A former White House reporter thought Donald Trump was going to have a coronary when the journalist didn’t listen to his demand to “shut up.”
Brian J. Karem, who famously asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the 2020 election, over the weekend published an essay called “Trump still sounds like a child,” in which the reporter recalls “the time he told me to shut up or he’d leave; I don’t shut up and he didn’t leave.”
Karem used the recent development of Trump calling a reporter “piggy” to make his point that Trump was terrible to all reporters, women and men alike.
“He usually talks down to women, dismisses them and belittles them. Sometimes he admires their physical attributes in such a fashion as to make the rest of us in the room uncomfortable,” he wrote. “But it’s not limited to women. Donald Trump is worse than a misogynist. He’s obviously a racist, but that’s not the whole story. He’s a misanthrope. He absolutely loathes everyone – unless there’s something in it for him. He believes that makes him a renaissance man. I’ve heard him say that he’s an ‘equal opportunity offender.’ But, big deal. So is every other Medieval man.”
Karem says Trump didn’t like him very much at all.
“That being said, I guess I’ve never been able to do much for him, though during his first administration I was asked by a staffer where the ‘Playboy After Party’ was following the White House Correspondents Dinner. While we were put on alert, Trump never had the temerity to show up for the party,” he wrote. “Usually Trump yelled at me, or told me to sit down. Still he’d call on me and I’d ask him questions that would usually anger him to the point that I thought he might have a coronary. His face occasionally got [red]. he stammered. He pointed his finger. He never called me ‘Piggy’ but once he told me if I didn’t shut up, he’d leave his own press conference. I didn’t shut up. He didn’t leave.”
Karem then linked to a prior telling of the story, in which he wrote, “I have asked questions of every president since Ronald Reagan. I have been told to be quiet on more than one occasion. I’ve been told I shouldn’t be allowed into a press briefing. But before Tuesday I had never made anyone threaten to leave his own news briefing. Donald Trump did that.”
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