Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

HAMPTON, N.H. — The shiny black French-made helicopter landed at the grassy airfield in southern New Hampshire on the morning of October 22, 1987. Out stepped Donald Trump. The 41-year-old real estate mogul from New York wore a scarlet tie and a navy blue suit and slipped into a rented limousine.

With him was the reason for his visit—a man named Mike Dunbar, an area Republican activist and a master craftsman of wooden chairs, whose daily reading of the Wall Street Journal had made him think Trump might make a good president. He had launched an effort to get Trump to run.


The limo sped seven miles up U.S. 1 to Portsmouth, to an old restaurant called Yoken’s, the site of the weekly meeting of the local Rotary Club. Awaiting Trump’s arrival was a crowd of 500, some 300 more people than the organization had members.

Outside, people waved signs. “Trump in ’88.” “Trump for President.” “Vote for an En-TRUMP-eneur.” Inside, Dunbar was stunned. “I remember looking around the room and thinking, ‘My word, they couldn’t stuff another body in here,’” he said the other day here at his chairmaking school.

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Trump began by telling the people who were there that he wouldn’t run for president in 1988, which disappointed some, especially Dunbar. Then Trump railed, with no notes, and for roughly the next half hour, about Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Washington, Wall Street, politicians, economists and “nice people” of whom he had “had enough,” he said. This country was facing “disaster” and was “being kicked around.” Other countries were “laughing at us.”

“It makes me sick,” Trump said.

“If the right man doesn’t get into office,” he warned the Rotarians, “you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country in the next four years like you’re never going to believe. And then you’ll be begging for the right man.”

Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is often derided as a seat-of-the-pants affair, driven by publicity and surrounded by a fog of improvised policy ideas. But to an extent that would shock anyone who wasn’t there, Trump’s speech in 1987 forecast exactly the worldview that would catapult him to surprise GOP front-runner status in this year’s race. His speech was nativist and isolationist, an angry, gloomy rant about America losing out in a dangerous world. His message of failure—American failure—has been remarkably constant since that moment 28 years ago, with one twist: Back then, the sitting president wasn’t Barack Obama. It was Ronald Reagan.

Over the years, Trump has been a Republican, a Democrat, an independent and a member of the Reform Party, and his positions on issues like abortion and health care have run the gamut, but there would be no mistaking the overall worldview of a President Trump. On this front, he’s been saying the same thing for decades, right down to his go-to line.

“Believe me,” he said at Yoken’s.

This week, in a phone interview, Trump himself said he remembered making the appearance and giving a speech, which he called “really a speech on success.”

Nearly 30 years later, with Trump having dominated the current election cycle since he started running for president last June, those who witnessed the speech don’t recall what he said as much as they remember how he said it.

Donald Trump disembarks from his helicopter at the Hampton Airfield in New Hampshire, October 1987. Walking to greet him is Mike Dunbar, a local woodworker, Windsor chair maker and Republican activist who tried to recruit Trump to run for president and convinced him to visit New Hampshire. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar

“He was flamboyant and dynamic,” said Timothy “Ted” Connors, who worked for the Portsmouth Housing Authority.

Morton Schmidt, a veterinarian, marveled at Trump’s confidence. “He didn’t seem to waver,” Schmidt said.

Too much so, said Warren Wilder, who ran an insurance company. “I thought he was very egotistical,” he said.

“It was all about him. I, I, I,” said Peter Weeks, a former mayor of Portsmouth.

Trump was “brash,” said Addison Redfield, who operated a boarding and grooming kennel for dogs, but people paid attention. “He got a standing ovation when he came into the room. He got a standing ovation when he finished speaking.”

They didn’t know it at the time—how could they have known?—but the 500 people who crammed into Yoken’s of Portsmouth in October of 1987 were the first in a long line. They ended up getting a sneak preview. This was exactly the man Dunbar wanted to run for president. And he would. In 2016.

