Roger Stone recognized that Buchanan would be Trump’s main opposition in the Reform Party. This triggered Trump’s first real political slugfest, and he showed he had a taste for it. An hour before Buchanan was to appear on CBS’s Face the Nation on September 19, 1999, producers received a statement from Donald Trump via fax:1 “Pat Buchanan’s stated view that we should not have stopped Adolph [sic] Hitler is repugnant. Hitler was a monster, and it was essential for the Allies to crush Nazism.”
Trump was referencing ideas in Buchanan’s 1999 book A Republic, Not an Empire, and the fax led the host to ask about it. The point of Buchanan’s appearance was to announce his switch from the GOP to the Reform Party in the coming weeks. But now Buchanan had to defend himself on air, meaning Trump had masterfully inserted himself into the conversation. “That’s a silly and false caricature of my position,” Buchanan said.
A Republic, Not an Empire, a defense of isolationism, includes the contention that World War II could have taken a different course had some countries not declared war so quickly on Germany. Buchanan argues that Hitler offered “no physical threat to the United States” as of late 1940. It was not a work of Holocaust denial or a treatise praising Hitler in general. In another section, Buchanan criticized U.S. foreign policy, writing, “After World War II, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders.”
Trump and Stone took this book and combined it with editorials Buchanan had written over the years about Nazi Germany and synthesized it into a two-word sobriquet: “Hitler lover.”
Jim Nicholson: Pat had published this book, and it was very offensive to Jews. My Jewish Republican friends, after I was going to make an effort to keep Buchanan, were imploring me to tell him to go to hell.
Roger Stone: Pat’s a friend of mine. You can go back and look at the clips. Trump taunted him for praising Adolf Hitler, taunted him for finding no fault with the Third Reich.
Pat Buchanan: I’m not gonna get into that. I can give you the history I’ve given you, but I’m not gonna get into that.
Stone conscripted Dave Shiflett to write an anti-Buchanan op-ed under Trump’s byline. Published in the Los Angeles Times on Halloween 1999, it accused Buchanan of having a “psychic friendship with Hitler,” excoriated him for arguing that concentration camps did not kill Jews during the Holocaust, and vowed to stop him from “hijacking” the Reform Party’s nomination.
Dave Shiflett: It was a pretty good op-ed. I thought that was a good reflection of Trump’s basic viewpoint.
Pat Buchanan: Trump called me a lot of names but, as we’ve come to understand, these are terms of endearment.
Tony Coelho, Al Gore campaign chairman and Democratic congressman from California 1979–1989: Pat had a core, he really believed his stuff. In my view, he’s honest and real to his views. I may disagree with him, but I don’t have trouble with people like that.
Trump and Stone kept up a media campaign about Trump’s political intentions. They enticed New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney to the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, where Trump touted a National Enquirer survey of readers who were “clamoring” for a Trump candidacy. “Those are real people. That is the Trump constituency,” Trump said, insisting he would run on the Reform line only if he determined he could win the entire thing.2 Skeptics argued this was Trump’s out, indicating he never intended to follow through.
To Dateline NBC’s Stone Phillips, Trump, who’d started dating model Melania Knauss, hinted that if he were president he’d have a first lady, although it was “not a priority.” When USA Today reporter Tom Squitieri was interviewing Trump, he “turned to Roger Stone, his political consigliere, and said, ‘Let’s make him White House press secretary when we win.’”3
Tom Squitieri, journalist and professor: I took him moderately seriously, guessing he would stay in as long as it was easy and he got his way. I also knew it was partially designed to boost his book. The serious factor was an obstacle with editors who thought it was all a stunt.
Trump sat in CNN’s New York studio on October 8, 1999, and told Larry King he would open an exploratory committee for a presidential run. He extolled lower taxes, railed against NAFTA, and said Germany, France, and Japan were “ripping off” America.
Larry King: Can you say it is a major step?
