Early this morning, after he had stunned the world by winning the presidency, Donald Trump took a call from a longtime confidant.
"Nobody believed in me," Trump said. Literally, only two or three people, he said, had thought he could pull this off -- and at times, not even Trump himself. Now he had a lengthening call list of world leaders who wanted to pay their respects to the new leader of the free world.
It was a starkly different scene last June, when the businessman was still seen as a hopeless underdog. Trump was on his blue-and-red Boeing 757, huddling with his top staffers, who were begging him not to talk about Gonzalo Curiel.
Trump had a score to settle. He told his staff he wanted to denounce the judge handling the lawsuit against Trump University. His advisers pushed back hard, saying this would be a huge distraction, that Trump had to be seen as fighting for America, not for himself.
The unofficial Republican nominee took the plunge anyway, calling the Indiana-born judge, whose parents were from Mexico, a “hater” who had “an inherent conflict of interest.”
