Chapter 10

_______________________

TRUMP, BIN LADEN, AND DANCING WITH THE STARS

Nine years, seven months, and nineteen days after the 9/11 attacks that changed all of our lives for the worse, Erica and I attended the White House Correspondents’ dinner in grand style. We sailed up the Potomac River to Washington, DC, in Voyager.

We had previously attended several of these glitzy occasions, amused by how star-starved Washington-based journalists react to famous guests, who are usually gracious. As a semi-celebrity, I usually got a warm welcome from the younger staffers, had fun sitting next to prominent guests such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, and enjoyed some belly laughs at jokes from the president and the comedy host, who this year was an unusually acerbic Seth Meyers.

The target of the ruthlessly barbed jokes by Meyers and the president was my old friend Donald J. Trump, who had it coming after joining maliciously xenophobic Sheriff Joe Arpaio in resurrecting the long-simmering “birther” movement that sought to prove President Obama, who was seeking reelection in 2012, was really born in Kenya and was thus disqualified from occupying the Oval Office. However twisted, a straight line can be drawn from Trump’s involvement in the birther crap and his election to the presidency. No one else running knew how potent the bogus issue would prove to be.

The dinner came just a week after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, substantively putting the silly issue to rest. That night, with Trump in attendance, Obama enjoyed twisting the comic knife. He queried whether Trump’s next probe might be whether the moon landing actually happened. Obama also showed a video of his own birth, which turned out to be the iconic clip of Simba being born in the cartoon movie The Lion King.

Trump would have better luck using the birther issue later against Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries. Since the Texas senator really was born abroad, in Canada, the argument could be made with a semi-straight face that Senator Cruz technically was not the “natural-born citizen” the Constitution requires of presidents.

The billionaire businessman-who-would-be-king was also in the bull’s-eye at the correspondents’ dinner because for several weeks he had been talking up another wacky idea: He was running to succeed Barack Obama in the White House. The forty-fourth president launched a string of stinging jokes about how Donald as the forty-fifth president, clearly a laughable idea to most of those smarty pants gathered in the cavernous Grand Ballroom, would convert the White House into a casino with a jacuzzi on the South Lawn.

The president mercilessly mocked Trump’s inexperience for high office, pointing out that on that week’s installment of Celebrity Apprentice Trump had just fired Gary Busey rather than Meat Loaf. The president deadpanned, “These are the types of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.”

The man who would improbably become president was fuming. I am certain the mockery that night helped persuade Trump, after years of pondering, finally to make the run for the White House.

President Obama was in fine form, relaxed and funny. He and First Lady Michelle Obama gave Erica and me a warm greeting, waving and smiling broadly from their seats on the dais. Twenty-four hours later, when Erica and I realized what must have been going on in the president’s head at the time of his wisecracking, we decided he was the world’s best actor. If the weather had been better that same day in Afghanistan, he never would have made it to this Saturday party. He would have been concerned with the far-weightier matters that he dealt with on Sunday night.

THE GREATEST NIGHT OF MY CAREER, MAY 1, 2011

That Sunday night, May Day 2011, the White House announced that the president of the United States would be addressing the nation at around 10 PM. The prevailing wisdom was that he was going to tell the American people that the fugitive Gaddafi had been caught.

But even that dramatic premise caused major head-scratching. Gaddafi dead or alive, captured or free, did not warrant a presidential prime-time address to the nation. So as our live 10 PM show approached, we pondered what the hell was up.

At the Fox News Washington Bureau, Craig, Greg Hart, and a team of the bureau’s young staffers were frantically calling sources and checking social media and the AP wires knowing that it was probably something connected with the military. On the other hand, it was not a major act of war like an atomic explosion because we would have heard about it by now. I was on the air speaking via remote with Fox News’s White House correspondent, Mike Emanuel, when it hit me.

“Wait a minute—hold it. Ladies and gentlemen, something I just thought of,” I interrupted Mike. “What if . . . what if it’s Osama bin Laden?” When I said it, the words just out of my mouth, I knew that it was true. I sensed a gasp, then a wave of affirmation sweeping the nation.

I doubled down, cautioning the audience that I was not reporting the death of Osama bin Laden as fact, but saying, “This is a reporter relying on his experience telling you what my surmise is.” Then I asked viewers and specifically my studio guest, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, “Is it possible that the terror mastermind who killed so many Americans, that striking from bases in Afghanistan, something may have happened to him?”

Was it too good to be true? Bin Laden, captured or dead? I promised high fives and cheers all around if that were the case.

At 10:40 PM ET, five minutes before CNN, my voice cracking with emotion and joy, I reported the confirmation from senior Capitol Hill producer Chad Pergram. I read a note from Chad out loud, saying over and over, “Osama bin Laden is dead. Osama bin Laden is dead. Can it be? Can it be, ladies and gentlemen? The man who caused so much misery and pain? Osama bin Laden is dead!”

Then, as I read the AP wire from my desktop computer, my voice filled with rising excitement, I said, “Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Bin Laden is dead! Urgent confirmed! Bin Laden is dead. Multiple sources. Happy days. Happy days, everyone. This is the greatest night of my career. The bum is dead. The savage who hurt us so grievously, and I am so blessed, I am so privileged to be at this desk at this moment.”

Beginning with a typically snotty headline, here is how the important website Mediaite described what happened:

         GERALDO RIVERA’S FINEST MOMENT: HOW THE MUCH-MALIGNED ANCHOR BROKE THE BIN LADEN NEWS BEST

         In breaking the news, no one could top Geraldo Rivera’s pure euphoria. Rivera, who was on deck to anchor his regular program At Large, appeared as confused as all of Twitter around 10 PM, when the White House announced the news that the President would speak about an unknown topic within the hour. After about a half hour of errant speculation on the life and health of Muammar Gaddafi, a light bulb went off in Rivera’s head.

It was true. Bin Laden was dead, and I was never more alive. When Fox News anchor Brett Baier and his impressive team of staff and experts took over the channel at midnight, at the urging of Darla Shine, wife of FNC’s then-senior vice president and later co-president, Bill Shine, I hurried to join Craig and a live camera crew outside the White House, where a huge and boisterous crowd of college students had spontaneously gathered. They were cheering and high-fiving, and I was with them, “dancing on bin Laden’s grave.”

A funny story that I have never told . . . When I first got to the White House, I could not find Craig and the crew. In a panic, I asked to be admitted to the White House on the assumption that he and the rest of the media were somehow inside. The Secret Service guys at the heavily fortified gate reluctantly let me into the president’s residence. They were as euphoric as I was, and they understood that I needed to find my crew. To make a long, silly story short, Craig and crew were not in the building. So after running through its historic halls I came out the other side, asked breathlessly to be allowed to exit, was permitted out, where I finally found them, and immediately went live, ebulliently reporting the news and the jubilant crowd reaction.

Amidst the raucous celebration, I somehow noticed that I had a text message from Afghanistan. My dear friend, then-two-star Major General John F. Campbell, was watching our coverage with a large contingent of his soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). His command was having a very tough time on this deployment, having just lost six soldiers in a vicious firefight with the Taliban. The division would lose 245 soldiers killed in action by the end of the year’s deployment when I joined them in Afghanistan in 2012.

But this night, they were cheering and celebrating along with the rest of the Free World. The monster was dead, and I was honored to bring the nation the news for which we had waited for so long.

It was as Mediaite further described, “The most significant and joyous national security announcement of the past several decades,” and here is how I described the significance of the moment the next day in a column for Fox News Latino:

         He haunted my life since that crisp, clear September day almost ten years ago, when Osama bin Laden sent four hijacked airliners to inflict mass murder on innocent men, women, and children.

               When the twin towers fell on 9/11, among the business people, visitors, and first responders who died were several dads from my girls’ former elementary school in Rumson, New Jersey.

               The loss of those fathers sent a tsunami of grief and disquiet through all of our children. The horrors and grief of war had come to the shore of America.

               At the time anchor of CNBC’s highest rated show, I begged to be allowed to go into the field to chronicle the hunt for the mass murderers who killed those fathers. Refused permission, I quit my plum job and signed on as a war correspondent with Fox News, the spunky new network created by old friend Roger Ailes.

               I started at Fox on a November Friday. By the following Tuesday, I was in Pakistan en route to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan, reporting on the burgeoning effort to catch or kill bin Laden, and to punish the Afghan Taliban who had given al Qaeda sanctuary.

               Ten difficult assignments in that war-torn region since brought little advance to the story. We marched, we searched, and we watched our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines fight, kill, and be killed. Still bin Laden eluded us.

               My secret fear was that he would outlive me, or that he would simply stay vanished and invisible, sending an occasional taunting or threatening video, mocking us: “Catch me if you can!”

               Now Osama bin Laden is dead, killed in a hail of gunfire from an elite team of Navy SEALs raiding the terror mastermind’s absurdly lavish compound in Pakistan.

               We were there when he escaped our clutches in Tora Bora in December 2001. And we were on the air Sunday night when the news was confirmed that he was dead. In between those monumental events, life has gone on for my family, my country, and me. But the long shadow of the world’s most wanted man darkened the sky and chilled the air. Now he is gone. Sure there are more storms ahead. But today the sky is again crisp and clear.

Mediaite’s Frances Martel, whom I don’t know, wrote the piece grudgingly praising my performance that fateful night, admitting,

         It’s difficult to give props to Geraldo Rivera. Building a legal career out of militant Puerto Rican separatism only to hop on TV and spend decades highlighting the absolute worst in America—from local news reports on crack houses to his Jerry Springer-esque talk show to the Milli Vanilli of journalism, The Mystery Of Al Capone’s Vault—few can challenge his reign as America’s most prominent media punch line.

               That’s not to be overly harsh on Rivera or to undermine the role he played to Americans last night, but only to emphasize how much more unexpected it was to see him rise so strikingly to the occasion. He is the last person one expects to accurately speak for all America on a serious issue, but he was the only journalist on the air that night with his heart sufficiently placed on his sleeve to stop being an anchor for a little bit of time and just react like a human, specifically, a New Yorker.

