By Eileen Moon
For more than 30 years, Fox News correspondent and former Two River Times owner Geraldo Rivera enjoyed a friendship with former President Donald Trump rooted in their shared identities as native New Yorkers, accustomed to the glare of publicity and known for speaking up and speaking out through decades of conflict and controversy.
But, Rivera told The Two River Times last Tuesday, the relationship between the two men has ruptured in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
While he understood that Trump would “exhaust all of his legal options” before conceding the election, Rivera said, “I really thought he was a realist and would do the right thing when the time came.”
Instead, despite dozens of unsuccessful challenges to the election results, Trump refused to accept his defeat.
“I was off the Trump train after the lawsuits collapsed,” Rivera said. “Maybe he was sincere. I saw it as selfish.”
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, Rivera considered his fellow New Yorker a friend, supporting him through the questions and controversies that accompanied his four years in office.
“We frequently spoke over the last five years. He really had honored the friendship that we had, knowing each other since the 1970s.”
He remembers talking with Trump about how they met. Rivera believes it was in the mid-1970s, at an engagement party with Rivera’s then-fiancée Francine Lefrak, whose father, Sam, was a friend of Trump’s father, Fred.
Rivera, then an award-winning reporter for Eyewitness News, and Trump, following in his father’s footsteps as a rising real estate developer, would cross paths many times over the years.
Rivera catapulted to fame after his groundbreaking exposé of deplorable conditions at Willowbrook, a state institution for disabled children on Staten Island. Trump earned national attention as the developer of Trump Tower in Manhattan and the savior of the historic Wollman Skating Rink, which he redeveloped in the mid-1980s.
“We kind of grew up together,” said Rivera, who is now 77. “I used to live in a Trump building.”
That relationship only strengthened over the years. “I had him on my daily show about 30 times,” Rivera said.
“He told me he was going to run for president in 1999,” Rivera said.
After Trump’s election in 2016, that relationship took on extra consequence.
“It was a heady time, to be friends with the president.”
In recent years, Trump would call Rivera, who now lives in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Shaker Heights with wife, Erica, and their daughter, Sol, to talk about the issues on his mind.
The president also connected for interviews on Rivera’s radio program, “Roadkill with Geraldo Rivera.”
Their last conversation took place Friday, Nov. 13, just 10 days after the election. At that point, Rivera still believed Trump would eventually accept the results of the election and act in the best interests of the nation. At the conclusion of that call, the president invited Rivera to call him at the White House the following week.
Acting on Trump’s invitation, Rivera called him the following Monday, but Trump didn’t take his call.
A second call also brought no response.
“By then, they were going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole,” Rivera said. “I didn’t call again.”
Between their last conversation that Friday and the following Monday, an event took place that Rivera sees as pivotal in Trump’s continued protests over the election results.
On Saturday, Nov. 14, on its way to the golf course, the president’s motorcade drove by thousands of supporters who were in Washington, D.C. for a “Million MAGA March,” protesting the results of the election.
“In my opinion, that is what hardened his resolve to the point that he went off the rails,” Rivera said. “He took the Republican party – a good portion of the Republican party – with him.”
It was a direction that would lead, less than two months later, to yet another election protest in Washington culminating in the attack on the Capitol and the deaths of five people, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick.
“In my opinion, he deserves to be impeached,” Rivera said of Trump.
But he doesn’t believe that the former president should or can be convicted now that he is no longer in office. “I don’t think it’s constitutional. I believe the constitutional argument (that impeachment when a president is out of office is not sanctioned under the Constitution).
“He’s already shamed by his status as the only president to be impeached twice.
He definitely deserved to be indicted. I think that he richly deserved to be impeached. That’s a big journey for me.”
In addition to his television news career, Rivera was the owner of The Two River Times from 1991 to 2002. It’s a time he looks back on fondly from the complexities of national politics.
“I loved that time. There was such a wonderful sense of community. I remember fondly what it was like to own the newspaper. It was less of a business than a community.”
During the years of his ownership, The Two River Times played a key role in establishing the two rivers as a distinctive area encompassing the towns along the Navesink and won many awards for its coverage of local issues and events, said Rivera.
The paper also was an important participant in the resurrection and renaissance of Red Bank after its economic decline in the 1980s.
And in the aftermath of 9/11, the paper helped a grieving community come together, Rivera recalled, remembering his role as emcee of a star-studded fundraising concert for surviving families of 9/11 at the Count Basie Theatre (now the Count Basie Center for the Arts) headlined by Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. “We raised a ton of money,” he said.
When Rivera sold the paper, he distributed the proceeds of the sale to his employees.
He’s pleased to see that it has endured as a community publication well into the 21st century. “It’s fabulous that it is still there,” he said. “That people care enough about it to keep it going.”
The article originally appeared in the February 4 – 10, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
