Jeffrey Lord, Donald Trump's "good guy" on CNN, is opening up about how he rose to be one of the Republican presidential candidate's top television surrogates doing battle with the Trump naysayers in a Vanity Fair feature posted Thursday.
Lord, 65, has ably defended Trump against the likes of James Carville, Ana Navarro, Van Jones, and David Axelrod throughout the year as the election lumbered through the Republican presidential primary phase and transitioned into the main presidential race, the magazine noted.
"On CNN, Lord humanizes Donald Trump much the way a biographer might describe a controversial historical figure — he defends the veracity of his stances, their merit, and, more often than not, why people could reasonably support the guy," Vanity Fair writer Tina Nguyen writes, referring to Lord as Trump's "anger translator."
"To do so, Lord often relies on persuasive, if cherry-picked and sometimes apocryphal, examples from history . . . All of this obfuscation, of course, makes him a particularly effective surrogate — or apologist, as some might say — for Trump."
Lord is hardly new to politics, serving as a former aide to President Ronald Reagan and late U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, who was a Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1996, according to the American Spectator.
Vanity Fair said Lord struck up a bromance with Trump after defending a potential presidential run by the billionaire real estate developer in his 2013 American Spectator article "Never Ignore Donald Trump."
After a failed campaign to win a seat in the Pennsylvania state legislature while in his 20s, he worked as a press secretary on Capitol Hill before becoming chief of staff for Reagan cabinet member Andrew Lewis, whom he followed when Lewis became chief executive with Warner-Amex Cable Communications, Vanity Fair noted.
In the 1990s, he became burned out on politics and decided to write novels before returning to Pennsylvania to look after his elderly parents. Lord said everything changed when Trump contacted him after his American Spectator piece.
"I'm not naïve here," Lord told Vanity Fair. "I'm sure he was doing that with a lot of people. If you're thinking about running for president of the United States, it's a good idea to call people in the media and talk to them. But in our case, we just hit it off, and I was predisposed that way, anyway. And, of course, people thought I was insane."
Lord's main CNN foe, Van Jones, told Vanity Fair that one of Lord's best attributes is that he runs counter to the media stereotypes of Trump follower.
"The great crime that Jeffrey Lord commits in the eyes of liberals is that he's well-read and thoughtful, and still thinks all this stuff," Jones told the magazine. "Because the great myth to liberals is, only dumb people think that. Well, Jeffrey can quote Jefferson, and Mill, and tell you exactly what speech was given in the 1920 Republican convention, and he still believes all this stuff that I find kind of abhorrent."
When not on CNN, Lord continues to take care of his mother, which he has done for the past 12 years, in a suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, apartment as she struggles with dementia.
"I've lived in Manhattan. I've lived in Washington. It's great, but I just, you know, I don't think that's for me at this point," Lord told Vanity Fair when asked about his plans after the presidential election. "I think it's just better to be plugged into the real world. And now, it's an enormous asset."
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