CHAPTER THREE Trump and His Enemies: “I Call Them Animals”
Donald Trump had no rational reason to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but Trump persisted with the “birther” lie for years. Ted Cruz’s father played no role in the JFK assassination, but that didn’t steer Trump away from a crackpot conspiracy theory in the National Enquirer. When he became president, Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” to Rep. Adam Schiff as “Adam Schitt” and to his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as a bumbling “Mr. Magoo.”
Fact-checking the Trump presidency often means watching an erstwhile real estate mogul and reality-TV star fire insults and smears like a schoolyard bully. Democrats, Republicans, men, women, the young and the old, previous and current Cabinet officials—all have faced Trump’s slashing, sneering and slippery calumnies. Many a true word is said in jest. But not so much when Trump is in the picture. He lobs insults filled with falsehoods. He changes history to denigrate opponents. He fabricates tall tales about his foes out of whole cloth. He gaslights. In one case, he falsely accused a Democrat of killing a newborn.
This side of Trump gets especially frothy when the legal stakes are high. He accused Robert Mueller of a series of nonexistent conflicts of interest as part of his PR warfare against the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Trump falsely accused ex–FBI director James Comey of leaking classified information. He sometimes indulges in a strange, ever-morphing rant about a Democratic senator who is suing him over his business dealings with foreign governments.
This chapter sets the record straight on some of the most venomous personal attacks in Trump’s repertoire.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)
“Look at Blumenthal. He lied about Vietnam. He didn’t just say, ‘Hey, I went to Vietnam.’ No, no. For 15 years, he said he was a war hero, he fought in Da Nang province. We call him Da Nang Richard. Da Nang—that’s his nickname. Da Nang. He never went to Vietnam. And he’s up there saying, ‘We need honesty and we need integrity.’ This guy lied when he was the attorney general of Connecticut. He lied. I don’t mean a little bit. And then, when he got out… and when he apologized, he was crying. The tears were all over the place. And now he acts like, ‘How dare you?’ ”
—Oct. 1, 2018 (remarks)
Few foes get under Trump’s skin like Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Both men were born to privilege in New York City in 1946. Both went to Ivy League schools, and both managed to get five deferments to avoid the Vietnam War.
After his fifth deferment, however, Blumenthal enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1970 and served for six years, based in the United States. Trump’s fifth deferment (he was diagnosed with bone spurs in his heels after graduating from college in 1968) exempted him from all military service. He said on Howard Stern’s radio show in 1998 that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases stateside was his own, personal Vietnam.
The “Da Nang Richard” story is a richly detailed but false smear that Trump repeats whenever Blumenthal crosses him. When Blumenthal first ran for Senate in 2010, the New York Times published an article that called him out for saying he had gone to war in Vietnam.
“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Blumenthal, then Connecticut’s attorney general, said in 2008. He also praised a group of military families in 2003 by saying, “When we returned [from Vietnam], we saw nothing like this.”
The day after the Times article was published, Blumenthal said at a news conference, “On a few occasions, I have misspoken about my service, and I regret that, and I take full responsibility. But I will not allow anyone to take a few misplaced words and impugn my record of service to our country.”
A few days later, Blumenthal apologized for mischaracterizing his military record.
Trump took those facts and spun a tangled web of falsehoods.
“For 15 years, he said he was a war hero, he fought in Da Nang province,” Trump said. “We call him Da Nang Richard. Da Nang—that’s his nickname.”
Blumenthal never described himself as a war hero or claimed to have fought in Da Nang. His misleading remarks came during events in 2003 and 2008, not over 15 years.
“And then, when he got out… and when he apologized, he was crying,” Trump said. “The tears were all over the place.”
He appeared to be referring to Blumenthal’s news conference the day after the Times article. Blumenthal did not apologize, drop out or cry at this event, as the video makes plain. He apologized days later in a written statement, but written statements don’t have tear glands.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
—July 15, 2019 (remarks)
The president falsely accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota of supporting the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks.
A Somali American and practicing Muslim, Omar won a House seat in 2018. She’s an unabashed Trump critic. She’s a naturalized U.S. citizen. She’s the first lawmaker to wear a hijab in Congress. And she’s not a terrorist sympathizer.
In 2019, Trump tweeted that Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to their countries. Asked about those racist comments the next day, Trump claimed Omar had voiced support for al-Qaeda: “ ‘When I think of al-Qaeda, I can hold my chest out,’ ” he quoted her as saying.