Donald Trump: I don’t think I can say it’s a major step, I’m looking at it very seriously. I have a lot to lose, Larry. I mean, I’m the biggest developer in New York by far.… But I really want to see, if you get that nomination, what happens from there? If I couldn’t win, if I felt I couldn’t win, I wouldn’t run.… I’m not looking to get more votes than any other independent candidate in history.… There’s a great lack of spirit in this country … and I think the spirit has to be brought back.
Trump floated a running mate—Oprah! “I mean, she’s popular, she’s brilliant, she’s a wonderful woman. I mean, if she would ever do it.” He continued, “I haven’t even started campaigning yet. Now, maybe when I start campaigning, I’ll do worse. Perhaps I shouldn’t campaign at all, I’ll just, you know, I’ll ride it right into the White House.”4
Trump was trying out the idea of a presidential run on himself, the media, the public—and the Reform Party. What challenges would surface, what would be easy? He had invited Ventura to dinner that night at Jean-Georges in the Trump International Hotel.5
Roger Stone: We talked about Oprah for vice president, that was catnip for tabloid media. He’s on the cover of both the Daily News and the New York Post. There were cartoons at the time.
Jesse Ventura: We were simply looking for viable candidates. All third parties, when they’re growing, do that.
Dave Shiflett: Trump was big on Jesse. He liked Jesse’s attitude. He just said what he wanted to say. That was always important with Trump, to say what you believe, say what you think.
Roger Stone: Jesse couldn’t stop talking about the improbability of his own election in Minnesota and how it could be done nationally, and how Donald was the guy to do it.
Jesse Ventura: Don’t build me and Trump into more than it was. There was no plan ever laid. We didn’t do any type of meeting to determine this could happen, that could happen. We were casual acquaintances before that. I happened to win governor. And if he wanted to use that politically, my win as governor, fine. I didn’t give him any recommendations to do anything. So anything he did, he did on his own. Did he watch us? Maybe.
The next morning Trump went on NBC’s Today Show, and Matt Lauer asked whether women were his Achilles’ heel. Trump said there’s “nothing in the closets” and blamed media “scum” for making things up.
Matt Lauer: What’s it going to take to make you decide to do this?
Donald Trump: Well, I’ll be deciding sometime early next year, and there’s only one really important thing, and that’s if I can win. Not if I can get the Reform Party [nomination], because I believe I can get the Reform Party. It’s really if I can win.… The Reform Party has a huge obstacle. You have Democrats, and you have Republicans. And you have 25 or 30 percent of the people are going to vote for one or the other or both, no matter what.…
If the economy is bad at the time of the election—and you know, we have a long way to go, and lots of things can happen—the Reform Party candidate would, if it’s the right candidate, have a good chance. If it’s Pat Buchanan, there’s no chance. He’ll get a hard-core group of wackos. But the Reform Party candidate, if it’s the right candidate, would have a good chance of winning the election, depending a little bit on the economy at the time of the election.
Phil Madsen, Reform Party operative: Trump was not messing around. This was an authentic exploratory effort. At this point, it was Roger Stone I was talking to, but I’m sure he wasn’t operating alone. They had this committee established. They wanted to know more about us. It’s exactly what any logical, reasonable person would do who was thinking about running for president and had not done so before. Trump was not campaigning, but Stone was setting up events that would give Trump a real good opportunity to get a sense of what it was like. They had a book written already, his policies. That book was done before they ever met us. So, Stone put together the structure of a campaign and some of the content. And then Trump was experimenting with this new entity. It was truly an exploratory committee.
Russell Verney: I didn’t then, and I’m not even sure I do now, view Donald Trump as a very partisan person. He has a lot of policy positions that would cut across both parties. He wasn’t fixed in a specific dogma, so an independent third party made a lot of sense.
