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- [00:00]
Adam
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- [00:06]
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- [00:36]
Chelsea Handler
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- [01:16]
Donald Trump
Ladies and gentlemen.
- [01:21]
Anthony Zuercher
I.
- [01:21]
Donald Trump
Am officially running for President of the United States and we are going to make our country great again.
- [01:35]
Adam
16 June 2015, the day Trump announced he would be running to become the Republican nominee for president. What we didn't know then was that Trump would go on to become one of the most important figures of the next decade, running for president three times, winning twice, and losing once. And his journey from that announcement after he famously rode down a golden escalator in Trump Tower through to winning the Republican nomination is the subject of of the next two episodes of Old Newscast. And for those of you who don't know, Old Newscast is where we look back at some moments which have proved to be turning points in recent history. And we talked to people who either covered them as journalists or were involved in them in some way. We have done plenty of episodes before, ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the expenses scandal in Westminster. And just to set the scene for these old newscasts in 2015, President Obama is coming to the end of his second term in the White House and and the front runners to fight the 2016 election for many are Bush and Clinton. That's Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Jeb Bush, brother of George W. And son of George H.W. for the Republicans. So Why did Donald Trump decide to run? And how was he able to win against all the odds? That will be the subject of the next two episodes of old newscast, newscast.
- [02:55]
Catriona Perry
Newscast from the BBC.
- [02:57]
Donald Trump
We have to build a wall, folks. I will rest. Law and order to our country. No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald we want to win. And we will win. Please clap.
- [03:11]
Adam
Hello, it's Adam in the studio. And joining me is our chief presenter in Washington, D.C. catriona Perry.
- [03:17]
Catriona Perry
Hello, how are you?
- [03:18]
Adam
I'm very well, thank you. And sitting next to Katrina is americast's Anthony Zuercher. Hello, Anthony.
- [03:23]
Anthony Zuercher
Hello, Adam. How are you doing?
- [03:25]
Adam
Very well, thank you. And I am ready to be led down memory lane by you two because obviously I remember these moments, but not in as much detail as you two do because you were actually covering them for real. So June 16, 2015, that's the moment of the famous golden escalator in Trump Tower. Katrina, what were you actually doing in life at that point?
- [03:44]
Catriona Perry
Oh, well, how long have you got to answer that one? But in a professional context, that is what I meant. Well, interestingly, on that day, I had just come back from Florida because the day before had been the launch of Jeb Bush. So I had just landed back in D.C. on a couple of hours sleep. And that Jeb Bush launch down in Florida still to this day has the record of the hottiest, sweatiest day I ever worked in my whole life. It was like peak June, Florida. Gross, gross, gross. Jeb Bush, of course, at that time, front runner. So it was really important to have gone down to Florida for that launch.
- [04:23]
Donald Trump
We don't need another president who merely holds the top spot among the pampered elites of Washington. We need a president willing to challenge and disrupt the whole culture in our nation's capital. And I will be that president.
- [04:37]
Catriona Perry
So I came back the next day ready to report on, you know, this big announcement that Donald Trump was making. I didn't go to New York because I had just come back from Florida and we were waiting on that now, as it turned out. And this is, I suppose, how our lives work when you are displaying dispatched over here as a foreign correspondent. I was actually woken from my sleep at the crack of dawn by the desk in Dublin because I was working for rte, the Irish public broadcaster at the time, to tell me about an absolute awful tragedy that had happened in Berkeley, California, where a balcony had collapsed with a whole pile of Irish J1 students at a 21st birthday party. Six of them had died, seven of them very badly injured. One has since succumbed to her injuries. And so this was one of the greatest losses of life of Irish people abroad. So I was all in political mode and then dispatched off to California. So I was in a plane somewhere over the United States at the moment that Donald Trump actually came down those famous golden escalators.
- [05:47]
Adam
Wow, what a contrast. And Anthony, you were hard at work in the BBC bureau.
- [05:52]
Anthony Zuercher
I was. I was with the BBC at the time. I had just begun in 2015 to pivot towards covering that presidential race. I had been to a lot of the campaign kickoffs that had stretched over the course of the year, including Marco Rubio down in Florida. I had been to Rick Perry's in Texas, Rand Paul in Kentucky. I did not go to New York, which says a little something about what we thought Donald Trump's chances would be. I covered that from here in the bureau in Washington and was actually on World News America that night talking about his campaign and talking about his speech and talking about his chances. And I hope you don't have that video because I don't want to be reminded of how wrong I was saying that I didn't think he had a chance to win the nomination. Scoffing almost.
