A bit over four years ago, I was with Donald Trump when, perhaps for the first time, he was publicly booed in the context of the presidency. Given the catcalls he received last Sunday at the World Series and now at the Ultimate Fighting Championships last night, it was a telling moment that points toward how the commander-in-chief takes in criticism–and facts.
In September 2015, while Trump had emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, his campaign remained quixotic. While writing a story on his 35-year fixation on his net worth and how it shapes his self-image, I spent nearly two hours talking with him in his office, got a personal tour of his Trump Tower apartment and received an unsolicited telephone follow-up from him. On Thursday, September 24, I stopped by Trump Tower, impromptu, to check in on a photo shoot we were doing with Trump.
Someone else happened to be popping by that day: Pope Francis. As I noted four years ago, other than in some version of a joke about two people who walk into a bar, the pope and Donald Trump had probably never appeared in the same sentence, much less the same block. But providence intervened when the pontiff, on his first visit to America, decided to hold evening prayers at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral—and the papal planners decided that the formal procession down Fifth Avenue, led by the Popemobile, would commence below Trump Tower, six blocks north.
Continue here to read this entertaining editorial from Forbes, published on Sunday.