We’re about to leave these players to their fates. Taking a parting glance at the waves caused by Trump’s full-throated entry into the presidential race demonstrates that something new was rising from the east, if not in substance then in form.
The shock that Trump had actually announced his candidacy was soon replaced by the shock of what he’d said while doing it. Mexico sending rapists! Reporters who might have been impelled to ignore a candidacy that many still saw as a publicity stunt were nevertheless drawn to report on the outrageous words. If he was a clown to them, he was one of those scary, threatening ones, the grinning kind you don’t dare turn your eyes—or your cameras—from.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton chided him with a classic politician’s distance and decorum, not even mentioning Trump by name as she explained to a Nevada journalist her opposition to placing children in large detention centers. “A recent entry into the Republican presidential campaign said some very inflammatory things about Mexicans,” Clinton said, building on her earlier comment that “unfortunately, the public discourse is sometimes hotter and more negative than it should be, which can, in my opinion, trigger people who are less than stable.” She was referring to a shooting that claimed nine lives in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.1
Trump hammered back, casting himself as the victim by saying in an Instagram video, “Wow, it’s pretty pathetic that Hillary Clinton just blamed me for the horrendous attack that took place in South Carolina. This is why politicians are just no good. Our country’s in trouble.” The caption was, “Hillary Clinton reaches new low #TrumpVlog.” He no longer had to phone the New York Post and trade gossip that he’d collected in exchange for a next-day mention of him blasting his opponent. He knew the game of pillorying better than Clinton and had no compunction about insulting a woman by name. Hillary Clinton would be his new Rosie O’Donnell, social media his Page Six. Trump, who’d turned 69 years old two days before his announcement, had honed his methods for the world of 2015, and he was applying them ruthlessly.
It turned out McConney was right about rock stars. Three days after the announcement, Neil Young put out a statement that Trump did not have permission to use his song. Trump fired back on June 24, tweeting a photo of Young’s business proposal and saying the musician was a “total hypocrite” and that he “didn’t love [the song] anyway.”
That wasn’t the only relationship that soured after the announcement. On June 29, 2015, NBC severed ties with Trump “due to recent derogatory statements” he made about immigrants.
Sam Nunberg: He announces. The next week he’s dropped by everyone. It helped us politically, but it was killing his business. He lost a lot of money. Part of it too was he didn’t know where this was going to go. He got pushed into wanting to go the full distance after they fucked him after his announcement speech, especially when he got The Apprentice taken away. I don’t want to betray his trust here, but I’ll put it to you one way. It didn’t happen immediately, but eventually it hit him. And boy, boy, boy, did you not want to be around him then. I don’t think he was upset at [Mark] Burnett. He was upset at NBC. The irony was, whenever they hurt his business it was going to help him. He would prefer they didn’t hurt his business, but it would help him politically to become a martyr.
Justin McConney: Once The Apprentice was done, he took his chair from the show and moved it up into his office and put a sign on it that says, “The chair from The Apprentice. 2004 to 2015. Number One show.” Then he had a couch, which was full of sports memorabilia: boxing gloves, Shaq’s sneakers. If you were a reporter that would go in during that time period, he would walk you over to his couch of memorabilia.
Jonathan Wald, cable news producer: He was a spectacle that we couldn’t get enough of. No guilt. None whatsoever. At the time it was the best story going.
Sam Nunberg: There was a time he liked Hillary. When I saw him really not like her was two days after our announcement. There was a terrible terrorist shooting in South Carolina. The racist went into the black church. It was disgusting, and she blamed him, his speech, for it. And Trump said, “She’s a nasty, nasty…” I won’t use the word he used.*
Jonathan Wald: There were a couple of interviews we did with Don Lemon, who he now calls the dumbest man on television, at Trump Tower in which they got along famously. My favorite moment was when we were told that Mr. Trump wanted to speak with us before an interview. There’s a table with a map on it with pins in it for the states he’s focusing on and what he’s targeting and what his strategy is going to be to win the presidency. He sidles up and walks us into his office and says, “You guys wanna see Tom Brady’s helmet?” [Laughs.] I said, “Yeah, I would love to see Tom Brady’s helmet!”
