by Jim Acosta
It was too much to ask Biden to run again. And the White House had made its choice clear. Obama’s people wanted Hillary. It was “her turn,” we were told. They loved Biden inside the West Wing, but there was little appetite for a Biden candidacy.
All that being said, defeating Trump in 2016 should have been a layup. It wasn’t. The Democratic Party had written off, even laughed off, Trump’s chances from the very moment he entered the race. And now, somehow, he was president.
During his transition to power over the next few months, Trump appeared to do little to bring the country together. Instead, he did what he knew best: he turned much of the transition into a reality TV show. As he assembled his Cabinet and White House team, he paraded candidates for various positions through Trump Tower. But the one episode of “Trump Transition Apprentice,” as I thought of it, that crystallized this haphazard process most was the president-elect’s treatment of Willard Mitt Romney.
It’s probably too much to call me an authority on Mitt Romney. But I covered him during the 2012 presidential campaign. Romney ran a hard-fought, respectable race, but lost, handing Barack Obama a second term. It was the former Massachusetts governor’s second attempt to win the presidency, and for a brief period in 2015, he was considering a third go at it. But as the 2016 campaign was heating up, Romney made it clear he did not want to be a three-time loser. That left him in an awkward place. He desperately wanted to be president. Members of his family were willing to support him had he decided to run in 2016. But Mitt, a thoroughly decent human being, tamed his ambitions and stayed on the sidelines.
And yet, Romney would not stay silent. Having courted Trump’s support in 2012 (an event I covered in Las Vegas), he clearly felt the need to atone for that mistake. Romney, sources told me, regretted asking for Trump’s support, an endorsement that came on a wild day—publicly because it featured two men who could not have been more different and personally because I believe it marked the first time Trump went off on me.
Trump appeared on The Situation Room via phone, as he so often did with CNN and other outlets, right after my live shot on his endorsement of Romney. My report had focused on Romney’s decision to accept Trump’s endorsement, despite the fact that the Manhattan businessman and avowed birther was something of an affront to the former Massachusetts governor’s good manners.
After my report was over, Trump complained that my live shot sounded as if it had been written by the Democratic Party.
Later, an Obama operative emailed me: “[D]id Trump just go negative on you?”
“Yep,” I replied. We were still years away from “fake news,” but I had clearly gotten under his skin.
Flash forward to 2016, and it was as if Romney were trying to undo Trump’s endorsement. At a critical moment in the early stages of the 2016 GOP primary cycle, the former Massachusetts governor raised a giant caution flag to the world. In an auditorium on the campus of the University of Utah, I watched, somewhat stunned, as Romney delivered a sustained, scathing takedown of the man whose support he had once gladly accepted.
“He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers,” Romney said. “He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.”
The former governor’s speech was a brutal, unmistakable fire warning to the nation. Here was the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee, as mild-mannered as they come, describing the GOP’s eventual nominee as little more than a reality show clown. Romney, a man whose idea of letting loose was cracking open a can of Diet Cherry Coke, was describing Trump as a unique threat to the world conning his way into the White House.
I understood the earnestness of Romney’s message all too well. As a reporter on his campaign plane, I had come to see the Romney the rest of America didn’t really get to meet. Stiff and awkward on the trail, he could be funny and disarming in his off-the-record interactions with reporters. Most of us in the Romney press corps viewed him as a rather admirable father figure—but golly (as Romney would say), he was a disastrous presidential candidate. Despite all his decency and his qualifications as a businessman and governor, Romney was a gaffe machine. Those gaffes seem downright quaint now. And there were many during the 2012 campaign:
“I like to be able to fire people.”
“Corporations are people, too.”
“Binders full of women.”
And so on.
At Trump’s rallies four years later, Trump ridiculed Romney over his loss in the 2012 race. “He choked like a dog,” he would howl. Romney “walked like a penguin,” he would joke. The Republicans in Trump’s crowds ate it up. They laughed at Romney’s awkwardness with a cruelty that took me by surprise. Trump’s tirades were hardly unintentional. They were often verbal spasms emanating from a candidate who delighted in inciting an audience. Trump didn’t commit gaffes. He trolled with taunts that he absolutely meant, and that were, in many cases, simply hateful. He masterfully tapped into this sadism time and again.
In the end, the GOP brushed off Romney’s warning in Utah and was somewhat vindicated for it. In the election’s aftermath, even Romney seemed to bow to the moment. During the transition to Trump’s presidency, Romney let it be known he was interested in becoming Trump’s secretary of state. Many in the Republican establishment felt he would be the perfect fit. He would normalize Trump, some thought. Calm things down. But that unlikely marriage would never come to pass. The president-elect instead chose to humiliate Romney, to rub it in that he, Trump, had accomplished something the former Massachusetts governor, a fellow billionaire (at least on paper), could not.
I was sitting in CNN’s New York bureau one night during the transition when we received a tip that Trump and Romney were having dinner together in the city. One of CNN’s campaign-embedded producers, Noah Gray, found out where: Jean-Georges, at the Trump International Hotel, across from the CNN studios in Manhattan. My producer Kristen and I made a reservation for 5:30 p.m. The two of us sat in the restaurant, running up the tab for two hours, before Trump and Romney finally came in. We were stalling until the moment they arrived. We could not have been luckier. They were shown to a table about fifteen feet away from us.