***

“Would you like to be the president of the United States?”

The person asking the question was Rona Barrett, an early TV celebrity reporter. The year was 1980.

“I really don’t believe I would, Rona,” said Donald Trump.

“Why,” Barrett asked, “wouldn’t you dedicate yourself to public service?”

“Because,” Trump said, “I think it’s a very mean life.”

In 1984, in the New York Times Magazine, in a cover story that served as a seminal boost to his fame, Trump said he wouldn’t want to run for office because of “false smiles” and “red tape.”

By the summer of 1987, though, Dunbar was planning his recruitment of Trump. He thought Vice President George H. W. Bush was “boring,” he told the New York Times, and neither Bush nor Senator Bob Dole were “lighting any fires,” he told the Associated Press. “We need a businessman,” he said to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “someone who can cut through all the malarkey.” A Trump spokesman reiterated Trump’s lack of interest in running a campaign.

Dunbar was undeterred. He had been the Portsmouth chairman of three successful congressional campaigns, but he looked at Washington, he said the other day in Hampton, and saw incompetence and gridlock. So he raised more than $1,000 to pay for mailers touting a potential Trump candidacy, ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation February 16, 1988, primary election. And he talked to people around town. Almost all of them at least had heard of Trump Tower.

Trump was ascendant and acquisitive. He had been on the covers of GQ and Fortune. He was the owner of two casinos and three lavish homes. He was wrapping up a deal to buy a 282-foot yacht from the Sultan of Brunei. His first book, The Art of the Deal, was about to hit stores.

On September 2, 1987, readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe found in their newspapers a full-page “open letter from Donald J. Trump.” He had spent $94,801 on what amounted to ad space. “To The American People,” it began.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” Trump wrote.

“The world is laughing at American politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” he continued.

A full page ad, pitched as an open letter from Donald Trump, that appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe (pictured) on September 2, 1987. Trump spent a total of $94,801 on the ad space. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar

“Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies,” he concluded. “Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created—machines created and nurtured by us. ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

Trump signed his name with a thick-tipped pen in his upright script.

Talk to foreign policy analysts today, and they give Trump points for consistency—but consider the ideas in the letter simplistic, naïve and dangerous. “He’s basically saying we don’t have any time for allies,” Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer told me. “Isolationism is a recipe for total failure,” said Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who worked for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and is currently an advisor to Hillary Clinton. The Trump worldview, they say, ignores the reality that alliances, trade agreements and diplomacy are a big part of the reason the United States was then and remains now a global superpower.

At the time, the New York Times took the “open letter” sufficiently seriously to respond to it in an editorial, saying “it is better to make adjustments in the balance of burdens out of a clear understanding of the United States’ underlying commitments, and not out of resentment.” But pundits paid Trump’s printed thoughts only so much heed—he was a businessman, after all, not a potential maker of policy. The main thing reporters wanted to know: Was this the beginning of a platform for a political aspirant?

Trump was predictably coy. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor or United States senator,” his spokesman said. “He will not comment about the presidency.”

Trump told People he “was hoping that some politician sitting on his ass in Washington would see the ad, read it, and say, ‘That’s a great idea.’”

“But really,” he said to a reporter from the Miami Herald, after a Florida businessman started his own attempt to draft Trump, “I have no intention of running for president.”

Trump didn’t leave it at that, though.

“I believe that if I did run for president, I’d win,” he told the New York Times the first week of October.



It was talk like this that kept Dunbar’s hopes up. He spoke to Trump’s longtime assistant, Norma Foerderer, flew to New York—the last time he was there, he told me—rode the elevator to the 26th floor of Trump Tower and found himself sitting across from Trump. “I remember this humongous desk, made out of stone,” he said. “It was just this huge slab of stone, polished like glass.”

Details were finalized.

Portsmouth. Yoken’s. October 22.