Omar appeared as a guest on “BelAhdan,” a Twin Cities PBS show about Middle East issues, in 2013. She did not voice approval for al-Qaeda and in fact condemned terrorist acts as “evil” and “heinous.”
She said the Muslim community should not be held accountable for the acts of Islamic terrorists. “I think the general population needs to understand that there is a difference between the people that are carrying on the evil acts—because it is an evil act, and we do have evil people in this world—and then the normal people who carry on, the normal people, regular citizens who carry on their life,” she said.
The discussion later turned to English speakers who say Arabic words in scary tones.
“I remember when I was in college, I took a terrorism class.… We learned the ideology,” Omar recalled. “The thing that was interesting in the class was, every time the professor said ‘al-Qaeda,’ he sort of, like, his shoulders went up, and you know. ‘Al-Qaeda.’ You know, ‘Hezbollah.’… You don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity. You don’t say ‘England’ with an intensity. You don’t say ‘the Army’ with an intensity. But you say these names because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to leave something with the person that’s hearing.… It’s said with a deeper voice.”
Rather than proudly proclaiming support for al-Qaeda, as Trump insinuated, Omar recounted how her college professor would arch his shoulders and accentuate the name of the terrorist group for effect.
Former president Barack Obama
—Oct. 16, 2017 (remarks)
Trump appeared to forget the name of a fallen Army sergeant, La David Johnson, while offering condolences to his widow over the phone. Days later, he falsely claimed that Obama never even called the families of fallen soldiers.
The president maligns Obama with false claims on a near-daily basis, but this one is especially revealing. Nothing is out-of-bounds when it comes to Trump’s falsehoods, not even the deaths of U.S. service members.
In reality, Obama often consoled the families of the fallen.
After a military helicopter was shot down over Afghanistan in 2011, Obama comforted the families of all those killed, according to Jeremy Bash, a top Pentagon official at the time. The White House photographer for Obama, Pete Souza, said in an Instagram post that he “photographed him meeting with hundreds of wounded soldiers, and family members of those killed in action.”
Former FBI director James Comey
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR.… He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted.”—April 13, 2018
No evidence shows that Comey leaked classified information. The Justice Department inspector general issued a report that cleared Comey and his attorneys of this smear.
Before Trump sacked him, Comey wrote a series of memos about his interactions with the president in early 2017. Trump had just taken office. The FBI had launched an investigation into his campaign and its contacts with Russians. At an Oval Office meeting on Valentine’s Day, the president asked Comey to cease looking into Michael Flynn, who had resigned a day earlier from his position as national security adviser because of undisclosed contacts with Russians.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told Comey, according to Comey’s unclassified memo of the Feb. 14 conversation. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
How did this conversation wind up on the front page of the New York Times three months later?
As FBI director, Comey was in the unusual position of deciding which of his memos were classified. He was sure that his memo describing the Feb. 14 meeting with Trump contained no classified information. He sent the memo to a law professor friend, who then read its contents to a Times reporter.
“A private citizen may legally share unclassified details of a conversation with the president with the press, or include that information in a book,” Comey wrote in his own book, “A Higher Loyalty.”
In 2018, the Comey memo was released to the public with no redactions. In 2019, the Justice Department inspector general issued a report that criticized Comey over several matters but cleared him of leaking secrets. “We found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media,” the report said.
Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III
“Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend. Also, why is Mueller only appointing Angry Dems, some of whom have worked for Crooked Hillary, others, including himself, have worked for Obama?”—July 29, 2018
These are false claims about imaginary conflicts of interest.
Career ethics officials in the Justice Department cleared Mueller, a Republican, to investigate Trump in May 2017. He was appointed special counsel by a Trump appointee, Rod Rosenstein. Although they worked together for years, Comey and Mueller both hesitate to describe themselves as close friends.
At a congressional hearing, Mueller said under oath that Trump did not interview him for the FBI director job, which he had held for 12 years. Rather, Mueller took the meeting with Trump to offer his views on the organization. “It was about the job and not about me applying for the job,” Mueller said. Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon told investigators that the purpose of the meeting was not a job interview but to have Mueller “offer a perspective on the institution of the FBI,” according to the special counsel’s report.
“Although the White House thought about beseeching Mueller to become Director again, he did not come in looking for the job,” Bannon said.