Not only could we see them talking. We were close enough to see what they were eating. The body language was revealing: Trump sitting there with his arms crossed like the alpha male as Romney tried to close the deal. RNC chairman and future White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was also at the table.
At one point, Trump turned around and said, “Hello, Jim Acosta.”
We were busted. But we were customers, too, and they couldn’t do anything about it. I went live on the air, over the phone, with Anderson Cooper to give CNN a full report. Was it a bit much to be doing a live report from a five-star restaurant on a dinner starring the president-elect and his one-time rival? Perhaps. But it was a striking moment of political theater, one that gave the public a glimpse into what could have been a moment of unification for the incoming Trump administration.
Had Trump selected Romney, he would have sent a powerful message. To some extent, he would have been seen as a unifier, capable of healing the nation’s political wounds. But, of course, Trump isn’t a unifier. “Secretary Romney” was never going to happen; this meeting was just stagecraft. The press was brought in to snap photos, and the picture that made the rounds that night showed Romney with an expression on his face of a man having crow for dinner. It was not one of his best moments.
I got mixed signals from senior officials as to whether Trump and his people wanted to humiliate Romney by showing this thoroughly decent but defeated man bowing to the next president. A senior White House official insisted Trump actually considered the idea. As they left the restaurant, I asked Trump if Romney would be the next secretary of state. He responded, “We’ll see.” And they were gone.
About fifteen minutes later, I spotted Romney outside his hotel a couple of blocks away. He was standing in the rain, alone, umbrella in hand.
“I got nothing for you, Jim,”
he said to me.
“Of course,” I responded. And we left it at that.
It struck me as a sad and poignant scene: a man who just four years ago was the Republican nominee for president standing in the pouring rain alone. No Secret Service agents around him. No entourage. Mitt Romney had tried to warn Republicans to stay away from Trump and he’d been kicked to the curb.
* * *
THE OPEN WOUNDS ON DISPLAY DURING THE TRANSITION ONLY made me more skeptical about what was to come with Trump’s inauguration. Consider the morning of January 11, 2017. With a little more than a week before being sworn in, President-elect Donald J. Trump held his first and only news conference since winning the White House (actually, his first since late July 2016).
My guess was that he would not take a question from me, but I also thought he might. Trump seems addicted to conflict. And I had certainly had my moments with him for much of the 2016 campaign.
Regardless of whether Trump was going negative on me during the Romney campaign in 2012, his real piss-and-vinegar attitude toward me got its start at a news conference in Florida in 2016, shortly after he had won the South Carolina primary. This one was held, like most of his events, at a Trump property, his golf course in West Palm. The seating configuration for the news conference was the first sign of trouble. In a massive ballroom decorated with golden chandeliers and other over-the-top Trumpian touches—pictures of Trump were everywhere—the event’s organizers had set up approximately twenty rows of chairs. The first fifteen or so were reserved for guests. Way in the back of the room were the seats for the press. It seemed we were expected to shout our questions over the guests assembled in the ballroom. This was clearly designed to limit our questions to those that would meet the guests’ approval.
This press conference came after the infamous Republican debate where Marco Rubio made fun of the size of Trump’s hands. Trump, as we all sadly recall, had defended his hand size at the debate by joking that he doesn’t have to worry about any other corresponding inadequacies (i.e., the size of his penis). Yes, we were going there, in 2016. The news coverage went on for days, with discussions about Trump defending his manhood at a debate. Trump didn’t seem to care that he was demeaning the office of the presidency by gleefully dragging the national political discourse into the gutter.
Which brings us to my question at this news conference. I asked Trump just that: Is it presidential to engage in talk about the size of one’s manhood? Trump snapped at me.
“You should not have asked that question,” he said, clearly irked.
One of the guests, a woman sitting in front of me, registered her disgust. “What an asshole,” she said loudly.
But Trump then went on to defend the size of his hands, describing them as big and beautiful. He even turned to one of his friends in the front row to brag about his ability to drive a golf ball. It was odd to hear him go on in this fashion. To be clear, that’s not what I was asking. Then he answered the question, vowing to be the most presidential president since Abraham Lincoln.
Still, the episode damaged my standing with the Trump campaign. Later on, in March 2016, he abruptly scrapped a press conference he had scheduled at Mar-a-Lago on the night of the Florida primary, a contest he had won decisively, driving Rubio out of the race. I called his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, asking why Trump had canceled.
“Why? So you can ask him about the size of his hands again?” she asked sarcastically.
And then there was a run-in I had with Trump in May 2016, when he called me a “real beauty.” Trump was holding a news conference at Trump Tower to answer questions about his charitable giving, or lack thereof, to veterans’ groups. Much of this dated back to the real estate tycoon’s decision a few months earlier to skip a debate in Iowa and instead hold an event to raise money for veterans’ causes. In the months since, it was starting to become clear that Trump hadn’t been as generous as he said he would be. By the time May rolled around, reporters were asking the hard questions. Where was the money he had promised to veterans? How much had Trump contributed? He hated the scrutiny but loved the coverage.
