Look, we all know Trump is a guy who plays loose and fast with the truth. He’s got a rhetorical style cooked in the spicy, spicy soup of the Manhattan real estate market, which means he big ups his statements until they really bear no resemblance to reality.
The curious case of Trump and “Jim,” the friend who lost his love for Paris — my latest, as we prepare to head East https://t.co/5QUeVuQat5
— Vivian Salama (@vmsalama) July 12, 2017
“Jim, lemme ask you a question, how’s Paris doing?”
“PARIS? I don’t go there anymore!” pic.twitter.com/rllkayUixG
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 24, 2017
The way Trump tells it — Jim is a friend who loves Paris and used to visit every year. Yet when Trump travels to the city Thursday for his first time as president, it’s unlikely that Jim will tag along. Jim doesn’t go to Paris anymore. Trump says that’s because the city has been infiltrated by foreign extremists.Whether Jim exists is unclear. Trump has never given his last name. The White House has not responded to a request for comment about who Jim is or whether he will be on the trip.
“Whether Jim exists is unclear.” The Associated Press is flatly saying the president might have repeatedly invoked an imaginary friend.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 12, 2017
Jim, from Trump’s description, sounds old, settled, rich. His Paris, one imagines, spanned from Cartier to L’Ami Louis. But he didn’t ring a bell for observers of the New York–Palm Beach power scene. “I haven’t got a clue as to who Trump’s friend Jim is,” David Patrick Columbia, of New York Social Diary, said. “I know a few Juleses but no Jims who fit the bill,” the writer William Norwich said, confessing that he’d been puzzling over Jim’s identity ever since Trump name-checked him. “You really think there is an actual person?” the journalist Kati Marton asked. “Jim is akin to Mexican rapists and Swedish terrorists.”