In 1998, Trump said his record with 'the women' was too 'controversial' to run for president
LatestDonald Trump is facing a growing list of accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Since The Washington Post released a 2005 video of Trump bragging about sexual assault, accusations of harassment, assault and generally creepy behavior pile up at a clip of several per day. Who could have possibly seen this coming? Well, everyone. But also Donald Trump.
Sure, he boasted in the 2005 video about groping women, but Trump also made a stunningly prescient prediction in a 1998 appearance on CNBC. In the interview with host Chris Matthews, the two men spent a bunch of time discussing Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. Then Matthews asked Trump if he ever considered running for president. (The year after the interview, Trump did end up forming an exploratory committee to run on Ross Perot’s Reform ticket, but dropped out of the race a few months later.) Here’s how the conversation with Matthews went (with my emphasis):
TRUMP: People want me to all the time.
MATTHEWS: What about you?
TRUMP: I don’t like it.
MATTHEWS: Why?
TRUMP: Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about [Bill Clinton] with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?
Sadly, we no longer need to imagine anything; the constant dribble of new information about Trump’s record with “the women” has become all too real.
As for the CNBC interview, Matthews went on to quip, of the Trump-Bill Clinton comparison, “Well, you might be close to him, but it’d be no cigar.” Trump’s response was, as one might expect from his record, demeaning of women: “Yeah. They might like my women better, too, you know?”
Here’s a short clip of the interview, as reproduced in a recent NBC Nightly News segment:
Ali Gharib is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Sometimes he writes about bars and broke down cars.