October 19, 2016

The Trump Files: Famous Tic Tac Gobbler Donald Trump Had This Breath Advice for Larry King

At the beginning of 1989, New York real estate mogul Donald Trump had just completed a wave of high-profile hotel and casino purchases: He’d recently snagged the Plaza hotel in New York for the highest price paid for a hotel in US history, and he’d purchased his third and final Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal.

The mogul sat down for an interview with CNN’s Larry King in April to talk about his business. King asked Trump if he had plans to expand beyond his East Coast properties, and Trump replied that he did have California real estate. 

But then Trump apparently could not take it any more and asked King if he could move his chair “because your breath is very bad. It really is.” Without pausing for a response, he continued, “Has this ever been told to you before?” King said no and attempted to turn Trump’s accusation into part of the interview. “So this is how you get the edge,” King said, “you threw me right then, and no one has ever told me that.”

Trump persisted, “Has nobody told you that? Sharon hasn’t said it? You’re kidding.” King said his wife had never mentioned this and Trump replied, “Okay. Your breath is great.”

In a 2010 interview on King’s CNN show, Trump recalled the moment. “I took heat the next day,” he said. Trump also told King that his breath wasn’t actually bad that day—Trump had just made the comment in response to an earlier question from King about Trump’s strategies for catching people off guard in his business dealings. By commenting on King’s breath, Trump said, he was merely illustrating the point. “And you even were offended by it,” Trump said to King “and you forgot the first part of your question.” King had, according to Trump, indeed been caught off guard.

For his part, King told Playboy in a 1990 interview that Trump’s shock tactic didn’t work on him. “The first question I asked Trump was, ‘Is there a method to getting an edge in negotiations that you could relate to us? And he said, ‘Larry, you have bad breath,'” King recalled. “He made a very good point: Shock ’em. But it didn’t work.” 

But one way or another, the moment seemed to have made an impression: In 2011, King and his wife, Shawn, starred in a series of TV commercials for BreathGemz, mints that “are powerful, dual action capsules,” King says, that give him “the confidence to be close to anyone.”

Even Donald Trump.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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