               Sure, many will refute that a journalist getting emotional is the proper decorum for someone privileged with such a responsibility . . . But last night was unquestionably the best broadcast of Rivera’s life; he said so himself. No one better captured the breathless, unadulterated relief of knowing a man who had caused so much suffering had finally reached his end after a life that will go down as one of the most repulsive in human history, and for that, at least part of the debt of good reporting Rivera owes to his viewers has been paid.

“FOR GOD AND COUNTRY, GERONIMO, GERONIMO, GERONIMO,” MAY 2011

Rob O’Neill, the member of SEAL Team 6 who killed the terror mastermind, has described how the corpse of bin Laden was first brought to Jalalabad Airport for tentative identification. The team was also waiting for a second aircraft ferrying the remaining members of the team, whose helicopter had been left behind and destroyed after crashing as it attempted to land in the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I interviewed Rob about it one day at Fox.

         Rob O’Neill: It was neat because we were with the entire team. We are all obviously elated for a number of reasons: One, we just killed bin Laden; two, we lived. We are gonna live. We are gonna be best friends for the rest of our lives. This is so cool. We were part of this team that will be legendary. We didn’t expect them to say SEAL Team 6, but the more we heard it, we were like, this is a bigger deal than even we thought. And then you were on the air and then I remember you started speculating the first time we heard bin Laden and then you confirmed, “bin Laden is dead, bin Laden is dead!”

               And I was eating a sandwich as the president came out. And finally, ’cause what was happening before that was we were watching you on television and most people I am assuming were wondering why it was taking so long, but behind us, my boss is on the phone with probably the White House or the CIA and they are just trying to get a head count on what happened in the house; how many are dead; how many were wounded; how many women and children; what is the total head count; ’cause we always want that after a mission.

               So they are just trying to straighten that out before they tell the president. Then the president comes out and I remember watching him and he said, “Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world, the United States conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.” And I remember that so vividly because I hear him say bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, and I look at Osama bin Laden, like he is right there and just everything kinda flashes through all the missions, that “We are never gonna find him.” “The guy is a ghost.” “I will never be on that mission”; and realize, Oh my God, how in the world did I get here from [his hometown] Butte, Montana? [Laughs] And I killed him.

The melancholy side of the triumph is that the death of bin Laden did not end the War on Terror. In a pessimistic appraisal that was widely reported in February 2016, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a Senate hearing, “There are now more Sunni violent extremist groups, members, and safe havens than at any time in history.” Matthew Henman, head of the Terrorism and Insurgency Center, which analyzes international security risks, told reporters, “Five years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, it is not wrong to be fairly pessimistic in our outlook on the world.”

It did not take long for Henman’s pessimism to be realized. In June 2017, Tora Bora was back in the news for the worst of reasons. It had fallen back into the clutches of radical Islamists. Only this time it wasn’t the Taliban or al Qaeda, it was ISIS. After gaining and then losing territory in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, this malignancy spread to Afghanistan. Smaller than the other extremist groups, ISIS in Afghanistan had been more or less contained in a network of tunnel hideouts in the Achin District, near the Pakistan border.

Our air forces found them there and attacked their refuge in April 2017, dropping the so-called Mother of All Bombs, a 20,000-pound giant said to be the most powerful nonnuclear weapon in our arsenal. By all accounts, the gigantic explosion inflicted scores of casualties and led to rejoicing among our military leaders. We had landed what seemed a killing blow. Rather than being wiped out, however, the terror organization simply regrouped and moved, choosing a sanctuary less vulnerable to our air strikes. According to my old friend Hazrat Ali, who is still in the area, a thousand surviving ISIS fighters attacked Tora Bora. As of this writing, ISIS occupies the infamous cave and tunnel complex that bin Laden built, and our side spent so much time, money, energy, and reputation trying to destroy.

I am almost tempted to let ISIS alone to discover the same sorry fate as every other would-be occupier of Afghanistan. Let them exhaust their blood and treasure trying to outmaneuver the Pashtun tribesmen and alter their brutal society. ISIS will not find the fertile ground they found in the Sunni heartland of Mesopotamia. However they fare in Tora Bora, there is no end in sight to their brand of terror. The peril posed by Sunni Muslim extremists will be just as bad or worse on the tenth anniversary of bin Laden’s death as it was on the fifth, but at least he is dead. The United States did what we pledge to do to those who attack us. We tracked him down and took our revenge on the perpetrator for his terrible crime. I was not in New York when the planes hit the towers, but I was on the air almost a decade later when we learned justice had been done. And SEAL Team 6 and the world were watching.

LAST DANCE, DECEMBER 2011

Bin Laden’s death did not end the War on Terror. Like President George W. Bush’s preposterous “Mission Accomplished” banner eight years earlier, 2011 turned out to be President Barack Obama’s year of cockeyed optimism. Six months after we celebrated bin Laden’s death in Afghanistan, Obama told us our war in Iraq was also ending.

America was eager to move on, and bring our troops home. I had the privilege of being on what we all thought was the last US combat convoy out of Iraq in December 2011. As we left, bound for Kuwait, there was an omen of bad times ahead in the rearview mirror. It was a mob scene happening at the base behind us. Instead of the valuable assets we left behind being handed over to proper authorities, as we pulled out of the base, a mob of civilians poured over the fence, grabbing and stealing every piece of equipment they could get their hands on. Among the loot was row upon row of brand-new Ford F-150 pickups, symbolic of all the billions of American taxpayer dollars wasted on that sorry excuse for a country. I left apologizing for not opposing the Iraq War in the first place.

As I reported at the time, “For someone who considers himself a patriot, as I do, it is extremely difficult not to rally behind a president when he beats the drums of war. So it has always been. We can disagree about domestic policy, but when the nation’s leader says we are threatened from abroad, the majority of Americans suspend misgivings or even gnawing disbelief and give the man in the Oval Office the benefit of the doubt.

         Our war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the classic example. It was funky from the get-go, and I should have known better. Instead, I concentrated on chronicling the heroic efforts of our stressed Armed Forces as they followed goals that vacillated from attempted conquest, to force protection, to nation building, to finding a respectable way out.

               We didn’t go for the oil. We didn’t go to establish a strong base in a dangerous, strategically important part of the world. We went as an act of national self-defense. But was it really?

               Invading Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction that we had only flimsy evidence ever really existed required an act of willful blindness. That lame dog-and-pony show that Secretary of State Colin Powell put on in the United Nations in 2003 to prove our case that the Iraqi dictator was really attempting to build a nuclear weapon and then to rally international support for the invasion, showed how pathetically thin our proof was. For good reason, Secretary Powell’s longtime military adviser and chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, later called his own involvement in that UN presentation “the lowest point of his life.”

               Our proof then was a thousand times less convincing than the evidence today that neighboring Iran is heading down the road to nuclear weapons. And yet in 2003 we all nodded sagely when Powell, the hero of Gulf War I, spoke, and I dusted off my body armor and packed my bags, eager to follow our troops into action in the sands of Mesopotamia.

               I had plenty of company in the pro-war camp in February and March 2003 during the inexorable run-up to the war, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t take me off the hook for enthusiastically backing a bloody conflict that turned out to be as unnecessary and costly as its critics predicted.

I don’t for a second want to imply that what I experienced was even a fraction of the trauma endured by our deployed warfighters, but my experiences still rattled and deeply unsettled my soul.

         The only salve to my conscience is that I always put my own ass as far out on the line as the GIs who fought and died in this God-forsaken place. After our vehicle got shot up outside Mosul in northern Iraq in 2004, I was convinced I was going to die there. On some trips I would come home and sit on my porch overlooking the Hudson River, staring in a kind of dark trance, drool leaking from the edge of my mouth, thinking about all the death and destruction we were seeing.

               Two images haunt me to this day; both involve pickup trucks. The bed of one Toyota truck outside Baghdad in 2005 held the torn-up body of a woman killed because she wanted to vote. The bed of another pickup outside Fallujah in 2004 held a pile of dead insurgents piled one on top of the other like they were bloody lumber headed to the mill.

               During the war’s darkest days before the surge, between 2004 and 2007, we were losing two, three, or four GIs every single day. The line from the Sting song, “every step you take . . . ” played in my brain every time we went out on foot patrol, because every step contained the possibility that the ground would explode in our faces.

               All those images crowded my mind this past Saturday as our C-130 military transport aircraft landed at Camp Adder, our last Iraqi base. I was there at the beginning of the conflict. This was my eleventh and final trip into Iraq.

               At the height of the war, this sprawling base in southern Iraq held 12,000 of our troops and airmen. It is a vast, dusty place, far larger than, say, JFK or LAX. Now it was almost deserted, save for the visiting brass and journalists gathered to mark the occasion of the withdrawal of the last US military unit in Iraq, 480 officers and enlisted personnel from the Third Brigade of the First Cavalry.

               After speeches and interviews, the brass left on the aircraft, and I was privileged to be among five reporters given the high honor of making the four-hour drive out of Iraq and into neighboring Kuwait. And so the long war that claimed the lives of 4,487 GIs, spread so much pain and suffering, and cost a trillion US taxpayer dollars, ended not in victory, but with a profound sense of relief. It was over, and I survived.

               Some of the friendships made with members of our fighting forces will endure forever. Having seen so much tumult and death together, we are friends for life. My heart aches for those who fell or were wounded or otherwise scarred by the grim experience. But the next time the president calls, they and I will be there again, however heavy it weighs on our hearts and minds.

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD, 1990–2017

My final combat assignment was Afghanistan in 2012, where General John F. Campbell was by then the four-star commander of all our forces. As I arrived at the US Embassy for an interview with our brave and highly skilled ambassador Ryan Crocker, the compound came under Taliban mortar attack. The fortified building was immediately locked down, and to my dismay, I was trapped inside as the action raged outside.

Refused my urgent requests to be allowed to leave, I was comforted by the fact my brother, Craig, was outside the compound with a second camera crew. I knew that because the embassy had the TV on a live, local news broadcast reporting the action, and there was Craig doing his thing.

