Trump mistook ‘diverse’ congressional staffers for waitstaff at White House gala, new book claims

Awkward moment occurred during first year of Trump’s presidency

One of Donald Trump’s first White House dinners attended by leaders of Congress turned into an awkward affair with the president insulting a group of congressional staffers and clashing publicly with Nancy Pelosi, according to a new book.

The revelations come from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in her upcoming look into the Trump White House, Confidence Man. The book releases 4 October; exerpts detailing this incident were obtained and published Wednesday by Rolling Stone.

According to Ms Haberman, the president was attending a White House evening event with top members of congress including then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, before the pair took power in their respective chambers.

At one point in the dinner, Mr Trump turned to a group of his own guests — described in the book as racially and ethnically diverse — and directed them to serve dinner. The staffers reportedly worked directly for the two Democratic congressional leaders, as well as others in attendance.

According to Rolling Stone’s characterisation of the exerpts, Mr Trump’s chief of staff then “rushed to correct” the situation and informed the president of who he had addressed. There’s no indication that Mr Trump apologised.

The awkward moments continued throughout the dinner, according to Ms Haberman. At one point during the event, Mr Trump addressed the room and reportedly blamed millions of votes from undocumented immigrants — one of his favourite, never-proven conspiracies about America’s election systems — for Hillary Clinton even coming within striking distance of him in the 2016 election.

That claim drew silence from the room and a direct rebuke from Ms Pelosi, according to Rolling Stone, who according to the magazine challenged Mr Trump’s assertion directly.

“I don’t believe so, Mr President,” she shot back.

It’s not clear how that particular situation ended, but Mr Trump was known during the latter half of his term in office to eschew the attempts at dealmaking with Democrats in favour of outright hostility towards the party that contested him at almost every turn on Capitol Hill.

The former president has largely moved on from his claims of widespread fraud in 2016 to a set of more timely conspiracies centred around his defeat in the 2020 election; he continues to insist from his Truth Social account that he be reinstated as president even as GOP state officials have now testified under oath that Mr Trump’s legal team informed them that the campaign possessed no evidence to support the president’s claims of fraud.