Donald Trump's decades-long obsession with being president
It's been going on since the '80s
In October 1980, in his first major interview on network TV, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment discussing the tough decisions he had made as a builder. (Rona Barrett Looks at Today's Super Rich would air the following year.) Then the 34-year-old abruptly turned the casual interview into something more controversial: a lecture on the lack of leadership in the U.S.
Gas prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been kidnapped from the U.S. Embassy in Iran were being held hostage while, according to Trump, "we just sit back and take everybody's abuse.... I just don't feel the country is going forward in the proper direction."
Barrett was taken aback by Trump's shift to politics. "Would you like to be president?" she asked.
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No, he said. Politics was a "mean life.... Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today because of television." Trump said he knew people who would be "excellent" presidents because they were "extraordinarily brilliant...very, very confident." None of them would seek the office, because of the media scrutiny, which he called a tragedy. "One man could turn this country around. The one proper president could turn this country around," he said.
Trump would spend decades waiting for him.
Since his rise as a businessman in the 1980s, Trump has shown few constants when it comes to politics, with one exception: He has tried to align himself with winners, people who could raise his profile and further his business goals. He's teetered back and forth between political parties and offered conflicting clues about his core beliefs, from health care to abortion rights. Trump has helped candidates on opposite ends of the political spectrum with money and endorsements, while often expressing concern that the country was losing its spirit and its stature.
Seven years after Trump's Rona Barrett interview, in the spring of 1987, Michael Dunbar, a furniture maker in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, tried to convince Trump that he was the man who could turn things around. The Republican Party activist had become fascinated by news reports about Trump's business acumen and personality. He sent out mailers encouraging Republicans to "draft Trump." Friends told him the idea was laughable, but Dunbar invited Trump to speak to the local Rotary Club. Trump, intrigued, invited Dunbar to discuss the idea at Trump Tower that summer.
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The two devised a plan: Trump would fly his helicopter to a New Hampshire airfield, speak to the Rotary crowd at Yoken's restaurant, and hold a news conference.
A few weeks later, Trump took out full-page ads opining on foreign policy in three major newspapers. "There's nothing wrong with America's Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can't cure," he wrote in the ads, which cost a combined $95,000. He questioned why the U.S. continued to provide military funds to Japan and Saudi Arabia, and implored, "Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."
The image of the rest of the world laughing at U.S. leaders would become an enduring theme in Trump's political rhetoric. This time, it came in the seventh year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, just weeks before the publication of Trump's book The Art of the Deal, in which Trump called Reagan a smooth performer but questioned whether "there's anything beneath that smile."
On the day Trump's ads appeared, he told reporters that he would travel to New Hampshire. He was asked whether he was running for office. "There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor, or United States senator," an unidentified spokesman replied. "He will not comment about the presidency."
On Oct. 22, 1987, Trump's helicopter landed at a New Hampshire airfield, where a limo paid for by Dunbar ferried Trump to Yoken's restaurant. There, a waiting crowd held placards that read "Vote Trump for President" and "Vote for an En-'TRUMP'-eneur." In his talk, Trump reprised themes from his ads. But he then told the assembled reporters: "I am not interested in running for president."
Trump's brief flirtation with a run for office was over, but he reveled in the curiosity about his emerging political ambitions. Promoting his book, he would continually repeat his stances on issues such as trade. "This sounds like political, presidential talk to me," Oprah Winfrey told Trump when he appeared on her talk show in 1988.
"I probably wouldn't do it," Trump said, "but I do get tired of seeing what's happening with this country. And if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally."
A few months later, Trump attended his first Republican convention, as George H.W. Bush accepted the party's nomination. During an interview on CNN, talk-show host Larry King asked Trump why he was there. Trump said he wanted to see "how the system works."
Trump, who boasted of his wealth, cast himself as a man of the people: "You know, wealthy people don't like me because I'm competing against them all the time...and I like to win. The fact is, I go down the streets of New York, and the people that really like me are the taxi drivers and the workers."
"Then why are you a Republican?" King asked. "I have no idea," Trump said. "I'm a Republican because I just believe in certain principles of the Republican Party."
Trump became a vocal supporter of Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. "I think Bill Clinton is terrific," Trump said Dec. 27, 1997, on CNN. "I think he's done an amazing job. I think he's got the toughest skin I've ever seen, and I think he's a terrific guy."