As the attack in Kabul and around the nation fizzled with minimal casualties, I had a life-affirming moment during a live broadcast of my own show the next morning. Akbar set up a phone interview with the spokesman for the Taliban, and I asked him, “How does it feel to get your ass kicked? All those dead Taliban and no US casualties?”

My most vivid recollection of that eleventh and final assignment in Afghanistan was a lot less macho. I was accompanying our forces on a pre-dawn helicopter raid on a suspected Taliban compound. The choppers landed in a tilled field about a quarter mile from the compound, and the troopers charged ahead. By then a limping gimp, I was humiliated when the sergeant in charge had to come back to ask me to hurry it up, because I was falling too far behind.

I twice tried to get back to war reporting in 2014, after ISIS invaded Syria and Iraq. But after initially being approved, the trips got canceled. The first time was when ISIS, the scourge that replaced al Qaeda, captured Iraq’s Mosul Dam. Fox canceled that trip because it said there was no money in the budget.

As for the second cancellation, during the siege of the Syrian city of Kobani by ISIS, I was told it was the unavailability of appropriate insurance. By then James Foley and several other journalists had been beheaded by ISIS and all the networks were becoming reasonably very concerned about reporters’ getting caught, tortured, and killed.

To stay busy during that long dry spell, I did mostly Hollywood true-life post mortems like Elvis at 80, The Sad Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, and The Mysterious Death of Joan Rivers. On the tenth anniversary of Scott Peterson’s being sentenced to death for the murder of his eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child, I did a special one-hour report on the surprisingly privileged life Scott was enjoying on death row in San Quentin prison.

There was also Hollywood. Many reporters have done cameos in films and television series over the years. I have done more than most. Most proudly, I appeared as myself in the finale of Seinfeld, directed personally by mad genius Larry David, and in the last season of The Sopranos, where I heaped a faux investigative reporter’s scorn on James Gandolfini’s fabulous Tony Soprano. Speaking of great mobsters, I joined Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Sylvester Stallone’s Cop Land, which was shot in and around my home in Bergen County, New Jersey, home to many NYPD officers. A couple of times, I related to Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe in Law and Order, and got literally knocked out by Jane Lynch’s wonderful Sue Sylvester in the finale of Glee.

Storm-tossed sharks ate me limb by limb in Ian Ziering’s Sharknado V, Silver Shamrock, in a gory bit reminiscent of the bridge scene in Monty Python’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail; remember, “It’s just a flesh wound,” the Black Knight says as he loses body parts. Creator and producer Greg Garcia put me in several episodes of his long-running hit comedy, My Name is Earl, starring funny, cool Jason Lee. I take an artiste’s pride in having guest-starred as Alfred the Nerd in the highest-rated episode ever of Baywatch, bulking up opposite perennially hunky David Hasselhoff. I appeared, again as myself, in the Jody Foster film Contact; the John Travolta-as-Bill Clinton mash-up movie Primary Colors; and with Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks in the 1990 bomb Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by the otherwise great Brian De Palma.

One of my movies, All About Steve, a widely panned road romp starring Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper, was honored with two Golden Raspberry Awards, given to films the critics feel are the year’s worst.

I hit the soaps back in 1991 with a smoldering performance in The Young and the Restless, which had a kissing scene. Speaking of passion, I was also murdered that year in the title role in the Perry Mason movie The Death of the Tattletale Romeo, starring Raymond Burr. Tattletale Romeo was a not-too-subtle play on what should have happened to me after I published my unfortunate tell-all autobiography earlier that year. The fun part of the film mystery was discovering which of the many infuriated women whom I “exposed” was the real perpetrator.

The assorted cameos keep my Screen Actors Guild card active, and while my acting resume is not exactly Hollywood Walk of Fame material, it has certainly been colorful. If only I could do Game of Thrones or Star Wars or maybe a remake of Up in Smoke, my acting career would be complete.

PRESIDENT TRUMP AND ME, 1976–2017

I have known him for decades, through various phases of life in the big city, including more than a dozen interviews, clubbing, and prominent attendance at pro fights at Madison Square Garden, and in Atlantic City. We met around 1976 when I was engaged to marry Francine LeFrak, the elegant daughter of another powerful real estate mogul, Sam LeFrak, a friendly rival of Donald’s father, Fred. Both magnates hailed from the borough of Queens and came up at roughly the same time. The families remain close. Francine’s billionaire brother, Richard, is one of President Trump’s close friends.

We were class flirts during high school, and, while always working hard, were also fixtures on the New York scene. He kept zig-zagging to success, accumulating power and money, while I went from local reporter to network correspondent to talk show host and back again.

Beginning around 2000, we often discussed on camera and off the possibility of Trump’s running for president. He brought up the topic so often I finally lost patience with the question. When he asked Sean Hannity and me after the Celebrity Apprentice finale in February 2015, whether he should “go for it?” I told him, essentially, put up or shut up. Still, I was shocked when he did, more for the platform he choose than the decision to do it. I thought he would run as a pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-business, independent, Reform Party, fiscally pragmatic, social liberal, not unlike Hillary Clinton. Instead, I watched along with the rest of the world as he evolved from the flamboyant billionaire showman I knew, into a wildly unconventional, deeply conservative Republican candidate. I hold out hope that he will remember his core New York values on issues like the social safety net, choice, and health care, although his ideological transformation seems deep and permanent.

By steering hard right, he won the election, but not the affection of most women. My wife and her friends hate him. The scope of their alientation became apparent on the day after his January 2017 inauguration, when hundreds of thousands marched on Washington and in scores of other cities, here and abroad. The biggest day of protest in American history was specifically motivated by the fear that President Trump will stack the Supreme Court with pro-life justices, who will abolish a woman’s right to choose. Their fears are exacerbated by the president’s late-in-life conversion to the anti-abortion side of our divided society. He managed, by the day after his presidency began, to frighten, alienate, and motivate an entire gender.

The college-educated, more female and minority half of the country professes disgust and alarm that a chauvinist is our president. Yet, among the whiter, more male, less-educated half, he is beloved. Despite the hubris and chaos of his early presidency, many of his supporters are healthy traditionalists, old-fashioned, and politically incorrect. I am none of those things, yet I cling to the promise that Trump has it in him to be a great, or at least a good, president. As I will shortly argue in closing this book, I believe he is a good man, and I lament that saying that infuriates the Hillary Clinton/Erica Rivera half of the American electorate.

Whatever your feelings about the man, there is no denying that his election has jolted awake the economy. He is a cheerleader for capitalism and so far, it is paying off for everyone with a 401-k.

SEVENTY IS THE NEW FIFTY, JULY 2013

Aside from the physical battering of my life rigorously lived, now threescore and fourteen years, there has undoubtedly been an emotional toll. I have a form of post-traumatic stress, the most dramatic symptom of which is sitting more or less comatose for long stretches, immobile. As I mentioned, there were times after particularly grueling combat assignments, the ten or so during the really bad pre-Surge, Iraq War years, 2004–2008, when I would come home, sit on my porch, and simply stare.

After years devoted to staying fit, plus the blessings of good genes from long-lived ancestors, veneers on my teeth, the knee replacement and medicines, sprays and ointments focusing on but not limited to hair loss, high blood pressure, cholesterol, and wrinkles, I am holding my own. My workout regimen is not rigorous, but it is regular and frequent. I love old-fashioned newspapers, but refrain from reading them until I’m on the stationary bike. It is a reward that makes the pedaling easier. Then I do some medium weights and lots of abs. I do it four or five times a week, unless I am on assignment, when I just do the best I can in the hotel room.

When I’m in New York, I routinely take my real bicycle everywhere. From the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Fox News in midtown is twenty minutes tops, usually through Central Park, which is mostly closed to vehicles other than pedaled or horse-driven. During daytime traffic, on the always-jammed streets and avenues, a cab, Lyft, or Uber could take twice that long. The only impediment is weather; I do not ride in the rain, snow, or when it is below forty degrees. Biking is risky enough; there is a near-death experience almost every time out, and it may eventually kill me.

Despite the risk, the alternative to staying fit is too grim to bear. Dying slowly is bad enough. Do not go gentle; go kicking and screaming. Plus, I enjoy working out. Being physical sometimes leads to drunken self-confidence, as on the late night I sent a nude selfie out to the world to mark my seventieth birthday. As I said at the time, “70 is the new 50.”

It became a big deal, going viral and hitting every entertainment news show. It later topped Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “2013’s Most Mind-Blowing Selfies.” Happily, nobody got hurt and I didn’t get fired. Roger was snide but not riled whenever it came up. Erica de-escalated the crisis by joking, “This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when I fall asleep first. Thank God we have towels in the bathroom. (One was placed strategically.) But I’m proud my husband looks so hot.”

“70 is the new 50.”July 2013.

I later tweeted, “Note to self: no tweeting after 1 AM.” Having been initially critical of my impetuosity, several friends and business advisers later told me that the buffed nude shot was great promotion, especially for the Millennial viewers who do not usually watch cable news, certainly not Fox, and instead caught the septuagenarian strongman on the internet.

The only negative selfie feedback was the cancellation by Duquesne University of a July 2013 speech and panel discussion I was going to lead to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of JFK. As the first reporter in the United States to broadcast the Zapruder home movie of one of history’s most significant murders, I had an undeniable connection to the story. That did not matter in the end. In announcing the cancellation of my appearance, the college called my selfie “inappropriate and not in line with the school’s values as a Catholic University.”

I launched a Twitter storm in response:

         Duquesne’s cancellation of my JFK panel appearance is pretentious censorship. Do students agree with administration? Am I banned for life? Are all prospective speakers similarly scrutinized, or is my sin receiving special attention? Does the selfie outweigh my Peabody, Emmys, RFKs, and other professional achievements on Duquesne’s scale of morality? Are the students of Duquesne so sensitive and protected that they will be unable to concentrate on the topic being discussed because they cannot un-see the image?

