President Donald Trump has no qualms about slapping steep international tariffs on “the friends of America” and potentially destroying those historic relationships because “he’s never had any friends” himself, an ex-employee told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday.
Jack O’Donnell, who was once the president of Trump’s former Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, made his case after Burnett played an interview clip from 1990 in which Trump said “it would be hard” to choose a best friend because he’s “a non-trusting person.”
“He’s always been a loner,” O’Donnell told Burnett. “He admits he doesn’t trust and he’s never had friends. And I think as a result of that, I think you take the friends of America, our historical friends, NATO, everybody we dealt with that came together during World War II.”
“He doesn’t look at them as friends, ’cause he doesn’t really know what friendship is,” he continued. “So that’s why it’s so easy for him to cast them away. They’re just another person. What Donald Trump has is acquaintances, and that’s it. He does not have friends.”
O’Donnell, who wrote “Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump” (1991) after several years of working under Trump, added there was only one person the former real estate mogul ever “called a friend” during that time. O’Donnell didn’t name them Monday.
Trump dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day” and announced a 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the U.S., with levies on dozens of countries set even higher. Global markets have been intermittently spiraling ever since; Trump himself spent the weekend golfing in Florida.
When asked why Trump has been so aggressive with his tariffs, O’Donnell replied bluntly.
“Well, he loves to exert authority over people,” he told Burnett. “And that is one of his defensive mechanisms. If somebody’s coming after him, he goes after them more. But the bottom line with Donald Trump is, he thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.”
O’Donnell went on to claim that, during their former business relationship, Trump used to seriously internalize the financial advice of an Atlantic City newsletter author — simply because the writer “would literally praise Trump at the beginning of every newsletter.”
Whether that person is now Elon Musk, who claimed his mission as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is to cut only wasteful public spending, or White House trade adviser Peter Navarro — who is backing Trump’s tariffs policies — is unclear.
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“He is just a friendless guy, and that makes it easy for him to do some of the things that he’s doing today,” O’Donnell concluded Monday about the U.S. president.