formal announcement until the current run of The Apprentice was completed on May 22, 2011.14
With executives from firms that purchased TV advertisements headed to New York for a conference on May 16, officials at NBC told Trump to decide immediately whether he would host the next season of his show. Required to choose between the money the network would pay him and the prospect of real political combat and, perhaps, public service as president of the United States, Trump took the cash. He revealed his decision not at a rally of citizens who had supported him, but before the crowd of advertisers. After he affirmed his commitment to them, he made sure to pound his chest a little: “I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and, ultimately, the general election.” A week later, viewers saw Trump anoint a country singer named John Rich winner of The Apprentice. Rich prevailed over a lineup of celebrities that included, among others, a baseball player who had admitted using steroids, a Playboy centerfold model, and the winner of Mark Burnett’s first Survivor contest, Richard Hatch, who had been imprisoned for tax evasion.
The ratings for the show had improved during Trump’s political theatrics, and he did what he could afterward to hold the spotlight. He didn’t have to try hard as would-be Republican standard-bearers seemed unable to imagine themselves prevailing without Trump’s approval. Even Mitt Romney trekked to Trump Tower after Donald had publicly denigrated him as a “small business guy” who “walked away with some money from a very good company that he didn’t create.” Trump had also predicted that Romney was “going to lose.” Yet there was Romney, sober Mormon bishop and paragon of solidity, seeking the approval of a serial fake candidate who used bankruptcy as a business strategy, spoke a profane strain of New Yorkese, and was a principal in one of the most notorious sex scandals of the twentieth century. (Trump remained, however, a teetotaler like Romney.) When Romney did eventually lose, Trump took no pleasure in being right. He logged on to his Twitter account and used the social media platform to loose a stream of despairing comments including:
“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.”
“Our nation is totally divided! Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice!”
“The world is laughing at us. This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
“Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble … like never before.”
“Our nation is a once great nation divided! The Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy.”
“Hopefully the House of Representatives can hold our country together for four more years … stay strong and never give up!”
In the aftermath of the tweets, the Daily News of New York cited a “Trump insider” as it reported that the man’s three grown children, who each worked for him, had gone to him with a request that he back off Obama. A Trump spokesperson insisted that this meeting never occurred, but Donald Trump did seem to direct his ire elsewhere. He sparred with the singer Cher and then the comedian/panel-show host Bill Maher, who jokingly promised to donate $5 million to charity if Trump proved, with his birth certificate, that he was not fathered by an orangutan. Never one to be outdone, Trump directed a lawyer to send Maher a copy of Trump’s birth certificate and a letter, which said, in part:
Attached hereto is a copy of Mr. Trump’s birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan.… Please remit the $5 million to Mr. Trump immediately and he will ensure that the money be donated to the following five charities in equal amounts: Hurricane Sandy victims, The Police Athletic League, The American Cancer Society, The March of Dimes, and The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Maher may well have possessed the $5 million, but a comedian’s joke is a joke, and he wasn’t going to give Trump what he wanted. Trump filed a legal claim against Maher, then withdrew it. He had many other battles to attend to, including his conflict with the attorney general of New York over Trump University and a fight with the first minister of Scotland, a onetime ally who had become an enemy because of a disagreement over some wind turbines.15