British restaurateur Keith McNally is among those still in disbelief that “not too bright” Donald Trump went on to become president.
McNally, 73, wrote in a new memoir that the future president was a regular at his New York City hotspot Balthazar for two years after it opened in 1997. There, the owner saw the real estate mogul’s personality up close.
“Even then he seemed like a caricature of a rich, pushy New Yorker with diabolical taste,” McNally wrote, according to an excerpt obtained by People.
McNally noted that Trump, who became a household name shortly after for his firing of contestants on The Apprentice, was “very decent” and not at all “offensive” to him. Trump even tried to rent McNally space for a restaurant at one of his properties.
The restaurateur wrote that he was invited to tour a space for rent in a building Trump owned on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. McNally said Trump was even willing to pull out of an agreement with another tenant to get McNally in the spot he liked most.
“Walking through a series of overdecorated spaces, we passed one that was noticeably less gaudy than the others,” McNally wrote. “I asked the Don if that restaurant space was also for rent. ‘No, that one’s taken. I guaranteed it to someone else a month ago.’”
McNally wrote that Trump then paused for a second and smiled before saying, “‘But just because it’s guaranteed doesn’t mean it’s locked in.’”
McNally ultimately passed on the space, he wrote.
The memoir also likened Trump to King Henry VIII, whose desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon—a request denied by the pope—helped spark the English reformation. Henry VIII went on to be married six times before he died at 55 in 1547.
McNally also recalled that Trump, now 78 but then in his early 50s, did not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed—at least not in their late 1990s interactions.
“He wasn’t too bright and if someone had told me that one day he’d be President, I’d have thought they were certifiable,” McNally wrote.
McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, is now on sale.
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