At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, President Donald Trump railed against journalists who use anonymous sources, telling the crowd of grassroots Republican activists that reporters should be required to disclose the name of anyone who gives them information.
This issue was at the forefront of Trump’s mind, after the Washington Post released a story late Thursday night referencing nine anonymous sources in the White House who verified claims that Gen. Mike Flynn had spoken to the Russian ambassador about lifting sanctions.
But not only has Trump used anonymous sources before—he’s actually been an anonymous source.
In 1991, well before Trump ever had Presidential ambitions (or, at least public ones), he phoned a People Magazine reporter as an anonymous source named “John Miller” to brag about the many amazing women Donald Trump had been seen with all over New York—and how many he’d bedded.
Miller told People that Trump had three girlfriends in addition to his then-partner Marla Maples, and that Madonna had basically chased Trump down at an event in an effort to sleep with him. (Trump had no interest, Miller said.)
Trump eventually confessed to People that he was “John Miller,” but the name appeared regularly in stories about Trump’s exploits in the 1980s and 1990s, along with a second alias, “John Barron.” Posing as Barron, Trump would often place nuggets of favorable information about himself in business publications, acting as his own public relations department.
His aides appeared to use a variation of the same technique during the campaign, asking reporters at Trump’s favorite network, CNN, to go off the record and to be described as sources.
Of course, his experience as an anonymous source may be what leads Trump to believe that anonymous sources are particularly incredible. But that doesn’t quite explain why on his path to the White House, Trump also used anonymous sources to attack President Obama, including over Obama’s supposedly missing official birth certificate.
He revisited the same tactic over and over, claiming that sources told him Obama had applied to Occidental College as a foreign student, and that Obama planned to add a massive spending program to the federal budget that would cost more than $6 trillion.
Trump cited anonymous sources who told him Obama bought his Chicago home from convicted criminal Tony Rezko (that turned out to be true), cited sources in the New York AG’s office who told him an investigation against the Trump Foundation was a political smear campaign, and even—occasionally—used the testimony of random people on the street to bolster his own credentials.
The WWE match he starred in, the “Battle of the Billionaires,” was the greatest WWE match of all time. Or so he said that anonymous people had told him.
Even in his CPAC speech, Trump cited a “friend” named “Jim,” who relayed information on Paris’ new reputation for being a violent city. (Jim claims that’s because of immigrants to France from the Middle East and Africa).
The Trump Administration used CPAC to define the media—and not the Democrats—as the opposition party seeking to obstruct Trump’s agenda. But the war on anonymous sources may be the wrong front to open in the larger, ongoing battle.