Trump will be different next time as President, says Black

Former media tycoon Conrad Black says there’s a reason Donald Trump could be a better US president second time around.

Former US President Donald Trump give a thumbs up as he walks off after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas in July. Picture: Andy Jacobsohn/AFP

Conrad Black, the former media tycoon, has claimed that Donald Trump will not be a “jackass” in the White House as he predicted that the former president would secure the Republican Party nomination.

Black, a former owner of the Telegraph group of newspapers before he was imprisoned in 2007 for fraud, said that he was still in contact with Trump, the US president from 2017 to 2021.

He told the Cliveden Literary Festival that he thought Trump would be the Republican candidate for the election in 2024. “He calls me occasionally and I think he has learnt lessons which are disagreeable to him at times,” he said.

Conrad Black served prison time for fraud in a case involving his newspaper company, Hollinger International. Picture: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

“But I think he has taken on board that the presidency of the United States has to be conducted with greater dignity than he showed.

“You can’t behave like a jackass in the White House,” he added.

Black has apparently moved closer to Trump, writing a biography of him in 2018 entitled Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other. The following year Trump gave Black an official pardon over his 2007 convictions for siphoning money from his company.

The Supreme Court overturned two of Black’s three mail fraud convictions. He served three and a half years in prison before being deported to his native Canada.

Black claimed on Sunday that he had been “spuriously convicted” and said of his experience of prison: “To take a line from Monty Python, it was something completely different.”

The Times