- [06:45]
Catriona Perry
Well, Anthony, I'll just say you would not have been alone in that because as I say, I was over dealing with this terrible tragedy in California for about two weeks when I came back here to the Bureau in D.C. and I said to an editor in Dublin, you know, we didn't really go big on Donald Trump because it was wall to wall national tragedy. I think we should, you know, have a look back into Donald Trump and what's been happening over the last week or so. And I was told by someone who would pride themselves on good news judgment, oh, don't worry, that'll go nowhere. That's going nowhere.
- [07:15]
Adam
Well, yeah, because I mean, the vibe at the time was that he was the comedy candidate.
- [07:19]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah. You know, I had been at cpac, which is a Conservative Political Action conference annual here in Washington, D.C. technically in Maryland, just a little outside of D.C. and the 2015 CPAC, which was in February, I believe, maybe early March. This was a big deal because this was considered to be the part where all of these big candidates would show up and be on the stage in front of conservative activists and volunteers and opinion makers. This was the first salvo in the 2016 Republican presidential nomination fight. And the big attention getter was Jeb Bush and whether he would be well received there. And the Jeb Bush people Actually packed the hall with his supporters in order to make him have a happier reception, a warmer reception. Rand Paul, that was more his crowd there. So I think there were a lot of people expecting him to do well there because the CPAC at the time had a libertarian kind of event. It was younger, was more kind of iconoclastic. Scott Walker, there was a lot of attention paid to him as the Wisconsin governor who had had a really good event in Iowa a few weeks earlier. And how would he do in one of these big set piece speeches? There wasn't a lot of talk about Donald Trump. He was there. He had an afternoon speaking engagement that a lot of people didn't go to. I remember being in the hallways of CPAC in this big convention center and watching Donald Trump walk by and he had an entourage of people around him, these big kind of burly looking bodyguards. And he kind of moved through the crowd, but no one really gave him much attention. They kind of viewed him as a joke and a sideshow. He'd always threatened about running for president, but he never really did so. Even when he threw his hat in the ring in that July with the escalator speech, most people kind of shrugged it off. And what I had said at the time about why I didn't think he could get the nomination was if you looked at not just the polls, which actually did okay among a crowded field in the polls early on, but his negatives, his negative ratings among Republican voters was over 50%. It was remarkably higher than anyone else in the Republican field. And my take was that someone who's that unpopular, net negative, unpopular among Republican voters, you know, they don't do well. They're never going to make any headway. You know, people had already made up his mind. He didn't have his high ceiling. And the reality, of course, as we'll discuss, is that he changed opinions and tapped into people who were not responding to polls about what they thought of Republican presidential candidates.
- [09:58]
Catriona Perry
The big thing he had going for him though, that time was his name recognition and his fame. Like you're talking about that CPAC in 2015. I was there as well. And the other person who was like a God walking around was Ben Carson.
- [10:11]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah.
- [10:11]
Catriona Perry
Like you couldn't get near to him. I remember running down a car.
- [10:14]
Adam
He was a neurosurgeon.
- [10:15]
Catriona Perry
Yeah. You know, really, really famous and highly thought of doctor, had separated conjoined twins, all kinds of things. And he was really the hot property. But very few people would have known him beyond medical journals and so on. Whereas when Donald Trump in June. Everyone knew instantly who he was. He didn't have to explain himself, he didn't have to explain his background, what he stood for. And in politics, as we know, that's more than half the battle. Right? It's getting people to know who you are and what your name is.
- [10:48]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah, Ben Carson was funny in that CPAC too, because I had heard a lot of the buzz around him and he had fanatical followers. People who, like Donald Trump's supporters, wanted someone who wasn't a politician, who were fed up with the system and wanted someone from the outside. And so there people handing out pamphlets. And he had a really bad draw for speaking time. I think it was Thursday morning, like 9am A really tough time for him, but it was a packed room. I went into there thinking this guy must be some sort of lights out public speaker, someone who's going to electrify the crowd. And then he comes out and he's kind of hunched over and kind of mumbling and just kind of talking and wandering around on the stage. I'm like, is it just early? Is he not in his game? But, you know, we found out later he's not the most compelling, engaging public speaker. But it was who he was, his background and his outside the beltway, outside of Washington politics message that resonated, at least for a while, and in a way that Donald Trump clearly tapped into successfully later on.
- [11:53]
Adam
And we should talk about his backstory because, I mean, he was famous from the Apprentice, which is a much huger show in America at the time than the British version was. I mean, he was not the equivalent of Alan Sugar in the national consciousness. He was way huger. And also the Trump brand was in lots of places and had been around for a long, long time. And also Katrina, he had flirted with politics many, many times before, which everyone sort of forgets.