Roger Stone: People wanted to see a man working without a net. You never knew what he might say, including me, or anyone around him, and he was endlessly entertaining. He understood that you need to engage a voter before you could educate them. I did not think that you could combat hundreds of millions of dollars of paid negative media with a free media blitz of your own, where it meant being seen and heard everywhere that you possibly could, even if it meant six interviews a day. He did think you could out-communicate paid media. He was right and I was wrong.
Katie Couric: I was at Yahoo!, and I was kissing the ring to see if he’d do an interview. I went to see him in his office, and he had magazines piled up high that he was on the cover of. He said, “Can you believe this?” I said, “Wow, no, I can’t.”
Steve Bannon: The guy who missed it, and missed it hard, my good buddy Mr. Roger Ailes and Rupert Fucking Murdoch. Fuck them. They were dead wrong on this thing from the beginning. They thought Trump was a fucking goombah. And they’re supposed to be media geniuses? Fox was the never-Trump network until they weren’t. He’s got an ability to viscerally connect into people’s guts and hearts. I always tell people, “I’m always arguing with him, and I’m always wrong eventually.” You can go anywhere in the world today, and it’s all him. He’s saturated everything.
Tucker Carlson: Bannon’s not smart enough to understand the implications. He has no fine motor skills, that’s his problem. But Bannon also had the quality that Trump has, the ability to look at everybody else in your peer group and say to their face, “You’re wrong.”
Reverend Al Sharpton: I go do Morning Joe in early December a month after Trump won, and Joe [Scarborough] was asking me, “You and Trump know each other for years. Tell me about Donald Trump. I don’t understand how he translated to these working-class poor people.”
I said, “Trump is an outer-borough guy who was never accepted by the real estate moguls and downtown barons of that industry. So he always had a chip on his shoulder. He felt that they looked down on him and his father. And you’d have to be a New Yorker to understand an outer-borough status. I had it double because I was from Brooklyn and black. But he felt like that. You didn’t see him at the power breakfasts. He didn’t hang out at the Regency. He wasn’t a member of those clubs. That’s why he wanted to splash his name. And he translated that chip on his shoulder, that resentment, to those blue-collar workers in Appalachia and Kentucky because that was really how he felt. The fact that he was a billionaire, if he is, it was us against them, and he felt that.”
I get off the show. Get in the car. We were having a board meeting of the National Action Network, and in the middle of the meeting, my phone rings. I look at the number. It ended with 2000. I didn’t know the number. And the voice comes on, “Would you hold on for the president-elect?” And Trump comes on. “Al, I saw you this morning. I was telling my wife, ‘He got me. This guy knows me.’ You’ve got to be a New Yorker to know that. You’re absolutely right. They look down on us, Al. Look at what you did to the black establishment. And can you believe I’m the president of the United States?”
I said, “No, I’m having a hard time getting my head around it.” And he laughed. “I want you to come to Mar-a-Lago.” I said, “The only way we meet is if I can bring the other civil rights leaders.” He said, “No, I don’t know them. I know you. We fight, but I know you. Anybody who knows race knows Al Sharpton.” “I’m not doing that,” I said. “You’re not going to get me in a photo op. We know each other too well. It’s going to be a serious meeting. The head of Urban League, NAACP, same group that would meet with Obama.” “I ain’t doing that,” he said. “Well, we’ll talk,” I said. “As things come up, I’m sure we’ll talk,” he said. I asked, “Who’s the contact to you?” “Call me,” he said. “Nobody talks for me. You know that, Al. You call me when I’m in the White House, you just tell them it’s you.” That was the last conversation we had.
Sam Nunberg: Anyway, I’m done with these fucking interviews. I’m done in general. This is the last time I’m ever talking about the elections. This is it. When I write a book, it’s going to say, “I worked for Donald Trump.” Now you understand my personal feelings. To me, honestly, it’s water under the bridge now because I already vented on national TV [on March 5, 2018, when he made numerous rambling cable-TV appearances]. I loved that day. You know me. I loved that day. Everybody knows who I am. They know I’m not a low-level, part-time consultant. I’m getting booked now.