He welcomed her into the Oval Office in 2018, but former President Trump reportedly had a much different response after the 2020 presidential election when Kim Kardashian called asking him for a criminal justice-related favor: “Hell no.”
The episode, which included Trump hanging up on the reality TV star, is recounted in Jonathan Karl’s forthcoming book “Tired of Winning.”
Kardashian made headlines in 2018 when she met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss prison reform and sentencing. Days after the meeting, Trump granted clemency to Alice Johnson, who was serving a life sentence on nonviolent drug and money laundering charges.
“I have nothing bad to say about the president,” Kardashian said later that year. “He has done something amazing.”
Kardashian later would urge Trump to grant more commutations, according to the ABC News journalist’s book, as first reported Monday by Axios’s Mike Allen.
“A source familiar with the conversations tells me Trump listened to her requests and demanded a straight-up quid pro quo,” Karl said in his book.
“[Trump] would grant the commutations, he told Kardashian, if she leveraged her celebrity connections to get football stars who were friends of hers to come visit him at the White House.”
The 43-year-old SKIMS founder “actually tried to do what Trump demanded,” according to Karl, “seeing it as a small price to pay to get justice for people she believed were serving unjust sentences. But all the players she approached declined. Trump had become too toxic.”
After Trump exited the White House in 2021, Kardashian reached out to the ex-commander in chief about snagging his support for other clemency efforts.
“Hell no, the former president told her. He wouldn’t do it,” Karl wrote.
“’You voted for Biden and now you come asking me for a favor?’ Trump told her,” the book said.
“After a few more choice words, the line went dead. Trump had hung up on her.”
While Karl noted that Kardashian never publicly endorsed a 2020 White House hopeful, she posted heart emojis on a photo of then-President-elect Biden and Kamala Harris on social media in the days after the November election.
In 2021, Kardashian said she was a mixture of both political parties.
“I believe in the rights that the Democrats want, but I believe in the taxes that the Republicans want,” she said at the time.
A spokesperson for Trump ripped Karl’s book, telling Axios, “This filth either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”