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Trump secretly recorded boasting about how many retweets he got for backing Confederate-named base

Republican senator James Inhofe put president’s voice on speaker phone in Washington restaurant

Andrew Naughtie
Friday 31 July 2020 17:17 BST
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Senator James Inhofe, recipient of a boastful phonecall from Donald Trump
Senator James Inhofe, recipient of a boastful phonecall from Donald Trump

Donald Trump has been recorded calling a Republican senator to boast about the praise he received on Twitter for saying bases named for Confederate army officers should not be altered.

The senator, Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma, received his call from Mr Trump while dining at an Italian restaurant in Washington, DC. Mr Inhofe put the call on speakerphone, apparently to hear it better, and inadvertently allowed Mr Trump to be heard by other patrons – one of whom recorded the exchange and sent it to the New York Times.

On the recording, Mr Trump can be heard asking Mr Inhofe “we’re going to keep the name of Robert E Lee?”.

“Just trust me,” says Mr Inhofe, “I’ll make it happen.”

The exchange appears to refer to the mooted renaming of Fort Lee in Virginia, which Mr Trump has vehemently opposed. In a tweet last Friday, the president proclaimed that Mr Inhofe had reassured him that the fort and others like it would not be renamed, and that the senator “is not a believer in ‘cancel culture’”.

“I had about 95,000 positive retweets on that,” said Mr Trump on the call. “That’s a lot.” (At the time of writing, the tweet has had around 34,500 retweets, and around 134,000 likes.)

Mr Trump also vented his frustration at the state of the country. “A lot of it is this cancel culture,” he appears to say on the indistinct recording. “A lot of people want to go back to life, not this bullshit.”

The two men also seem to discuss the troubled future of Trump nominee Anthony Tata, a retired army officer whose nomination to a Pentagon office seems in jeopardy thanks to his history of Islamophobic tweets and embrace of conspiracy theories. The morning after the phonecall, Mr Inhofe postponed Mr Tata’s confirmation hearing.

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