According to a new book from Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington, Trump wanted to push the birther conspiracy during the 2016 election but was reined in by his staff:
By 2016, he apparently considered it a liability. But to jettison this from his arsenal would be to ignore what made Trump, well…Trump. Still, the decision was made by the future president and his senior staff that it was worth letting this one slide. In the days leading up to Trump’s first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, held at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, Team Trump tried to organize an event at the site of the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. There, he would—however tepidly—relinquish birtherism at long last.
But first, the campaign wanted Trump to release an official written statement renouncing birther conspiracy theories and declaring once and for all that baby Barack was born in the United States. His aides asked him for a short and sweet statement, just a few sentences; they could put this to bed quickly and hopefully without causing a big fuss.
Trump convened some of his top campaign brass, including Hope Hicks and Jason Miller, on a conference call that month as he was patched in from his executive perch at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He told them he wanted to dictate a statement.
“Okay, are you ready?” Trump asked everyone on the call. “Okay, here it is….”
This kicked off what two people on the call independently described as a seven‐minute, meandering spat of word vomit during which Trump kept finding new ways to say that his birther crusade was, in fact, necessary, good, and proper. He repeatedly echoed his past comments on the matter, claiming credit for forcing President Obama to settle the issue by publicly releasing his original long-form birth certificate. He insisted this never would have happened without his incessant questioning of Obama’s birthplace. He had achieved what John McCain, Bill Clinton, and so many others could only dream of doing, he thought. He blamed Hillary Clinton for being the godmother of the racist birtherism craze and for starting it in the first place. (She didn’t.) So really, Trump reasoned, what he did was a smashing success that warranted no apology, and he was happy he helped settle one of the great questions of our time.
Had this soliloquy been made public, it would have spanned two pages, single spaced.
“You get all that?” Trump asked.
At first, the Republican presidential nominee was met with dead silence, with those on the line confused as to what the optimal response could possibly be. Multiple advisers wanted to tell him that his dictated statement was far, far, far too long and would cause many more headaches for the campaign than it would resolve. If released, this would defeat the purpose of everything the campaign staff was trying to accomplish on this front. And yet, no one wanted to upset Trump, whose legendary hair-trigger temper could easily be set off by the slightest sign of perceived insolence.
Hicks—a top confidante and a press and comms hotshot whom Trump had for years treated as a surrogate daughter and whom he affectionately called Hopey and Hopester—was the brave one. Hopey/Hopester went first.
“Uh, we can’t do this,” she said, explaining that it would predictably deliver Trump a self-inflicted blow. She recommended they go the route of a less obstreperous, and much shorter, statement to the media.
“Okay,” Trump said, before polling the other members of the conference call on whether they agreed with Hicks, or if they preferred using the diatribe the boss had just dictated. No campaign official who chimed in sided with Trump, with each of them giving some pussyfooting version of “this is insane, why would we do this?” adding a “sir” or two to be safe.
After each aide said their piece, the call was interrupted by yet another uncomfortable silence. It lasted an interminable three seconds. Then the inevitable eruption came.
“I WANT THAT STATEMENT!!!! GET ME THAT FUCKING STATEMENT!!!!!!!” Trump roared into his phone—multiple recipients of his wrath recount—as his thundering voice crackled on the receiving ends. “I WANT THAT GODDAMN FUCKING STATEMENT RIGHT NOW!!!!! WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, WHY IS…JASON! JASON! GET THE HELL UP HERE NOW!”
Click.
By the time all the other participants on the call had hung up, Miller, Trump’s trusted senior communications adviser, was already hustling up to DJT’s 26th floor office in the tower. Behind closed doors, Miller—with a thick skin for verbal lashing and a calming voice—miraculously managed to walk Trump back off that ledge and strike a compromise: Miller would release a brief, innocuous statement in his own name, not Donald J. Trump’s, and the Republican presidential nominee would get to have his own say at the Trump hotel event in Washington, D.C. The secret, gargantuan Trump statement would be canned, never to see the light of day. When Miller emerged from Trump’s office, he assured fellow campaign officials that he’d put out that fire, at least for the time being.
Actually, his statement ended up being pretty close to that:
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
Here’s the Politifact statement on that.
How come nobody ever talks about the incredibly abusive way he speaks to his staff? Somebody should tell him to “be best.”