WASHINGTON – Something remarkable happened, according to Donald Trump, when Donald Trump arrived at his campaign rally in Evansville, Indiana last week.
Nine “miners” greeted him backstage. They were “tough guys,” “seriously tough cookies,” men he wouldn’t want to fight. But eight of the nine were crying.
“Crying out of happiness,” Trump said. “Because they’re back.”
Eight days later, on Friday, the U.S. president spoke at a campaign fundraiser in Fargo, North Dakota. Another moving moment, in his telling, occurred when he was walking into the room.
“A strong man came up to me, tough kind of a guy, and said: ‘I want to thank you, Mr. President, for saving our country.’ And he had tears coming down his eyes,” Trump said. “This wasn’t just a statement, because he had tears coming down. Unless he was a real wise guy. But he had tears coming down his eyes.”
Trump flew from North Dakota to South Dakota. There, he repeated the story from eight days prior in Indiana, almost word for word, about how he had encountered nine men, eight of whom were crying.
But there was something odd about this version. This time the nine men were “steelworkers,” not miners, and the encounter happened “at the opening of one of the big plants for United States Steel,” not backstage at the Indiana rally.
Trump tells a lot of stories about his private interactions with people. Many of these stories are widely seen as dubious, and some of them have been shown to be lies, but most of them are carefully constructed so that they are difficult to conclusively prove fictional. So although Trump is a serial liar, we can’t say for sure that he is making all of these stories up.
We can say that he is making some of them up. About the others, we can say that a curious number of people sure seem to be bursting into grateful tears in Trump’s presence.
The crying characters in Trump’s stories tend to share three characteristics: they are male, they are “tough” or “strong,” and they do not have names.
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By Trump’s telling, the waterworks began early in his presidency. In May 2017, he told CBS about what happened when he let “the head of a major, major company” visit the Oval Office.
“I said, ‘Have you been to the White House before?’ ‘Yes, 51 times.’ I said, ‘Oh good, so you’ve been to the Oval Office.’ ‘No, I was never brought to the Oval Office.’ I said, ‘Come on, I’ll bring you to the Oval Office.’ The person came into the Oval Office and started to cry,” he said. “This is a tough person, by the way. Came into the Oval Office and started to cry.”
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In January 2018, Trump told an American Farm Bureau convention that farmers had approached him crying after he signed an executive order to ease an Obama-era water regulation many farmers opposed.
“Men that were tough and strong, women that were tough and strong — they’d see me, they had tears coming down their eyes, because I gave them back their property, I gave them back their farms,” he said.
Campaigning in August against Ohio’s Democratic candidate for governor, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray, Trump said “strong,” “tough” businesspeople had been reduced to tears by Cordray’s regulatory work.
“I have to say that people were coming up to me, strong people, tough people with businesses that were 100 years old, people that were pillars of their community, and they had tears in their eyes, what Cordray was doing. He was putting them out of business,” Trump said.
After North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un agreed to return the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War, Trump began claiming that multiple parents of Korean War soldiers had approached him on the campaign trail to beg him to make this happen. When it was noted that these parents would be more than 100 years old, Trump changed the story to claim it was the children of the soldiers, not the parents, who had approached him.
He added tears to this new version.
“People would come to me and with tears in their eyes,” he said, “and say, ‘Would it be possible to get back the remains of our father?’”
There are some examples, of course, of people actually crying around or about Trump. When Trump gave a July speech at a U.S. Steel plant his tariffs have helped, one steelworker indeed became teary in a television interview.
Trump was not satisfied with one.
“We had an audience of steelworkers, some of the roughest, toughest people you’ve ever seen. And half of them had tears coming down their face,” he said the next day, though that did not happen.
For all his respectful mentions of supposed crying, Trump has also used crying as a weapon of shame in political attacks. When former staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman turned on him in August, he called her a “crazed, crying lowlife,” elaborating: “She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes.”
He has periodically referred to Democratic leader Chuck Schumer as “Cryin’ Chuck” and “Fake Tears Chuck” since Schumer choked up after Trump imposed his Muslim-focused travel ban in 2017. Attacking Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal for Blumenthal’s lies about serving in Vietnam, Trump claimed that Blumenthal “cried like a baby” when he was caught, though that did not happen either.
On Air Force One on the way to the North Dakota event on Friday, he criticized Andrew Weissmann, a lawyer on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, for attending Hillary Clinton’s election-night party in 2016. He said: “People that are on Mueller’s team who are there crying. They were crying.” There was, as usual, no evidence of crying.
Trump told author Tim O’Brien for a 2005 biography: “I don’t believe in crying...when I see a man cry I view it as a weakness.” Asked during his 2016 campaign whether he cries himself, he again said no.
“The last time I cried was when I was a baby,” he told People magazine in 2015. He told Christian Broadcasting in 2016: “No, I’m not a big crier. I like to get things done.”
He concluded: “But I know people like that. I know plenty of people that cry. They’re very good people.”
