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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—The secret of every Donald Trump conspiracy theory—the ones he pushes and the ones he rails against—is that he’s made them all seem real, all seem possible. Every day is a race between the absurd and the unprecedented. Things that never would have been believable are obviously true. Easily debunked lies are insisted on as fact. People who would have been ignored or forgotten about or never paid attention to in the first place are bizarre kind of stars now.


That’s the upside-down world where Tom Arnold lives, and the former Roseanne spouse is self-aware enough to appreciate the oddity of his role in the freak show that politics has become. “Donald Trump is a D-list f---ing president, and his enemies are D-list, like Tom Arnold,” he says.

Right now, the writer-comedian-actor is working on his upcoming Viceland show, “The Hunt for the Trump Tapes,” channeling his minor celebrity into already landing conversations with Anthony Scaramucci, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen, and made him a regular of cable news shows as he’s stumbled into manic relevance. Like, why was he with Cohen, even as the Trump lawyer contemplates turning on his old boss? What was a man who once said he’d take a bullet for the president doing with a man who has positioned himself as the nexus of all the Trump hate in Hollywood? And just what, exactly, does Tom Arnold think he’s doing?

“My goal is for Donald Trump to resign before he really destroys—you know, to keep pressure on him. And I think that you will see that, as shocking as it is, that I am keeping pressure on him. It makes no sense that I, what Tom Arnold does, would be keeping pressure—that Tom Arnold taking a selfie with Michael Cohen in the stupid lobby of the Regency would be,” Arnold told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, recorded as Cohen was preparing to do his own interview with George Stephanopoulos teasing that he’d cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Though the answers can get contradictory about what he’s seen and what he thinks is true, Arnold believes that the much-discussed but so far never proven “Apprentice” outtakes are real, and so is the famed recording from the Four Seasons Moscow that’s described in the Steele dossier—and that’s just the start.

Arnold hopes he’s gotten Trump’s attention (that’s part of why he keeps going on cable news) but says he thinks the reason all his carrying on about embarrassing hidden recordings hasn’t rated a @realDonaldTrump tweet is the same as the reason Stormy Daniels hasn’t.

“Because,” Arnold said, “it’s true. And he knows it’s true.”

He dared the president to prove him wrong. He says he’s already talked to lawyers about some kind of lawsuit and discovery process he’d use to kick it off, and he claims to have some kind of legal strategy by which this would work.

“The second he says my name, we’re going to f---ing go in to [“Apprentice” producer] Mark Burnett, and he has to open it up for me. Because I know exactly the episodes. I know exactly what I’m going to do.”

Arnold’s role in this fever dream/gonzo journalism prank all dates back to an interview he did in 2016 claiming he’d seen a compilation of “Apprentice” outtakes showing Trump making a range of outrageous and racist comments. Neither Arnold nor anyone else has verified that it exists, or where, or what’s happened to it, though there is the tantalizing mystery that Burnett, the show’s producer and a Trump friend, has kept all the archives from the show sealed and frightened former staffers into silence with legal threats.

Arnold acknowledges that he does not currently have the tape he says he saw. Or, really, any others, though he has a lot of new tapes of interviews with other people. He’s offered occasionally contradictory versions of the circumstances under which he saw what he claims, but he now insists he can’t reveal anymore because of which sources might be exposed.

But, he says, any stretch of uncut Trump footage will do.

“My whole goal, really, is to get one 12-hour day of the boardrooms shoot. Because if America could see that, they’d know what’s going on in the White House right now, how incompetent the guy is. That’s really my goal. It’s not to hear one N-word. And by the way, you’d hear much worse than that,” Arnold said, referring to the set where Trump used to build up to his “You’re fired” catchphrase. “You’d see the incompetence that’s going on. You’d see why we don’t know what’s happening to these children at the border, you’d see why Puerto Rico [happened], you’d see what’s going on with the Supreme Court, why the country is falling apart, all the lies, all the people that were working at the White House, the jobs, the EPA. You’d see why the country is on the verge of this stuff with North Korea. If you see one 12-hour day, America would go, ‘Oh.’ And then when Robert Mueller comes out with his stuff, they’d go, ‘Oh, yeah. That makes a hundred percent sense.’”

“I just want to see—to go in there and—and if he didn’t say the N-word in those 10,000 hours of ‘Apprentice’ things, then I will let him take a piss on me on the White House lawn, and that will be the pee tape,” he says. “But I also happen to believe there’s a pee tape.”

Arnold and Trump used to be friends. They went to a party at the Playboy Mansion together, and he says they had a good time. He says Trump tried to get him to appear on “Celebrity Apprentice,” and he almost agreed. Trump once appeared as a guest when Arnold was hosting “The Best Damn Sports Show.” He and Trump once went to an Elton John party, where, he says, Trump told him, “Boy, you dodged a bullet with Roseanne. She’s disgusting.” (The couple divorced in 1994 after four hurricane years of marriage.)

Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including more on what Arnold says he’s found and what he would think about appearing as his old “Roseanne” character Arnie Thomas on the resurrected reboot “The Conners” coming in the fall.

What does a free spirit like Tom Arnold do all day? He’s a stand-up comic. He tours. He released a new special that happened to land as his ex-wife tweeted herself into being fired from her own eponymous show. His movie career, such as it was (quick, name anything you remember him being in other than “True Lies”) is basically over.

But that’s not what Tom Arnold does. What he does is get your attention, even when you don’t want to give it to him. And he makes you keep coming back, because maybe, just maybe, this time there’s going to be something to it—like Monday, when he responded to Cohen’s interview about maybe flipping by tweeting, “Seems like I’ve heard those same exact words somewhere before but that guy was crazy so nevermind.”

Arnold has a way of falling into news cycles and catching attention. In December, when he was tweeting his theories of what was behind Leeann Tweeden, who happened to have been a former contributor to his sports show, accusing Al Franken of groping her, serious people were quietly pointing to him as the only person they thought was telling the truth.

Arnold knows, at least somewhat, what he’s doing—performance art that’s more performance than art, with little evident concern about blowing himself up, because when he blows himself up, at least there are fireworks everyone looks at.

“Things are working,” he says. “You know, think about this: What did Trump get by saying Barack Obama wasn’t born here?”

Arnold’s original suggestion for where to meet for the podcast was the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the favorite Trump haunt where Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal both say they spent time with the future president behind closed doors. But since that seemed too loud, we spoke instead across the cluttered desk in his home office, an award for Best Comedic Performance in “True Lies” right behind him on the wall, along with a framed copy of a 2009 New York Times profile, aptly titled “The Human Punch Line.”

Everywhere, there are signs that Arnold has being doing his homework, in his madcap way. Emily Jane Fox’s new book, “Born Trump,” is on a pile. His phone is full of texts, he claims, from all sorts of people, like Sean Bannon, Steve Bannon’s nephew and body man. He has a recording on his computer of Burnett telling him that he won’t appear on “The Hunt for the Trump Tapes.”

Neither Scaramucci or Cohen responded when asked why they talked to Arnold, or what they were up to. Cohen retweeted the selfie Arnold posted. But then he denied he’d turned over any recordings—Arnold had tweeted that he has everything—or that they’d be spending the weekend together, as Arnold claimed. “Appreciate @TomArnold kind words about me as a great father, husband and friend,” Cohen tweeted. “This was a chance, public encounter in the hotel lobby where he asked for a selfie. Not spending the weekend together, did not discuss being on his show nor did we discuss @POTUS. #done #ridiculous.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arnold’s “True Lies” co-star and friend, told me he wished this would stop.

“His heart is in the right place. But at the same time, he is suffering from not getting enough notoriety, so I think that he is now using this crazy stuff that he does for notoriety, to get out there and be somebody,” the former California governor says.

Schwarzenegger appears on Arnold’s show too, with the host appearing to ambush him in an alley and demand to know what he knows.

“I said, ‘Tom you’re so brilliant. Why don’t you do something positive instead of this garbage of finding tapes?’” Schwarzenegger told me. “I did that right there in front of the cameras. He’ll probably cut that out.”

Arnold says that in addition to getting attention, he feels he’s on a personal mission. His mother abandoned him and his family when he was a child growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, and he says that’s why Trump’s birtherism turned him.

“If your family is unusual in any way in a small farming community, small white farming community, people point that out a lot. And Barack Obama—I saw this mini doc that Davis Guggenheim did at the 2008 [Democratic National Convention]. It was very touching. And it was about Barack Obama growing up in Kansas not far from me in a small community. And his grandfather looked exactly like my grandfather,” Arnold says. “And then Donald Trump, in 2011, I turn on the TV, and he is saying that Barack Obama was not born here. And I just thought, ‘Oh my God. Where is his grandpa?’ Because he’d be like, ‘You shut the f--- up.’ It’s like my grandpa used to have to do that for me. And his grandpa wasn’t even alive to do that.”

A week and a half ago, Arnold was on CNN, a Cheshire smile on his face as he sat silent for a minute not answering whether he knew whether Cohen was cooperating with the government. It was the last stop on a media blitz after he tweeted a photo of him with Cohen (chyron: “Actor, Talked to Michael Cohen”), during which he said some things that were never true, like that he’d be spending the weekend with Cohen, and some things that might be true, like the text messages he claims to have from him.

Arnold is loving all of it.

“I know it’s the best thing that could ever have happened,” he says. “And also, I’m doing a f---ing TV show, and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

He goes on: “Every day, it’s like, people have said, ‘Well, there’s his 15 minutes of fame.’ And they’ve been saying that for 30 f---ing years. Eventually you start totaling it up.”

After the crazy CNN interview, Hillary Clinton’s communications director Nick Merrill retweeted a thought going around in Democratic circles: “Tom Arnold being the guy who takes Trump down is honestly the ending we deserve.”

I ask Arnold what he thought about that.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s good.”