Most of the internet agreed, criticizing the school’s rigid policies regarding social media etiquette. Columbia University professor Marc Lamont Hill tweeted, “They did the same to me last year.”

I posted another nude selfie a year later, but the picture was neither as salacious nor as widely disseminated. By then, around the time of my ominous and cautionary meeting with Roger about getting old, my tight bod began deteriorating. Running my hands over wrinkling alligator skin and atrophying muscles, I see an old man in the making, in slow motion. The camera may not blink or lie, but makeup and good lighting help create an illusion that I am more or less the same swashbuckler you grew up with. No longer cute like during the rock ‘n’ roll newsman days, I cling to being marginally appealing in a reminiscent way, still recognizable, at least to women over forty. Looks are only skin deep, but most days it feels like an old man lives inside.

Sitting on a bar stool, cigar-smoking and boozy, I maintain the illusion of toughness, relatively big shoulders and biceps; but that illusion only lasts as long as you don’t ask me to take it outside. Too gimpy now for real street fights, I would limp into the alley as my opponent laughed. Adjusting to this new reality, I am in the late stages of making the television transition from roving bare-knuckled reporter to wise/faded/Ancient Mariner/Veteran Correspondent/Stoner Uncle.

As I mentioned in the prologue, my operating philosophy is pragmatic idealism, the need to deal realistically with the moral imperative to be good, do well, and be happy. Essentially it is “love the dream,” but always remember that dreams do not put food on the table or pay college tuitions, charitable contributions, or make good on your wife’s or kids’ shopping and doctor bills.

FIGHTING FATHER TIME, 2014–2017

My hair color is probably fading brown over spreading white, but I cannot say for sure because it has been color-corrected ever since Roger Ailes went on a rant to our mutual old friend Woody Frazier, then Fox News coordinating producer. Woody has been around so long, he was my producer at Good Morning America in the mid-1970s. In the early 1990s he was my older son Gabriel’s Little League coach in Brentwood, California.

One morning out of the blue, Woody asked why I was letting my hair go gray. “No wonder the younger demo [ratings demographic] sucks,” etc. Since Bill Shine, then Roger’s executive sidekick, asked me the same question that same morning, I knew it was Roger doing the asking and reached immediately for the Just for Men. When I failed to get the color right, at times looking cartoonish-dark brown or shoeshine black, I hooked up with Kirsten, a clever stylist at Truman’s Hair Salon for Men on Madison Avenue, just happy I had hair left to color.

It may not have much to do with “fighting Father Time,” but my generation was the first to embrace recreational drug use as a lifestyle. I smoked my first joint as a junior at the University of Arizona in 1964. The only semi-gringo playing in the intensely competitive Tucson intramural soccer league, composed mostly of Mexican and other Latin American university students and workers, I was introduced to Reefer Madness and have probably averaged a modest joint a week since. My pro-pot position has been consistent for the half-century since college. In the 1970s I was on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

With some notable exceptions (Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump), virtually everybody I have ever known has at least tried pot. If you are reading this, the odds are that you have tried marijuana, which is why surveys consistently show that a majority of Americans, across a broad ideological spectrum, favors medical marijuana, broad decriminalization, or even total legalization, as in Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, California, and a half dozen other states and counting.

Several stubborn holdouts, like Alabama, still treat pot possession as a felony, which is dumb. One of my deep fears is that in appealing to his right-wing base, President Trump will become a throwback to the bad old days of Prohibition. His pick of old-line, conservative, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general is worrisome in this regard, although with Russiagate, a revolt by so-called Sanctuary Cities, and a fight over the border wall on his hands, the new AG may not have the energy to go after potheads.

As grass spreads, it needs personal regulation. As with booze, the rule is never to get high when you are trying to do anything except making love or chilling out. I agree with former president Obama that pot is less destructive than alcohol, but when you get high on your supply before you have fulfilled your duties as a responsible student, teacher, or parent, you are destined to be a lethargic dope-smoking dope. People who start smoking as young teenagers, and then try to go to school or work stoned, are the generation that makes up the slacker class of underachievers.

Pot isn’t the only drug of choice among my age group. Baby Boomers now use an array of pharmaceutical weapons in the losing war against Father Time: Rogaine, Propecia, statins, Lyrica, medical marijuana, chin lifts, liposuction, eyebrow lifts, and other life-enhancing, penis-enlarging, artery-expanding, mental-health-extending therapies that have changed the social pecking order to an extent that is not yet fully appreciated.

FIRST (SENIOR) CITIZEN TRUMP, JUNE 2015 TO NOVEMBER 2016

Sexual capacity and a firm body are just two measures of vivacity. Internal health is still the ultimate arbiter. Seventy may be the new fifty, but a seventy-year-old neck still aches. Billy Crystal’s classic SNL character Fernando says, “It is better to look good than feel good,” and I do look better than I feel. Which brings me back to President Trump, and the extraordinary stamina he displayed during the grueling campaign.

A large man at six-foot-three inches tall and weighing anywhere from 230 to 250 pounds, he refuses to show any signs of wear and tear over the year and a half of nonstop campaigning, and now a year as the nation’s chief executive. Despite a diet that was often composed of fast food, and a less-than-stressful exercise regimen that consists primarily of playing golf at Mar-a-Lago (sixteen times in the first hundred days) or at another of his fabulous resorts, he physically dominated the long campaign, behaving like a prime-of-life Energizer Bunny. At every stop along the way, he bounded onto the stage, enthusiastically greeting his swelling crowds of devoted followers, throwing kisses, waving his arms in triumph, and pumping his fists.

Then already seventy, fully five years past the traditional, sanctioned retirement age, Trump was more vibrant and energetic than his “low-energy” rivals for the nomination. In a funky appearance on The Dr. Oz Show two months before the election, he was hailed as “the healthiest person ever to run for president” by his colorful personal physician, Dr. Bornstein. When I asked the president in a conversation on board Air Force One in October 2017 to what he credited his extraordinary stamina, he said it was his parents and their “good genes.”

Whatever his secret, there is no doubt Trump ran circles around Hillary Clinton, out-campaigning her every step of the way. When she faltered, wilting in the heat at the World Trade Center memorial service on September 11, 2016, stumbling as she entered her limousine, Trump pounced, ridiculing her frailty and saying bluntly that she lacked the stamina and energy to be president. She later disclosed that she had been secretly diagnosed as suffering from pneumonia. It was a plausible explanation, but that she kept it from the public just added fuel to the notion that she was a sneaky secret-keeper.

Love him or hate him, First Senior Citizen Trump on the campaign trail displayed amazing physical prowess. It could be a function of the fact that, unlike me, smoke-free President Trump never drank, either, reserving his body for his crusade to accumulate enormous wealth and then capture the White House.

CELEBRITY APPRENTICE, FEBRUARY 2015

In the months before the official beginning of the 2016 presidential campaign, I was shocked that Roger allowed me to do Celebrity Apprentice, my first reality show. In retrospect, my loving ex-boss, who was not yet laid low by scandal, probably wanted to give his aging, unpredictable, still explosive and ideologically suspect fading star reporter something to do as far away from Fox News as possible. I have a way of sometimes offending the conservative sensibilities of our audience, as I did, for example, asserting confidently during the campaign that there was zero chance Hillary Clinton was going to be indicted for the phony-baloney email controversy.

Celebrity Apprentice turned out to be a blast. I did well and spent quality time with soon-to-be president Trump and his family, whom I hold in high regard. I have spent time before and since with his older children, who were deeply involved in the show. Their dad and mother, businesswoman Ivana Marie Trump, did a great job raising them. As the campaign made clear, daughter Ivanka is enormously poised and impressive, and could well be our first female president. I lament the fact that hatred for her father has rebounded so negatively on Ivanka and her businesses, which should have nothing to do with politics. Her brothers, Eric and Donald Jr., are also solid citizens, and have theoretically taken full control of his far-flung business empire.

Until his father’s run for the White House, Don Jr. and I shared the added connection of being dads with daughters in the same school. I ran into his wife, Vanessa, in the school elevator and told her a couple of months before the election that her father-in-law still had a shot. Stately, in a tall, blonde, stylish way, she joked, “He’d better, after all this work.” Thirty-four-year-old Eric is nothing like the doofus portrayed on Saturday Night Live. A tall, good-looking, thoughtful young man, he and his wife, Lara, raised a ton of money, north of $15 million, for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, an effort I was delighted to support.

On Celebrity Apprentice, the Trump kids were tough judges, but they gave me every benefit of the doubt. My journalism background and legal chops also helped immeasurably in outmaneuvering rivals like Sharknado star Ian Ziering, rocker Kevin Jonas, and helicopter-pilot-to-the-stars, Falcon Crest’s Lorenzo Lamas, who all conspired to get me fired. Despite his machinations with the other two plotters, I had a soft spot for Lorenzo. His dad, Fernando Lamas, was my dad Cruz Rivera’s favorite actor. Pop loved the way Fernando represented the ideal Latin man—suave, sharp, and sexy.

SHE’S HIRED, FEBRUARY 2015

My stint on his Celebrity Apprentice required six weeks of taping, eight months of waiting for NBC to schedule the series, and a month and a half of highly rated, nail-biting, two-hour taped broadcasts, followed by a two-show live finale in February 2015. Beginning with an eclectic collection of sixteen strong personalities, the show went through incidents of backstabbing, phone looting, clothes shedding, shouting, and buckets of crying, finger-pointing drama.

The idea is that the two teams are assigned business-related tasks that are taped one day, and presented to boss Donald in the boardroom the next day.

One task was fairly typical, to compose and present a jingle for Budweiser’s new wine coolers. My “Team Vortex” triumphed even as rival “Team Infinity” collapsed, and we easily won the competition, which featured our rapping to my memorable catchphrase for the wine-cooler commercial Nice over Ice.

To set up the final showdown between longtime television host and producer Leeza Gibbons and me, Trump fired everybody except Vivica A. Fox, the feisty and impressively talented actress. At that point, the lovely star of Empire and Independence Day graciously conceded that she could not match either Leeza’s skills as a producer or mine as a fundraiser. It was a humbling moment for both Leeza and me, and we both love Vivica for bowing out with such grace.

