Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
The struggles of unemployed steelworkers seemed far removed from Donald Trump’s 5th Avenue
apartment in Manhattan. In September 2015, I was waiting for the candidate in his living room admiring
the high-rise view of Central Park but not so much his taste in decorating. The ceiling was frescoed. Most
everything was gilded. The living room reminded me of the absurdly pretentious palaces occupied by
our troops in Iraq. Mentally, I labeled the style of the Trump apartment, “Late Saddam.” This was my
first interview with Donald Trump for 60 Minutes. The gold on the furniture paled in comparison to the
candidate’s gilding of the facts. Trump swept into the room in an affable mood. He introduced his wife,
Melania, who had declined an interview but still wanted to welcome her visitors. Trump and I sat down
in an arena of light set up by our cameramen. 60 Minutes Executive Editor Bill Owens and Producer
Robert Anderson watched, a few feet away, on a bank of monitors connected to four cameras. Once we
began, I was immediately surprised by Trump’s lack of information. His blundering through the issues
was unlike any presidential candidate I had ever met. That’s not a partisan rebuke. At 60 Minutes, I’ve
inter- viewed Republican nominees George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. I’ve done multiple
interviews with Republican congressional leaders including John Boehner, Mitch Mc- Connell and Paul
Ryan. Each of them knew the issues cold. You could agree or disagree with their policies but their pro-
posed solutions to America’s challenges were at least thoughtful and plausible. Trump, on the other
hand, had no idea what he was talking about. He seemed confident his audience wouldn’t know the
difference.
I asked Trump how a tycoon could understand the frustrations of the unemployed. He said, “You look
at the real unemployment rate is [sic] through the roof because all of these people, ninety-three million,
they can’t get jobs, people can’t get jobs. And I will change that around very quickly.”
Ninety-three million? I thought. Did I hear him right? The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (bear with me
here) reports that in October 2016, the number of people in the entire US labor force was 159,712,000.8
Those were people who were working or recently seeking a job. So, if ninety-three million of them “can’t
get jobs,” that would mean the unemployment rate was 58 percent. For perspective, the estimated
unemployment rate in the 1930s during the Great Depression, peaked at just under 25 percent.9 As
Trump and I spoke, the unemployment rate was actually 5 percent—not 58 percent. And 5 percent was
half of what President Obama faced in his first year. The number of jobless Americans looking for work
was fewer than eight mil- lion, not ninety-three million. In a twisted way, Trump’s figure was accurate,
but it wasn’t true. There were ninety-three million Americans who were not working, but they were re-
tired, in school, disabled or dealing with childcare—in other words—Americans who had no intention of
looking for a job. Trump’s version of what he called “the real unemployment rate” left me with an image
of my ninety-five-year-old mother-in- law, marching into a factory with a lunch pail and a timecard. If
the unemployment rate were 58 percent, there would be a mob waving pitchforks and torches, pushing
down the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps this is what Trump understood. He needed
outrage to get his voters to the polls, so he trumped up an outrageous America.
About Obamacare, he said in our interview, “Unless you die, you get nothing.” When we turned to the
nation’s infrastructure, Trump said, “You know, we have to do something. We have to fix our country.
Sixty percent of the bridges are unsafe.” Fortunately for our country, that was another crazy
exaggeration. In 2017, The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card, said the
number of “structurally deficient” bridges amounted to 9.1 percent—not 60 percent.10 The ASCE report
noted that the number of deficient bridges was decreasing in 2016. Finally, on foreign policy, Trump
offered me this appraisal: “Let me tell you, we don’t get along with anybody, our country. We have bad
relationships with everybody.”
In our interview and in his campaign, Trump created a wholly imaginary dystopian horror where
unemployment is more than double what it was in the Great Depression; health insurance pays nothing
until you die, most bridges are near collapse and, overseas, America has not one friend in the world.
Then he offered miraculous solutions. On drug smuggling, Trump told me simply, “It’s not going to
happen anymore.” He explained he would deport all of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants,
but he said, “We’re rounding ’em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they’re gonna be
happy because they wanna be legalized.”
I got the impression Trump had little understanding of the challenges facing the country and not a clue
about how government worked. It seemed to me he was a real estate huckster who believed his own
advertising. In real estate “real” is what you say it is—all kitchens are “gourmet,” all living rooms are
“flooded with light” and all neighborhood schools are “superior.” This is why he embraced the phrase
“fake news.” He had to come up with an alternative explanation because if what America heard on the
news was real, then Donald Trump was a liar.
“You know,” I said to Trump. “The problem with a lot of these ideas is that the president of the United
States is not the CEO of America.”
“That’s right,” he acknowledged.
“The Constitution is gonna tell you, ‘no,’” I said. “We’ll see,” he replied.
“The Congress is gonna tell you ‘no.’” “We’ll see.”
“The Supreme Court is gonna tell you ‘no.’” “Well, we’ll see.”
As we wrapped up the interview, I concluded Trump wasn’t serious about being president and the
Republicans would never nominate him anyway. I believe I was right about Trump, but I was dead wrong
about the Republican Party which was willing to mortgage its conservative credentials to the
flamboyant, womanizing, flimflam man. On July 21, 2016, I was in Cleve- land’s Quicken Loans Arena
anchoring CBS News coverage of the Republican National Convention. Among those who were not there
was the host governor, Republican John Kasich, who refused to support the nominee. During his
acceptance speech, Trump laid out his proprietary litany of America’s woes and then delivered words
that sent me lunging for my notebook, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone
can fix it.”
That’s as good a definition of hubris as you are likely to find. The Greeks had a solution for excessive
pride. The goddess Nemesis took revenge in many creative ways. She famously lured the young man
Narcissus to a pool where he fell in love with his ref lection and obsessed until he died.
In our interview I said to Trump, “You love hearing about yourself.” His answer was, for once, insightful,
informed and concise. “I do,” he told me.