President Trump’s longtime friend and the chair of his inaugural committee, Thomas Barrack, said in a new interview he’s disappointed with Trump’s recent comments and tweets.
“He thinks he has to be loyal to his base,” Barrack told the Washington Post. “I keep on saying, ‘But who is your base? You don’t have a natural base. Your base is the world and America, so you have all these constituencies; show them who you really are.’ In my opinion, he’s better than this.”
“I tell him all the time: I don’t like the rhetoric,” he said.
The billionaire real estate investor, who served as deputy undersecretary to Interior Secretary James Watt during the Reagan administration, said he was particularly bothered by Trump’s December 2015 call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
He was also worried about the president’s charges that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the United States and his promise to build a wall the country would pay for.
“‘Oh my God, where are we going with this? What did he just say?'” Barrack thought, according to the Washington Post. “Which I continue to say, by the way. It is shocking to me that he would talk that way because he is not that way.”
He believes the president has surrounded himself with too many people who don’t want to tell him “no,” though he said Trump is OK with people coming from opposing viewpoints.
“He is very good at being told he is wrong,” Barrack told the Washington Post. “People don’t have the courage to do it. He pushes back hard, but the people he respects the most are the people who have the most refined and not wimpy point of view.”
Barrack founded a real estate investment company in Manhattan called Colony NorthStar. He met Trump in 1987 and has since grown close to the Trump family, including the president’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Barrack serves as an outside adviser to the president and said he speaks with Trump at least once a week. His friendship with Trump spans three decades, and Barrack said he isn’t afraid to tell Trump when he’s wrong.
The billionaire real estate investor told the Washington Post he first started talking with Trump about the presidency in 1987, but their conversations didn’t turn serious until 1999.
When Trump decided to make a run for the White House in the 2016 election, Barrack helped raise money for his old friend, and held a fundraiser for Trump at his house in Santa Monica that brought in $7 million. In June 2016, Barrack started a political action committee called Rebuilding America Now, which raised $23 million.
Barrack suggested Trump hire Paul Manafort, who he met in Beirut four decades ago, to serve as his campaign chairman. Manafort is now under investigation as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, as well as possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
When Trump won the presidency, Barrack was tapped to chair his inaugural committee. In that role, Barrack raised more than $100 million.
“Yeah, I raised the most money for him,” he told the Washington Post. “The inauguration itself was over $100 million that we had to raise from scratch. So of course he said, ‘Would you like Treasury? What would you like to do?'”
Barrack decided to remain outside of government.
