Veteran ABC News White House correspondent and author of a Trump tell-all, Jonathan Karl, has hit us all with more than a few bombshell revelations from his book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. However, this one might be my favorite one yet.
Karl, who was touring to promote his new Trump tell-all, was a guest on CNN’s New Day with host John Berman, where he humored him with a “bizarre” story of the time Trump compared Karl to his youngest son Barron who, according to Trump himself apparently, is rather reluctant to tell his dad he loves him.
So much has come from Karl’s book, that it’s easy to lose track of some of the smaller, yet still eye-popping stories the ABC White House correspondent covers in it. So, towards the end of their interview, Berman asked Karl about one particular, rather strange anecdote Karl covers in his tell-all that’s seemingly been overlooked by the mainstream media.
“You write about a meeting that you had in the Oval Office,” Berman stated, noting that Karl was the head of the White House Correspondents Association at the time, and the organization had a rather tense relationship with the then-president.
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“And you went in with Zeke Miller, another reporter, right, to talk to then-President Trump because he was sort of musing about the possibility of going to the White House Correspondents Dinner,” Berman went on. “And you write about this conversation.”
“The former president says ‘Jonathan is very cool.’ He told Zeke Miller, ‘He’s like my son.’ Trump then proceeded to reenact a conversation with his son. ‘Do you love your dad? I don’t know. But he does. But he’s too cool, the kids,'” Berman says, reading directly from Karl’s book.
“Donald Trump, it seemed, was comparing me to his teenage son, Barron, and he was comparing my lack of excitement about his possible appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, with his son’s reluctance to say out loud that he loved him,” the CNN host concludes.
“I mean, this was, there have been many surreal moments,” Karl responded. ” I can’t say if it was the most, but it was certainly in the top, top five.”
Karl goes on to set the stage for Berman and viewers, saying he and Miller were called to the Oval Office at “the beginning of March. It’s a week before the world shuts down, United States shuts down because of the pandemic.”
The topic at hand was the White House Correspondents Dinner. Apparently, then-President Trump was weighing the possibility of not skipping the event as he had the previous years.
“I hadn’t even invited the guy,” Karl explained. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to invite him. He had called the press the enemy of the people.”
“I wasn’t even going to actually ask him. I just said ‘We respect your decision. If you want to come, you’re welcome to come. If you don’t want to come, that’s fine,'” Karl went on to recall. “And that’s that that that whole bizarre exchange where he’s talking about his son not wanting to say he loves him.”
“It is. It is odd, to say the least. And by the way, has an hour to spend with you with the pandemic is breaking out all over the world,” Berman responded.
Will Barron be the only Trump child to come out of that family who doesn’t drink the Kool-Aide? I guess we’ll see.
You can watch the clip here:
Featured image via screen capture