***

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s trip to New Hampshire, Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt lamented in a campaign stop in Portsmouth that Americans had grown cynical and skeptical, “turned off” and “tuned out.” Jessica McClure, a toddler stuck in a well in Texas, became a national media sensation thanks to non-stop coverage by the seven-year-old Cable News Network. In Washington, thousands of gay couples protested by throwing rice at a mass “wedding.” President Reagan’s AIDS commission was three months old. In the Persian Gulf, Iran had just attacked with missiles American tankers, and United States forces had retaliated with military might, bombing an Iranian oil platform. The careful reader of the business pages of the Portsmouth Herald would have noticed that Trump, with an estimated net worth of $850 million, was on Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest people in the nation, at No. 63—a single slot below the brothers David and Charles Koch. On October 19, the stock market crashed on what would come to be known as “Black Monday,” three days before Trump’s scheduled Yoken’s visit.

In this atmosphere of disillusionment, anxiety and change, Trump mounted the Rotary Club dais. The crowd was significantly bigger than the Yoken’s turnouts had been for Dole and fellow Republican presidential candidates Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp.

For Trump, though, it wasn’t political—it was promotional. Running for president? “I wasn’t even thinking about it,” he told me this week. “I don’t think I ever even had politics in mind. I was doing deals in those days.”

So why did he accept Dunbar’s invitation?

“It was a lot to do with my book,” he said. “I was getting ready to do books and things.”

The Art of the Deal was due out in early November, and Trump mentioned it at Yoken’s. “You’ll have to read it,” he told the crowd, according to the Eagle-Tribune, based in North Andover, Massachusetts.

He didn’t stop there, of course. Wall Street, he said, according to the Portsmouth Herald, was “the biggest casino in the world.” Economists? “Perhaps the profession I have the least respect for.”

Politically, he had “had enough of the men who say, ‘Vote for me because I am nice,’” he said, according to Foster’s Daily Democrat, the newspaper in nearby Dover, New Hampshire. “I have nothing against nice people, but I personally have had enough of them.”

“I want someone who is tough and knows how to negotiate,” he said, according to the New York Times.

“I want a tough, smart cookie. I want the best people representing me, whether it’s in a deal or whether it’s for thiscountry—because, believe me, there’s no difference,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Trump, left, with Dunbar, center, and a local businessman, right, at the dais during the Rotary Club lunch in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following Trump’s first speech as a would-be politician on October 22, 1987. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar

“The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces, but when the negotiations are over, it is my belief—I’ve never seen this—they laugh like hell,” he said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Trump’s foreign policy proposal? “Whatever Japan wants, do the opposite.” And the Soviet Union and Iran? Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini? “You think Gorbachev is tough?” Trump said. “Think of this character Khomeini. I mean, this son of a bitch is something like nobody’s ever seen. He makes Gorbachev look like a baby. And Gorbachev is one tough cookie.”

An editorial the next day in the Portsmouth Herald noted that Trump had drawn “a bigger phalanx of newspeople and cameras than are focusing on most of the announced candidates.” The newspaper called Trump “a forceful speaker whose blunt statements and energetic manner grip an audience and touch a responsive chord in many people who feel, like he does, that America allows its foes and even some of its allies to run roughshod over this powerful nation.” It made no mention of the book Trump had come to town to push.

In November, as Bush, Dole, Gephardt, Kemp, Robertson and other presidential candidates like Michael Dukakis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson campaigned in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20 asked Trump if he would want to be president if he could be “appointed,” as if that were somehow an option. Trump said he would want the satisfaction of running and winning. “It’s the hunt that I believe I love,” Trump told her.

Nobody talked about Trump as presidential material in 1992 or 1996. In 1992, his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, had filed for bankruptcy, and his companies were billions of dollars in debt. In 1996, he was rather remarkably back on Forbes’ rich list, but his late-’80s reputation as a business whiz had been sullied. People hadn’t forgotten yet about his failures.

