When I met Donald Trump 10 years ago, he wasn’t crazy – he was charming

Exactly 10 years have passed since first I came face to face with Donald J. Trump. Meeting outside the golden doors of his elevators in Trump Tower just nine months before he descended his golden escalator, the future president could not have been more charming.

“It’s a great honour,” he said, happily shaking my out-stretched hand. Polite almost to the point of obsequiousness, it was as if he regarded the British Broadcasting Corporation, my then employer, as an offshoot of the British monarchy.

Nick Bryant with Donald Trump ahead of their 2014 interview in New York.Credit: BBC

As he led me through to his boardroom – a more elegant space than the wood-panelled firing chamber on The Apprentice – he was lucid, intelligent and unexpectedly humble. These were the days when he enjoyed the company of journalists. Not yet had we become “enemies of the people” or “fake news”. Only when the camera went on did Trump more resemble the figure we know today. More boastful. More outlandish. More conspiratorial – he launched into a riff about wind farms.

As he reminisced about his decaying casino empire in Atlantic City – its demise, in the hands of new owners, was the topic under discussion – he spoke wistfully of lost greatness, previewing the nostalgic nationalism that would drive his presidential campaign.

So what version of Trump would we see in the White House, I naively pondered after his shock victory against Hillary Clinton. The sensible or the swaggering? The lucid or the loudmouthed? Within minutes of him taking the oath of office came the answer, as he ranted about “American carnage” and then fumed about media coverage of his meagre inaugural crowd size.

From the off, Trump sounded more like a potentate than a president, and so it went on. The next time I threw a question at him in Trump Tower was in August 2017, after neo-Nazis had clashed with anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. To the slack-jawed disbelief of the press corps, he opined how there were “very fine people” on both sides.

There was an extent to which the presidency merely magnified existing character flaws. So alien to Trump was the notion of self-sacrifice that America’s war dead were “losers” and “suckers”. Even when he won the presidency, he could not stomach electoral truths – in this instance, the fact Clinton had accrued 3 million more votes. Thus, he became the first victorious president to complain about his victory. A sore winner.

But to cover his presidency was also to watch his mental decline. I cannot be sure, but I very much doubt that the Trump I met in 2014 would have suggested injecting bleach to fend off a deadly virus. Yet that was his wacky quackery when COVID struck six years later. Nor could staring directly at the sun without glasses during a solar eclipse or suggesting hurricanes could be blasted with nuclear weapons be described as acts of a self-styled “very stable genius”. The awesome power of the presidency fuelled his megalomania, and his megalomania fuelled the madness of King Donald.

Defeat in the 2020 election only made him more dangerous and deranged. Not only did an American president incite an American insurrection to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump, the January 6 congressional inquiry was told, even expressed support for hanging Mike Pence, after his MAGA militia bayed for the vice-president’s lynching.

That should have been the end of Trump. But six weeks later he was feted at a conservative conference in Florida that felt more like a cargo cult. A gold statue of Trump was even put on display, the kind of idolatry that fuelled his messiah complex. After the failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump went mega-messiah. His narrow escape was proof that the Almighty, like Hulk Hogan, is in his corner.

Journalists, I realise, are generally not qualified to engage in psychiatric portraiture. But with Trump, his narcissism is self-evident. So, too, is the mounting signs of cognitive decline. Just witness his bizarre digressions, such as wondering out loud whether a shark or an electric engine poses the greater hazard in a mid-sea emergency or his riffs on “the late great Hannibal Lecter”.

Comparing his rally rants to speeches from 2017, experts canvassed by the health publication STAT observed he mixed up words more, used shorter sentences and was more digressive. What Trump has labelled “the weave”, his ability to embroider various random strands of thought, experts cite as evidence of speech patterns known as tangentiality, another sign of mental degradation.

Trump is not yet an American Caligula, the Roman emperor who, myth would have it, appointed his stallion as a senator. But his utterances are becoming weirder. Had Joe Biden’s decline not acted as a masking agent, the former president’s infirmity would have received greater attention.

Even now that the 78-year-old is the old man in the race, the temptation is to write off his wackiness as the same old crazy, when actually we’ve reached the point of next-level crazy. Now he is not only banging on about wind farms but linking them to the soaring price of bacon. No amount of sanewashing can obscure the fact that the elevators in Trump Tower no longer appear to go to the top floor.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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