Cindy Adams tells Trump 'if you could handle a locked skirt you can handle a locked-down country' on B-day call
President Donald Trump does not take time out to personally wish happy birthday to all his friends. But for his longtime friend and supporter Cindy Adams, who turns 90 on April 24, he made an exception.
"Happy Birthday to the great Cindy Adams of the New York Post. Cindy is 90, but looks 39 to me. She is going strong!" he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. It's hard to say why the president decided to send out wishes two days in advance.
A few hours before the post went live, Adams, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, penned an op-ed for the newspaper's sister magazine, Page Six, revealing that the POTUS had given her a call to wish her on becoming a nonagenarian. In the piece, she said that she had planned her "once-in-a-lifetime party" to celebrate her milestone for the past six months and which included a high profile guest list.
Then Adams dove straight into how she and Trump reminisced about the days when both of them were involved with the Miss Universe pageant during the call. One of them, more "involved" than the other in the pageant, she said.
"A friend from years before I joined the NYP in ’81, and who is now in the White House, rang to say happy birthday. We recalled when I was a Miss Universe official — long before he bought it — and he a single guy. Looking to meet the contestants. Who were chaperoned. With a monitor. Under lock and key. And yet he did it. He managed to date them. At one point on the phone yesterday, I said: 'Listen, honey, if you could handle a locked skirt you can handle a locked-down country.' His whole Oval Office broke out laughing. I had no idea he had me on speaker," she wrote.
Adams and Trump's friendship goes way back. In a cover story for Town and Country magazine last year, she revealed that the duo was first introduced by their mutual friend, Roy Cohn, in the early 1980s. Recalling her first impression of Trump, she said: “Some kid he (Cohn) was piloting around whom I'd never seen."
When she bought her nine-room penthouse in Park Avenue in 1997 -- a plush pad that a real estate agent branded “one of the few true must-see Manhattan apartments” -- her husband, comedian Joey Adams, was gravely ill, and the then-business mogul Trump was by her side, helping her out by setting up security for the place.
“Donald did the security when I bought the apartment,” she shared. “He’s done a lot for me.”
She has also mentioned previously that Trump used to send her flowers regularly when she stayed at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “Cindy has always had the beat of New York and its people. She’s understood the inner workings of the city better and longer than anybody," Trump once told the New York Times.
Since Adams was famous for unapologetically sticking with her friends, the 2016 election initially posed a dilemma since both Trump as well as Hillary Clinton were friends of hers. Both of them had stood by her after her husband’s death. Although the choice was a difficult one, she ultimately decided to throw her support behind Trump as she knew him the longest.