It was a classic example of how NeverTrumpers gave aid and comfort to Democrats at crunch time, moves that demoralized Republican voters and suppressed votes for Trump.
“He was on a phone call to his donors that he essentially leaked to the press. Okay. You know, he’s a sleazebag,” he said. Trump knew Sasse was reverting to his old ways shortly after the Nebraskan won his primary, when he viciously criticized Trump for a plan to draw down troop size in Germany.
“I want to bring troops out of Germany. You know, some of them, because we’ve got 54,000 troops in Germany costing us billions of dollars. Germany treats us badly on trade and many other things. And so I’m going to reduce it by 25,000. And I hear Little Ben Sasse is chipping away saying how we shouldn’t do it. You know, he wants to stay in Afghanistan, let soldiers stay there and get their faces blown off, and their arms blown off for another 19 years and die,” Trump said.
Then Trump regaled me with detailed stories of how various Nebraska Republicans yelled at him for endorsing Sasse when he was somewhat vulnerable. “I said, uh, no kidding,” explaining that he made other similar mistakes in an effort to avoid having too many primary battles.
“So I end up supporting a guy who’s a sleazebag. By the way, you can quote me on all this stuff. A very dishonest guy, because at least go out there and you know, play who you are,” Trump said in our interview. “You’ve got to see him at that meeting. He was like a quiet little boy who just sat there. And they did all the talking on his behalf and you know that he couldn’t have been better. He didn’t say a bad thing about me for two years.”
I peppered Trump about why he had enabled Anthony Fauci, who relished his role in advocating lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to the COVID pandemic. Trump defended him in part, as did so many others I spoke with in the Trump administration. But Trump conceded Fauci had faults.
“Well, who knew that he knew so little? Anthony Fauci is a good promoter—he’s a great promoter. He is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with people’s health,” Trump said, needling him about the wild first pitch he threw at a Major League Baseball game during his 2020 publicity tour.
I asked Trump at a later interview whether he ever got suspicious about what was by that point acknowledged to be a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Trump had been excoriated by the press for suggesting COVID-19 had leaked from the lab, disagreeing with the cover story from China and the World Health Organization that it had been initially spread via a nearby wet market. A year later, many in corporate media begrudgingly acknowledged his suggestion was accurate.
Wasn’t it interesting how devastating the virus’s impact was globally compared to how it had affected China, I asked. Did he ever wonder if it was intentional?
“No, I never thought China did it on purpose. I thought it was done out of incompetence and I may be wrong because they were the biggest beneficiaries. I felt it came from the lab from day one. I think it was an accident,” he said, rejecting any grander conspiracy theory.
Trump acknowledged his public health messaging about COVID had not been handled well, but he was clearly proud of what he accomplished in the big picture.
“One of the things that I’m disappointed about is that I think we did a great job with COVID,” said Trump. “With the vaccine, that’s such a game-changer and nobody else would have done that. And I did something else. I went out and bought hundreds of thousands of doses before we knew that we had a vaccine. That was a big risk.”
“Nobody’s ever treated the FDA the way I did, because this was life and death,” Trump said. “I was really almost bad to them, but I wasn’t bad because I’m trying to save lives.”
“I found them to be not incompetent but unbelievably bureaucratic,” he said, noting that in meetings Food and Drug Administration officials would talk about how many years it would take to get treatments and medications approved.
He wondered if Biden had a “senior moment” when he claimed there was no vaccine when he came into office. “He got shot, meaning jabbed, on December 21st, apparently. Now, do you think he didn’t know where he was? That was a little scary,” Trump said.
Trump also expressed concern about Pfizer, the drug company that he said “has great power, in my opinion, over the FDA.” He worried that Pfizer’s financial concerns were affecting decisions made at the FDA.
I asked him about reports that the vaccine approval had been inappropriately delayed until after the election. He seemed to agree that it may have happened, but wasn’t too concerned. “I don’t feel badly about that,” he said. “If they would have done it before election, fake news media would have made it a tiny story, so it wouldn’t have had the impact. Because it was after election, the press made it massive.” He figured that was better for everyone.
Fred Barnes once commented about how weird it was to interview Trump, because he’s far more genteel in person than he is in public. Usually politicians kiss babies and are saccharine sweet in public, but revert to their natural state in less public situations. Trump is something different. He’s the same guy on and off stage, but much kinder in smaller groups.
He’s profane, yes, and full of insults. But he even goes off the record to praise individuals, as he did with several frequent objects of his scorn. And he’d go off the record to criticize individuals he praised publicly. He dished excellent gossip, which I’m not at liberty to share. He was even an incisive critic of public officials’ rhetoric, noting Gov. Mario Cuomo’s overuse of language related to stars and suns.
The only time he really ducked answering was when I asked him if he’d had COVID during his first debate, marked by belligerence from everyone on stage: “That’s a very interesting statement. I’ve had other people say that. That was the area of time, right?” Others around the president also ducked the question. Later he would tell me that Regeneron was a cure, as far as he was concerned. That’s the monoclonal antibody treatment he received when he got hit with COVID.
In between my second and third interview, I also ended up getting COVID. I’ve had worse flus, but the duration of recovery was long, particularly as I was trying to write a complicated book under an incredibly short deadline. Even though I was no longer contagious, the famously germaphobic president actually scooted away from me when I told him.
Of course, relative to much of the left these days, Trump doesn’t seem to be nearly the germaphobe he was criticized for being just years ago. Of his COVID experience, he dryly remarked, “That was interesting.” Having just gone through it, I understood.
We discussed Kanye West’s idiosyncratic run for president in 2020. Democrats, led by Marc Elias, had successfully kept him off the ballot by hook and by crook. In Wisconsin, he was supposedly 14 seconds too late in filing his paperwork. Trump had kind words for West, but said he had “loony tendencies.”
Trump thought billionaire former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg would have a stronger run in the Democratic primary, just based on his spending. But he bombed his first debate, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she wanted to talk about running against a billionaire who speaks disparagingly of women. Not Trump, she said, but Bloomberg.
“One question, he was taken out. Remember the question? ‘And it wasn’t Donald Trump.’ How do you respond? He’s going ‘Holy s—! Get me out after the first question.’ That was Pocahontas. She took him out. Oh wow. You remember that?” Trump asked.
The night before our May interview, I’d seen Trump address the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. The next morning, Ted Cruz had given a rousing speech in which he talked frankly about how weird it was that Trump had done so much for the movement. He told a great, self-deprecating story about how he was a young policy advisor on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign and didn’t realize that meant he was just supposed to regurgitate talking points from conservative organizations.
There was a tough issue going on related to a regulation that had been enacted by President Bill Clinton on behalf of abortion groups. The campaign pledged to rescind it if elected, but Bush never touched it, not even in his second term. When Cruz opposed Trump in 2016, it was in part because he didn’t trust him to enact pro-life regulations. Yet he succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. He said courage was the key ingredient missing from many GOP politicians.
Trump was engaged in front of the crowd of pro-life legislators and supporters the night prior. He seemed like he was having fun. I asked him the next day about his late-in-life conversion to politics.
