Trump's Top Op - Donald Trump's political adviser Roger Stone

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by John J. Miller

AT AGE 47, Roger Stone is already one of the great characters of Washington-a man who embodied the liberals' "decade of greed" talk in the 1980s, when his extensive Reagan-administration contacts helped him become one of the flashiest lobbyists in town. He was like a character in a Tom Wolfe novel, a D.C. master of the universe, who bragged about how much his suits cost and bopped around in a Jaguar (when he wasn't in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes). In 1985, The New Republic tagged him a "state-of-the-art sleazeball."

Stone is now working for billionaire presidential contender Donald J. Trump. Almost nobody in Washington takes Trump's candidacy seriously. They don't doubt he could win the Reform party nomination, but believe he won't even pursue it. And Trump's very lack of seriousness is symbolized by his choice of Stone as chief political adviser. If Trump really wants to be president, he might be wise to leave Stone at home.

It's not that Stone is ignorant of politics. In fact, he loved politics from a very early age. He says he read Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative when he was twelve. Even as an adolescent, he spent every free minute working on Republican campaigns in Connecticut and New York with his close friend, the late Republican operative Terry Dolan. He had a particular taste for hijinks, as when he ran a candidate for lieutenant governor of Connecticut without the poor man's knowledge.

After high school, Stone enrolled at George Washington University and took an apprenticeship with Chuck Colson at the Nixon outfit, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (later known, not so affectionately, as CREEP). There, Stone adopted a pseudonym and wrote a check to Pete McCloskey, a Republican congressman from California who had been spending time in New Hampshire, thinking of challenging President Nixon. The check came from a group calling itself the Young Socialists Alliance. When it cleared the bank, Stone ran to the press to embarrass his target. "I did some things, in retrospect, which were in terribly poor judgment," he told the Washington Post in 1986. In 1974, he lost a job in Bob Dole's Senate office after Jack Anderson wrote a column pinning Stone as a "dirty trickster."

Throughout the 1970s, Stone was a committed Republican, and a fairly conservative one. When he married in 1974, he and his wife honeymooned at a GOP camp for teens where they were counselors. By 1976, Stone was devoting himself to the Reagan cause. "He fought and bled for Ronald Reagan that year," says Grover Norquist, a longtime GOP activist. "Working for Reagan in 1984 tells you nothing about a person, working for him in 1980 tells you something, and working for him in 1976 tells you everything. That's what true believers did." Four years later, Stone ran Reagan's campaign in the Northeast. Then it came time to cash in.

Stone says that Donald Trump was one of his first clients at the highpowered Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly lobbying firm. "He was an early Reagan backer I got to know when I was organizing New York state," he says. "We became friendly." Stone has been on the Trump payroll for nearly 20 years.

Though he kept his hand in politics, nothing would ever top his efforts for Reagan, or even come close. In 1986, he made the mistake of calling Vice President Bush a "weenie" in Time magazine-a snub that has made it difficult for him in presidential-level GOP circles ever since. He worked for the short-lived candidacies of Jack Kemp in 1988 and Arlen Specter in 1996, and he played a part in a few state races. But he increasingly focused on his corporate clients. "I don't really consider myself a political consultant anymore," he now says.

He's doing plenty of political consulting at the moment, however. It's clear he has been thinking about Trump and the Y2K races for some time. He had encouraged New York radio personality Bob Grant to run for the Senate from New Jersey as an independent against the likely GOP nominee, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. In September, Whitman backed out. Many in the state think that Grant scared her away-she didn't win a majority in either of her gubernatorial races, and Grant presumably would have peeled off a portion of the Republican base. The buzz among New Jersey Republicans is that Stone did Trump's bidding. The mogul has been furious with Whitman ever since she approved the use of state development funds to build a tunnel in Atlantic City that benefits Steve Wynn, one of Trump's casino rivals. There's no evidence that Trump asked Stone to help sic Grant on Whitman, and Stone calls the theory "a hell of a stretch." Others disagree.

Presidential politics, too, were on Stone's mind before Trump made noises. Last June, Stone asked Pat Buchanan's sister Bay for a meeting. They had worked together in 1990 during Bay's losing bid to become California state treasurer. Bay invited along their mutual friend Lyn Nofziger, who was supporting Pat's presidential ambitions at the time. Over lunch at The Palm in Washington, Stone was eager to discuss Buchanan's future-outside the GOP. "Roger suggested that Pat look at the Reform party because it has millions of dollars in matching funds available," recalls Nofziger. "Roger said he knew what to do to get the Reform nomination." Four months later, Buchanan did indeed bolt the GOP-but without Nofziger, who refused to abandon his party, and without Stone.