Donald Trump Has No Friends

In 2016 the New York Times went looking for them and found two, one of whom didn't call back. The only man who ever publicly claimed the title was Jeffrey Epstein. Trump now says he barely knew him.

Let us begin with the search party.

In 2016, when it became clear that this man might actually become President of the United States, the New York Times did what newspapers do and went looking for the people who knew him best. Not colleagues. Not employees. Friends. The ones you call when something goes wrong, or when something goes right and you want somebody to be pleased about it.

They found two candidates.

One of them returned their calls.

I want to be fair here, because two is not zero, and one returned call is not none. But most people who have reached the age of seventy have accumulated more than two possible friends, and generally when a national newspaper telephones to ask whether you are close with the man who might run the country, you ring them back, because that is an interesting phone call to receive.

The polling of the acquaintances

Reverend Al Sharpton has known him for decades, across business and politics and television, in the specific overlapping New York circles where everyone eventually meets everyone. Asked about Trump’s friendships, Sharpton said he had never met anyone who claimed to be his good friend.

Not that he had never met the friends. That he had never met anyone who said they were one.

Joe Scarborough, who at the time was as close to him as any broadcaster in America, described himself as a casual friend, which is what you call yourself when you would like to be accurate and also would like to remain employed.

Richard LeFrak, a fellow New York developer, offered the most useful description anyone has managed, which is that being friends with Trump is like being friends with a hurricane. A hurricane is a thing you can be near. It is a thing you can talk about afterward. It is not a thing that asks how your mother is doing.

And Trump himself, at a rally in New Hampshire, told a crowd of strangers that as far as he was concerned he had no friends, and then informed the strangers that they were his friends.

This is, when you think about it for even a moment, one of the sadder sentences ever produced by an American politician, and it got applause.

The one who lasted

For thirteen years he had somebody, and the somebody was Roy Cohn.

Cohn had been Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the communist hearings and was, by the general agreement of everyone who encountered him, one of the least pleasant men in the history of the New York bar. He became Trump’s lawyer and then his mentor and then the person Trump telephoned fifteen or twenty times a day to ask about this or that.

This was a real relationship. Trump testified as a character witness at Cohn’s disbarment proceedings, which is not nothing, because character witnesses are volunteers.

Then Cohn got sick. He told everyone it was liver cancer. It was AIDS, and people knew, and people talked, and eventually people talked to Trump.

Cohn’s secretary of many years, Susan Bell, described what happened next. Trump dropped him like a hot potato. She said it was like night and day.

Cohn, near the end, told a journalist that Donald pisses ice water. He died in August 1986, having not spoken to Trump in something like a year.

Trump went to the funeral.

I have read that sentence several times and it does not get less interesting. He would not take the man’s calls but he attended the service, which is the behavior of somebody who understands that a funeral is an event with photographers at it and a phone call is not.

The applicant

Here is where it becomes genuinely remarkable, and I want to lay it out slowly because the shape of it matters.

Across seventy-nine years, one person has gone on record describing himself as Donald Trump’s closest friend.

One.

It was Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein said it on tape, to the author Michael Wolff, in 2017, describing a decade in which he understood himself to be Trump’s closest friend. In the same recording he called Trump a horrible human being with delusions of grandiosity who did nasty things to his best friends and their wives. So the single applicant for the position also filed a review, and the review was poor.

Trump, for his part, said in 2002 that he had known Jeff for fifteen years and that he was a terrific guy.

He has since said there was no relationship. He has said they did not socialize together. He has said he was not a fan.

So the only man who ever claimed the job has been posthumously demoted to somebody Trump knew the way everyone in Palm Beach knew him, which leaves the current count of publicly acknowledged lifelong friendships at approximately zero, held steady across nearly eight decades.

The vacancies

There is also the matter of everyone who has left.

His personal attorney went to prison and testified against him. His campaign chairman went to prison. His chief strategist went to prison. His chief financial officer, who worked for the organization for roughly half a century, went to prison. His national security adviser pleaded guilty. His longtime adviser had a sentence commuted. His first Secretary of State reportedly called him a moron. His first chief of staff, a retired Marine general, later described him in terms unsuitable for a family newsletter.

At some point a pattern stops being a run of bad luck and becomes a hiring practice, and then it stops being a hiring practice and becomes a personality.

The one who was widely described as his actual best friend, the financier Tom Barrack, fell out with him publicly and was later indicted, which in this particular social circle appears to be less an ending than a phase.

What he does instead

He does not drink, so there is no version of him at a bar. He does not read, by the account of nearly everyone who has worked for him. He has no hobby that anyone has documented beyond golf, which he plays at courses he owns, with employees and paying members, and which he wins.

He eats in front of a television. He watches the television and then he telephones people about the television.

And there is Natalie Harp, who follows him with a portable printer and a battery pack, printing out favorable coverage and handing it to him on paper. Somebody built that job. Somebody looked at the situation and concluded that what was required was a person whose entire function is to physically deliver good news into his hands, all day, continuously, and nobody in the vicinity said this seems like a lot.

The part that is not funny

The obvious response to all of this is pity, and I would like to head that off, because pity is the wrong instrument and he did not earn it.

Nobody did this to him. There is no tragic accident in the record, no fire, no crash, no illness that took everyone away. Every single one of these vacancies was created by him, individually, on purpose, one person at a time, over sixty years, and the clearest example is a dying man who had spent thirteen years as his closest adviser and whose calls stopped being answered the week the diagnosis got out.

And it is not a private matter, which is the actual reason to write any of this down.

A person with one real friend has one person who can say, without an agenda, that this is a bad idea. Not an aide, who can be fired. Not a lawyer, who is paid. Not a crowd in New Hampshire. One person with nothing at stake, who has known you for forty years, and whose disapproval costs you something.

He does not have that. He has never had that. He got rid of the last candidate in 1986.

So when the senators laugh at him the second the door closes, and when the woman with the printer hands him another sheet of paper, what you are looking at is not a lonely man. It is a decision-making apparatus with the correction mechanism deliberately removed, sixty years ago, by the man sitting inside it.

He said it himself, in New Hampshire, to a room full of people he had never met.

They applauded.