Trump Admits He Sometimes Used Aliases
But likely GOP nominee insists to Jimmy Kimmel he never posed as spokesman
Donald Trump admitted Wednesday that he had sometimes posed as other people during business deals, but he continued to deny reports that he had frequently pretended to be his own spokesman.
Trump said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live! ” that he had often used aliases in real estate transactions to avoid paying a premium for the Trump name. But that distinctly Trump-like voice in a recorded phone extolling the Manhattan mogul’s wealth and sexual prowess to a reporter? Not him, he said.
“You know, over the years I’ve used aliases. And when I’m in real estate and especially when I was out in Brooklyn with my father and I’d want to buy something,” he said. “I would never want to use my name because you had to pay more money for the land. If you tried to buy land, you used different names.”
The interview came as Trump has spent weeks denying allegations that during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s he frequently called reporters pretending to be a publicist named John Miller. The Washington Post first reported on the allegations after it had obtained a taped interview of one such conversation.
Trump admitted under oath in the 1990s that he had sometimes used that name. But in the interview Wednesday he repeated his more recent assertion that John Miller was not him.
“It didn’t sound like me, though, really,” Trump said to Kimmel. “You think that sounded like me?”
“Yeah,” Kimmel said, adding that the tactic was “brilliant” and “funny.”
“I will say this: To me, that didn’t sound like my voice,” Trump said.
Contact Akin at stephanieakin@rollcall.com and follow her on Twitter at @stephanieakin
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