Chapter 2

IN THE BEGINNING

Just before the fifth anniversary of the operation that had killed Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama was sitting at the head of the conference room table in the White House Situation Room. This author asked Obama, “Donald Trump: What are your thoughts, if he was to be sitting in this chair, about how he would be handling these decisions?”

Obama replied: “Well, I don’t have those thoughts. Because I don’t expect that to happen.”

He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says “religion,” it might have “Muslim.”

—Donald Trump on The Laura Ingraham Show discussing President Obama, March 30, 2011

I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized.

—Manhattan hotelier Leona Helmsley in 1990