WSJ’s Peggy Noonan shares recent encounter with Trump after avoiding him for 8 years: ‘He was hilarious’

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan spoke about her recent encounter with President-elect Donald Trump after purposefully avoiding him for eight years, revealing the concern she had that his “charming” personality would cloud her judgment. 

“I never met Trump until two or three weeks ago,” Noonan said in a recent conversation with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss released Tuesday. “In 2015 and 2016, when he was deciding to or had decided to run for president- was running, his office and his aides did what they would do with anybody else in journalism, which was reach out and say, ‘We want to know you. We want to meet you. Come on in, meet the boss, have lunch.’ And I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to.'” 

“And the reason was, I had a feeling that up close he would be charming and funny, and that there would be something endearing, and that it would mess with my swing as an observer,” she explained. “I didn’t want to see him up close. I didn’t want to see him far away. I wanted- had this intuitive sense [to] see him at a middle distance. And I felt I saw him clearly at a middle distance.”

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Noonan, a vocal Trump critic, acknowledged the war of words she and the former president have had over the years and the attacks she received through tweets and at his rallies, telling Weiss, “I’ll look back on it kind of warmly, in a weird way.”

“So two or three weeks ago, he came to the Wall Street Journal for an editorial board meeting, and my instinct kicked in again. ‘Don’t go.’ But then I corrected myself,” Noonan said. “I’ve been writing about him for eight years. I have occasionally clubbed him like a seal. He has occasionally clubbed me. And it would be so wrong if he came to my newspaper, and he couldn’t go there and take retribution or do whatever he wanted to do. It just struck me as the fair, right thing. And so I went.”

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“And so we’re waiting for him… I’m sitting next to [Wall Street Journal editorial editor] Paul Gigot, and in a silence as we nervously wait, Paul says, ‘How many times have you met Trump?’ And I said, ‘I’ve never met Trump.’ And he said, ‘You’ve never met Trump?!?’ And he went, ‘Whoa,’ like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna have a drama here.’ And suddenly I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, maybe it will be a drama.’ You know how Trump acts, like, when he’s gonna be horrible- I mean, up close,” she continued. “So anyway, at a certain point, the doors fly open and the entourage comes in, and there’s Trump, who in person in that blue suit and the tie is huge, and the hair is huge, everything is huge. And he, like, blows by others, and he just says to me, ‘You are wonderful. You are the most remarkable woman.’”

“And then he sat down with us… He went on and off the record. But off the record, he was hilarious, rude, inappropriate, said things about foreign leaders that should not be said to a bunch of journalists. And I just sat back and thought by the end, ‘Honey, your intuition was right. If you’d met him in 2015, you would have loved him and not seen him,'” Noonan added.  

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Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter and author of “A Certain Idea of America,” recently told Fox News’ Bret Baier that the country is “in the middle of something very big” following Trump’s victory. 

“I have a feeling that people are thinking that they don’t really like all that they’ve seen of the 21st century, and they had a sense that Mr. Trump didn’t like it either. That’s why they elected him twice. And more than half the country, I think, is just in a major pushback against the establishment,” Noonan said.