Ivanka Trump, Wendi Murdoch, Gayle King and Veronica Grazer attend the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 8, 2026. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
MS NOW's Michael Steele kicked off his segment Friday night with a bizarre tale of an encounter he once had with President Donald Trump that revealed his twisted priorities.
Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, regaled viewers with this story to make more sense of Trump's humiliation earlier in the day, as his Justice Department was forced to throw out a defective criminal case against an Olympic canoeist for "vandalizing" the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
"Remember, Trump spent months micromanaging this project, folks," said Steele, noting the president went on and on about the pool's lining, its new color, and every detail of the project before it went awry. "He went around the normal process for government projects and contracts and handed out a no-bid contract to a company that apparently just screwed the whole thing up."
Trump, said Steele, famously "doesn't have a whole lot of interest in the minutiae, the details, the importance of public policy. But when it comes to the stuff he really cares about, well, like his pet projects, his businesses, the stuff that he gets, you know, money from that puts money mo money in his pocket, Trump becomes the ultimate micromanager."
Steele then dove into his personal story of encountering Trump years before.
"A long time ago, I was in a meeting with Donald Trump, and at one point, Ivanka Trump walked in with options for different paint colors for the bathroom walls of one of his hotels," said Steele. When that happened, he continued, "Trump stopped the meeting for a full 15 minutes as he looked through the different colors, before settling on the one he liked. And folks, you better believe that was the color they used for those bathrooms."
This sort of thing is far from a one-off, said Steele, since new Wall Street Journal reporting revealed that "Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O'Rourke for an update ... which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven't, and for how much," and he then instructs her on exact amounts to ask those companies and donors to give.
"Even a president who's up for re-election should not be that intimately involved in his own fundraising operation," said Steele, saying he has seen this process up close as a party operative, and it simply doesn't happen. But Trump isn't even up for re-election. "He's in his second term as president. He has no more campaigns to run."
Despite that, said Steele, "the man is still taking time out of his day. A lot of time to make sure that some of America's richest people and corporations are giving him money that he can play with."