The Washington Post reported that when the question came up of whether Mueller might be interested in retaking the top FBI job, he said he could not do so unless the law limiting tenure in that position was changed. Mueller had already served a full ten-year term as FBI director, and Congress in July 2011 passed legislation allowing him to serve an additional two years.
It’s misleading to say Mueller “worked for Obama.” The FBI is an independent agency. Mueller was appointed FBI director by President George W. Bush and was extended in office under a bipartisan law.
The “angry” Democrats, according to Trump, are the lawyers who worked on Mueller’s team. Eleven of the 16 attorneys on Mueller’s team contributed to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Obama. The other five have no record of political contributions. One attorney who donated the maximum amount represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 lawsuit. Another attorney without a record of political donations represented a Clinton aide at one point. Both of those lawyers worked for WilmerHale, a firm that also represented Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Regardless, under federal law, Mueller was not allowed to consider the political leanings of his staff during the hiring process.
Finally, the Mueller report sharply disputes Trump’s characterization of a “nasty & contentious business relationship.” Instead, it portrays a man seeking a refund.
“In October 2011, Mueller resigned his family’s membership from Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, in a letter that noted that ‘we live in the District and find that we are unable to make full use of the Club’ and that inquired ‘whether we would be entitled to a refund of a portion of our initial membership fee,’ which was paid in 1994,” the Mueller report says in a footnote. “About two weeks later, the controller of the club responded that the Muellers’ resignation would be effective October 31, 2011, and that they would be ‘placed on a waitlist to be refunded on a first resigned / first refunded basis’ in accordance with the club’s legal documents.… The Muellers have not had further contact with the club.”
Bannon, according to the Mueller report, “told the President that the golf course dispute did not rise to the level of a conflict and claiming one was ‘ridiculous and petty.’ ”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
—May 22, 2018 (speech)
—Sept. 29, 2018 (campaign rally)
—Jan. 9, 2020 (campaign rally)
On May 16, 2018, Trump appeared to suggest that undocumented immigrants were “animals” during a meeting with California law enforcement officials.
“We have people coming into the country or trying to come in—and we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump said. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”
The next day, May 17, Pelosi said, “When the president of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘These are not people, these are animals,’ you have to wonder, does he not believe in the spark of divinity? In the dignity and worth of every person?” She continued, saying that “calling people animals is not a good thing” and defending “undocumented immigrants.”
The following day, May 18, Trump tweeted a clarification: “I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as ‘Animals,’ a big difference—and so true.”
This smear works like a shell game: Pelosi had referred to “undocumented immigrants”—not to MS-13 gang members, on the day before Trump posted his clarification. Two years later, he was still repeating the attack on Pelosi.
The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
“So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) ‘last in his class’ (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election.”—March 17, 2019
—March 20, 2019 (speech)
—May 30, 2019 (remarks)
Trump often fumed at Sen. John McCain of Arizona when he was alive. But these fumes all came after the senator died in 2018.
McCain only learned of the existence of the Steele dossier, a private intelligence memo containing uncorroborated allegations of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, after the election, at a conference in Canada.
In late November 2016, McCain dispatched David J. Kramer, a senior director of the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the report. Kramer returned with a copy of the dossier, which McCain gave to the FBI. The FBI already had a copy.
McCain was not last in his class at the United States Naval Academy, though he was near the bottom.
Trump often claims McCain’s “no” vote in the Senate was the only impediment to a bill that would have repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act. That’s not the case.
The House in 2017 narrowly passed the American Health Care Act, 217 to 213. An earlier version of the bill had failed, but some amendments won over conservatives who had balked. The Senate was not happy with the House proposal and crafted its own repeal-and-replace legislation, the Better Care Reconciliation Act. McCain voted for that bill, but it failed to get enough support in the Senate. As a last-ditch effort, Republicans put up a bare-bones bill (the “skinny repeal”) that would have kicked some of the hardest policy decisions to a conference between the House and the Senate.
McCain and two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the skinny repeal. The differences between the House and Senate positions had proven to be huge and intractable through months of negotiations. There was no guarantee that a conference committee would have hammered out an agreement.
Finally, Trump often takes credit for reforms enacted years before he took office. In response to a 2014 scandal over wait times and patient care at Veterans Affairs in Phoenix and other locations, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by McCain and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) created the VA Choice program. Obama signed it into law. Trump in 2018 signed the MISSION Act, an expansion and update of the Choice program that is named after McCain. But he falsely takes credit for the whole effort while erasing McCain’s role, even at one point saying, “McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets. I got it done.”
