An old interview in which President Donald Trump named Tom Wolfe as one of his favorite authors, but then immediately flip-flopped on whether he’d read Wolfe’s latest book, has gone viral again.
In the 1987 broadcast of CNN’s “Crossfire,” the then-celebrity businessman Trump began by telling Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden that he thought Wolfe (who died last year aged 88) was “excellent.”
Trump admitted he hadn’t read Wolfe’s newest satirical novel at the time, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which was released earlier in the year and tackled the themes of racism, greed and politics in 1980s New York.
But when pressed in the video that NowThis shared online Monday, Trump seconds later claimed he did actually read the book. He then appeared to blame any backtracking on a faulty earphone.
Check out the clip here:
Trump famously eschews reading, including presidential briefing materials. National Security Council staffers, for example, have been told to keep briefing papers to a single page, with bullet points and graphics, The New York Times reported in 2017.
He sometimes claims in interviews to have read books, but then can’t answer questions about them. In a 2016 interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News, he said his favorite books were the Bible, “Art of the Deal,” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
When Kelly asked the latest book he’d read, Trump answered: “Oh, no, it’s so long, because now I read passages. I read ― I read areas, I read chapters. I just ― I don’t have the time.”