Erica, our three daughters, and I went to South Africa on safari at the Mala Mala Game Reserve over the Christmas holidays, December 2016. We hooked up with Kevin and Julietta, our old Voyager crewmates. After sailing around the world with us, and up the Amazon River, they live now in Kevin’s native Cape Town. It was Sol’s first safari; it brought up memories of past African adventures, and a wonderful time was had by all. After stopping in Amsterdam, Holland, on the way back for a visit with my firstborn son, Gabriel, and his wife, Deb, and their firstborn child, Desmond, we got home to an uneasy America about to give a decidedly mixed welcome to President-elect Donald Trump, the longest of long-shot chief executives.
It was a tumultuous transition amidst sharp charges that Trump’s presidency was illegitimate. Aside from the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, who garnered almost 2.9 million more than he did, my friend Donald was being tarred by serial scandals. One included alleged Russian-sponsored hacking of Democratic Party operatives, and the inference that Russian president Vladimir Putin poisoned the minds of American voters with damaging leaks. The hard left was having a field day alluding to the Manchurian Candidate–elect who was a stooge for the wily Kremlin boss.
Adding to the toxic atmosphere surrounding Trump’s ascendency to the White House were the actions of FBI Director James Comey, who destroyed Hillary’s momentum in the last week and a half of the campaign with a bogus story of ultimately nonexistent illegal emails. There were also salacious and almost surely false and slanderous allegations of shenanigans leveled at Trump and/or his staffers during the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes, golden showers, and so forth. True or false, it all conspired to make him the most unpopular president-elect in the history of polling. By midsummer 2017, he was the most unpopular president in the seventy-year history of polling.
With Erica, Isabella, Simone, and Sol boarding the Blue Train in Pretoria, South Africa, December 2016.
With Erica, Sol, and Isabella near the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, December 2016.
As he carried on with his lurching transition, he did something shortly after our arrival home to New York that, despite everything, stirred optimism in my heart. On the night of January 2, 2017, with Congress officially out of session, GOP leaders had voted virtually in secret to disembowel the Office of Congressional Ethics. Some of those voting to eviscerate the office had themselves been investigated and punished for ethical lapses. President-elect Trump would not hear of it, letting Republican congressional leaders know that he opposed the underhanded move. The next morning I tweeted twice:
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
Nice move by #PEOTUS Trump putting Republican lawmakers in their place for attempting to weaken #Ethics laws. Strong, significant signal.
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
#GOP is about to find out who is in charge. Hint: it ain’t them & it won’t be business as usual. It is #POTUS45 #draintheswamp
On January 12, eight days before his inauguration, I got an email from Trump assistant Meredith McIver that copied both tweets. Scrawled across it was a handwritten note from Trump: “Geraldo-Miss You-Thanks! Donald”
Worried that my opposition to his policies on everything from Mexican immigration to Muslims to former POW senator John McCain’s service had soured our friendship, I was delighted to hear from him. I emailed Meredith immediately, telling her I was honored, and asking if I could stop by to say hello before he left for Washington and the inauguration. She wrote back, “He asks if you are here now? Can you come up? Let us know your schedule. He’s here Tues/Weds next week as well . . .”
Glad that I had shaved my scrawny vacation beard, at four o’clock that afternoon I was escorted up the gilded elevator at Trump Tower to his transition office. After waiting a few minutes as he and the first lady–elect met with Missouri senator Roy Blunt and his wife, who were helping organize the inaugural festivities, I was escorted in. As he was leaving, Senator Blunt was helpful, pointing out that I had been among the first to predict that Trump would be the eventual GOP nominee. I was grateful no one asked whom I voted for in the general election; it would have been awkward. As the Missourians left, Melania lingered to ask by name how Erica and Sol were doing. She told me how excited she was about her husband’s extraordinary success.
