New Book Reveals Trump Mocked Gay Men and Speculated Staffers Sexuality
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In her new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reveals Donald J. Trump’s penchant for belittling and mocking gay men stemmed from the vulgar rhetoric of working in New York City real estate. Trump often speculated about others’ sexualities and mocked gay men and called them “queer” or “faggot,” his employees reportedly said.
Trump often speculated about the sexuality of people in his orbit, mocked gay people, and made crude, explicit comments.
Haberman suggests in the book that Trump made the comments with a goal to “shock.”
According to the book, in a meeting, Trump once speculated about the sexuality of his spokesman Jason Miller, who he deemed “likes the ladies.”
“You know how sometimes someone turns out to be gay later, and you knew? This guy, he isn’t even like one percent gay,” Trump said about Miller, who was in the meeting, according to the book. The former president frequently mocked gay men or men that were seen as weak by calling them “queer” or “faggot”, former Trump employees told Haberman, according to The Daily Beast.
Former Trump Organization executive Alan Marcus also said Trump would “belittle” another executive that he believed was gay, calling him “queer” and bragging about paying him less, per the book.
His fixation on sexualities extended well before his political career, and in the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, Trump called reporters to find out if people that he’d shaken hands were gay, the book says.
In an interview with CBS News‘ John Dickerson Sunday morning, he asks Haberman, “I want to read from something you wrote: ‘To fully reckon with Donald Trump, the presidency and his political future, people need to know where he comes from.’ What do you mean, where he comes from?“
Haberman says, “New York in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, was a very, very unique setting because of this combination of dysfunctional and sometimes corrupt forces that touched on media, that touched on City Hall, that touched on the political party system in the various boroughs, that touched on how real estate projects got done, and which touched on racial tribalism, John, and that is a big piece of what he took from his life in New York.”
The current incarnation of that racial tribalism shows up in some of Haberman’s scoops about Trump’s presidential years. Like other books of the Trump era, “Confidence Man” has gotten attention for new revelations: Trump considered firing his son-in-law, and engaged in casual transphobia. But Haberman’s larger goal is to put the scoops in the book, and her Times coverage, in an archeological framework, to chart a 50-year, steady, unchangeable DNA.
She said, “Donald Trump is generally the same, depending on the context. And he tended to treat the White House as if he was still in a real estate office dealing with local county leaders, as if it was still 1980.”
“What are the elements in the Donald Trump playbook that he’s had his whole life?” asked Dickerson.
“He has a handful of moves that he has used forever. And people tend to impute a ton of strategy to what he’s doing. But really, there are these moves. And it’s the quick lie, it’s the backbiting with one aide versus another, it is the assigning blame to someone else. All of this, again, is about creating a sense of drama, a sense of chaos, and often, John, about keeping the responsibility off him.”
New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman has been covering the world of Donald Trump since her days as a metro reporter in the late 1990s. Haberman talks with CBS News’ John Dickerson about her new book, “Confidence Man.” https://t.co/QiOIYZzS8t pic.twitter.com/KoYa5Ytq6S
— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) October 1, 2022
When Dickerson asks, “Has he essentially transferred the skills of the New York real estate world, as strange as that is, into a political party?”
Haberman responds, “He has transferred how he views the New York real estate industry into the Republican Party. And not just the New York real estate industry, but the New York political system. We’ve seen it in ways that are overt with the Republican Party in terms of comments that get made at rallies, and we have seen it in subtler ways in terms of how candidates deal with journalists or how they engage with basic facts sets.”
The book’s publisher, Penguin Random House, says in its synopsis:
From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump’s presidency like no other journalist, Confidence Man is a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that chronicles his life and its meaning from his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency.
Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.
Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.
Maggie Haberman on Donald Trump: “He saw the presidency as the ultimate vehicle to fame” https://t.co/UyqDZEDVN7
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 2, 2022
The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.
Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.”
PREORDER Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, in the UK (!) here https://t.co/cBy83BWAqV or the US here. To be released Oct. 4 https://t.co/vB2v3C0Ref
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 26, 2022
That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before. In this revelatory and news making book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.
Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America is out Tuesday October 4.
