Donald Trump once reportedly tried to ban Braille from Trump Tower elevator button panels, even after being warned it would be against the law.
Barbara Res, a former longtime executive for the Trump Organization, alleged in an op-ed published by the New York Daily News on Wednesday that Trump ordered an architect to “get rid of the (expletive) Braille” as the Manhattan skyscraper was being constructed in the early 1980s.
“No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump reportedly told the unidentified man, who was showing him “what the interior of the residential elevator cabs would look like.”
Res, who was the organization’s vice president in charge of construction, said Trump likely knew the architect would never remove the Braille.
But his ordering of “an underling to do something that was impossible” was a win-win situation for him, Res explained. He could bash his workers for disobeying orders, and blame them later if anything went wrong.
Res admitted in the piece to occasionally lying on Trump’s behalf. But she also claimed to have stood up to him.
“Trump is really not all that different now, but the stakes are higher. And there aren’t many order refusers anymore either,” she wrote, before criticizing an anonymous senior White House official who last week penned an op-ed in The New York Times that bashed Trump as amoral and petty.
“The ‘just do its’ are getting done. And they are not directed at carpenters and painters or fan magazines. Now they’re about alienating allies, cozying up to dictators and employing dangerous nonsensical economic tactics,” Res wrote. “The self-aggrandizing Anonymous wants the world to know that there are adults in the room. Really? What the hell are they doing?”
Read the full New York Daily News article here.