Both in his forthcoming book, The America We Deserve, and in appearances, Trump argued for raising taxes on the wealthy, banning assault weapons, helping charter schools, applying the death penalty more, halting interventions in overseas humanitarian crises, terminating NAFTA, and slowing immigration. “We must take care of our own people first,” he and Shiflett wrote.
Reform Party members were interested in him, and Trump clearly stated his intention to run if he thought he had a real chance of winning. Yet few members of the establishment political class could envision it. We spoke with political and media leaders, including Ed Rendell, Andrew Stein, Tony Coelho, Robert Torricelli, Dean Barkley, Jim Nicholson, Joe Lieberman, and Ralph Nader, who said they never took a potential Trump run seriously.
Mike Zumbluskas: There were a number of Reform Party people, not just in New York but all over the country, who wanted Trump. A lot of these people came up through the Perot organization. They wanted a businessman to run the country. A lot of them saw the national debt running up, and they wanted somebody to go in and change Washington.
Lenora Fulani: People liked Trump because he could finance [a run]. His heart was not necessarily connected to building something outside of the two-party system that would advance the role and participation of ordinary people.
Dean Barkley, Independence Party U.S. senator from Minnesota 2002–2003: Donald Trump seemed like a very flamboyant, self-centered businessman who liked getting his name out there. I found him an opportunist. He flies around in his own Trump plane. He liked being in the news. He liked being the center of attention.
Lenora Fulani: I liked Governor Ventura. I was glad he was part of the movement, whether we agreed on everything or not. Trump was interested in running, and he was a real estate developer, he had money, and the person who brought him around was Jesse Ventura. Ventura did that because Pat Buchanan had reached out.
Jesse Ventura: Buchanan is a hard-core, right-wing Republican. Plain and simple. I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
Ralph Nader: At the time I thought Trump was just bluffing to get publicity and that he would never run, because he would never disclose his financials. See how right I was?
Tucker Carlson, Fox News: Trump has a very constant need, a huge appetite for entertainment. And I recognize that because I’m exactly the same way. That’s one of the reasons I went into the media. Trump just likes getting out there, flying around in the plane, sitting and bullshitting with people. But I also think it was a commercial calculation, designed to self-explode.
Polls showed the public was skeptical, too. Three out of four Americans did not take Trump’s candidacy seriously in a July 1999 Gallup poll.6 Forty-seven percent viewed Trump negatively, and only 41 percent had a favorable opinion of him in a Gallup poll two months later.7 Voters preferred Pat Buchanan (28 percent) and Jesse Ventura (24 percent) to Trump (11 percent) in a September Time/CNN poll. Only 6 percent of registered voters said Trump would be the best Reform candidate behind Buchanan (24), Perot (16), Ventura (13), and Warren Beatty (10) in an October Newsweek poll.8
Stone arranged a new flurry of interviews and public appearances. On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Tim Russert pressed Trump on past negative comments about women. Trump answered that women would respect what he said and added that women are “cunning” and “so tough they make us wince.” Trump said Buchanan should not be taken seriously because he was a “Hitler lover.”9
Tim Russert: Why are you joining the Reform Party?
Donald Trump: Well, for one thing, I really believe the Republicans are just too crazy right. I mean, just what’s going on is just nuts. And I’m seeing the Democrats as far too—I mean, Bradley and Gore are so liberal, it’s just too liberal for me. And I really think they’ve hit a chord, they’ve hit a very good chord, and I guess I’m very popular in that party.10
Pat Choate, Reform Party politician: I was very unsupportive of Trump coming in and being part of the Reform Party. I just didn’t think Trump fit. During that period he had done an interview from his bed after having sex with the lady who eventually became his wife, on The Howard Stern Show. He had had business difficulties. He had bankruptcies. He was not of the people that made up the bulk of the Reform Party, which were basically Reagan-type Democrats, independents, and conservative Democrats.