One month later, reports surfaced that Clinton had had a secret sexual relationship with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Trump was unperturbed. "The best thing he has going is the fact that the economy's doing great," Trump said in August 1998, days after Clinton finally admitted a relationship with Lewinsky. Trump suggested that if he were a candidate, he would face similar controversy: "You think about him with the women. How about me with the women?"
As a new election approached, Roger Stone, Trump's longtime lobbyist, examined the potential field, led by Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. Stone said that this could be Trump's moment and that the path forward might be within a third party. Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire with no political experience, had won nearly 19 percent of the vote in 1992, and Jesse Ventura, a professional wrestler, had improbably won the governorship of Minnesota in 1998 on the Reform Party ticket.
On Oct. 8, 1999, Trump announced on Larry King Live that he was leaving the Republican Party to join the Reform Party and was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. He made a U-turn on Clinton, calling the previous four years "disgusting" and professing Reagan as his role model. Trump said his main competitor for the Reform Party nomination, Pat Buchanan, was too divisive.
Who, King asked, would Trump pick as his vice-presidential candidate? Trump named Oprah Winfrey.
Although he called himself conservative, Trump was floating many liberal ideas. In The Advocate, a gay-oriented newsmagazine, he took issue with how Buchanan talked about "Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans." Trump called himself a conciliator, saying he would extend the Civil Rights Act to include protections for gay people and would allow them to serve openly in the military. Trump also called for universal health care and the protection of Social Security, through a one-time tax on the super wealthy and new money generated by renegotiating trade agreements.
Trump's quasi-campaign traveled to Minnesota for a January 2000 meeting with his role model, Ventura, and Ventura's campaign staffers. Dean Barkley, who had chaired Ventura's campaign, advised Trump, "Just be honest. It's not what you say, but how you say it. And talk to the public, not at them."
But Trump eventually chose not to run. On Feb. 19, 2000, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in which he said that his exploratory campaign was the "greatest civics lesson that a private citizen can have." But he was not sure a third-party candidate could win.
Although Trump had already pulled out of the race, his name remained on the Reform Party ballot in Michigan and California. He won both primaries.
Trump changed parties seven times between 1999 and 2012, starting when he left the GOP to consider a run under the Reform Party banner. After registering as a Democrat in 2001, he switched back to the Republicans in 2003. He became a Democrat again in 2005 and a Republican in 2009. He chose not to be affiliated with any party in 2011. Asked what he would say to critics who saw the constant party-switching as proof that he had no core beliefs, Trump responded, "I think it had to do more with practicality, because if you're going to run for office, you would have had to make friends."
Then he returned to the GOP, in 2012, once again stoking speculation that he had his sights on the presidency.
Trump's celebrity status promptly put him among the 2012 frontrunners. An April 2011 survey of early-primary-state GOP voters showed him tied for second place behind Mitt Romney. Among Tea Party supporters, Trump led the field. And his positions became more aligned with the conservatives': Now he was against abortion and no longer advocated making gays a protected class.
He bashed Obama with an intensity he had never displayed with his predecessors. He called the president's signature health-care law a "job killer." He drew wide attention for focusing on the long-discredited assertion that the president had been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya.
Obama put his birth certificate on public display and ridiculed the real estate mogul days later at the annual black-tie White House Correspondents' Association dinner, joking that Trump could now turn his attention to whether the United States had faked the moon landing. The audience roared with laughter while Trump looked on stone-faced, although he later insisted the evening was "phenomenal."
Two weeks after the dinner, Trump announced that he would not run, saying that "business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector."
On Feb. 2, 2012, he endorsed Romney and became an outspoken surrogate. On Election Day, Trump went to Boston to attend what he expected to be a Romney victory party. Romney's loss made him livid. If only the candidate had used him more, Trump said, Romney would have been a winner. Trump took to his increasingly favored medium, Twitter, to vent his frustration: "This election is a total sham and a travesty." "We can't let this happen.... The world is laughing at us."
The world is laughing at us. It was the same concern Trump had from his first interview with Rona Barrett, when he said one proper president could turn the country around. Now a full-fledged celebrity, Trump was certain who that man might be.
After Romney's loss, Republican elders huddled to create ways to transform the GOP into a younger, more inclusive party with new ideas. Trump was forming a different plan. Twelve days after the 2012 election, he filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He wanted to trademark an old phrase from Reagan: Make America Great Again.
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.