We keep hearing this from different players. It’s almost like a universal belief among those who actually interact with him.
More excerpts from the upcoming Michael Wolff book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” are coming out.
One of those nuggets involve the newly elected Trump and 21st Century Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch.
In December 2016, a month after the election, Murdoch called Trump to discuss a meeting he’d had at Trump Tower with a few tech company executives from Silicon Valley.
According to the accounts in Wolff’s book:
Murdoch was not impressed with Trump’s understanding of politics, immigration visas or the relationship between tech companies and former President Barack Obama, according to the excerpt.
When he got off the phone with Trump, Murdoch reportedly said: “What a f**king idiot.”
Trump apparently spent some time patting himself on the back for the great meeting he had with these tech guys, saying they’d been treated badly by the Obama administration. He was going to be the breath of fresh air they needed.
“These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation,” Trump said, according to the excerpt.
“This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”
Murdoch suggested that tech was losing an administration that had treated it favorably, saying that “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket.”
“They practically ran the administration,” he added. “They don’t need your help.”
This one is a kicker:
Murdoch supposedly warned Trump against taking a liberal stance regarding the H-1B visa program, used to help these tech companies bring in the high-skilled foreign workers for their U.S. companies.
The point there being, should Trump side with tech companies on those visas, how does he get to claim to be a hardliner on immigration?
Wolff wrote that Trump shrugged off the suggestion.
“We’ll figure it out,” Trump said.
Considering that Trump has taken advantage of that visa program, himself, in order to keep from hiring American workers at his resorts, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care.
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