In his recent cover story with Rolling Stone magazine, Donald Trump suggested that fellow GOP contender Carly Fiorina’s looks are enough to turn off voters.
The Republican front-runner has since clarified, saying he was “talking about her persona.” But Paul Solotaroff, the author behind the Rolling Stone piece, says that’s a lie.
Solotaroff followed the eccentric billionaire on the campaign trail for 10 days, watching as he wooed voters in Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire. In his profile of the leading GOP candidate, Solotaroff described a moment in which Trump, seeing Fiorina appear on TV, said: “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president.”
“I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” he continued, according to Rolling Stone.
Trump, who tops the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, responded to widespread criticism for his remarks about Fiorina’s appearance on Thursday, telling Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that he’d frequently spoken as an “entertainer” throughout his time with Solotaroff.
“Many of those comments are made as entertainer, because I did ‘The Apprentice,'” he said. “I decided not to do it again because I wanted to run for president. But some comments are made as an entertainer. And, as everybody said, as an entertainer [it] is a much different ballgame.”
However, Solotaroff said Thursday evening on CNN that he wasn’t sure of any additional context capable of supporting Trump’s clarification.
“I was there, I was sitting across from him as he finished his meal and you know, Donald, for all of his energy and for all of his wayward charm, has this 12 to 14-year-old boy sort of permanently affixed to his inner life,” he told host Anderson Cooper.
“He was positively floating [after a rally in Iowa] and so he was feeling loose and playing to the room [of] six or seven people,” Solotaroff added.
Asked whether anyone in that moment reacted to Trump’s remarks, Solotaroff responded: “You do that with Donald Trump at your own physical peril. Nobody shuts up Donald.”
“So it’s sort of ‘yes men’ all around him,” Cooper asked.
“In a word, yes,” said the Rolling Stone contributor. “There’s this quality of a mobile echo chamber around Donald, but there’s a certain kind of brilliance to that. This is a guy who has attacked and won, attacked and won, ever since he left military academy at the age of 18 and the idea that he’s suddenly now, at the age of 60, going to start taking life instruction from some hack political operative, he hasn’t hired that guy.”
“He’s hired functionaries and those are the people he surrounds himself with, not strategists,” Solotaroff continued, adding that in his experience around Donald, he never once noticed “a serious person in the room.”
Despite the backlash for his latest gaffe, Trump surged to 32 percent in a CNN/ORC poll of likely Republican voters on Thursday. He will take center stage at the next GOP primary debate on Sept. 16.
