Donald Trump is trying to set the record straight: He actually had a blast at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and just wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to being taunted by the president. 
 
 Trump also calls himself ratings gold, evaluates the GOP hopefuls and suggests his own endorsement is the one worth waiting for. And based on their treks to Trump Tower, some seem to think so too. 
 
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 “The Republican field has several good candidates in the race — most of whom have come to see me at my office in Trump Tower,” The Donald writes in his new book, out this week. “The reason they come to see me isn’t just because I am a nice person but because millions of people listen to what I say and know I ‘get it.’ Some magazines have said I am the single most important endorsement a presidential candidate can have. I don’t know if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t say that to brag; I just tell it like it is.” 
 
 “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again,” put out by the conservative publishing house Regnery, focuses heavily on the frequent fire-breathing cable news network guest, developer and reality TV star’s prescriptions for nation-curing. 
 
 The book reads like a Trump interview on TV — he volunteers to show the reader proof that Jon Huntsman called him and asked to speak with him, questions why President Barack Obama gets so much credit for Osama bin Laden’s death and begins sentences with, “Here’s the deal.” 
 
 He claims credit for creating Lady Gaga. 
 
 “She became a big star and maybe she became a star because I put her on the Miss Universe Pageant. It’s very possible, who knows what would have happened without it, because she caused a sensation,” he writes. 
 
 Chapters are entitled “Get tough,” “Take the Oil,” “Tax China to Save American Jobs,” “A Safety Net, Not a Hammock” — all hitting on the same protectionist, smaller government themes that Trump strummed when he toyed with a presidential run back in the spring, harnessing a take-the-fight-to-Obama message that left an imprint on how the GOP primary candidates have campaigned. 
 
 Trump wraps the book with an afterward on “The Press and the Presidency,” in which he lambastes by name reporters he felt were dishonest, recaps some of the more notable moments of his exploratory effort and evaluates the GOP hopefuls who had come to meet with him prior to the book going to press. 
 
 “I think I’ve had a very big impact [on the course of the race], and they’re not coming up to ask me for money, they’re coming up to ask me for an endorsement,” Trump told POLITICO in an interview last week about the book. 
 
 “I love the country, and they’re talking about the wrong things,” he says of the current White House, in a refrain that helped him stoke polls earlier this year. “We use to be one of the great [countries] and now we’re a laughingstock.” 
 
 Trump didn’t rule out an independent run himself, either in the book or in his POLITICO interview, when asked whether he would be willing to run with the group Americans Elect, which is trying to get on the ballot for a third-party candidacy in every state. But he says his NBC show “The Apprentice” — which he cited in pulling out of the race in the spring — would keep him from running, because of equal time laws and his contract. 
 
 Trump said he will most likely endorse in the GOP race but didn’t put a timeframe on it. 
 
 In the last chapter, he writes up the field of hopefuls who have come to see him. ||||| It might be true that no American has spent more one-on-one time with the leading Republican presidential candidates than Donald Trump. 
 
 The real estate mogul and reality show host has devoted the second half of this year to fashioning himself as the single most important potential endorser in the GOP sweepstakes. The candidates have cycled through his offices at Trump Tower to ask for his support, and he has cycled through Fox News’s anchors talking about it. The latest to come calling is former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who will visit on Monday. 
 
 This is what makes the afterword of his new book, “Time to Get Tough,” so relevant. After boasting of his own accolades — he writes, “I was quickly #1 in the polls,” as well as, “I am a ratings machine” — Trump offers his personal impressions of the candidates. 
 
 Trump writes that Mitt Romney has been “spectacular” in the debates and that the former Massachusetts governor is “a much different guy” in private than he is in public, describing him as “warm and engaging.” 
 
 “He gets criticized for changing his opinions, or ‘flip flopping,’ but over a lifetime I’ve seen many people who don’t change and they always get left behind,” Trump writes. “Smart people learn things, so they change their minds. Only stupid people never change their minds.” 
 
 In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump repeated his defense of Romney’s evolving positions on key issues. “If you have a concrete wall in front of you, you can’t just try to run through it,” Trump said. “You have to go around it, under it, over it. Everybody changes.” 
 
 
 
 Trump writes that he found Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be “much different from what you see in the debates.. . .so forceful and strong.” Trump writes that he said to Perry: “Rick, why can’t you act this way in the debates?” 
 