The November 9, 1999, call from bed to Howard Stern’s radio show reveals the one-of-a-kind political confection of Trump all coming together—the businessman, tabloid tantalizer, and crafty campaigner selling, selling, and selling. Trump touts his presidential aspirations, insults Bill Clinton for his taste in mistresses, and hands the phone to his love interest, Melania Knauss, who admits she is wearing nearly nothing.
Howard Stern: I know that you have a book coming up pretty soon, right?
Donald Trump: Correct.
Stern: Right. I believe that this is advance publicity for the book.
Trump: Well, that’s true, but I really am considering this. But it would be very, very important to have your endorsement.
[Trump eventually hands phone to Knauss]
Stern: You’re perfect. And what do you do, you go out with him every night and you guys have sex?
Melania Knauss: That’s true. We have a great, great time.
Stern: Every night, you are saying?
Knauss: Even more.
Trump could play in places low and high. The same day as the call to Howard Stern, a Trump-bylined article ran in the National Enquirer: “Why I Should Be President.” Meanwhile, University of Pennsylvania student Theodore LeCompte, who ran a speaker series and would later manage two Democratic presidential conventions, had been working to lure MSNBC to shoot an episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews on the campus. Trump brought Melania Knauss, Donald Trump Jr., and his bodyguard Keith Schiller to the November 18, 1999, event.11
Theodore LeCompte: I had seen Hardball do a campus town hall at the Institute of Politics at Harvard on TV and I was like, “That’s really cool. I wish they would do one here.” And so I reached out to a producer. A month or so after I sent that, [Hardball producer] Phil Griffin called and said, “Hey, we want to do Hardball on campus with Donald Trump,” because he had gone to Wharton.
Roger Stone: We would prepare talking points for him. He would really look at them. He would go out and perform magnificently and say most of what we wanted him to say but in his own words. He’s his own man. No one puts words in his mouth. It didn’t work then, doesn’t work now. He can’t be managed or handled like a traditional candidate. He’s not George W. Bush to Karl Rove. Puppet mastery. Sometimes he would take a few notes, that was a major concession.
Chris Matthews: Are you running for president?
Donald Trump: I am indeed [audience cheers]—maybe.
Matthews: When you run for president, will you release your income tax returns?
Trump: You know, it’s something I haven’t even thought of, but I certainly, I guess, as I get closer to the decision, which I’ll probably make in February, it’s something I will be thinking of. They’re very big. They’re very complex. But I would probably have—I probably wouldn’t have a problem with doing it.
Theodore LeCompte: Chris Matthews goes, “Are you running?” And Trump said, “I’m running.” And when everybody was cheering he said, “Maybe.” There was an AP reporter who didn’t catch he said “maybe,” so a wire report went out that he announced. It wound up getting more attention than we anticipated, because there was this AP report that said he was running.
Hardball had information on specific Trump policy ideas included in his forthcoming book. He proposed a onetime 14.25 percent tax on individuals worth over $10 million that he claimed would raise $5.7 trillion to reduce the national debt.12 Matthews asked Trump about the idea, and a student asked a follow-up question.
Richard Kilfoyle, former Penn student: Theo was looking for volunteers to ask questions at the event. I was the token Republican in my group of friends.
Richard Kilfoyle: I still see problems where people would be shifting their money to other nations …
Trump: I don’t see it, because this nation will boom, the economy will boom, and ultimately they’re going to shift their money anyway if our economy isn’t booming. Look what they did with Asia. When Asia went down, money shifted into Asia because they thought they were buying things cheap. So money’s going to shift where the economy is good.
Kilfoyle: But they only have to ship it out for a year. So I don’t see where the …
Trump: Well, I just think that the booming economy that we create by my plan would keep the money here because it’s incentive. They’re going to want to be where the action is, they’re going to want to be where the good economy is. And they move their money around—hey, including me—you move your money around where the action is, and now it’s a real world economy. But this country would be booming. We’d have no debt. It would be unbelievable.
Richard Kilfoyle: I don’t know if he understood his own policy or not. My friends liked it. They thought it was funny. Afterward they called me Trump Killer, because they thought that my response had put Trump in his place.
