WSJ’s Peggy Noonan shares recent encounter with Trump after avoiding him for 8 years: ‘He was funny’

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan spoke about her recent encounter with President-elect Donald Trump after deliberately avoiding him for eight years, expressing concern that his “nice” personality would cloud his judgment.

“I never met Trump until two or three weeks ago,” Noonan said in a recent interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss released Tuesday. “In 2015 and 2016, when he made a decision or decided to run for president – he was running, his office and his assistants did what they would do with anyone else in journalism, which was, ‘We want to know. We want to meet you. Come in, meet the boss, have lunch.’ And I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to.’

“And the reason was, I felt that up close he would be lovely and funny, and that there would be something lovely, and that it would disturb my swing as a spectator,” he explained. “I didn’t want to see him up close. I didn’t want to see him from a distance. I wanted- to have this intuitive sense. [to] I saw him from a distance. And I felt I saw him clearly far from the center.”

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Noonan, a Trump critic, acknowledged the war of words he and the former president have had over the years and the attacks he’s received through tweets and at his rallies, telling Weiss, “I’ll look back on it fondly, it’s a weird way.”

“So two or three weeks ago, he came to the Wall Street Journal in an editorial board meeting, and my mind went in again. ‘Don’t go.’ But then I fixed myself,” said Noonan. “It’s been eight years since I wrote about him. I ride him like a drink. He sometimes teases me. It would be a mistake if he comes to my newspaper, he can go there and punish himself. or do whatever he wanted to do It just struck me as the right thing to do, so I went.

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Noonan said he first met President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board before the election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

“So we’re waiting for him… I’m sitting next to him [Wall Street Journal editorial editor] Paul Gigot, and quietly as we wait in fear, 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, ‘Wow,’ like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have drama here.’ And suddenly I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, maybe it’s going to be a drama.’ You know how Trump does, like, when he’s going to scare—I mean, up close,” he continued. “So, at some point, the doors open and the team comes in, and there’s Trump, he said personally. in that blue suit and tie he is big, and the hair is big, everything is big. And, like, he blows others away, and he just says to me, ‘You’re a miracle. She is a very remarkable woman.’

“Then he sat down with us… He went on and off the record. But off the record, he was funny, rude, inappropriate, saying things about foreign leaders that shouldn’t be said in a press conference. And I just sat down and he went back and thought at the end, ‘Honey, your mind It was fine. If you’d met him in 2015, you’d have loved him and not seen him,'” Noonan added.

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Noonan said that Trump had walked past his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal and told him he was ‘good’ despite their frosty relationship. (William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty Images; Evan Vucci/AP)

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Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter and author of “A Certain Idea of ​​America,” recently told Fox News’ Bret Baier that the country is “in the midst of something very big” following Trump’s victory.

“I feel that people think they really don’t like everything they’ve seen in the 21st century, and they felt that Mr. Trump didn’t like it either. That’s why they elected him twice. And more than half of the country, I think, is in a big anti-establishment crisis,” Noonan said.