Writer Michael D’Antonio is author of more than a dozen nonfiction books including Mortal Sins and the upcoming Never Enough, Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, which will be published in September.

When I heard Donald Trump say Thursday night that he wouldn’t rule out a third party run if he isn’t the GOP nominee, my ears perked up. Last year, after all, it was a different story.

In the third of a series of meetings, Donald Trump asked me to switch off my audio recorder. We had just finished a long interview for my unauthorized biography— Never Enough, Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success—which will be published in September by St. Martin’s Press. In conspiratorial terms he told me that he was giving serious thought to running for president. Knowing that he had first flirted with this idea in 1987, and had indulged speculation about a possible presidential run ever since, I applied a grain of salt to this revelation and filed it away in my mind.


In subsequent sessions, as we talked about his business dealings and personal life, Trump kept returning the subject of presidential politics. He expressed lingering disappointment with Mitt Romney. “Something happened to him,” Trump told me. “I don’t know what happened to him, but he should have won that election.” Trump repeated complaints about Obama and defended his birther-ism, and he took interest when I told him I was from the first primary state of New Hampshire and had covered campaigns there in the past for Newsday and others.

Finally, Trump let the cat out of the bag, saying that he had heard some much from people urging him to run that he thought he would. One subsequent comment, which I didn’t consider very important at the time, was focused on whether he would run as an independent, like the previous businessman candidate Ross Perot or as Republican. (Knowing his record, which included past support for many left-leaning ideas, donations to candidates in both parties, and an aborted bid for the Reform Party slot, I couldn’t assume anything.)

“I’d run as a Republican,” he told me last summer as we chatted in the formal reception room of his Trump Tower apartment. “I wouldn’t do a third-party line. The system isn’t set up for that. I’d be a conservative Republican.”

The cover art for Michael D'Antonio's forthcoming book about Donald Trump, "Never Enough, Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success." | Courtesy of Michael D'Antonio

This statement seemed definitive, but Trump can be so difficult to pin-down that I followed up, asking, “If you got to the convention, and you had a lot of delegates, maybe won a couple of primaries—can you imagine yourself working with the party establishment?”

“Yeah. That’s deal making. Look, Obama never made a deal except for his house, and if some Republican did that deal they’d be in the hoosegow—you know what I’m talking about with the house, right?"

Trump was referring, of course, to speculation around the purchase of Barack Obama’s home in Chicago. “That’s why I’m here,” he continued. “If you did that deal, you’d have lots of problems. He expanded his house with land owned by somebody else. It was a big story, but it never went anywhere. If it were somebody else, it would have been a Nixon situation.”

When I then asked Trump about how he’ll handle political opponents, he reiterated a basic principle he holds about responding as hard as possible, whenever someone offends him. This is the approach he has taken in Twitter wars and celebrity feuds—and even in just the last 24 hours with Fox News’s moderator Megyn Kelly.

“But I’ll go after them,” Trump said. “I’ll expose them as being very dishonest, and it may work and it may not. Ultimately it’s hard to beat the press. The press is so dishonest. But I will go after them. It’s hard to beat the press, but the good news is there’s some very honest media.

“I have Twitter, I have Facebook—between Twitter and Facebook I’ll be at five-million people by the time your book comes out. That’s more than the biggest media company.”

In fact CNN has more than 28 social media million followers. The New York Times and the BBC each have more than 17 million. But as so often is the case with Trump, he was expressing a general thought— I have a lot of Twitter followers—and the exact accuracy of his claim wasn’t so important to him.

Was Trump serious when he told me he would only run as a Republican, or was he serious on Thursday night when he said he wouldn’t rule it out? I would say he was as serious as he could be, in both instances. And he’s most serious of all about keeping his options open, and keeping everyone talking about him.