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The True Story of Donald Trump’s First Campaign Speech—in 1987
By Michael Kruse
February 05, 2016

The shiny black French-made helicopter landed at the grassy airfield in southern New Hampshire on the morning of October 22, 1987. Out stepped Donald Trump. The 41-year-old real estate mogul from New York wore a scarlet tie and a navy blue suit and slipped into a rented limousine.

With him was the reason for his visit—a man named Mike Dunbar, an area Republican activist and a master craftsman of wooden chairs, whose daily reading of the Wall Street Journal had made him think Trump might make a good president. He had launched an effort to get Trump to run.

The limo sped seven miles up U.S. 1 to Portsmouth, to an old restaurant called Yoken’s, the site of the weekly meeting of the local Rotary Club. Awaiting Trump’s arrival was a crowd of 500, some 300 more people than the organization had members.

Outside, people waved signs. “Trump in ’88.” “Trump for President.” “Vote for an En-TRUMP-eneur.” Inside, Dunbar was stunned. “I remember looking around the room and thinking, ‘My word, they couldn’t stuff another body in here,’” he said the other day here at his chairmaking school.

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Trump began by telling the people who were there that he wouldn’t run for president in 1988, which disappointed some, especially Dunbar. Then Trump railed, with no notes, and for roughly the next half hour, about Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Washington, Wall Street, politicians, economists and “nice people” of whom he had “had enough,” he said. This country was facing “disaster” and was “being kicked around.” Other countries were “laughing at us.”

“It makes me sick,” Trump said.

“If the right man doesn’t get into office,” he warned the Rotarians, “you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country in the next four years like you’re never going to believe. And then you’ll be begging for the right man.”

Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is often derided as a seat-of-the-pants affair, driven by publicity and surrounded by a fog of improvised policy ideas. But to an extent that would shock anyone who wasn’t there, Trump’s speech in 1987 forecast exactly the worldview that would catapult him to surprise GOP front-runner status in this year’s race. His speech was nativist and isolationist, an angry, gloomy rant about America losing out in a dangerous world. His message of failure—American failure—has been remarkably constant since that moment 28 years ago, with one twist: Back then, the sitting president wasn’t Barack Obama. It was Ronald Reagan.

Over the years, Trump has been a Republican, a Democrat, an independent and a member of the Reform Party, and his positions on issues like abortion and health care have run the gamut, but there would be no mistaking the overall worldview of a President Trump. On this front, he’s been saying the same thing for decades, right down to his go-to line.

“Believe me,” he said at Yoken’s.

This week, in a phone interview, Trump himself said he remembered making the appearance and giving a speech, which he called “really a speech on success.”

Nearly 30 years later, with Trump having dominated the current election cycle since he started running for president last June, those who witnessed the speech don’t recall what he said as much as they remember how he said it.

“He was flamboyant and dynamic,” said Timothy “Ted” Connors, who worked for the Portsmouth Housing Authority.

Morton Schmidt, a veterinarian, marveled at Trump’s confidence. “He didn’t seem to waver,” Schmidt said.

Too much so, said Warren Wilder, who ran an insurance company. “I thought he was very egotistical,” he said.

“It was all about him. I, I, I,” said Peter Weeks, a former mayor of Portsmouth.

Trump was “brash,” said Addison Redfield, who operated a boarding and grooming kennel for dogs, but people paid attention. “He got a standing ovation when he came into the room. He got a standing ovation when he finished speaking.”

They didn’t know it at the time—how could they have known?—but the 500 people who crammed into Yoken’s of Portsmouth in October of 1987 were the first in a long line. They ended up getting a sneak preview. This was exactly the man Dunbar wanted to run for president. And he would. In 2016.

***

“Would you like to be the president of the United States?”

The person asking the question was Rona Barrett, an early TV celebrity reporter. The year was 1980.

“I really don’t believe I would, Rona,” said Donald Trump.

“Why,” Barrett asked, “wouldn’t you dedicate yourself to public service?”

“Because,” Trump said, “I think it’s a very mean life.”

In 1984, in the New York Times Magazine, in a cover story that served as a seminal boost to his fame, Trump said he wouldn’t want to run for office because of “false smiles” and “red tape.”

By the summer of 1987, though, Dunbar was planning his recruitment of Trump. He thought Vice President George H. W. Bush was “boring,” he told the New York Times, and neither Bush nor Senator Bob Dole were “lighting any fires,” he told the Associated Press. “We need a businessman,” he said to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “someone who can cut through all the malarkey.” A Trump spokesman reiterated Trump’s lack of interest in running a campaign.

Dunbar was undeterred. He had been the Portsmouth chairman of three successful congressional campaigns, but he looked at Washington, he said the other day in Hampton, and saw incompetence and gridlock. So he raised more than $1,000 to pay for mailers touting a potential Trump candidacy, ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation February 16, 1988, primary election. And he talked to people around town. Almost all of them at least had heard of Trump Tower.

Trump was ascendant and acquisitive. He had been on the covers of GQ and Fortune. He was the owner of two casinos and three lavish homes. He was wrapping up a deal to buy a 282-foot yacht from the Sultan of Brunei. His first book, The Art of the Deal, was about to hit stores.

On September 2, 1987, readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe found in their newspapers a full-page “open letter from Donald J. Trump.” He had spent $94,801 on what amounted to ad space. “To The American People,” it began.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” Trump wrote.

“The world is laughing at American politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” he continued.

A full page “open letter from Donald J. Trump” that appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe (pictured) on September, 2, 1987. Trump spent a total of $94,801 on the ad space. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar
A full page ad, pitched as an open letter from Donald Trump, that appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe (pictured) on September 2, 1987. Trump spent a total of $94,801 on the ad space. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar
“Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies,” he concluded. “Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created—machines created and nurtured by us. ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

Trump signed his name with a thick-tipped pen in his upright script.

Talk to foreign policy analysts today, and they give Trump points for consistency—but consider the ideas in the letter simplistic, naïve and dangerous. “He’s basically saying we don’t have any time for allies,” Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer told me. “Isolationism is a recipe for total failure,” said Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who worked for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and is currently an advisor to Hillary Clinton. The Trump worldview, they say, ignores the reality that alliances, trade agreements and diplomacy are a big part of the reason the United States was then and remains now a global superpower.

At the time, the New York Times took the “open letter” sufficiently seriously to respond to it in an editorial, saying “it is better to make adjustments in the balance of burdens out of a clear understanding of the United States’ underlying commitments, and not out of resentment.” But pundits paid Trump’s printed thoughts only so much heed—he was a businessman, after all, not a potential maker of policy. The main thing reporters wanted to know: Was this the beginning of a platform for a political aspirant?

Trump was predictably coy. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor or United States senator,” his spokesman said. “He will not comment about the presidency.”

Trump told People he “was hoping that some politician sitting on his ass in Washington would see the ad, read it, and say, ‘That’s a great idea.’”

“But really,” he said to a reporter from the Miami Herald, after a Florida businessman started his own attempt to draft Trump, “I have no intention of running for president.”

Trump didn’t leave it at that, though.

“I believe that if I did run for president, I’d win,” he told the New York Times the first week of October.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/donald-trump-first-campaign-speech-new-hampshire-1987-213595