The task for the finale began when Leeza and I were flown down to Universal Orlando Resort onboard one of the private jets in Donald Trump’s aerial armada. Our task was to produce and shoot a new commercial for the theme park. At the same time, we were told there would be a finale fundraising gala for which we would be responsible not only to raise as much money as possible, but also to provide entertainment for the event.

The show began with the introduction of the teams brought together to help Leeza and me complete the complex task. It was like a class reunion. Her “Team Leeza” was buttressed by previously “fired” celebrities Brandi Glanville, the fiery and underrated Housewife of Beverly Hills; baseball great and man of deep integrity and soul Johnny Damon; and my arch-nemesis, former boy-band guitarist Kevin Jonas.

My squad consisted of Vivica and the two actors who had unsuccessfully conspired with Kevin to get me fired earlier on, Lorenzo Lamas, who starred in the soap operas Falcon Crest and The Bold and the Beautiful, and Ian Ziering of Sharknado and Chippendale’s fame, whom I really did not like at the time. I have subsequently changed my mind, and now admire Ian’s work ethic and resolve. When he was conspiring with Lorenzo and Kevin Jonas to sabotage me, I called them out in the boardroom in a dramatic confrontation. Faced with firing either Ian, Kevin, or me, Trump gave the young rocker the heave-ho. President Trump later told me how NBC executives lobbied him to fire me instead of Kevin because he was a bigger draw for the younger demo coveted by television advertisers. The boss declined because, as he said, “It was the right thing to do.”

In the final task, after Universal executives briefed both teams about the parameters of the commercial they were looking for, we set out to plan. As presented on the program, Leeza’s team had a rocky start when Brandi and Johnny wandered off to have hot dogs and beer, as Leeza and Kevin strove to get the commercial scripted and cast.

Distracted by the need to raise even more money than the almost $600,000 I had already brought in, I reached the day of the commercial shoot with many loose ends still unresolved, as usual. I was the front man for our spot, which emphasized the adventurous aspects of Universal and the need for kids to have courage to experience it fully. I decided to focus on the new Harry Potter theme park, dressing as a caped wizard, wand and all.

When the time to shoot the spot came, we discovered that no one had taken responsibility to get our child actors gathered where we needed them, when we needed them. The episode ended with me charging off to find our crew, even as I muttered that from this point on I was taking full control of our production. As we faded to black and teased the next week’s huge live finale, the odds seemed to favor my rival, Leeza, who despite her crew’s partial desertion announced that she had landed Olivia Newton John to perform at the finale’s big gala.

At that point, I had secured neither a performer nor enough donations to secure a victory. It was a nerve-wracking week, struggling to pull off a long-shot, come-from-behind win. Anyway, I tried mightily but fell short in fundraising because my generous donors were by that point tapped out. I did put on a great show, though, landing live performances at the celebrity-studded gala from Jose Feliciano and Tony Orlando, both friends of more than forty years.

The challenging competition culminated in a rousing, highly rated live finale, in which I lost to the formidable talk-show host and philanthropist Leeza Gibbons. When Trump declared Leeza his latest Apprentice, despite the fact that I raised more money, most of the cast members reacted favorably.

Leeza was much more popular than I during the taping. She was a soothing presence who kept her head below the line of fire. I was more sharp elbows and bare knuckles, earning the loyalty of just six of the sixteen contestants, including Kate “Plus 8” Gosselin. I have a soft spot for Kate because of all she was forced to cope with in her life before television, and was protective of her during the competition. Most responsible adults would be respectful of any woman who could successfully nurture that many kids, including surprise sextuplets, with such a lame husband.

After another task, which was to sell wedding dresses, Kate and I dressed as a newly wedded couple. She wore one of our dresses. I was in black tie and tails. In the boardroom scene that followed, Kate told the world that her ambition was to “be Geraldo’s next ex-wife,” a funny line that my straight-shooting, plain-talking, gorgeous wife, Erica, did not particularly appreciate.

What I appreciated beyond Erica’s unvarnished and loving support was her donating $25,000 of her own money to my cause. My Fox News crowd also came through impressively. Because the show rules say no checks, and given the short notice that a particular task was a fundraiser, nobody had the chance to get cashier’s checks.

Sean Hannity, who really has become one of my best friends, showed up with $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He still talks about how I planted a big kiss on his cheek during the network TV broadcast. In October 2017, Sean donated another $25,000 to the charity I designated for Puerto Rico’s hurricane relief. He really has a heart of gold. Another generous conservative not given credit for his philanthropy (he could give away his fortune and liberals would say it was ill-gained anyway), Bill O’Reilly came through during Celebrity Apprentice with $15,000. Morning show cohosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, both stand-up guys and terrific pals, came by with $5,000 each. Joseph Abboud, the famed suit maker, just happened to be walking by. He emptied his pockets, donating the $800 he had on him. Supermarket billionaire businessman and perennial mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis and his wife, Margo, brought more than $20,000 cash. They are among New York’s most generous philanthropists, and I really like them.

Best of all was party-boy billionaire Stewart Rahr, better known as Stewie Rah Rah, who actually has an office in Trump Tower. In one of my earlier fundraising drives, Stewie had donated $50,000 through my radio show to help rebuild the Rockaways on Long Island after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. For Celebrity Apprentice, Stewie gave me another huge donation, a whopping grand total of $150,000. This man is a treasure and so much fun to be around. Short and stylish, a caricature of a Jewish entrepreneurial perpetual-motion machine, he made hundreds of millions when he sold his family’s generic drug business. Now he’s party central from the Hamptons to St. Tropez. When he and the other high rollers gave me all that money, Trump complained that my fundraising consisted of taking money from all our mutual friends.

At the announcement that Leeza had won the competition, my daughter Sol, sitting with Erica in the studio audience, began sobbing. She was bereft. Trump did something then that made him a friend for life. He was compassionate and grandfatherly to my then-ten-year-old, comforting her and even allowing her to sit in his big red chair to see what it felt like to be boss.

Also at the Leeza announcement, what was noteworthy to me was that Trump did not say that I was “fired,” his signature line. Instead, on the last Celebrity Apprentice of his life, he said that Leeza was “hired.” The distinction is important. He told me later that he informed network executives that despite their desire for him to “fire” me, he wanted to make it clear that Leeza and I were both winners.

After the dust settled and we were off the air, I confessed to the future president of the United States that I was relieved that he picked Leeza. Given the strong women on the show, and their majority preference for Leeza, I told him that he and I would have been reamed if he had picked me over her. “Those dames would have kicked our butts,” I whispered.

He agreed, giving me a knowing glance and saying quietly as he looked around, “You’re telling me.” He said it shaking his head as only a man who understands contemporary gender politics would shake his head. When Hillary Clinton later played the “woman card” against him, I was relieved that she did not have a Celebrity Apprentice arrow in her quiver.

Reacting to being fired on Celebrity Apprentice, February 2015.

When I lost Celebrity Apprentice, Donald Trump “was compassionate and grandfatherly to my then-ten-year-old, comforting her and even allowing her to sit in his Big Red Chair.” February 2015.

BIG MONEY FOR A GREAT CAUSE, MARCH 2015

Even though I lost in the end, doing Celebrity Apprentice was a terrific, positive experience. I outran and outlasted fifteen of the sixteen younger competitors and thus became the first Peabody Award winner to be a finalist on Celebrity Apprentice. That was almost as cool as when I was on the covers of both Newsweek and Playgirl magazines in the same year, an earlier (1988) distinction. I also renewed my friendship with the charismatic host, the man who would soon become our forty-fifth president.

The show brought me back to the prime-time mainstream television audience, which had followed the talk show but usually does not watch Fox News. Black and Latino young people seemed especially delighted to see me again after such a long absence, given their reaction on the street or in airports.

I also made a new friend in fellow cast member Sig Hansen, the star of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch. A chain-smoking, hard-drinking free spirit, Sig is my kind of guy. He is bold, brave, and exists on a diet of coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate.

After the competition, I repaid his efforts on my behalf during the show by traveling to Alaska to attend a benefit for his charity, the US Coast Guard Foundation. At a gala in Anchorage attended by Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft, since retired, and Senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich, Erica, Sol, and I were pleased to be able to present a $40,000 gift to the foundation in honor of Sig.

Putting aside the usual ebb-and-flow melodrama of reality television, I was responsible for one discordant note. It began when former NFL great Terrell Owens, one of the best receivers in the history of football, a six-time Pro Bowler and future Hall of Famer for the Dallas Cowboys, was fired when his Apprentice team failed to generate any meaningful money during one of the fundraising challenges.

During the taped post-task analysis, after Terrell was fired and had left Trump Tower, I said casually to no one in particular that since Terrell was famously broke at the time, he should never have appeared on a program that was basically a fundraiser for charity. Just the week before, my daughter had shown me a tape of Terrell on an episode of Dr. Phil in which mothers of his children were demanding unpaid support.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Kenya Moore, the devious star of Real Housewives of Atlanta, took it upon herself to snitch to Terrell, who later that night called me demanding to know how I could do something so unnecessary. I begged forgiveness and lobbied the NBC producers to keep the obnoxious sequence off the air, which to their credit they did. Terrell was right. It was low, and the telling of it embarrasses me.

By the way, speaking of low, this was the season the treacherous yet charming Real Housewife Kenya Moore got thrown off Apprentice for stealing Vivica A. Fox’s cell phone and posting bizarre, obnoxious tweets in sweet, religious Vivica’s name. I would pay top price for an MMA bout between Kenya and her idol Omarosa, who, after terrorizing several seasons of The Apprentice, similarly rode roughshod for a year in the White House as an aide to President Trump.

Reunited with the entire cast at the show’s live finale, Terrell could not have been nicer or more friendly and forgiving. I also lament that this fine fellow, indisputably one of the best NFL pass-catchers ever, has not yet made the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Hopefully, he’ll join the class of 2018.