 “He said, ‘Donald, the debates are just not my thing. So I said, ‘Why don’t you pretend you are someplace else? You gotta act different. You are getting killed in the debates.’ But he repeated, ‘Donald, they are just not for me.’ 
 
 Trump describes Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) as “a real worker bee.” He notes that she visited his office “more than once” and that “no matter what happens with her run for the White House she’s got a great political future ahead of her.” 
 
 One candidate who hasn’t visited Trump is former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. Indeed, Huntsman made a public show of not wanting or needing to see Trump, and last week declining an invitation to a debate Trump is moderating two days after Christmas in Iowa. 
 
 But in his book, Trump tells a different story. He writes that Huntsman had courted Trump just like the other candidates. 
 
 “He called me a number of times and I was unbelievably busy doing a deal and I didn’t get back to him,” Trump writes, adding: “In fact, he left me his number and the person’s name to call to set up a meeting.” 
 
 Trump writes nothing about Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), who scorned him Sunday on CNN: “I don’t understand the marching to his office. I mean I didn’t know that he had an ability to lay on hands, you know, and anoint people.” 
 
 In the interview, Trump said he plans to endorse a candidate “over the next month or so” and that he would consider making an independent run next year if he is not satisfied with the Republican nominee. 
 
 Trump weighed his own run this spring, as he drew media attention for challenging President Obama’s birthplace. He writes that he didn’t run because he believed the press would have unfairly gone after his hundreds of business deals. “It is very hard for a truly successful person to run for office,” he writes. 
 
 Trump writes that he had completed his financial disclosure forms in preparation for a campaign, and publishes a three-page summary in the book. He estimates his net worth at $7 billion, including a “brand value” he assesses at $3 billion. 
 
 Trump writes at length about NBC, which airs his show, “The Apprentice.” He criticizes its decision to change the time of Jay Leno’s show: “I warned them it would be the first time in history somebody’s going to be taken out of the #1 position and moved.” 
 
 Trump also writes about his beefs with marquee talent in the network’s news division. “They have this guy called Lawrence O’Donnell whom I seldom watch (and neither does anybody else). His ratings are terrible,” Trump writes. 
 
 Trump claims credit for the commercial success of pop star Lady Gaga: “I really believe I had at least something to do with it.” 
 
 But what really gave Trump a rise was Obama’s riff on him at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which Trump attended as a guest of The Washington Post. The president was making fun of Trump and the outsize role he was playing in the GOP race. 
 
 “While I shouldn’t admit this, I don’t mind being the center of attention, especially on such an evening,” Trump writes, adding: “I loved it!” ||||| Campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, Obama criticises those Republicans who continue to support their candidate 
 
 Barack Obama assailed the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, on Tuesday over remarks about groping women, also criticizing Republicans who continued to support the candidate. 
 
 “You don’t have to be a husband or a father to hear what we heard just a few days ago and say that’s not right,” the president said in Greensboro, North Carolina, in his first public remarks since the release of a 2005 tape showing Trump bragging about groping and kissing women without their consent. 
 
 “You just have to be a decent human being to say that’s not right.” 
 
 Campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, Obama said the Republican presidential nominee is unfit “for a job at 7-Eleven”, let alone the presidency. 
 
 He encouraged the crowd of nearly 8,000 to respond at the ballot box in November. 
 
 
 
 “If it makes you mad,” the president said, “then you say ‘That’s not somebody I want representing the United States of America.’ You can do something about it, North Carolina.” 
 
 “The guy says stuff nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7-Eleven,” he added. 
 
 The president, among Clinton’s most powerful surrogates, did not reserve his criticism solely for Trump. He also mocked Republicans who rebuked Trump’s comments but continued to endorse his candidacy. 
 
 
 
 “That doesn’t make sense to me,” Obama said. “You can’t have it both ways here. You can’t repeatedly denounce what is said by someone and then say but I’m still going to endorse him to be the most powerful person on the planet and to put them in charge.” 
 
 
 
 He also expressed his disbelief at the Republicans who have expressed hope that Trump might change his ways. 
 
 “What did you think? He was going to transform himself? I mean, I’m 55 and it’s hard for me to change. I know at 70 it’s going to be harder.” 
 
