Trump Says C-SPAN Asked for His Call and the Golf Club Case Never Involved Him

President Trump was up in the small hours of Wednesday morning, and he spent part of that time going after The New York Times. In two posts on Truth Social, a little more than 20 minutes apart, he took issue with two separate Times stories. One was about how he ended up on C-SPAN Monday night. The other was about a years-old settlement at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

His complaint in both cases comes down to what got left out. On C-SPAN, he says the Times made a planned call sound like a stunt. On Bedminster, he says the Times put his name on a story that, by every account of the case, was never about him.

The call C-SPAN says it was glad to get

Monday night C-SPAN launched a new evening show, “Washington Journal Primetime,” hosted by longtime anchor Mimi Geerges. It’s the same idea as the network’s morning call-in show: regular people phone in and say what’s on their minds. A few minutes into the debut, Geerges told viewers, “It looks like we’ve got a call from the White House.” The call ran about eight minutes, according to C-SPAN’s own clip and the Roll Call Factba.se transcript.

Trump opened by wishing her luck. “I’ve watched you numerous times and you do a great job,” he said. Asked what he watches on C-SPAN, he said the call-ins, because “it gives me a little bit of an indication of where we are.” Then, with a little needle: “We have some great Republicans calling in, and I’m not so sure the Democrats are thrilled, but the Republicans seem to be.”

Geerges didn’t throw softballs. She asked about immigration and whether long-settled workers who pay taxes should still be deported. She asked about the Iran war and how much longer it would run. She asked about the push in the House to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump said he’d be “disappointed” in any Republican who backed it and that “Pete has won two wars.”

Most outlets wrote the call up as a surprise. CNBC called it “unannounced” and lumped it into a run of drop-in appearances, including a quick briefing-room visit with UFC boss Dana White earlier that day. The New York Post called it a “surprise interview.” The Times line Trump went after said he called in “apparently without notice.”

Trump says that’s flat wrong. “It was a fully scheduled call, as a favor to C-Span, set up through White House Communications,” he wrote. “It was done at C-Span’s request, not mine.” He added that the Times “knew this, but lied, in order to demean.”

What’s on tape fits with a friendly, planned call more than a crash. Geerges ended it by telling him, “We so appreciate you calling to congratulate us,” and added, “You have an open invitation to come on the program and be our guest.” Trump signed off with, “It’s my honor to be one of your early calls.” C-SPAN hadn’t said anything publicly about how the call was arranged in the coverage we reviewed, so for now Trump’s account is the only one on the record from either side of the phone.

A harassment case against a club manager, not the owner

The second post was sharper. The Times had written about the “settling of a sexual harassment suit brought years ago by a waitress at President Trump’s golf club in Bedminster.” Trump’s answer: “What they fail to say is that it did not involve President Trump, a rather important omission. FAKE NEWS!!!”

On that point the record is on his side. The case at the center of Tuesday’s news is an ethics complaint from New Jersey’s Office of Attorney Ethics against Alina Habba Mildon, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and later served as acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the waitress, Alice Bianco, then 21, said her boss at the club had harassed her. The accused man was a manager. Nobody in the complaint or the coverage says Trump harassed anyone, knew about it at the time, or signed off on the deal.

The complaint is about the lawyer. In 2021, before she went to work for Trump, Mildon was a dues-paying member of the club. The Washington Sun, which first reported the complaint, says she paid more than $156,000 in membership dues between 2020 and 2025. She befriended Bianco, and Bianco dropped her own lawyer. On Aug. 8, 2021, the club agreed to pay Bianco $15,000. Three days later Mildon’s law partner drew up the paperwork, including a nondisclosure agreement. New Jersey law doesn’t allow those in workplace harassment cases.

Investigators say Mildon had a conflict of interest, because she was acting like Bianco’s lawyer while also being tied to the club. Mildon told them she saw herself as a neutral go-between whose “job was to make everybody happy and make this move along.” The office’s director, Johanna Barba Jones, wrote that she “could not have been a neutral in this matter.”

Bianco later hired a new lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, and sued both the club and Mildon. All told, the club and Mildon ended up paying Bianco $400,000, according to the complaint as described by the Sun. Smith isn’t holding back. “She’s unethical and she should be disbarred,” she told the Times, quoted by the Daily Beast.

Nothing is decided yet. The complaint goes to a special ethics officer, who will hold a hearing and recommend a penalty, anywhere from a warning to losing her law license. New Jersey’s Supreme Court makes the final call. Mildon had not commented publicly in the reports we reviewed.

Why Trump fights the framing, not just the facts

Trump has been at war with the Times for years, and both posts fit a pattern. He doesn’t only fight what a story says. He fights how it’s built. A headline or a first paragraph that puts “President Trump’s golf club” next to “sexual harassment” leaves a lot of readers thinking the owner was the one accused, even if the details further down say otherwise. A phrase like “apparently without notice” turns a polite on-air thank-you into a president barging in.

Notice that on both counts he’s pointing at something checkable. The bigger test is Habba Mildon’s hearing. If she ends up disciplined, expect Trump’s critics to keep stapling his name to it. If you want to judge the story fairly, keep the same question in mind Trump asked overnight: who did what, and to whom.