Team of Five, by Kate Brower: on Principles & Values
Bill Clinton:
2015: Encouraged Trump to run for President
Bill Clinton may have been the reason Trump ran in the first place. He called Trump in late May 2015, a month after his wife announced her candidacy, and reportedly told him that he thought his message was resonating with frustrated conservatives who
felt overlooked by the Republican establishment. He was intrigued when Trump confided in him that he was considering running for president. Clinton told Trump that he was tapping into a big part of the Republican electorate that was tired of career
politicians. ("It's a complicated story," Trump told me when I asked him directly whether Clinton encouraged him to run for president.) Trump announced his candidacy weeks later.When I asked Trump if he could see himself becoming friendly with a
former president after leaving office or rekindling a friendship with Bill Clinton, as onetime rivals and former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had done, he said, "It's possible. Anything's possible."
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Donald Trump:
Has not spoken with Obama or Clinton since his inauguration
Former presidents used to help each other in times of crisis. Trump has made that impossible. He has not spoken with Obama or Clinton since his inauguration more than three years ago (aside from a brief hello and goodbye to Obama during George H.W.
Bush's funeral in December 2018). In fact, the only substantive conversation he and Obama have had was during the customary visit Trump made to the Oval Office two days after he won the 2016 election. He has been criticizing him ever since.
"I didn't like the job that he and Biden did," Trump said at a Fox News Town Hall in March. "I didn't like the position they put us in." Seeking to justify his administration's bungled response to the novel-coronavirus outbreak in
America, he attacked Obama, tweeting that his handling of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu was "a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem."
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Donald Trump:
Presidential library to be located in New York or Florida
Have the years Trump has spent in that awe-inspiring office given him empathy for what his predecessors went through? "No," he replies flatly. When I ask him whether he would go to Obama's presidential-library opening, the question sounds preposterous.
Presidents have always attended one another's library openings as a sign of respect. But: "I don't know," he answers. "He probably wouldn't invite me." Trump mulls it over for a moment and says, "Why should he?"On the subject of the location of his
own presidential library, he uses our interview to distinguish himself from his predecessors--and to take a swipe at them. "That's a very interesting question. I have thought about it very little. I'm more thinking about all of the things that we're
doing, which are a lot," he says, jutting his chin out proudly. "New York seems to be the most natural place, but Florida is another one. I know location like nobody," says the former real estate developer. "We'll pick somewhere very appropriate."
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Donald Trump:
Admired Pres. Andrew Jackson; undid Pres.Obama's Oval Office
Trump has disparaged all the former living presidents and has not said much about the dead ones. The only president he seems to truly admire is the 19th-century populist Andrew Jackson. He has a portrait of the slave-owning general who fought
Native Americans hanging prominently in the Oval Office. Unlike most presidents, who are too busy with policy to make decorating decisions,
Trump picked out his wallpaper and rugs. He enjoyed moving Winston Churchill's bust back to the Oval, after Obama had it placed in a hallway outside the Treaty Room on the second floor of the residence.
Everything Obama had done, from letting the rug in the West Wing corridors get dingy to moving that bust, was anathema to Trump.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
George Bush Sr.:
2005: Time's "Partners of the Year" with Jimmy Carter
The former presidents supported George W. Bush after 9/11, and how George H.W. Bush and Clinton traveled the world together, seeking help after the tsunami in Asia, and in their leadership roles raising money after Hurricane Katrina. They became
near-constant companions, doing interviews together and even traveling with George W. as part of the American delegation to Pope John Paul II's 2005 funeral in Rome. "Come on," Bush senior implored Clinton. "It will be better with you along."