At a Trump Tower news conference in May, in responding to questions, Trump turned to his arsenal of biting one-liners. I asked him why he couldn’t withstand the scrutiny that comes with running for president of the United States. The question went to the heart of one of his biggest liabilities, his temperament. Trump could have easily answered the question by saying, “I can handle the scrutiny. Nice try, Jim. Next question.”
Instead, of course, he went on the attack: “I’ve seen you on television before. You’re a real beauty,” he growled.
Needless to say, by the time his Trump Tower pre-inauguration press conference in January 2017 rolled around, he had a pretty good idea what would happen when he called on me in a press conference.
Part of the reason I figured he would avoid my question was that my colleagues at CNN had just broken an important story that the president-elect had been told about concerns inside the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian government might have compromising information on him. Another news outlet, BuzzFeed, had reported some of the salacious but unsubstantiated allegations contained in the dossier, which came to be known as the Steele Dossier. CNN did not delve into those details, determining that they were unproven and, therefore, outside the bounds of fair reporting.
None of this was sitting well with Trump. For weeks, Democrats had charged that he was already an illegitimate president-elect, having lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and been linked to possible Russian interference in the election. There were questions at the time about his financial ties to the Russians, but there was no hard evidence of any possible collusion at that point. Trump’s team saw the Russian story as yet another attempt to diminish the new president, softening him up for 2020. And Trump was already thinking about 2020—yes, even before he was sworn in. So, he decided he would return to one of his favorite lines of attack from his campaign playbook: an assault on the media, specifically CNN and BuzzFeed, for having reported the Steele Dossier story.
Trump’s incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, launched the first salvo, describing CNN and BuzzFeed’s reporting as “a sad and pathetic attempt to get clicks.” The accusation was particularly frustrating to my colleagues at CNN because we intentionally had not reported the details provided by BuzzFeed, as they were unsubstantiated at the time. CNN had decided, however, that the very fact that the intelligence community had presented Trump with the information about the Russians was, by itself, news, and it was. There was no denying that it was a major development.
But Spicer and the Trump team decided to lump CNN and BuzzFeed together in an attempt to chip away at the credibility of the news media at large. “For all the talk lately about fake news, this political witch hunt by some in the media is based on some of the most flimsy reporting and is frankly shameful and disgraceful,” Spicer said.
Note the use of the term fake news. The “fake news” attack was a cynical ploy. The U.S. intelligence community had determined that Russian operatives had unleashed a blizzard of “fake news” stories on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to boost Trump. The most sinister of these bogus reports had accused the Clinton campaign of running a child-sex ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC. It was a ridiculous and sickening lie, but a deranged man from North Carolina believed it was real enough and showed up at the restaurant with a gun, which he fired inside the eatery. Fake news was more than malicious. It was potentially deadly.
But Spicer wasn’t alone when it came to making “fake news” the talking point of the day. The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, continued the scripted attack, referring to the Russia stories as “fake news,” too.
“Today, we’ll get back to real news, to real facts and the real progress our incoming president has already made in reviving the American economy and assembling a team that will make America great again,” Pence added.
Then, at his press conferen
ce, the president-elect himself ratcheted up the rhetoric even further. He first tried to divide and conquer, pitting one news outlet against another. “I want to thank a lot of the news organizations for some of whom have not treated me very well over the years—a couple in particular—and they came out so strongly against that fake news and the fact that it was written about by primarily one group and one television station,” he said.
Minutes later in the press conference, Trump used the line again. “I saw the information; I read the information outside of that meeting,” he said, referring to the Steele Dossier. “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.”
And again . . .
“Well, you know, President Putin and Russia put out a statement today that this [the dossier] fake news was indeed fake news. They said it totally never happened,” Trump said, taking the word of the Russian leader over American journalists and, for that matter, the U.S. intelligence community.
Later on, Trump was asked by Major Garrett of CBS News if he defended a tweet he had posted that compared the U.S. intelligence community to Nazi Germany. The president-elect had accused leaders of the intelligence agencies of leaking the material to the news media to damage him.
The word fake was uttered once more.
Trump also tied CNN to BuzzFeed, which he called a “failing pile of garbage.” BuzzFeed had also been a thorn in his side during the campaign, so much so that he’d even gone so far as to ban the news site’s reporters from attending his events. To be fair to BuzzFeed, many of its reporters are excellent, and some of them went on to be hired by CNN.
The president-elect, along with his new press secretary and vice president–elect, had assailed CNN’s credibility time and again in the run-up to the election. Now, at Trump’s press conference, I was deep in thought about what was unfolding in front of all of us. Trump was not only attacking the credibility of one of the world’s largest news organizations in CNN, but was also unleashing a profound assault on the truth. The fact that the U.S. intelligence community warned the president-elect about a potential Russian plot was not in dispute. This was something that had happened. This was an attempt to tell the public that up was down, that black was white, that real was fake. And it was all happening in front of our eyes.