Here’s President Trump (!) at CPAC in Maryland on Friday discussing the journalistic practice of quoting anonymous sources:
There are some terrible, dishonest people, and they do tremendous disservice to our country and to our people, a tremendous disservice. They are very dishonest people, and they shouldn’t use “sources”—they should put the name of the person. You [would] see stories dry up like you have never seen before.
Here’s a People magazine story about the time in 1991 that Trump admitted he’d called a People reporter named Sue Carswell and pretended to be a spokesman named “John Miller” in order to brag about how many women he (Trump) was dating:
When [Carswell] played the recording for friends of Trump and his then-girlfriend, Marla Maples, they were unanimous: the voice was Trump’s own, a ruse that Carswell noted in her story for the July 8, 1991, issue of PEOPLE.
By the time PEOPLE was putting its July 22, 1991, issue together, Trump had called Carswell to confess that he was, in fact, the so-called John Miller who called a couple weeks earlier.
“Miller” told People that Trump “gets called by everybody in the book, in terms of women,” had at least three girlfriends in addition to Maples, and was being pursued by both Madonna and Carla Bruni. (There is no evidence that Trump ever dated Madonna, and Bruni responded to the claims by calling Trump a “lunatic” who she’d only met once in passing.)
