The Time Donald Trump Tried To Get Me Fired

Same as he ever was

In 2013, Charlie Pierce asked me — he asked some real writers as well — to help cover his eponymously name blog while he took a week’s vacation. I promised him I wouldn’t make a mess of things. If memory serves, I wrote about 10 pieces that week, everything about guns in Oklahoma, to David Brenner in Texas, to stolen cow anuses in Missouri. But the piece below was definitely the first one published. I reprint it now — and it’s almost 12 years old — not so much to illustrate how monumentally wrong I was about Trump and what would be his hold on the nation, though you can see from the subhead and the conclusion what a whopper of wrong I was, but for two other reasons:

1. Trump was sworn in on Monday, as your sleepless nights since have no doubt reminded you, and, in re-reading this blog, I am reminded just how much his stale, hackneyed act hasn't changed. Thing is, his stale, hackneyed act now is now dangerous and metastasizing. Skewering Trump is all fun and games until he both guts and bloats a country, and

2. I remember that hours after the piece appeared, I got a call from Ryan D’Agostino, who was editing the blog that week, who told me that David Granger, the then-executive editor, the Grand Poobah of Esquire had just spent 45 minutes on the phone with Trump, who was furious about what I had written. He wanted Granger to fire me.

So much for not making a mess of things. Fearing, in fact, I might lose the gig after my first piece, I asked how Granger responded.

Ryan said he told him, “Tell Barry that it will be 45 minutes I will cherish for the rest of my life.”

It would be nice to think the president of the United States is no longer the kind of man who scours the internet (or has a staff who does) looking for stories every time and everywhere a disparaging word about him his heard. But we know, in fact, the man we elected . . . twice is exactly that kind of man.

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(First Appeared in Esquire)

Would God Be So Good?

Donald Trump getting the GOP nomination in 2016, much less becoming president, is Mars jumping in line of Earth to get closer to the sun.

By Barry FriedmanPUBLISHED: JUL 29, 2013 10:01 AM EDT

In 2016, Trump would be a longshot for the nomination. He was briefly at the top of the pool in the Republican primary in 2011, once polling ahead of eventual nominee Mitt Romney, but he has not had a significant role in the party's politics since the election. Many considered 2011 a publicity stunt for his television show, rather than a legitimate campaign.

Let's be clear: Representative Steve King of Iowa pulling back the chain-link fence in Tijuana so Mexican drug mules won't get their fat calves stuck in the barbed wire is a longshot. Trump getting the GOP nomination in 2016, much less becoming president, is Mars jumping in line of Earth to get closer to the sun.

"It's very difficult for me to make a commitment, with 'The Apprentice' and so many things," Trump said, "It's harder for me than some politician who says, 'I guess I'll run.'

Sure. Tony Danza agrees to do Celebrity Apprentice in 2015 and, what, you're going to miss that to argue corn subsidies with Rand Paul in Dubuque on the eve of the Iowa Straw Poll?

But he hears the call.

"I have a large following of people who are tired of seeing this country ripped off, and taken advantage of [by] everyone who does business with us. We used to be the smart one of the block, and now we're the dummies on the block. They want to see me, and I want to see them."

And by "large following," he means those who have misspelled tattoos and wouldn't believe Obama was born in America if they were in the same room when his mother's water broke.

The last time Trump sort of, kind of ran, he was consistent ... and consistently a dolt.

On dealing with OPEC and rising oil prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you're not going to raise that fucking price."

On taxing Chinese goods: "Listen you mother fuckers we're going to tax you 25 percent."

On Iraq: "We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school, we build another school, we build another road they blow them up, we build again, in the meantime we can't get a fucking school in Brooklyn."

He's not just good with words. Who can forget his special relationship with "the blacks" and uppity Jews?

Gals love him, too -- thrice-married mogul though he may be:

• "All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."-- From his book How to Get Rich.

• "I'll send one of my friends to pick up her girlfriend and I think it would be very easy." -- On Rosie O'Donnell and his own mysteriously beguiling friends, as reported by The New York Daily News.

• "She does have a very nice figure . . . if [she] weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." -- On his daughter, Ivanka, during a interview on the The View.

• "Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, 'Can you believe what I am getting?'" -- On former romantic partners, from Think Big: Make it Happen in Business and Life.

• "You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive]." -- On media zen and women's body parts, from a 1991 Esquire interview.

Trump is a bigot, a blowhard, a bore, and a megalomaniac misogynist, but enough about why Republicans find him delightful. Surely they're not stupid enough to be jerked around by him again or take him seriously as a presidential candidate.

Actually, Democrats hope they're just that stupid.