Three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan can claim one of the rarest commodities: A Donald Trump apology.
In 2011, the future president called Buchanan to express remorse over a series of verbal jabs from nearly a dozen years earlier, when the pair had tussled over the Reform Party’s presidential nomination, reports Tim Alberta in American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.
In October 1999, Trump, then best-known as a New York real estate developer and New York celebrity tabloid staple, launched an exploratory committee to run on the Reform Party line, founded by former independent presidential candidate Ross Perot.
“Perhaps most memorable was his feverish five-month assault on Pat Buchanan, the populist favorite who challenged [President George H.W.] Bush in the 1992 primary and was now running for the Reform nomination,” Alberta writes. “Trump called the ‘anti-Semite’ Buchanan a ‘Hitler lover’ who ‘doesn’t like the blacks’ and ‘doesn’t like the gays.’ Before dropping his candidacy in February 2000, Trump warned of Buchanan’s alleged extremism. ‘We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.’”
But by the time Trump next pondered a presidential bid, ahead of the 2012 cycle, his views had changed. They seemed to align much more with Buchanan’s long-stated beliefs, including non-interventionist foreign policy.
Buchanan, a Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and the Reform Party nominee in 2000, had also long been accused of bigotry and anti-Semitism.
Trump would face similar charges in the years to come, whether calling an Indiana-born federal judge a “Mexican” due to his parent’s heritage, or later in 2016 tweeting a graphic critical of Hillary Clinton that featured a six-pointed star, a pile of cash and the words “most corrupt candidate ever” — among many other questionable episodes during his presidential campaign and White House tenure.
“So, early in 2011, Trump would do something wildly out of character: apologize. Placing a telephone call to Buchanan one day, out of the blue, he told he former rival that he had been wrong to label him a racist. He even asked for forgiveness. Buchanan was stunned.”
The timing was hardly coincidental, Alberta writes.
“It was around the time of the Buchanan call, of course, that Trump was kicking off his birther crusade — and pondering once more a campaign for the presidency.”
Trump ultimately decided to forgo a 2012 presidential bid, but continued for years to claim, falsely, that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was ineligible to be president.
Trump went on to claim the 2016 Republican nomination over 16 establishment rivals and beat Hillary Clinton that November to win the presidency.