“The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will ‘flip.’ ”—April 21, 2018
“The writer of the story, Maggie Haberman, a Hillary flunky, knows nothing about me and is not given access.”—March 11, 2018
A picture is sometimes worth a thousand fact checks.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (interviewing Trump)
Attorney George Conway
“George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”—March 20, 2019
“I barely know him” is not the most credible sentence coming from Trump, who knows George Conway well. Not only is Conway married to one of Trump’s top advisers, but the president once considered him for a top Justice Department post, leading the civil division.
Things didn’t work out. (“The administration is like a shitshow in a dumpster fire,” Conway explained, shortly after tweeting claims that Trump suffers from malignant narcissistic personality disorder.)
Up until Trump’s presidency, the two men had been on somewhat-friendly terms, as evidenced by a 2006 letter from Trump to Conway:
Dear George: I wanted to thank you for your wonderful assistance in ridding Trump World Tower of some very bad people. What I was most impressed with was how quickly you were able to comprehend a very bad situation. In any event, the building has now been normalized, and the employees are no longer doing menial tasks, etc. for our former Board Members.… PS—And, you have a truly great voice, certainly not a bad asset for a top trial lawyer!
The Washington Post reported that shortly after they were married in 2001, Kellyanne and George Conway moved into an apartment in Trump World Tower in Manhattan. A few years later, George Conway impressed the future president by arguing at a condominium board meeting that Trump’s name should not be removed from the building.
Conway detailed sundry other interactions: at a fundraiser with Trump in Alpine, N.J.; during a shared SUV ride to a costume party; on a plane ride to an inaugural ball in Washington. He said the president called to pick his brain about a lawsuit alleging violations of the foreign emoluments clause; Trump also called Conway, a prominent conservative lawyer, for his opinion on lawyers the president was considering hiring as his outside counsel in the Russia investigation.
Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.)
—Nov. 1, 2019 (campaign rally)
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, a pediatrician, did not execute a newborn.
Northam, a Democrat, was asked on a radio show whether he supported a bill in the state legislature to loosen abortion requirements. He did not take a position on the bill and instead discussed late-term abortion procedures in general terms:
The first thing I would say is, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. There are—you know, when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
This is a clinical explanation of circumstances that might lead to a late-term abortion. Northam did not perform such an abortion, nor did he endorse them as a policy matter, nor was he advocating for the bill to ease abortion requirements in Virginia.
Former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok
—March 27, 2019 (interview)
—Dec. 10, 2019 (campaign rally)
—Dec. 18, 2019 (campaign rally)
This is what happens when Trump’s imagination runs wild. He invents conversations between former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and acts out both parts for his audience. Trump’s impersonation shtick at one campaign rally featured crude gestures and what Page called “sickening… fake orgasm” noises.
Behind the lurid facade, Trump is also accusing them of an undemocratic plot: leveraging the FBI machinery to help Hillary Clinton win. It’s an unsupported accusation, still devoid of evidence after years of investigating the investigators.
The Justice Department inspector general criticized anti-Trump text messages between Page and Strzok but found that bias did not taint FBI officials’ decisions in the investigation of Trump’s campaign and Russia. (“These judgment calls were not unreasonable,” the inspector general’s report says.)
Trump often mentions an “insurance policy” at the FBI targeting him in case he won. But Strzok has insisted that the reference to an insurance policy in a text message he sent to Page did not mean he or fellow agents were targeting Trump. Instead, Strzok said, the phrase was bureau shorthand for a difficult question involving intelligence-gathering.
“That text represented a debate on information that we had received from an extraordinarily sensitive source and method, and that typically when something is that sensitive, if you take action on it, you put it at risk,” Strzok publicly testified in July 2018.
The crux of the issue was whether an important source could be burned. “Given that Clinton was the ‘prohibitive favorite’ to win, Strzok said that they discussed whether it made sense to compromise sensitive sources and methods to ‘bring things to some sort of precipitative conclusion and understanding,’ ” the inspector general said in a report.
Trump, out of the blue, also claimed that Page got a restraining order on Strzok. “This is a lie,” Page tweeted in response. “Nothing like this ever happened. I wish we had a president who knew how to act like one.”