- [12:24]
Catriona Perry
Yeah, that's it. I mean, you would have been hard pressed then to find too many people who didn't know who Donald Trump was by virtue of everything that you've des there, Adam, and just his name being on the side of buildings, you know, in New York, in Chicago and in Vegas and so many other places. But actually, he had first talked about running for the presidency back in the 1980s, I think, you know, when he was very much recasting New York City, very involved in getting planning permissions for really big projects, developing parts of the city that were run down. Not without controversy. I mean, how long have we got? If we go into all the, the kind of development and planning controversy that he was involved with. He talked about it again around the year 2000 or so, I think. And then, you know, there was a series of incidents, let's say, in 2011, which we can talk about, which led to him potentially wanting to get involved in 2012. And, you know, a lot of people in his inner circle have talked in books and interviews since about a very famous incident at the White House Correspondents association dinner in 2011, when then President Barack Obama basically roasted him from the stage. And that he was so annoyed about that that seemingly he told his inner circle, you know, I'll show him. I'll show them, I'm going to be president now. He didn't run in 2012. It was a bit too tight really, at that point. And, you know, Donald Trump has denied that that was the moment that spurred him on to run for president. But, you know, it was in his consciousness.
- [14:06]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah, but as you point out, he had been thinking about for a long time being involved in American politics and running for president for quite some time. And I think, you know, you can't underscore, you can't understate the cultural cachet that he had for so long. I mean, you Talked about the 1980s and the art of the Deal, the best selling book that came out that kind of positioned him as this consummate dealmaker. I mean, he was a fixture in the New York tabloids all the time with his various, you know, wives or girlfriends. In the 90s, he hit on some hard times. His star definitely dimmed. It felt like almost like he was kind of an afterthought by, you know, the early 2000s. And then the Apprentice came along. And that really did reshape his brand, elevate him in a way that he hadn't been since the 1980s. I mean, I watched the Apprentice. I watched the first season of the Apprentice. Every episode, my wife and I would sit down there and, you know, it was compelling tv. It was fascinating. It was, you know, human conflict and drama and strategies. And there Trump was in the boardroom at the end of the show, presiding over it, making these hard decisions and firing people. You know, he'd swoop in on his helicopter at the beginning to give the instructions to all the contestants. It really made the Donald Trump as a brand that we saw him run on during his presidential campaign as a decisive man.
- [15:30]
Catriona Perry
And there was a lifestyle that was portrayed in that program like you're talking about the helicopter, but it was in Trump Tower. Everything was golden. You know, he just was this Self styled, wealthy, successful individual with this glamorous, golden lifestyle. And I think part of the attraction that he leaned on then in the campaign was, you know, this is what the American dream can get you kind of thing. You can be this successful. Look what I have. And that was compelling. And I mean, he made stars and celebrities out of so many people as well, didn't he, who appeared on that show. The kind of regular Joe version and the celebrity version as well. He reactivated people's career, some of whom.
- [16:11]
Anthony Zuercher
Ended up in his administration. Omarosa, who was kind of a complicated character in that first season, ended up being a senior advisor to him. You talk about the lifestyle and the helicopter and everything. One of the things I remember vividly after that July campaign announcement, I guess it was August, would have been the Iowa State Fair where Donald Trump was there. And they had this big poster that said the Field of Dreams, that had all of these Republican candidates kind of walking out of the cornfield, a reference to that 1980s film. And Donald Trump was off to one side, kind of as just one of this incredibly gifted, talented Republican presidential field that was competing. And it was Donald Trump who dominated the Iowa State Fair. And the way he did it wasn't by standing on a hay bale like politicians had in the past and giving their 5, 10 minute stump speech. I don't even think Donald Trump gave a stump speech. What he did was he came to a landing field that wasn't far from the Iowa State Fairgrounds, brought his helicopter in and gave Iowa State Fair goers helicopter rides around. And I was there when he was giving the helicopter rides. I was covering Hillary Clinton, who was doing the more traditional campaign events, eating the pork on a stick and visiting the various fried food things. And while she was doing that, Donald Trump was whizzing around on his helicopter, seemingly above everyone else. And I may have got that metaphor for his campaign was really striking.
- [17:41]
Catriona Perry
Those rides.
