Donald Trump has made antipathy to China a cornerstone of his marketing campaign to return to the White Home subsequent yr, however in keeping with a brand new e-book, he allowed one other obsession, over ladies and intercourse, to derail a White Home assembly with a senior US tech government meant to handle Chinese language threats to US telecoms networks.
“You don’t say no to the president,” Randall Stephenson, then chief government of AT&T, tells the New York Instances reporter David Sanger a few summons to the Oval Workplace in 2019.
Trump had seen Stephenson speaking on tv about China and wished to debate the matter additional, Sanger writes. However within the occasion, Stephenson says, Trump ranted about ladies and particularly Stormy Daniels, the grownup movie star who claimed an affair and whose hush-money funds from Trump are set to be the topic of his first legal trial, beginning in New York on Monday.
“Trump burned up the primary 45 minutes of the assembly by riffing on how males received into hassle,” Sanger writes in his e-book, New Chilly Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Wrestle to Defend the West.
“It was all about ladies and personal planes, he claimed. Then he went into an extended diatribe about Stormy Daniels, the previous porn star who claimed she had had an affair with him. It was ‘all a part of the identical stand-up comedy act’, Stephenson later recalled … and ‘we had been left with quarter-hour to speak about Chinese language infrastructure.’”
New Chilly Wars might be revealed within the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a duplicate.
Stephenson says that when Trump lastly received spherical to discussing China, he “appeared fixated on the query of whether or not the Chinese language, by shifting their gear into western markets, might pay attention to telephone calls or learn emails – the ‘again door’ downside that intelligence businesses typically briefed Trump about”.
Stephenson was much less involved, given Chinese language proficiency in hacking that made such fears largely irrelevant, and tried to clarify larger dangers: that China, by corporations equivalent to Huawei or ZTE, may be capable of “cripple the US communications grid”, and that Beijing may acquire international dominance by funding in Europe, Africa and Latin America.
However Stephenson “might see that the president’s thoughts was elsewhere. ‘That is actually boring,’ Trump lastly mentioned.”
An entrance by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, gave Stephenson his excuse to alter the topic then depart.
Stephenson had one other, extra bruising brush with Trump – which additionally contained a hyperlink to the Stormy Daniels affair.
The yr earlier than the abortive China assembly, the AT&T chief instructed staff the corporate had seen its status broken by a call to spend $600,000 on hiring Michael Cohen as a political advisor.
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“Our firm has been within the headlines for all of the flawed causes these previous couple of days and our status has been broken,” Stephenson wrote in a memo. “There is no such thing as a different strategy to say it: AT&T hiring Michael Cohen … was a giant mistake.”
Cohen was employed to advise on regulatory issues. However his enchantment as a advisor arose from his work as Trump’s lawyer and fixer, earlier than and after Trump entered politics.
Cohen orchestrated and was reimbursed for the hush-money funds to Daniels that produced the 34 legal expenses in opposition to Trump now set to be tried in Manhattan. Jailed for fraud and mendacity to Congress, Cohen turned on Trump. He is because of be a key authorities witness.
Trump denies wrongdoing and claims political persecution – as he does relating to 54 legal expenses in three different circumstances and multimillion-dollar penalties in two civil fits.