That sad story aside, Apprentice had a positive impact for me professionally, regenerating some of my old-school cool and leading to roles in shows such as the Glee finale and Law and Order, not to mention Dancing with the Stars, another reality show adventure in 2016. All my on-camera Apprentice feuds ended amicably. In 2017, my best frenemy, Ian Ziering, called personally to encourage me to do the hilarious Sharknado movie.

Celebrity Apprentice helped me raise $725,000 for Life’s WORC, a charity founded in 1971 by parents of disabled children living in the squalor and filth of Willowbrook. Leeza raised just $464,000, but then won the $250,000 bonus from the show for a grand total of $714,000. Raising money is harder than earning it. I hate asking people for money even for a good cause, but these are great causes. Leeza’s money went to a center dealing with Alzheimer’s disease. Mine was used to open the Family Center for Autism, a service for stressed families dealing with autistic children in Nassau County outside of New York.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, FALL 2015

The funniest coincidence in my entire, modest show-business career came when I played myself in a Puerto Rican–themed version of the classic Christmas tale Miracle on 34th Street. The film was called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Miracle in Spanish Harlem. In limited theatrical release in 2013, it did better on video.

Since the lead actress was not in any of my scenes, what I did not realize until recently when I finally watched the entire film is that it costarred Kate del Castillo, a notorious Mexican-American actress. Her notoriety is not based on her celebrity. It is based on the fact that the biggest fan of her biggest hit show was a real-life Mexican drug lord, Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, otherwise known as El Chapo.

Three years after Miracle in Spanish Harlem, in spring 2016, I wrote and reported a Fox News special called Beauty and the Beast: When Kate Met Chapo. It documented how El Chapo, the savage head of the Sinaloa, Mexico, drug cartel, called by the DEA “the bin Laden of the drug trade,” was undone by his need to see Kate del Castillo, at the time Mexico’s hottest actress, in the flesh, in the jungle.

I was drawn to the story, even identifying with the drug dealer. Not with his cancerous business, obviously, but with the absurd peril in which he put himself and his empire, just to be with the woman of his searing dreams. Remember in the movie King Kong when the giant gorilla is lying dead on Fifth Avenue? As the crowd gathers in wonder, a bystander speaks glowingly of the pilots of the military aircraft that have just knocked Kong from his perch atop the Empire State Building, congratulating them for killing the lovesick monster. Overhearing the conversation, the man who captured Kong, the promoter Carl Denham, played most recently by Jack Black, shakes his head and utters the movie’s unforgettable line, saying it was not the pilots, “No, it was beauty killed the beast.”

In my Fox News special on the drug lord’s recapture, El Chapo is the beast. Kate del Castillo is the beauty. He was captured because of his burning need to see the sultry actress whose character Teresa Mendoza in the wildly popular Mexican prime-time soap opera La Reina del Sur (Queen of the South) became Chapo’s destructive obsession.

The fictional Teresa was a ruthless, though charismatic, drug dealer. El Chapo identified with her and he was crazy about Kate. My in-depth special report chronicled how Chapo and Kate became pen pals, exchanging highly suggestive text messages both while he was in prison before his second escape, and later when he was on the lam.

With Kate del Castillo, the woman of El Chapo’s searing dreams. May 2016.

So desperate was the world’s most-wanted fugitive to see the object of his fascination that he risked everything to meet her face-to-face in a jungle rendezvous. Kate brought Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn with her for the high-stakes meeting.

Penn ended up screwing her businesswise, but that is another story. Mexican and American authorities agree that El Chapo’s recapture was the direct result of the Beast’s need to see his Beauty.

With reporting from Beverly Hills and from Altiplano Prison in Mexico, my Fox News special chronicled the obsession; the rendezvous; the semi-sleazy role actor Sean Penn played both during and after the steamy jungle meeting; the role of the Mexican government; the extradition of Guzman to the United States; his obsession with then-candidate Donald Trump, whom he threatened to kill; and finally, what impact (not much) Chapo’s incarceration would have on the terrible drug scourge his Sinaloa cartel unleashed on the United States.

Before his recapture I was spry enough, barely, to climb down a dark, hundred-foot-long rickety ladder to gain access to the fugitive’s remarkable mile-long tunnel, which should be the envy of civil engineers everywhere. I joked at the time of the escape in July 2015 that he should be hired to finish Manhattan’s Second Avenue subway. It was approved in 1929 with a whopping budget of $86 million. Predicted to open between 1938 and 1941, the subway was finally inaugurated on New Year’s Day 2017, seventy-six years late and about $4 billion over budget.

At Kate’s request, before he was recaptured after four months on the run, the diminutive billionaire doper provided a tape to Sean Penn in lieu of the interview they never got around to doing in their October 2015 jungle rendezvous. In the tape Chapo deadpans that he is merely providing a service by distributing a desired product to a needy clientele and that if he did not, somebody else would. Then the lovestruck tough guy got caught in a shootout with Mexican Marines and extradited to the US, and now awaits trial in Brooklyn on several capital offenses.

THE NEW YORK TIMES LIES ABOUT ME (AGAIN), APRIL 2016

Roger had taken me off the bench to cover the rioting in Baltimore, which followed the death in police custody of a young man named Freddie Gray. Two days into the upheaval, the boss was unhappy with the network’s coverage and ordered Bill Shine to order me down. Frustrated with being ignored by the Fox News producers, I welcomed the assignment. We got down there in a hurry and produced some important reports, including dramatic encounters with community members and rioters.

My team continued to monitor the situation in Baltimore until the riots simmered down with the indictment of six cops for the death of Freddie Gray, and a massive $6.4 million civil settlement to his family, which to me smacked more of a blackmail payout than reasonable compensation. The West Baltimore neighborhood remains in ruins.

My brother Craig produced a report that proposed a partial solution to what ails the racially fractured, half-wrecked city. He profiled a team of architects encouraging a massive rebuilding of West Baltimore by transferring ownership of its tens of thousands of derelict buildings to the residents in exchange for “sweat equity,” their agreement to rehabilitate the ruined and abandoned structures with private and public help. If only the local and state politicians were interested in solving their problems rather than just complaining about them.

But for the rest of the year and beyond, the big news out of hapless Baltimore was the orgy of bloodshed in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Most of the victims of the escalation of violence were young, black men shot to death by other young, black men at a rate that on a per-capita basis made 2015 the deadliest ever in the city, with 344 homicides. Although the city is one-thirteenth the size of New York, more were killed that year in Baltimore than in the Big Apple.

There have been no marches protesting the bloodshed in Baltimore. Instead, during the 2016 election campaign for a new mayor to replace Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, I was somehow made the issue. The New York Times blamed (credited?) me for providing the pivotal moment for the winning candidate for the Democratic nomination, which is tantamount to being elected in that overwhelmingly Democratic town.

Here is my blog protesting the wretchedly false characterization:

         In a story appearing in the Thursday 28 April 2016 edition headlined Victor in Mayoral Primary Is Ready to “Get Baltimore Working,” reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes that the apparent winner in the hotly contested Democratic primary for mayor, State Senate Majority Leader Catherine E. Pugh, “stared down Geraldo Rivera, the Fox News anchor, and berated him on national television for ‘inciting people,’” during the devastating 2015 Baltimore riots.

               Ms. Stolberg concludes that it was the defining moment for Senator (now Baltimore mayor) Pugh’s successful primary campaign. It is a total fiction.

               As the videotape Fox News has provided the New York Times makes clear, Senator Pugh and I were united in trying to report honestly and professionally about the chaos in West Baltimore a year ago, following the tragic death in police custody of Freddie Gray. We spent hours together during the urban turmoil and violence, the senator making several appearances on camera.

               As the tape shows, Senator Pugh’s disquiet was directed at the trouble-makers who were contributing to the mayhem, not at this reporter. Indeed it was my interview with Senator Pugh that the demonstrators, the most vocal of whom was later arrested, were attempting to disrupt.

               In 2005 another Times reporter (Alessandra Stanley) wrote a similarly fictional account of my coverage of Hurricane Katrina. That discredited story alleged that I pushed rescue workers out of the way so that I would be seen on camera rescuing elderly victims of the storm.

               There is a pattern. New Orleans was a fabrication the newspaper was forced to correct. So is Baltimore. Because the NYT wants it to be true doesn’t make it true. Your hatred of Fox News and me clouds your judgment and distorts your reporting.

President Trump calls the New York Times “a failing newspaper,” while still craving its acceptance. His ongoing complaint, particularly after the paper ran a front-page, two-page spread on his alleged exploitation of women, is that the self-proclaimed “Newspaper of Record” consistently exaggerates his failings.

During the presidential campaign, stories abounded in outlets like the Times and the Washington Post about the Trump University class-action lawsuit settlement, his bankrupt casinos, and his alleged mistreatment of women, most of which he still dismisses as “fake news.” Yet nary any stories praised either Trump’s civic accomplishments or his admirable family’s accomplishments, except to criticize their potential for conflicts of interest. Still, it was a surprise the morning after my April 2015 confrontation with the bullies in the rubble-strewn, tear-gassed streets of West Baltimore to get a congratulatory telephone call from Trump, who tracked me down at a local radio station in that stricken town.

“I loved when you told that punk that he was making a fool of himself,” the reality host about to turn formidable presidential candidate told me. Then he railed against urban anarchy and violent activists like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street and the gangbangers who just want to wreck and plunder.

Demonstrations, protests, and unrest initiated by those anti-police groups were polarizing the nation, fracturing it again along racial lines. When I criticized best-selling hip-hop artists like the highly talented Kendrick Lamar for exacerbating tensions with constant anti-police images in his videos, he retaliated by devoting an entire song on his top-selling album DAMN. to criticizing me. When President Obama told the country in his farewell address ten days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 that race relations “have never been better,” I wondered to which nation he referred. Each alleged act of police violence, like Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore Police custody, generated a furious and counterproductive response on the streets. All of it seemed to help Donald Trump’s candidacy. Police unions and those sympathetic to law enforcement, and most of the white working class, rallied to him ever more vigorously as supporters of inner-city communities protested the divisive Republican candidate.