- [17:42]
Anthony Zuercher
No, those were free. They were free, yeah. I mean, he didn't take that many people up. It was all about, you know, the look of it and the kind of message it sends here. I'm so wealthy, I have my own helicopter and I'm going to share it with the people. But that was one of the moments after the Golden Escalator where I thought, this guy, one has a flair, a campaign flare. He's a gifted showman and he's turning that for political benefit. And then seeing the way average Iowans connect, I remember there was a woman sitting on the side of the road, like on the way to where the helicopter was. And she was just out there with a handmade sign saying, God bless you, Donald Trump, just sitting there, hoping that maybe he'd go by or just showing to the people going by. I mean, that really tapped into. It was really clear he was tapping into something that was bigger than traditional American politics.
- [18:32]
Catriona Perry
And for me, that moment was a little bit after that, like, late August, September, early September, I think there was a big rally here in D.C. on the steps of the Capitol against the Iranian nuclear deal. If we remember back to that, Ted Cruz actually had organized it. And Donald Trump was added to the kind of run of speech kind of late in the day. But there was a huge crowd, and that was in Washington, D.C. you know, everyone rallying against this deal and the kind of Tea Party side of the Republican Party on the bill. And Donald Trump came in and he spoke and, you know, with his usual bombast, talking about all those great speaking lines that he said on that day in the escalator and still uses to this day about the wall and immigrants and Mexicans and so on. But the crowd was adoring it well.
- [19:20]
Adam
And going back to the roast that President Obama did in 2011 at that dinner for all the journalists, the White House correspondents dinner, I mean, that didn't just come out of nowhere, did it? That wasn't Obama just picking on him randomly as a funny person. It's because those two had had proper beef going back. Katrina Trump had accused Obama of not being American and therefore not legitimately president.
- [19:42]
Catriona Perry
Yeah. And that was really the, I suppose, subject matter of many of the gags and the jibes in that speech that President Obama gave that night was about birtherism, which is what the theory was called, where President Donald Trump was claiming that Barack Obama had not been born in the U.S. and of course, you have to be born in the US to be eligible for president. So he claimed to have all kinds of evidence that Barack, or as he liked to call him, Barack Hussein Obama, you know, had no legal right to be president and so on, which led toI mean, this went on for a very long time, but it ultimately led to then President Obama getting the long form of his birth cert from Hawaii, where he had been born from the authorities there, and putting that into the public domain to kind of put an end to all of this chat that perhaps he wasn't born in the US and was therefore not entitled to be president. And I mean, the gags that night, I actually just watched it back like it was, you know, Barack Obama has Comic timing, doesn't he? I mean, his speechwriters, I know quite a few of them are very talented individuals, but it was the timing with which the gags were delivered as well, you know, and saying that now that they'd been able to put the location of his birth to bed, so to speak, that that left Donald Trump time to get on with important things and other conspiracy theories.
- [21:11]
Donald Trump
He's taken some flack lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald Trump. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?
- [21:44]
Catriona Perry
Just the room was erupting in laughter at. At these kind of jokes. And then he, Barack Obama, prescient as he was, talked then about Donald Trump running for president, and showed an image on the screen of what the White House under President Trump would look like, which had a big Trump up in neon lights on the front of the building and, you know, girls wearing bikinis hanging out in the fountain and all of this kind of thing. And when you look to the White House now, I mean, we've basically had an infomercial on the lawn when Elon Musk went in with his Teslas, didn't we? We have him knocking down the East Wing to build a giant ballroom. So some of Barack Obama's gangs were on the money.
- [22:27]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah. And the birtherism thing, I mean, that was one of the ways Donald Trump was able to capitalize on kind of anti Obama. I mean, you could say animosity, racism from. I mean, he tapped into this well of resentment about Obama being different among conservatives in a way that other Republicans didn't. Another way that Donald Trump set himself apart from the Republican establishment because he was willing to go there and kind of give voice to all of the anger and angst among certain parts of the Republican base about someone like Barack Obama becoming president. And it's fun. He rode that wave and benefited from it from a visibility standpoint in 2011 and 2012, even with Obama jabbing him for it. And then Fast forward to 2016, and he was starting to get some flack for his past support of birtherism. And I remember being at an event at the old post office here in Washington, D.C. which Donald Trump at the time was turning into a Trump hotel. And he had all the media come and gather, and we were all in there, and he said, Barack Obama was born in the United States, full stop. And let's get onto other things. And then he accused Hillary Clinton of the Clinton campaign, of the one that was fostering the birtherism speculation. And he said he was one who helped encourage Obama to put it to bed. So he pivoted and turned in classic Donald Trump style. Here he is 2011 and 2012, saying all these kind of things about Barack Obama and not being a real American and tapping into this kind of nativist and resentful sort of strain within the Republican Party. And then five years later, it's like, oh, no big deal. It was actually the Democrats who did it. And I was just trying to help Obama.