Russell Verney: The first time I met him was in his office at Trump Tower in November at the request of Jack Essenberg, chairman of the Independence Party, our Reform Party affiliate in New York. It was a very long, narrow office with a spectacular view of Central Park and all the buildings around it. All of my discussions with him were about the process. They wanted to know what they have to do to achieve the nomination of the Reform Party and what were the logistics of it. Conversations about the campaign if it was to ever materialize.
Pat Buchanan: I went about my business, which was this: Our party was on the ballot in only about 19 or 20 states, so I had to get the Reform Party on the ballot. We drove in vans from one state to another getting the required signatures to get the Reform Party and my name on the ballot. And this took all the way from October 1999 to the summer of 2000.
Pat Choate: At that point I was co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s campaign. I was confident if Trump did run we could take him down.
Throughout December 1999, Trump gave speeches as part of motivational guru Tony Robbins’s Results 2000 seminars around the country. At stops in Miami, Hartford, Connecticut, and Southern California, he met with Reform Party bigwigs before heading to arenas. Trump was to give 10 speeches with Robbins at a reported $100,000 each. This fed skeptics. How could he be simultaneously running for president, giving paid speeches, and pushing a forthcoming book?
Roger Stone: We met with Reform Party people privately. He gave a speech and toured the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. We visited the Bay of Pigs Veterans Museum in Miami, and he gave a speech.
Phil Madsen: On the trip to Miami I was in a room with Trump, Melania, Stone, and four others. These were people Stone had selected to talk to Trump about what it would mean for him to run as a Reform Party candidate. Regarding Trump and Melania, she did not speak. He said almost nothing. He just listened to people as they talked. But I noticed that the two of them seemed very happy together. And it was little things, like, he would wash his hands, and she’d hand him the towel. She’d go to read something, and he’d read it ahead of time and get it for her. It was obvious that they were accustomed to being together. They were showing each other kindnesses, and I was touched by that.
Trump met with 40 members of the Reform Party at a hotel in Hartford on December 1 before giving another Results 2000 talk at the Hartford Civic Center with Tony Robbins. Trump fed off the energy of the thousands of fans who paid to see him and Tony Robbins speak. He told stories, recited business mantras, and asked, “Who thinks I should run for president?” in a freewheeling style he would elevate on the campaign trail in 2015. When Trump advised patrons at the Hartford Civic Center to “always sign a prenup,” one aide marveled to the New York Daily News, “Trump is making money running for president.”13 At Anaheim’s Arrowhead Pond, Trump offered his business maxim: “When somebody screws you, screw ’em back a lot harder.”14
On December 7, 1999, at a gathering of 100 Reform members at L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, with Melania Knauss in attendance, Trump argued that donors should be able to make unlimited contributions to candidates and said, “Nobody knows what the Reform Party platform is.”15 Roger Stone told reporters that focusing on traditional media and gatekeepers was a mistake in understanding how Trump might appeal to voters: “You can laugh at the … Entertainment Tonights and the Hard Copys if you want … but millions of people are watching those things and forming opinions based on what they see.”16
That night, Trump was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he was brought out to the band playing “Hail to the Chief.”
Leno had Trump admit he’d never been elected to anything and pointed out that being in charge of the Trump Organization was more like a dictatorship. (“That’s true,” Trump replied with a smile.) Leno also asked about alcohol (“I had a brother who had a big problem with alcoholism.… I’ve stayed away, not for any other reason, that and I just don’t like it”) and about Bill Clinton’s legal strategy (“His lawyers did an absolutely atrocious, terrible job. They could have fought harder for him not to answer that question … ‘Did you have an affair with this woman?’”).
Trump said that despite his divorces he believed in marriage.
“If you got married in the White House and got divorced would she get, like, everything west of the Mississippi?” Leno asked.
“You’d need a good prenup,” Trump replied jocularly.17