Brian Karem, the “loud mouth” White House correspondent for Playboy magazine, has been chronicling America’s divorce from Donald Trump. 24 Heures spoke with him.
New York / Jean-Cosme Delaloye
For once, Brian Karem didn’t need to shout his question to Donald Trump on September 23, 2020. That day, the Playboy White House Correspondent, who is normally relegated to the back of the press room, was not ignored by the President of the United States. Quite to the contrary. He even got the privilege to ask the first question of the briefing. "Win, lose or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?”, he asked.
Donald Trump didn’t hesitate. ”Well, we’re going to have to see what happens," the president replied. “You know that. I have been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.” Brian Karem followed up. The response he received from the president that day, 6 weeks before the November 3 election, previewed Donald Trump’s current strategy to try to hold onto power after losing to Joe Biden: "Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful… There won’t be a transfer frankly, there will be a continuation”, the president told him.
“This is the first president we have ever had who doesn’t give a shit about democracy.”
Two months after this exchange, Brian Karem still can’t believe Donald Trump tripped on such a “softball question”. “Let's face it. If I ask you as a president of the United States whether he will agree to a peaceful transfer of power, that shouldn't be a difficult question”, Karem said. “With Donald Trump, you have to try to keep it very basic, but he even finds those questions tough because he has got no answers”.
In his latest Playboy column, Brian Karem writes he is “tired" of the spectacle of a president still trying to overturn the result of the November 3 election. But the reporter is convinced that the relationship between America and Donald Trump will be terminated on January 20, 2021, on the day Joe Biden becomes the 46th President of the United States. “Donald Trump lost, so he is ultimately going to pay the price and he will be gone”, Karem said. “I know that he doesn't think he will be gone but he will be gone and once he is, we are all going to be a lot better off honestly.”
The journalist has been covering the White House since Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. He witnessed several presidencies coming to an end, but none like Donald Trump’s. "This is the first president we have ever had who doesn't give a shit about democracy”, Karem said. “He only cares about himself and that is the difference. He's a narcissist. He's a fascist. He's a danger to himself and to others. I think he is mentally ill and I will never be so happy to see somebody go as this guy."
These words from the 59 year-old journalist may come as a surprise. Brian Karem writes for a magazine that helped build the myth a billionaire playboy Donald Trump craves. The president may well have hoisted up a Bible in front of boarded up Washington church on June 1, 2020 after a crowd of peaceful protesters against police brutality had been tear-gassed to clear the way out for him. Donald Trump takes his pride from the fact that he is one of the few men who have been featured on the cover of Playboy.
The story on Brian Karem in 24 Heures.
During his first campaign for the White House in 2016, the businessman often signed his March 1990 Playboy cover with Playmate Brandi Brandt for his supporters. ”I guess we are saying “mea culpa," Karem said while describing the Trump presidency as anything but glamorous. “When my kids were about seven or eight years old, they acted a lot like Donald Trump”, he added. “They were like they wanted what they wanted when they wanted it. They acted like it was the only thing that mattered at that moment. Trump never got past that. So I feel like I've been a an angry parent in the press room for the last four years. It will be nice to deal with adults again”.
Brian Karem’s take on the Trump administration is not much better. “The people that work for Donald Trump are as delusional, if not more so than he is”, he added. “So dealing with his administration is like dealing with a bunch of children in a kindergarten class”.
The reporter’s heated exchanges with the president punctuated a year 2020 marked by the pandemic. When Donald Trump claimed in February that the coronavirus would magically disappear, he was responding to the Playboy correspondent. On August 19, Brian Karem shouted another question to Donald Trump, asking him whether he had any "regrets" about the tens of thousands of Americans who had died from Covid-19.
His question remained unanswered, but Brian Karem had played his role as a disrupter. “I would submit to you that Donald Trump loves running for office and hates governing and I thought he did as little governing in his four years as president as any man has ever done”, Karem said. “If you look at it objectively, out of the four years that Donald Trump has been in office, he spent almost an entire year on the golf course. He is dedicated to stirring up his base. He is dedicated to his rallies. He is dedicated to tweeting. He is dedicated to making fun of everyone who disagrees with him and threatening them. But he is really bad at governing”.
Brian Karem has been trying to educate Donald Trump’s supporters in his own way. “They think he cares about them, but they don't know,” he explained. “Ignorance has always been an undercurrent in American society and this idea that democracy means that my ignorant opinion equals your informed opinion. (…) Trump has played to that because he does the same thing and people see themselves in him. And so they like him. The only way to defeat him is through education. You've got to sit down in a room and listen to them and talk cogently to them”.
As Donald Trump keeps feeding his base with unfounded accusations of electoral fraud, the task is not easy. And Brian Karem's methods are praised as much as they are criticized. “ As my mentor Helen Thomas [Editor’s note: the longtime White House correspondent who died in 2013 at the age of 92] told me: “if you're looking to make friends don't become a reporter”, Karem said. “I didn't join the ranks of reporting to become everybody's best friend”.
Brian Karem also learned another important lesson from Helen Thomas. “She always told me, “Look, it doesn’t matter what the answer is”, he went on. “It doesn't matter if it is answered or not. Just ask the question, that way they can't deny that the issue has been brought before them”.
On Friday, Brian Karem took advantage of one of Donald Trump's rare public appearance since he lost the November 3 election, to shout another question to him: "Mr. President, you have lost the election! When will you admit you lost the election? " Donald Trump left the room without a word and without looking at him. But the president’s silence gave the reporter the answer he was looking for that day.