Peggy Noonan Reveals Why She Avoided Meeting Donald Trump Until This Month: ‘I Have Occasionally Clubbed Him Like a Seal’

Legendary Wall Street Journal columnist and former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan, recalled to Bari Weiss recently that she had avoided meeting Donald Trump until this month.

“I never met Trump until 2 or 3 weeks ago. Did I ever tell you that?” Noonan told Weiss at last week’s Free Press Book Club.

“Well, you just buried the lead. I mean, I’m hearing from Joe and Mika that they had this, like, reproachment as if it’s like the Soviet Union and America convening in Mar-a-Lago. And here’s Peggy. 20 minutes into the conversation saying you met Trump,” Weiss added before asking, “Tell us the context?”

“Here’s what

happened 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,” Noonan began, adding:

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.Yeah. I didn’t want to see him up close. I didn’t want to see him far away. I wanted– had this intuitive sense, see him at a middle distance. And I felt I saw him clearly at a middle distance. So the years pass and the tweets happen, and he attacks me at rallies. And it’s fabulous.No, I mean, it was really interesting. I’ll look back on a kind of warmly in a weird way. So 2 or 3 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.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. Just struck me as the fair right thing. And so I went and so we were waiting for him. He came late. He’s a guy on a campaign and we’re sitting around nervously because it’s the Wall Street Journal, it’s what we do. So I’m sitting next to 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, we’re going to have a drama here. And suddenly I thought, gosh, maybe it will be a drama. You know, maybe like you don’t know how Trump acts, like when he’s going to be horrible. I mean, up close. So anyway, at a certain point, the doors fly open and the entourage comes in and there’s Trump who in person and that blue suit and the tie, is huge, and the hair is huge and everything is huge. And he, like, blows by others. And he just says to me, ‘You are wonderful. You are the most remarkable woman.’

After noting Trump’s

kind words to her, Noonan concluded, “And I was in a funny way, it was like listening to Joe Biden. It was like, like going backwards again. And then he sat down with us and he was not to go off. I mean, 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’ve loved him and not seen him.”

Watch the clip above.