Donald Trump abruptly hung up on Washington Post reporters when they asked him Friday afternoon about reports that he used to masquerade as his own publicist in interviews.
The Post’s Marc Fisher and Will Hobson reported that they were 44 minutes into a call with Trump about his finances when they asked if he ever employed a man named John Miller as his publicist. Trump immediately went silent, and then the line went dead, they wrote.
Fisher and Hobson wrote that when they called back, Trump’s secretary told them, “I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.”
The inquiry came the same day the Post published audio of a 1991 interview in which a man by the name of John Miller, who sounded like Trump, recounting details of the real estate mogul’s love life to a reporter for People magazine.
Trump adamantly denied Friday that he was the person speaking with the People magazine reporter, saying “it doesn’t sound like me on the phone.”
“I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice,” he said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.” “And you can imagine that. And this sounds like one of these scams, one of the many scams, doesn’t sound like me.”
Yet, as the Post reported, Trump had admitted back in the ‘90s that he made the call and said it was “a joke gone awry.”
Trump also testified in a 1990 court case that he occasionally used the names John Miller and John Baron in interviews with the media, according to the Associated Press.