But in 2000, Trump toyed with a run (“The world is ripping off this country …”), and in 2004, and a little bit in 2008, and in 2012 (“Other countries” are “methodically and systematically taking advantage of the United States …”)—until last summer, at Trump Tower, when he announced that this time was for real.

“Our country is in serious trouble,” he said.

Mexico is “laughing at us,” he said.

“Believe me,” he said.

People from Portsmouth now think back to Yoken’s.

“I see the same man,” said Schmidt, the veterinarian.

“The leopard hasn’t changed its spots,” said Connors, from the Portsmouth Housing Authority.

“He was a schoolyard bully, and I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Wilder, the insurance man. “Personally, I wouldn’t follow him across the street.”

“It was the same bullshit back then that he’s spouting now,” said Weeks, the former mayor.

Mike Dunbar, now a master craftsman of Windsor chairs, working in his studio. | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar

“It shows how consistent I am,” Trump told me. “I’ve had great credit for the consistency of the message. Look at the trade deals we’ve done. Look at what Mexico’s doing to us. Look at what China’s doing.”

He added, “People just don’t get it.”

In Hampton, Dunbar said Trump called him after the event to thank him and invite him to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Dunbar explained that he didn’t like Florida and was busy with his Windsor chairs, and so he said thanks but no thanks, which seemed to surprise Trump, he said. Trump called him again in December to wish him a Merry Christmas. Around that time, too, a book showed up in the mail, a new hardcover copy of The Art of the Deal. Trump had written an inscription.

To Michael

I really appreciate your friendship

You have created a very exciting part of my life

On to the future

Donald

Almost three decades have passed. So much has changed.

The Bush who Dunbar thought was “boring” got elected president, and then Bill Clinton, and then the “boring” man’s son, and then a black man. Trump’s dire threats uniformly failed to materialize. Japan’s economy entered into a prolonged period of stagnation. The Soviet Union collapsed. And America in the last 30 years has had bubbles and booms, recessions of varied severity and recoveries that have ranged from suitably speedy to painfully slow. It’s a portrait not so much of ceaseless decline but rather natural cyclicality and resilience.

What hasn’t changed: Trump’s alerts of imminent demise, even as he himself has had his ups and downs and ups again. He was all but financially dead, and then he wasn’t, saved by amenable banks, savvy use of bankruptcy laws and reality TV.

A few years after Trump’s Yoken’s trip, Dunbar and his wife, Susanna, had a son—he was 45, she was 42—and Michael, their only child, became their priority. Dunbar quit politics, “cold turkey,” he said. He’s not even a Republican anymore—he’s unaffiliated, “an advocate of doing away with political parties,” he said. He has written nine books about woodworking, including “definitely one of the most important books ever written on Windsor chair making,” according to popularwoodworking.com, and eight teen adventure novels as well. He’s about to retire.

He still likes Trump. He still likes Trump for many of the same reasons he liked Trump back in 1987. “He says the things that go through my mind,” Dunbar said. “When I watch Washington in action, I just want to take them and bang their heads together and say, ‘You idiots!’ And he does.” Dunbar is voting for him next week. He’ll do it come November, too, he said, if given the chance.

An inscription to Mike Dunbar from Trump in his book, The Art of the Deal. It reads, "To Michael—Really appreciate your friendship. You have created a very exciting part of my life—on to the future." | Courtesy of Mike Dunbar

The other day, he opened his old copy of The Art of the Deal, re-reading out loud the middle part of Trump’s note.

You have created a very exciting part of my life

“Maybe I hoped he’d get a taste in his mouth, and maybe it did,” Dunbar said. “It just took some time.”

He watches Trump on TV, the rallies, the crowds, the polls, the same bravado he saw at Yoken’s, the same bombast, the same phrases.

“I was the guy at the beginning,” he said. “More than once, I’ve thought, ‘Isn’t this weird, how this is coming full circle?’”