From the Archive: The Day Trump Went Down the Escalator

When it all started …

I covered the 2016 Presidential Election for Bloomberg Politics, and for the first year, until it became clear that he was going to win the nomination and everyone was going to be covering him, I was on the Trump beat. I was assigned to write about Trump’s pending announcement that he would (or wouldn’t) be running for President the day before he went down that escalator at Trump Tower and changed everything forever.

The original headline on this piece, which ran June 16, 2015, was We Are All Donald Trump Now, which I think, like the piece, mostly holds up well. Here it is.

Back in 2000, my grandmother returned from visiting my uncle in Chattanooga to the Coles County Airport of Mattoon, Illinois. She flew as cheaply as possible, which meant she took tiny US Airways shuttles from Chattanooga to West Lafayette, Indiana, to Mattoon. When I picked her up from the airport, I was able to drive right up to the runway and watch the plane land — this was a small-town airport before September 11. When the plane came to a stop, my 80-year-old grandmother, carrying an overstuffed suitcase on her back like a pack mule, walked out of the plane…alone.

She had a grin a mile wide. “I was the only one on the plane!” she exclaimed. (Suffice it to say, the West Lafayette-to-Mattoon shuttle has since been discontinued.) “It was just me and the pilot. I felt like Donald Trump!”

On Tuesday morning, Trump will visit his natural environment, and speak to his natural base, by holding a press conference to announce his intentions about running for president in 2016. As with all things Trump, this will be a ridiculous, absurdist exercise in media manipulation that will, as always, work magnificently. Reporters will snort and snicker, but they will trudge over to the press conference anyway; Trump will say something outlandish and unreasonable; reporters will gleefully blast out every word of it (“Trump Says Obama Is Cheering For ISIS!”); we will shake our heads, that crazy Trump, and then we will all talk about Trump for a few more news cycles, whether he runs for president or not. Donald Trump often appears to be living in a loopy, cartoon world of his own imagining. He is also the foremost expert in how to drive the…