Donald Trump has made a lot of remarks on The Howard Stern Show over the years that he might regret, but perhaps no comment has come back to bite him as much as his admission of support for the Iraq War during an interview in 2002. Though Trump has regularly tried to say in the 2016 presidential election that he has always opposed the invasion of Iraq, audio of Trump telling Stern otherwise has prevented him from getting away with that claim.
A Politico story published Thursday revealed how Stern got that answer out of Trump, masterfully moving the interview from a cursory discussion about the housing market into vastly different territory:
Bored, Stern smartly steered Trump back into douchebag mode, with a nice assist from his deceptively gentle co-host Robin Quivers, a nurse and onetime second lieutenant in the Air Force who also works with the United Nations to help exploited girls around the globe. As Quivers oohed and ahhed cartoonishly at Trump's BMOC routine, like a sweetheart with the Fonz, she got him to reflect nauseatingly on how on 9/11 compromised the view from his penthouse apartment: "I have two windows that are focused on the building. … You can't believe that, after looking for 20 years at the World Trade Center, you can't believe they're not there."But Stern and Quivers in that interview were only softening Trump up for the rope-a-dope moment that has been so consequential in the 2016 election. Probing Trump's thoughts on 9/11, they got him to complain that "we really don’t know the enemy." Fair point, but it was the days of drumbeats: The hawks were gunning for war in Iraq. Confused about that enemy, Trump suddenly seemed perilously close to teeing up an emasculated antiwar position. Stern saw an angle. "Are you for invading Iraq?" Stern asked. "Yeah … I guess so," Trump said. Without assenting, he would have been stuck making the case for diplomacy or police action — something consistent with an inchoate enemy — which is discourse way too subtle to interest Stern or, as the world now knows, Trump. [Politico]
That was far from the first — or last — time Stern managed to butter Trump up before hitting him with a question that would produce an infamous soundbite. Read about some of the other moments over at Politico.
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