With typical moderation, President Obama tried to balance his response, condemning both cops who kill and cop killers, pleasing advocates of neither. Unseen or barely noticed was how street violence began ticking up in cities like Baltimore; Ferguson, Missouri; and Chicago as police began a subtle slowdown. In 2016 it was impossible not to notice that the Windy City had a bloody record 796 murders, more than New York and Los Angeles combined. I have neither doubt nor proof that the cop slowdown was intentional and perhaps even secretly coordinated among law enforcement agencies or constituent unions. “Blue flu” pulled cops back from the fray even as candidate Trump held boisterous rallies against rampant urban disorder in his often-inflammatory primary and general-election campaigns.

When he reached me at the radio station that day in Baltimore, he added that, before calling me, he had first called my boss, Roger Ailes, to praise my reporting in Baltimore. But mostly he wanted to praise the fact that I had not retreated during the confrontation on the street with the provocateur.

“You’re a champion,” he said, not for the last time. To great impact and mixed reviews, he draws harsh distinctions between champions and chokers.

CHAMPIONS, CHOKERS, CARICATURES, AND CONVENTIONAL THINKERS, 2015–2016

I thought Trump became a caricature to win the Republican nomination. You have to be a hard-right loco to win it. At least that was my conventional thinking. Trump, like any GOP presidential candidate, had to be a harshly conservative, hard-right-wing Attila the Hun to get nominated, and then a moderate-sounding Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush to get elected.

What the world and I did not expect was that, after securing the nomination, Trump never pivoted to the center. Instead, the harsh tone that won him the nomination later won him the White House. President Trump made a clear-eyed calculation that if he motivated both the frustrated and vaguely uneasy white working class, and the old, mostly but not exclusively southern, anti-civil rights, and yes, even semi-racist, whites who deeply resented political correctness, multiculturalism, undocumented immigration, and unmistakably, the eight-year tenure of our first black president—if he did all that, he had a shot.

Anyway, the person I thought I knew, my fantasy “real” Donald Trump, was visible when he spoke to the New York Republican Gala in April 2016, days before the Empire State’s primary election. This was Trump the builder, speaking at the event in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which he reminded everyone was once the crumbling, derelict Hotel Commodore until in 1978 he maneuvered to get control of it as a thirty-two-year-old novice developer from Queens.

A magnet for junkies, hookers, and derelicts, the hotel was redeveloped by him, saving the neighborhood and remaking East Forty-Second Street. He sold it twenty years later for a $143 million profit. He then went on to convert the West Side of Manhattan on the Hudson River waterfront from Fifty-Seventh Street to Seventy-Second Street. He overcame decades of neighborhood intransigence to remake a mangled rail yard, rusted tracks, and wrecked piers into a wonderful neighborhood, where Erica and I used to live.

After the city failed for a decade to get it done, in 1986 Trump made the Wollman Rink in Central Park an ice-skating asset for every kid in town, including mine. Twenty years later in 2016, he opened his terrific Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx, in an area that had been a garbage dump for decades as the city struggled to rehabilitate it.

As a mogul of uncertain reputation, he apparently made a habit of stiffing suppliers, some of whom I knew, which I duly reported beginning in 1991. But he also created jobs and made money from enterprise unlike any of his rivals for the nomination and certainly unlike Hillary Clinton. As candidate Trump brutally alleged during the campaign, she and husband Bill got rich, earning roughly a quarter-billion dollars, without ever having a real job in the private sector.

SUNDAY MORNING TRUMP, MAY 2016

Another small example of the president’s unfailing friendship came during the campaign on a Sunday morning in May 2016. Trump had just appeared for a remote taping of Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace from our studio on the twelfth floor of Fox News in New York. Chris, who would later receive deserved praise for his masterful moderating of the third and final presidential debate, was in the studio in Washington, DC.

I was downstairs in our first-floor Fox and Friends studio to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the killing of bin Laden, but first went upstairs to say hello to my controversial pal. He had not yet sealed the GOP nomination, but was getting close. When Trump finished taping, to prevent any competitive jealousy that I was stealing Chris’s guest and scooping him by putting Trump on my show live before Chris’s pre-taped show aired, I joked to Trump that I thought it was “Bring Your Friend to Work Day.” Rather than ask the presumptive Republican nominee to come downstairs with me, I told him I was going on Fox and Friends and would be delighted if he stopped by.

He did, to my surprise, taking a seat on what we call the “curvy couch,” for a long, live, newsworthy interview on the eve of a pivotal May 3 primary in Indiana. That friendly gesture is an example of why it is hard not to like him. He has always treated me with respect and affection. Of course, if he moves to deport innocent, undocumented immigrant youngsters or succeeds in banning Muslims or abortion, I will change my mind. But absent the implementation of some draconian policy, I am willing to give him the chance to surprise his critics and bring the country together. Indeed, there were some glimmers of hope. The compassionate way he handled the federal response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria was more like the president I hoped he would become.

To the extent that I can detect, Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body, although I certainly wish he had been quicker to condemn the KKK’s David Duke during the campaign and the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi rioters after he was elected. Before becoming president, green was his most important color. Other than driving ambition and an irrepressible ego, the president is a down-to-earth, all-around good guy, a player in his younger years to be sure, but not now. What kept me from supporting him was his toxic immigration policy. As I discovered researching two books on the subject, HisPanic in 2007 and The Great Progression in 2008, we cannot deport our way out of this problem. These immigrant families contain adults who are undocumented, but most are otherwise law-abiding and have been here for decades. Many of their children are US-born citizens. Make all the undocumented get documented by registering, getting background checks, paying a fine, learning English, and getting in line. Don’t muster a “deportation force” to round them up as if they are terrorists. They are the pizza deliverers, the babysitters, lawn mowers, poultry processors, and meatpackers. Some are computer whizzes and members of the military. They make America stronger, not weaker.

In that regard, I confess to being totally dismayed when Trump began spewing intemperate words against the federal judge hearing one of the class-action lawsuits pending against him, stemming from his now-defunct Trump University. In criticizing federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Trump went out of his way to label the Indiana-born jurist a “Mexican”— not a Mexican-American, but a Mexican. Can you imagine the chaos if judges were disqualified because they happened to be Irish or Jewish or African-American?

At the time of the controversy involving Judge Curiel, it seemed inevitable that “The Donald” was going down to defeat. This is what I wrote for the now-defunct Fox News Latino website in the days before the nominating conventions. In retrospect it reflects uninspired conventional wisdom.

“Trump’s obvious intemperance during this June 2016 controversy shrank the Republican Party, which needs to expand and be more inclusive. A Republican cannot win the presidency on white votes alone. There just are not enough to go around. He must moderate his rhetoric and reassess his apparently dim view of many in the Latino population and assure non-white, or non-Judeo-Christian Americans, that he does not consider us second class or some kind of enemy within. If he does not, then again, he knows that I could not vote for him. He may win anyway, but it is a long shot and he would take office in a nation divided.”

Shows how little I know. Trump’s long shot obviously paid off. The candidate ignited a movement grounded in white working-class men that uniquely captured the disquiet many Americans feel about our nation’s being destabilized by unregulated immigration. The reality is not nearly as daunting as the hype from xenophobic nativists, whose real fear is that the country will lose its white majority. But that is not to suggest that there are not real problems with our southern border.

EL CHAPO’S REVENGE, FEBRUARY 2016

As candidate Trump pointed out in campaign stops from the postindustrial Midwest to stricken New Hampshire, Mexican drug cartels are flooding our towns and cities, particularly in the Northeast, with heroin and its lethal synthetic cousin fentanyl in amounts and potency unseen previously. The Sinaloa drug cartel, formerly run by the aforementioned billionaire drug kingpin and now inmate “El Chapo” Guzman, is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, ranging from the kid next door to the doomed entertainer formerly known as Prince. According to Drug Enforcement officials, the number of US heroin addicts has jumped 135 percent since 2002, about when the Mexican cartels expanded out of the ghetto and began targeting the American Heartland. Heroin deaths in the same period skyrocketed 533 percent.

In the February 2016 week leading up to the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire, I filed a rare series of field reports investigating the impact of the drug scourge on folks in the Granite State. What I saw in New Hampshire was dire. This state of just 1.1 million mostly white, suburban, and rural people suffered four hundred overdose deaths in 2014 and another four hundred in 2015. Then 2016 and 2017 kept the pace with at least an O.D. death a day.

Reeling from that epidemic, authorities in New Hampshire and the Drug Enforcement Administration identified Chapo’s Sinaloa drug cartel as the principal supplier of the poison responsible for so much misery in such an unlikely place. El Chapo is in federal prison, as I said awaiting the first of his many trials, but while the head has been taken off the snake, nobody in law enforcement expects the cartel to slither away. In fact, now that they have synthesized heroin with a substance called fentanyl, their body count is just getting higher.

Each of the candidates from both parties picked up on the heroin/fentanyl-abuse issue, but Trump tied it best to border security, and made the biggest impact, easily winning the New Hampshire primary and accelerating his bizarre and historic journey to the White House.

LET’S DANCE, MARCH 2016

From the physical demands alone, Trump’s endurance during the campaign was a feat I could not have matched. I did not even get past the first elimination round on Dancing with the Stars in March 2016. By then my movements had lost fluidity, my legs were shot, my left knee creaky, having been replaced in 2009 with a titanium device that works well enough, the principal pain in the ass being at airports when the knee invariably sets off the metal detectors.

I no longer do my trademark strolling standups to camera because of the limp caused by the neuropathy in my right foot. Aside from swagger, the dead foot cost me a lost decade of senior tennis, skiing, and jogging. I have a perpetually sore back and wrists, ankles that crackle and pop, and a once-piercing stare that has become watery with age.

