Zinger Key Points
- Trump's fixation on Stormy Daniels sidelined crucial China talks, a book reveals, disrupting high-level discussions.
- Randall Stephenson's recount of Trump's obsession highlights challenges in navigating presidential summons.
Donald Trump’s intense focus on China has been central to his bid for the presidency, but a recent book reveals how his fixation on women and sex reportedly derailed a crucial White House meeting with a top U.S. tech executive aimed at tackling Chinese threats to American telecom networks.
The Presidential Summon Of Randall Stephenson
Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T Inc. T, revealed to New York Times reporter David Sanger a summons to the White House in 2019.
“You don’t say no to the president,” Stephenson said, according to Sanger’s upcoming book, “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West,” reported The Guardian.
According to Sanger, Trump had observed Stephenson discussing China on television and wanted to delve more deeply into the topic.
However, during the meeting, Stephenson recounted that Trump instead went on a tirade about women, explicitly mentioning Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who had alleged an affair with Trump.
The hush-money payments Trump made to Daniels are slated to be the focal point of his first criminal trial, which will commence in New York on Monday.
Trump’s Diatribe About Stormy Daniels
“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes in his book.
“He went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels, the former porn star who claimed she had had an affair with him. It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act,’ Stephenson later recalled … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure,” the book notes.
Stephenson, however, reportedly appeared less alarmed, citing China’s adeptness in hacking, which rendered such concerns somewhat moot. He instead emphasized more significant risks: the potential for China, via companies like Huawei or ZTE, to disrupt the U.S. communications grid, and the prospect of Beijing achieving global dominance through investments in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, according to the book.
But Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said,” Sanger writes.
Ivanka Trump To The Rescue?
Ivanka Trump’s arrival reportedly allowed Stephenson to shift the conversation and gracefully exit. This encounter with Trump wasn’t Stephenson’s only challenging interaction, as it also had ties to the Stormy Daniels affair.
Trump consistently denies any wrongdoing and frames the legal actions against him, including 54 criminal charges across three cases and multimillion-dollar penalties in two civil suits, as politically motivated persecution, The Guardian pointed out.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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