Nicknamed "the A-team" in the press, they became like father and son. Time made them Partners of the Year in its 2005 Person of the Year issue. After seeing how powerful the Clinton-Bush team was,
President Obama dispatched George W. Bush and Clinton to Haiti to raise awareness and funds after the devastating 2010 earthquake. This kind of teamwork and camaraderie now seems unthinkable and almost quaint.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
George Bush Sr.:
Former presidents shouldn't publicly criticize successors
George H.W. Bush did not think that a former president should publicly criticize his successor, believing that it would do lasting damage to the presidency if every sitting president had to be looking over his shoulder. The last former president to see
Bush before he died on November 30, 2018, was not George W. Bush: three days before he died, Bush, 94, welcomed Obama into his Houston home. That day, November 27, Obama saw the man he called "my buddy 41" for the last time. Bush had been in and out of
hospitals and was still mourning the death of his beloved wife of 73 years, Barbara, less than eight months before. He had good days and bad days now, but Obama was someone he wanted to see, even on a particularly bad day.When Obama was president,
Bush returned to the White House several times, including two visits to the Oval Office and the unveiling of the official White House portraits of his son and daughter-in-law in May 2012.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Hillary Clinton:
Trump made $100K donation to Clinton Foundation (pre-2016)
The election of 2016 was the most rancorous in modern history. But before things devolved, Trump had a mutually advantageous relationship with the Clintons. He got affirmation from the presence of the former president and sitting U.S. senator at his
2005 wedding to Melania, where Hillary Clinton sat in the front row during the ceremony. "I had a very good relationship with both Clintons, actually. They came to my wedding to the first lady, they were there," he told me, which of course I knew
because I'd seen the much-discussed surreal photograph that showed the Clintons and the newly married Trumps beaming. The Clintons, in turn, got money. Trump made a $100,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation and other donations to Hillary's Senate
campaigns, before the two embarked on their jaw-dropping, no-holds-barred political feud.Remarkably, Bill Clinton still had a locker at the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, during the heat of the campaign in the summer of 2016.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Jimmy Carter:
2005: Time's "Partners of the Year" with George H.W. Bush
The former presidents supported George W. Bush after 9/11, and how George H.W. Bush and Clinton traveled the world together, seeking help after the tsunami in Asia, and in their leadership roles raising money after Hurricane Katrina. They became
near-constant companions, doing interviews together and even traveling with George W. as part of the American delegation to Pope John Paul II's 2005 funeral in Rome. "Come on," Bush senior implored Clinton. "It will be better with you along."
Nicknamed "the A-team" in the press, they became like father and son. Time made them Partners of the Year in its 2005 Person of the Year issue. After seeing how powerful the Clinton-Bush team was,
President Obama dispatched George W. Bush and Clinton to Haiti to raise awareness and funds after the devastating 2010 earthquake. This kind of teamwork and camaraderie now seems unthinkable and almost quaint.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Jimmy Carter:
Asked Trump for $5 million for Carter Presidential Library
In The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that Carter had come to his office to ask for a $5 million donation to his presidential library. He was surprised that Carter had "the nerve, the guts," to ask for something so "extraordinary." Needless to say,
Trump did not give it to him. "He bragged about it," Carter said. "That was one of his major selling points: 'I turned down Jimmy Carter.' "But Carter was one of the first people to call Trump to congratulate him on his election victory in 2016
(a gesture Trump clearly appreciated).
In 2016, the Carters voted for Bernie Sanders and not Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and they do not feel much warmth toward the Obamas.
They were clearly disappointed that the Obamas had not sought their advice on leading effective postpresidential lives, and Carter felt that Obama did not pay him the proper respect when he was president.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
John F. Kennedy:
Called on Nixon and Eisenhower for advice in crises
Former presidents used to help each other in times of crisis. Trump has made that impossible. He has not spoken with Obama or Clinton since his inauguration more than three years ago (aside from a brief hello and goodbye to Obama during George H.W.
Bush's funeral in December 2018). In fact, the only substantive conversation he and Obama have had was during the customary visit Trump made to the Oval Office two days after he won the 2016 election. He has been criticizing him ever since.
Contrast that with John F. Kennedy, who called on all 3 of his living predecessors to ask for their help during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year and a half earlier, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had reached out to the man he'd just defeated,
Richard Nixon, and to his Republican predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He knew he could not afford to be too proud to ask for help. "No one knows how rough this job is until after he has been in it a few months," Kennedy confessed to Eisenhower.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Mike Pence:
Trump: Pence looks just how a vice president should look
A senior diplomat who has met with Trump several times said he has a "reptilian brain" and judges a person almost entirely by his or her appearance: "Straight out of central casting," he often says of his aides and of Vice President
Mike Pence, who, according to Trump, looks just how a vice president should look. Cabinet members privately lament Trump's refusal to embrace an endearing trait in any politician: a willingness to be self-deprecating.
Source: Team of Five, by Kate Andersen Brower
Apr 21, 2020
Page last updated: Mar 16, 2021