- [24:15]
Catriona Perry
Yeah, exactly. And the other wild thing about that night, of course, is as Barack Obama was standing up on that stage in the hotel here in dc, he was also authorizing the killing of Osama bin Laden. So, which all came out afterwards. So the first part of the news cycle on the Sunday morning was Obama roast Trump. And then we got all the information about killing Osama bin Laden, which then flipped. So Trump kind of dropped out of the news cycle in a way there.
- [24:44]
Adam
Right. Let's end this first episode of this two part series where we began, which is the 16th of June 2015, and we refer to it a few times, the golden escalator moment where Trump actually announces his, his entry into the race officially. And Katrina, there are so many things, so many sort of seeds sown that day that have flowered since. And I'm just thinking just the means by which he staged the event. We're talking about the gold escalator, the image, the, the, the theater is lodged in our brains.
- [25:16]
Catriona Perry
Yeah. And the thing you have to give Donald Trump credit for is that he is a master in marketing and advertising, in commanding the attention of the media, of, you know, the general population a lot of the time. But what he said on that day really are many of the policies that he has carried right through to this second term. You know, talking about immigrants, talking about the kind of people who came to the US being murderers and rapists, talking about building the wall. I mean, that's when he first spoke about that and making Mexico pay for it. Now we don't hear so much about the wall anymore because they're using other methods to keep people from coming into the US But a lot of what he first spoke about colored the entirety of that campaign. And the two that, right.
- [26:04]
Anthony Zuercher
They're not sending their best, I think was the line and then said, you know, Mexico sending rapists and murderers. And that's something we hear now talking about how Venezuela, he accuses them of opening up their insane asylums and their prisons and sending all of them to the United States. And talking specifically about the Somali immigrants, for instance, saying they aren't, you know, good people, they're garbage. We don't want them here kind of painting with a broad brush about like all of those. And it's a view he has that immigration is detrimental to the United States, particularly immigration from different countries, Third World, and his estimation, countries use even more colorful language reportedly on what kind of countries are sending these people and why they shouldn't be here. And so, yeah, the themes were there. The Build the Wall theme, the Make America Great Again slogan was on a placard, a billboard at that event. And all of those things were, you know, themes that he ran on and themes that he capitalized on because he identified, you know, I talked about his views on Obama and the birtherism, but it wasn't just that he identified things that the Republican base believed in that most mainstream Republican candidates were out of step on. Immigration was one of the biggest ones. Trade was another one. Education was a third. Where, you know, all of these, in his view, mealy mouth Republican establishment figures like Jeb Bush were just out of step. And he was, you know, he had the temperature of the base and was able to connect with them the way the other candidates weren't.
- [27:41]
Catriona Perry
I think, as well, because he had been a Democrat for most of his life, he also saw that the Democratic Party had moved away from, you know, those real meat and potato issues or pocketbook issues, as they're called here, that, you know, the party had become more concerned with culture issues with, you know, as people put it to me on the campaign trail, I don't really care what bathroom I can use or not use. I want to know, can I buy meat to give to my kids? You know, And I think he saw that the Democratic Party was kind of moving to a different place and that there was a really big gap there for him to move through and to pull those kind of independent voters, the flip flop sort of voters back into his camp.
- [28:23]
Adam
And of course, the words on the banners around him, the slogan is Make America Great Again. Those four words were there.
- [28:33]
Anthony Zuercher
Yeah, the four words were there. They were, you know, nostalgia driven. The idea that, you know, America was once great and it's not anymore that we have to get back to something, you know, a more golden time. That was. Nostalgia is a very powerful political force and one that Donald Trump did a really effective job of tapping into even the make America great again slogan, I think that came from Reagan. You know, he used it in his, in his campaigns in the 80s. But you know, Donald Trump also, you know, has very, you know, very grounded in the 70s and 80s as far as what his political outlook is. And so he taps into that fairly regularly.
- [29:15]
Adam
And what comes next we will discuss in the next episode of this series of All Newscast. Anthony, thank you very much.
- [29:21]
Anthony Zuercher
My pleasure.
- [29:21]
Adam
And Katrina, thanks for searching your memory banks for us.
- [29:25]
Catriona Perry
Thank you.
- [29:33]
Adam
And that's all for part one of this episode of Old Newscast. The second part will be landing in your feeds very soon. Bye bye.
- [29:40]
Catriona Perry
Newscast, Newscast from the BBC, from one.
- [29:44]
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- [30:29]
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