In an op-ed for New York Daily News, the former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res recalled that now-US President Trump asked to remove the braille from the elevators at the Trump Tower back in the 1980s.
As she tells it in the op-ed, an architect for the future Trump Tower came to Trump's office to show him the design of the interiors of the building's elevators; when the real estate mogul noticed the braille dots on the buttons, he demanded they be removed.
The architect refused, Res wrote, noting that braille in elevators is obligatory under US law.
"Get rid of the (expletive) braille," Trump reportedly said, according to Res. "No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it."
"A Trump-style win-win," she wrote.
In fact, Res herself said she used to sabotage or even outright ignore Trump's orders, simply to avoid an argument with the company's owner.
The op-ed comes around the same time as the recently published book "Fear," by Bob Woodward, which portrays the Trump administration as being at odds with the president himself.
The op-ed provides context for the administration, arguing that Trump retains as president his MO that he had in business: demanding impossible things impulsively.
Res bemoaned, however, that there are not "many order refusers" around Trump now. People that work with him don't sabotage his orders, she lamented.
"But what have they done to try to control him? Steal a memo off his desk so he will forget to sign it? How about not preparing the memo in the first place? And who refuses to lie for him when he makes his outrageous claims?" she wrote.
Switching from memories to international politics, Res proclaimed that Trump's "just do its" are now about "alienating allies, cozying up to dictators and employing dangerous, nonsensical economic tactics."
Something about that line sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? Blaming Trump for exact same things has been the prevailing narrative for his critics in the US Congress for quite a while, especially following the Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the effectively failed G7 summit in Canada.
Res did not elaborate on her accusations. However, Trump has imposed tariffs in order to even up the US' trade deficits with China, Canada and the European Union. He has met and negotiated with leaders of countries that previous administrations targeted with sanctions and unfriendly rhetoric (even negotiating an unlikely warm-up between North and South Korea). And he has forced US transnational corporations to come back home and bring their cash along thanks to the tax reform. Considering Trump's economic tactics in particular, an August 2018 Bloomberg piece said the US economy is "booming." They even put it in the headline.