Trump was relaxed and confident, sharing his sincere excitement at the prospect of living in the White House, belying the notion that he would consider it slumming after the luxury of his Trump Tower digs and his winter palace, Mar a Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
The next day I posted a picture of us, and said on Facebook:
Great spending time with the President-elect yesterday afternoon. He started by joking that I look better without the beard. But then he went right into a serious discussion about how he is getting the American taxpayer a break on the F-35 fighter jet. The first lady-elect, Melania, was there. She could not have been more gracious. She remembered Erica’s name and invited us to the White House. The President-elect joked about Celebrity Apprentice and about how Arnold Schwarzenegger is not doing nearly as well as he did.
With Bret Michaels, Ainsley, Sean, and friends during the inauguration. January 2017.
It wasn’t the last time he brought up the subject of ratings with me. He returned to the topic when we spoke on the phone, months into his presidency. He loved talking about how badly his reality-show successor had performed, bizarrely bringing up Arnold’s tanking ratings, and comparing them to his own, even during his address at the traditionally dignified National Prayer Breakfast on the day after he was inaugurated. Trump slammed Schwarzenegger again after the former governor was fired from Apprentice for low ratings at the end of his first season. What made it bizarre was that it came in the middle of a major controversy that had President Trump accusing President Obama of wiretapping his Trump Tower offices during the campaign and the transition.
That was all ahead for the forty-fifth president, like the endless debate over repealing and replacing Obamacare, building a border wall and banning Muslims, and cancerous Russiagate. At our Trump Tower meeting, he was in a good mood, looking forward to his inauguration, and decidedly annoyed by those calling his election as president illegitimate. I wrote, “That is of course bogus. He is our president, our one and only president, and on January 20th after his inauguration, he will be the 45th person in the history of the republic to have that honor. We wish him well.”
At the time of the Trump Tower meeting, still–Fox News executive Bill Shine had asked me to get the president-elect’s signature on a printout of an internal Fox News Election Day memo. The document was published around 5 PM on that historic Tuesday, November 8, and spoke of how the polls were forecasting a certain Hillary Clinton victory, which our Fox News experts predicted we would be able to call for the Democrat at 11 PM Eastern Time.
Sitting behind his desk in the transition office, President-elect Trump autographed it with his customary black marker, writing, “It didn’t turn out that way. Love, Donald.”
During the transition, I commented on how disappointing attempts to delegitimize President Trump’s election were, and reacted with humility upon discovering I was one of forty-one people he follows on Twitter, which, for better and worse, is still his go-to method of communicating with the American people. We spoke too on the night of his controversial inaugural address, which I thought was way too militant. At the Freedom Ball in Washington, DC, with Sean Hannity and Fox and Friends cohost Ainsley Earhardt, a lovely person inside and out, we were waiting for showtime backstage, hiding from the euphoric crowd gathered at the Convention Center, one of the three official celebrations. Sean was covering the ball with a live two-hour Fox News Special Report, and Ainsley and I were there to give color commentary on the show about the festivities and our take on the day’s historic events.
Through his unfailing support and vigorous advocacy during the campaign, Hannity had become the nation’s most important commentator, surpassing even Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly in his prime. By inaugural night, Sean was one of the president’s closest unofficial advisers, and he had the president’s old cell phone number, which to our surprise still worked. It would be shut down permanently at midnight.
It was so noisy in the cavernous hall, I could not hear what either Sean or Ainsley was saying to newly elected POTUS 45. When it was my turn, I congratulated him warmly, alternating between calling him Mr. President and “Boss,” the nickname I used during Celebrity Apprentice. At that moment, he was en route to the various balls with the first lady and his ecstatic children and their spouses, in the elaborate presidential convoy.
Surprisingly, he was not merely accepting of my warm wishes, he was combative, angrily criticizing the media for underestimating the size of the crowd that attended his address on the National Mall, ranting about the “dishonest media.” It was the beginning of his crusade against fake news. I tried to soothe him as best I could and promised to watch his back. A couple of hours later, he and the family showed up at the Freedom Ball. They danced to Paul Anka’s “My Way,” which became Frank Sinatra’s anthem in 1969, but which was seldom more appropriately used than on that inaugural night 2017.
The next day, the gigantic gender revolt, larger by far than his inaugural crowd, manifested itself on the boulevards of the capital and around the country. The vast sea of mostly women and girls hit the streets to demonstrate against Trump’s ascendency to the highest office in the land. It was perhaps the biggest day of protest in American history and an inauspicious way to begin a presidency.
