Donald Trump’s Political Origin Story isn’t Common Knowledge, But it Should Be

Trump's political ideology has aligned with Russian interests since 1987. Why?

Note: This is a guest article exclusive to The Banter from Philip Auerswald, Professor of Public Policy at the Schar School for Policy and Government, George Mason University. You can follow Philip on X here, and on Substack here.

by Philip Auerswald

When, how, and why did Donald Trump launch his career as a national political figure? As fundamental as this question might seem, it has rarely been asked—much less satisfactorily answered—since Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States on June 16, 2015.

The answer to “when” Trump launched his national political career turns out to be simple: thirty-seven-years ago, on September 2, 1987.

The answer to "how" is also straightforward: Trump claimed a spot on the national political stage by placing a full-page ad on that day relating to U.S. foreign policy in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. On the same day, he appeared on Larry King Live where he discussed both the ad and a recently accepted invitation to appear eight weeks later in New Hampshire, as the guest of the Portsmouth Rotary Club, at the start of the presidential primary season there. 

The New York Times published an article covering these events, also on the same day, with the headline “Trump Gives Vague Hint of Candidacy.” Astonishingly, however, in the intervening thirty-seven years, The New York Times has not once revisited this story. The Times is not alone. If published reports are any indication, no other major news organization in the United States has ever dedicated its own staff resources to covering Donald Trump’s political origin story. 

The reason to care about this omission lies in the third part of the question I posed above: Why did Donald Trump assert himself into U.S. politics in the manner, and at the time, that he did?

One clue lies in the content of the ad that constituted the announcement of Trump’s political coming out. Published at an expense of a quarter of a million dollars in today’s terms, the ad assailed allies of the United States for not fulfilling their obligation to contribute to a common defense. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” the ad proclaimed, with the subtitle, “An open letter from Donald Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can’t afford to defend themselves.” 

The theme, of course, is a familiar one. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is being “ripped off” by NATO and other alliance partners is his single most consistent policy-related theme. In the past six months he has stated more than once that, if reelected, he would invite the Russian Federation to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who purportedly do not pay their fair share for our common defense. 

The same was true thirty-seven years ago. From September 2, 1987, until roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall, Trump appeared not only in New Hampshire, but on The David Letterman Show, Oprah!, Donahue, and almost everywhere else it was possible to book an appearance at the time. Each time, the focus of his appearance was the deprecation of U.S. alliances and alliance partners. Even when accepting an honorary doctorate before a captive audience of Lehigh University graduates in 1988, Trump could not refrain from returning to the same theme: “Forget about our enemies — Russia, we don’t deal with them that much … Our friends are making billions of dollars and stripping us of our dignity."

Reporting on September 2, 1987, Times reporter Michael Oreskes hinted at the incongruity of a New York real estate mogul spending a quarter-of-a-million dollars of his own funds to broadcast views he had never previously expressed on the arcane specifics of U.S burden sharing agreements. Where did this all come from?

Here we have a second set of clues, also highlighted by Oreskes: Trump took his first trip to Russia, at the invitation of a top Soviet diplomat, just six weeks before he placed his ad and launched his two-year-long media blitz.

The alignment of Trump’s foreign policy message with Soviet interests in 1987 is as evident as the alignment of the same message with Russian interests today. That his trip to Russia might additionally have been related to his nascent political aspirations is suggested by an additional fact, so far entirely unreported in this context: Trump first registered a political affiliation (as a Republican) exactly three days before he and Ivana boarded their private flight to Moscow on July 4, 1987, accompanied (in Trump’s own account) by “two Russian colonels.”

Nearly thirty years later, when Donald Trump delivered his first major foreign policy speech of the 2016 election cycle at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was seated in a place of honor at the front row. "Our allies are not paying their fair share, and I’ve been talking about this recently a lot," Trump stated. "Our allies must contribute toward their financial, political, and human costs, have to do it, of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so. They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us ... The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice."

On this theme, and (arguably) this theme alone, Donald Trump has been entirely consistent for the past thirty-seven years.

These few incontrovertible facts constitute only a fraction of what can be gleaned from public sources about Donald Trump’s political origin story. Some, but by no means all, of what is easily knowable has been documented by journalists Luke Harding, Jonathan Chait, and Craig Unger, working independently. The efforts of yet-to-be-deployed teams of investigative reporters would no doubt yield further illuminating information.

One thing is already clear, however: Donald Trump was never going to invest in the Soviet Union. In all likelihood, he knew that before he took off for Moscow on July 4, 1987. 

From the very beginning, by mutual understanding, the Soviet Union was going to invest in Donald Trump.

Philip E. Auerswald is a Professor of Public Policy at the Schar School for Policy and Government, George Mason University. He has published on topics related to U.S. politics and foreign policy in The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco, Chronicle, and most recently, The New York Times and The Hill. He is the editor of The Kosovo Conflict: A Diplomatic History Through Documents (2000, co-edited with David Auerswald, with a foreword by Senator Joseph Biden Jr.) and Iraq, 1990–2006: A Diplomatic History Through Documents (2009) among other books and documentary compilations.

---

If you enjoy The Banter, consider becoming a paid member. You'll get access to our weekly Emergency Meeting Podcast, all member-only articles, and exclusive chat threads. We're immensely grateful to our readers for making our work possible.

Read the latest on The Banter (free):