Enthusiasm for the job of Presidency

 

By Al Kamen, Published: April 26

Birther madness buried an intriguing part of potential presidential candidate Donald Trump’s chat with ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos last week.

In the interview, Trump, the billionaire business mogul, author and star of the dreadful but highly rated television show “Celebrity Apprentice,” said he’d called the White House a while back to offer to build an enormous ballroom there to replace the tent that’s used for state dinners and other major events.

“Listen, every time I see a function,” Trump said he told David Axelrod , then a senior adviser to President Obama, “you put up an old broken canvas tent,” probably rented from some overcharging local company.

“I will build you, free of charge, one of the great ballrooms of the world,” Trump said he told Axelrod, one that will “cost maybe $100 million” and be “attached to the White House.” (No determination on the size of the gold plaque thanking “The Donald” or where it would be affixed.)

Axelrod said, “That’s great,” Trump recalled, but “I never heard from ’em.”

Our colleague Dan Balz e-mailed Axelrod to ask about Trump’s complaint. Axelrod acknowledged the conversation and said he had told Trump, “I’d pass that along to the social secretary, which I did.”

But Axelrod told Balz that the conversation occurred after he had called Trump, not the other way around. Trump, now at the top of some polls on nominees for the GOP presidential candidate, “contacted me originally asking to be put in charge of the operation in the gulf to seal the oil leak.” That would have been in late June or so.

Well, they had been using hair to soak up some of the oil from the BP well, and Trump has plenty of that. The well had been out of control for two months by then and there was that constant image of oil spewing in the gulf, despite numerous efforts to stop it. Nobody seemed to know what to do.

“I know how to run big projects,” Trump told Axelrod. “Why don’t you put me in charge?”

“I told him I thought we were close to solving it and would get back to him,” Axelrod recalled. “Two weeks later, we had the leak sealed, and I called him back to thank him for his offer.”

“It was in that conversation,” Axelrod continued, that Trump proposed building the ballroom.

Remember how President John F. Kennedy, looking for someone with management skills, picked former Ford executive and “Whiz Kid” Robert McNamara to run the Pentagon? Didn’t work out so well.

We e-mailed The Donald to see whether he wanted to respond to Axelrod’s comments. No word back.”