Sean Hannity was covering the presidential ball for a live two-hour Fox News Special Report, and Ainsley Earhardt and I were there to give color commentary. January 2017.
The demonstrators used the color pink to symbolize their profound disquiet that the reins of power had been handed to a chief executive who in their minds, among all the other things, views women as sex objects, and their reproductive rights as revocable. Rather than being off-put by the obvious schism in American society, I am heartened that the progressive half of the country, for months before and after the election lethargic and unfocused, that day found its voice. As the massive post-Inaugural protests and another on the president’s first anniversary in office made clear, there is now energetic opposition to President Trump, much of it fair-minded and fact-based, though some of it “fake,” to use the president’s characterization. Erica at one point asked me to stop supporting him with tweets because I was embarrassing her with her girlfriends.
“Why the implacable hatred directed at Trump?” I asked my loving, but steadfastly feminist wife during one of our kitchen debates that are reflected in millions of politically divided American households. She replied with anguished sincerity, “I feel like, what is it going to take to stop you defending him?!” She paused before firing another volley, “Him not speaking out about hate crimes or white supremacists? Him wrecking Obamacare and not replacing it? Him doing away with the global warming accord?” And so on. Her brother Josh Levy, a well-regarded Washington lawyer and former Democratic staffer whose firm represents GPS Fusion, the group that sponsored the infamous Trump Russia Dossier, has apparently stopped speaking to me because of my tireless effort to find silver linings in the president’s actions.
As in my family, the divisions within the country are bad and getting worse. The danger is that the two sides are so scornful of each other, that rather than checking and balancing, we are now at each other’s throats, fighting an ideological civil war. Amidst flashes of economic competence and riding a strong stock market and booming economy toward optimism, President Trump doesn’t help quell the discord. He still gives ammunition to his enemies, while making life difficult for his friends, careening from Twitter storm to Twitter storm of his own making.
Bottom line, I am dismayed by both his hard head and the unrelenting hatred directed his way. He may not think as you do, but that doesn’t make him bad. Although his policy choices are sometimes hard for me personally to tolerate, and as he and his administration deal sometimes haphazardly with crises like the Iran nuclear deal or issues like climate change, I am still determined to be the man in the middle. Roger Ailes once warned me that the only thing in the middle of the road was roadkill. Still, I want to be a small voice in the president’s ear and the country’s that says, “Cool down. Let us work this out. We are in this together.” Sometimes the president listens.
“Why the implacable hatred directed at Trump?” I asked my lovely, loving wife during one of our debates. December 2016.
And sometimes the president makes it difficult. As we went to press, and just a few days after Mr. Trump had called to tell me he appreciated my defending him and his family against some of author Michael Wolff’s more scurrilous attacks in his bombshell book Fire and Fury, the president got in hot water again when he reportedly asked, “Why do we want people from Haiti here?” and demanded to know, in reference to Africa, why he should accept immigrants from “shithole countries.” It’s impossible to excuse this sort of statement, and it’s hard to understand why the president makes it so easy for his opponents to paint him as a racist.
I tweeted him from my bed in the Cleveland Clinic.
Geraldo Rivera @GeraldoRivera
@realDonaldTrump last week I told you on phone that I love you like a brother. In that spirit I ask you to apologize for your unfortunate remarks. I’m in hospital getting back surgery My skilled compassionate nurse is from #Kenya She told me how you’d hurt her family’s feelings.
But there are times when President Trump gets it right. When historically vicious Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017 with winds in excess of 150 mph, it laid waste to the countryside. Civil society on my adored but battered Isla del Encanto teetered on the brink of breakdown.
Assigned by Fox and Friends to cover the disaster because of my lifelong ties to the island, limping into action, I spent almost two painful weeks in rough conditions bouncing between coverage of the general population’s suffering and helping my own family members in distress. My eighty-four-year-old Aunt Eli, youngest of my father’s sixteen siblings, and one of just three surviving, was living in the dark with a tree through her roof. It was my abuelos’ old house in Bayamón, where I lived and learned Spanish during the summer of 1958, when I turned sixteen years old.
