Whom does the country have to blame for Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics? The Republican Party, for cultivating conservative populism to score short-term victories against Barack Obama? The media, for covering Trump’s every utterance at the expense of all other candidates? Celebrity culture, for thrusting him into the public consciousness? Capitalism, for making him rich? Tall buildings, of which Trump has many?
Wrong, says The Washington Post, which revealed the supposed truth on Wednesday: it was former president and candidate spouse Bill Clinton all along.
According to several Trump sources (and one Clinton source) who spoke to the Post, the two men spoke over the phone in late May, shortly before Trump announced his run in June. During the call, the Trump sources said,
Clinton “encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party” and “analyzed Trump’s prospects and his desire to rouse the G.O.P. base.”That conversation, said the anonymous Trump sources, certainly didn’t discourage the billionaire to run: while Clinton never outright told Trump to enter the race, he reportedly told Trump that he was “striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right,” and his tone was supposedly “encouraging.”
(This is something a political genius would tell someone with a desire to run for president, especially if that person was a known self-promoter, capable of sucking the air out of a room full of his opponents—and especially if the genius’s wife happened to be running in the party against that known self-promoter.)
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/bill-clinton-called-donald-trump-before-presidential-run-2016