My main takeaway from Dancing with the Stars, Season 22 is that I probably should not have waited until I was a lame seventy-two-year-old to do the show. The physical challenges of the dance routines are rigorous, the training akin to the buildup to a boxing match. Actually, boxing has the advantage over dancing in that fighting is not as tough, at least not to me. A boxer for twenty-five years, getting punched in the face is nothing compared to the embarrassment of missing a dance step live in front of 12 or 13 million viewers, which I did routinely on DWTS.

My performance was lamentable, disastrous esthetically, but not lacking in good humor or charm. It was especially bad during the widely anticipated world-premiere event in March 2016. My partner, who deserved better, was Edyta Sliwinska. A glamorous, classically trained ballroom dancer who hails from Poland, Edyta was making her grand comeback to the program after an absence of five years.

Our dance that fateful premiere night was a Cha-Cha, a Latin number. Since dances on the show are actually thematic mini-musicals, ours needed a story. Returning to an old chestnut, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault, our idea was that Edyta was the long-sought treasure that had eluded me when I opened the Prohibition-era gangster’s vault in the basement of Chicago’s old Lexington Hotel in 1986. I blew the door open onstage, and she slinked out in a cloud of smoke to dance. DWTS, like Capone’s Vault, is live television. (Capone’s worldwide audience was far larger, approaching 40 million in those days before cable and Netflix.)

My Trump impression. In the backstage lot with Cheech Marin at Dancing with the Stars, March 2016.

Back in 1986, the Capone event was a gigantic embarrassment, but at least I did not have to dance. Here, dancing is the whole point. Aside from the theatrical aspects, the Cha-Cha demands considerable hip swiveling and rhythm, which I never had. Infirm, disabled, and lacking rhythm, I was a dance disaster.

Lack of rhythm aside, there was another reason I had turned down several earlier requests to appear on DWTS when I was more physically able: backstage romances were en vogue on the show in the early days. One professional dancer became serially engaged to several of her celebrity dance partners. Clean and sober in regard to fidelity, I no longer stray. I don’t have the track record to judge anybody who does, but I am over it. To ensure that everybody knew my DWTS partner and I were only in it for the dancing, Erica and I invited Edyta, husband Alec, and son Michael to dinner at our New York apartment the week ABC announced the cast and pairings.

With Edyta Sliwinska, my professional partner in Dancing with the Stars. She deserved better. January 2016.

Aside from checking it off my bucket list, another reason I wanted to do the show was to send the message to the big Boomer generation coming up behind me that they should get off the couch and shake their booty. Use it or lose it. Everybody our age has something that hurts. But move what you can, for as long as you can, since you will have plenty of time to be still after you die.

During rehearsals, the lame foot led to two body-slamming falls, but with the help of hidden braces on ankles, knees, and back, I got to the point where I felt I could make it through the routine without collapsing. My only beef was that the producers never communicated to the audience that I was an old man overcoming a physical impairment to compete. Instead, I came off as just an old man who could not dance. The bigger problem was that I choked during the live show. Adding to my physical clumsiness, during the Cha-Cha I zigged when I should have zagged and as a result earned for poor Edyta and myself the lowest score of the twelve couples competing.

When crotchety DWTS judge Len Goodman heaped scorn on my inability to point my toes, I laughed since with my ankles immobilized by tape, toe pointing was impossible. In a way, even worse was the post-dance interview with cohost Erin Andrews. The brave and glamorous sportscaster had just won a $55 million jury verdict against parent companies of the Nashville, Tennessee, Marriott hotel, an award she deserved, the hotel having failed utterly to protect her against a stalker who videotaped her naked through the peephole in her room door. To add to her tough slog, she later announced she was battling cervical cancer.

Perhaps because of the enormous attention her case had attracted, she seemed uncomfortable with me, as if she thought I was paparazzo covering her case. In fairness, I may be reading more into that than existed, but when I used an old show-business adage to explain my clunky performance, she did not get it. I said of my performance, “It is not how well the bear dances, but that the bear dances at all.” Her face was blank; then blinking as if snapping out of a mocking trance, she said she had no idea what I was talking about. My attempt at self-effacing humor dropped like a stone.

Anyway, it was ridiculous to think I could compete against the 2016 season’s crew, which featured some great, young athletes including Superbowl MVP Von Miller of the Denver Broncos, and Antonio Brown, the Pittsburgh Steelers All-Star wide receiver. The deaf heartthrob Nyle DiMarco, winner of America’s Top Model, performed impeccably, rousing the audience to cheers even as they wondered how he could keep the beat.

Wanja Morris, the charismatic heart of Boyz II Men, performed exuberantly with star dancer Lindsay Arnold, a gorgeous young blonde. Another budding star dancer who can also kick your eye out, UFC fighter Paige VanZant, was very impressive and a crowd favorite. Paige and Lindsay were both graceful and athletic.

Super-sweet Kim Fields, lately of Real Housewives of Atlanta, did a great job charming the crowd. So did the ABC Network hometown favorite Ginger Zee, who is the popular Good Morning America meteorologist. Ginger had a new baby, but she was trim, ferocious, and wowed the audience week after week.

The scrappy and wonderful Marla Maples, whom I have known since she was the second Mrs. Donald Trump, cartwheeled through the early weeks, easily handling with style the renewed and intense attention brought on by her ex’s electoral success. It was impressive to see her keep her poise and balance on and off the dance floor, her daughter Tiffany frequently by her side. The often-forgotten child among her supercharged siblings, Tiffany is also underrated, impressive in her own right, thanks in part to her wonderful mother.

Mischa Barton seemed to have a bad time on the show. The actress who surged to fame on The O.C. danced just marginally better than I did and did not seem to enjoy being there. We had a heart-to-heart about how at barely thirty years old she had been aged out of her ingénue phase by the casting directors and was only being offered mother roles. She had a series of well-chronicled controversies later.

Meanwhile, Full House and Fuller House star Jodie Sweetin did a great job impressing both the audience and the judges. Like Mischa, Jodie had a difficult time dealing with life after youthful stardom, and both Mischa and Jodie saw the dance show as a way back to show-business success or at least heightened visibility. To tell you the truth, that is probably why I did it, even though I was lame and getting lamer.

Heisman Trophy winner and former pro quarterback Doug Flutie was the only other contestant over fifty, and he is almost twenty years younger than I am. Best remembered for throwing the monumental sixty-five-yard “Hail Mary” pass in the rain to bring his Boston College Eagles to victory in the 1984 Orange Bowl over a heavily favored Miami team, he is one of the nicest guys you would ever want to hang out with. I was reminded that among the host of NFL and CFL teams he played for professionally were the New Jersey Generals of the now defunct USFL, a team owned by Donald Trump, who paid $8 million for it before the league went belly-up after failing to merge with the NFL. The Generals were terrific but the league was awful.

Flutie tried hard on DWTS, practicing each evening with his daughter Alexa, a professional dancer and San Diego Chargers cheerleader. Calm and sincere, he is a real family man and deservedly lasted on the show far longer than I did. Comparing Doug and the rest of DWTS cast to my colleagues on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice, I’d say this was a much nicer bunch. They were loving and supportive instead of backstabbing and conspiratorial.

The pleasant vibe did not help my performance. After forgetting key steps during the first routine, I similarly botched an even more flamboyant second routine the next Monday night. That sketch began prophetically with President Donald Trump (me) being interrupted in the Oval Office on a phone call with Vladimir Putin by my drop-dead-gorgeous first lady Melania, played of course by Edyta, another equally gorgeous European import.

For the routine, two other sexy dancers in the troupe rip off my conservative presidential suit, and Edyta and I break out in dance, doing a hot salsa to “Mi Amigo,” an upbeat classic by the late, great Tito Puente, who was mi amigo in real life. The idea was to stress the comic irony of Donald, the alleged anti-Latino who is hell-bent on building a great wall on our southern border after calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, dancing the Latin Night Salsa. We also aimed to ride the wave of attention that the candidates’ wives were receiving at the time, March 2016, in the tacky, “Whose Wife Is Hotter” debate mudslinging between Trump and Senator Ted Cruz.

To make a long story short, my dance did not suck as badly as it did on premiere night but was still pretty bad. The score was the same as the first night, a meager 13 out of 30, but it did not matter since, unbeknownst to us, we had already been voted off. They should give scores based on a handicap, like in golf. I joked when Edyta and I were eliminated that if we had not been, “I would have demanded a recount.”

My supporters in the studio audience included Erica, all five of my children, and Cheech and his beautiful Russian-born wife and brilliant concert pianist, Natasha. Everyone took the defeat fairly well, except then-ten-year-old Sol Liliana, who again, just like when I lost Apprentice the year before, started sobbing inconsolably. She loves her daddy and hates to see him hurt.

Since the only star she wanted to meet was Von Miller, I brought the strapping six-foot-three-inch, 250-pound Super Bowl MVP linebacker over to give her a hug, which went far to relieve her disappointment. He and the others, including the production team, were super-considerate, nice people.

At Dancing with the Stars with all five kids and Gabriel’s wife, Deb. March 2016.

Nyle won the DWTS competition. Not only did he dance superbly, he did it without the benefit of being able to hear the music. It was an amazing and deeply impressive achievement. The runner-up was Paige VanZant, who I thought was equally impressive, going from using her feet to kick people in the face as an ultimate fighter to elegant, sensual dancing. She could easily have been the winner of the show’s coveted “Mirror Ball Trophy.”

Looking back on the experience, I only regret not doing more to keep Edyta on the show’s center stage. That aside, having the far-flung kids all in one spot for those several days was wonderful. The girls giggled and shared “GLAMSQUAD On-Demand Beauty” makeup artists (the ones who come to your apartment or hotel room rather than you going to their salon) and tried on different dresses with Erica; the big boys hung with their daddy and I got to play with Desmond, aka Desi, my second grandson. The girls got to see me on a show their girlfriends actually watch. Trump got a kick out of my impression of him. Jon Peters and I hung out, endlessly talking about the good old days and the challenges of getting creaky; I lost five pounds and had a lot of laughs. All things considered, the whole DWTS experience was a life-affirming blast.