Craig and I got Eli a generator and other supplies, but big picture, I was frightened by the extent of the destruction islandwide. In terms of the number of people negatively affected, Maria is the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, and I wrote the following open letter to President Trump a couple of days before he was scheduled to visit:
Dear Mr. President,
As a concerned citizen with deep personal ties to the Puerto Rican people, I am heartened by your coming visit to this storm-ravaged island, home to 3.4 million of our fellow citizens, including members of my own family. This is a community in dire need of outside assistance after two devastating hurricane strikes in two weeks. As you know, Mr. President, the entire agricultural crop has been wiped out. The whole island is still without electrical power. Half the people have no running water, and the communications network has also been destroyed. Cell phone towers are down everywhere, and numerous streets remain clogged by downed trees and debris from the storm. Hospitals and other vital institutions are also severely damaged and vital staff struggles to get to their jobs because of fuel shortages that require waits of six hours or more at stations lucky enough to have gas. I am concerned that the relief effort up to this point does not seem to reach the scale necessary to alleviate the misery inflicted by the storms. Relief flights have finally started after a distressing delay, but what this beleaguered island needs are giant ships bearing cargoes of fuel, telephone poles, generators, heavy equipment and the like.
I turned sixteen in the Rivera family home, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 1958.
My eighty-four-year-old Aunt Eli, youngest of my late father’s sixteen siblings, in the Hurricane Maria aftermath. Puerto Rico, October 2017.
My tour of the port of San Juan does not show anything like the effort required to turn this awful thing around. Suspend the Jones Act, at least temporarily, so foreign flag vessels can join an armada of US ships bearing critically needed assets to rebuild and replace the wreck that exists now.
He delivered. The next day, President Trump temporarily suspended the Jones Act, opening San Juan Harbor to foreign flag vessels, and escalating the pace of the relief effort. He selected Lt. General Jeffrey Buchanan, an excellent soldier I met in Baghdad in 2011, to coordinate. Then the president called me. Luckily the operator on Air Force One got through on my cell phone in a rare area along the highway where cell service existed. We pulled over so as not to lose the signal as the operator put through his familiar voice.
He restated our friendship, promised to do all he could to help, and asked me to accompany him and First Lady Melania as they toured storm-ravaged areas. He gave me an exclusive interview when he arrived, the only one he did during this visit, and made news saying that the bankrupt island’s crushing $73 billion debt would have to be wiped out at the expense of bondholders like Goldman Sachs and “my friends on Wall Street.” Unfortunately, that idea never made it past the drawing board.
When the visit was over, he gave Craig, cameraman Benjamin West, and me a ride home on AF-1. The president and I talked about old times in several conversations on board the gigantic, plush aircraft, and I promised again to “watch his back,” as I did when I criticized two reports that were falsely alleging Trump fiddled when Puerto Rico burned. One of them blamed his alleged neglect for a nonexistent cholera epidemic on the island. Another sought to make him responsible for Puerto Rico’s notoriously corrupt, inept, and bankrupt power authority.
With the Coast Guard during a relief mission. Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, October 2017.
“He gave me an exclusive interview when he arrived, the only one he did during this visit” to the Hurricane Maria aftermath. Puerto Rico, October 2017.
We parted at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, DC, he and the first lady to head to the scene of the horrific Las Vegas massacre early the next morning, me to get home to Cleveland to recover from twelve days of nonstop reporting.
Despite the contempt in which half the country holds him, I do still consider him a friend. Erica thinks I have stopped being objective. In her opinion, the dark side has seduced me, my moral compass overcome. I disagree, and argue that while there is plenty to criticize, the reality is more nuanced. Never, or at least not since Nixon, has any president had a worse relationship with the press. Not the slickest ad-libber, everything President Trump says or does is construed in the most evil, negative way possible. Blessed as I am that many folks still trust what I have to say, I insist that POTUS 45 is not wicked. He has thin skin, but a big heart. He is not his stereotype. Neither am I. Otherwise, how could either of us have defied conventional wisdom for so long?
Everything Trump does or says is construed as evil. San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2017.