 
 
 Earlier in the day, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters the president had found Trump’s boasting about his behavior toward women to be “repugnant”. 
 
 There had been a wide consensus across the political spectrum, Earnest added, that Trump’s remarks “constituted sexual assault”. 
 
 At an evening rally in Florida, Trump managed to train his fire on Clinton rather than members of his own party, whom he had spent the afternoon denouncing on Twitter. 
 
 Trump seized on the hacked emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, that were made public by WikiLeaks this week, accusing the Obama administration of colluding with the Democratic nominee over its investigation into her use of a private email server. 
 
 “The DoJ fed information to the Clinton campaign about the email investigation so that the campaign could be prepared to cover up for her crimes,” Trump said at a rally in Panama City, Florida on Tuesday night. “This is collusion and corruption of the highest order and is one more reason I will ask my attorney general … to appoint a special prosecutor. We have to investigate Hillary Clinton and we have to investigate the investigation.” 
 
 He called the FBI investigation into her emails – in which the agency director, James Comey, reprimanded Clinton for being “extremely careless” but ultimately recommended no charges – a “disgrace”. 
 
 The email Trump singled out involves an exchange between Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon and the DoJ concerning a lawsuit pertaining to a freedom of information request about her emails. The exchange between Fallon and the individual at the DoJ occurred two months before the FBI opened its probe into Clinton’s emails, and it pertained to information that was publicly available. 
 
 There is no evidence that the DoJ communicated with Fallon on the email investigation. 
 
 Speaking to reporters aboard Clinton’s campaign plane on Tuesday, Podesta blamed Russian intelligence officials intent on undermining the Democratic nominee. 
 
 “I’ve been involved in politics for nearly five decades,” Podesta told reporters. “This definitely is the first campaign that I’ve been involved with in which I’ve had to tangle with Russian intelligence agencies … who seem to be doing everything that they can on behalf of our opponent.” Podesta did not confirm the veracity of the leaks. 
 
 Ahead of the Florida rally, Trump lashed out at the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who this week announced he would no longer defend Trump or campaign with him although he stopped short of formally withdrawing his support for the nominee. 
 
 “They’re not giving support – they don’t give the support that we really need – but the fact is that I think we should get support and we don’t get the support from guys like Paul Ryan,” Trump told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday. “[Ryan] had a conference call with congressmen, with hundreds of them, and they practically rioted against him on the phone. One person stuck up for him.” 
 
 “And I don’t really want his support,” Trump added of Ryan. 
 
 O’Reilly asked Trump to elaborate on his earlier tweet in which he wrote that it was “so nice that the shackles have been taken off me”. 
 
 Trump said the shackles represented some of “establishment people, the weak and ineffective people within the party”. When O’Reilly asked if “throwing off of the shackles” meant that he would become more outspoken, Trump forcefully denied that he was outspoken. 
 
 He also denied polling that shows him losing support among women, a group he had trouble appealing to even before the release of video in which he boasted about touching women without consequence because of his fame. He has dismissed the remarks as “locker room talk”. 
 
 “Most people have heard it before, and I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and say I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard a lot worse,” Trump told O’Reilly. “If that’s what it takes to lose an election, I think that’d be pretty sad.” 
 
 With less than one month left until election day, Trump is under pressure from party leadership and his own supporters to hone his attack strategy and stick to it. His campaign has so far proved resilient despite not having a conventional fundraising structure or voter outreach plan. 
 
 During the speech in Florida’s conservative panhandle, Trump encouraged the crowd to register to vote. He noted that the voter registration deadline in Florida had been extended because of the hurricane, which interrupted the state’s final registration days. 
 
 “It’s a movement. But if we don’t win, all it is a little asterisk in history,” Trump said. “There’s never been anything like this. So go and register. Make sure you get out and vote. November 28th.” The US election is on 8 November.
– One thing is certain: Donald Trump has no shortage of self-esteem. In his new book, out this week, he takes credit for making Lady Gaga "a big star," hypothesizing, "maybe she became a star because I put her on the Miss Universe Pageant. It’s very possible, who knows what would have happened without it, because she caused a sensation. … I really believe I had at least something to do with it." More from Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again from Politico, the Washington Post, and USA Today: On his endorsement: "The Republican field has several good candidates in the race—most of whom have come to see me at my office in Trump Tower. The reason they come to see me isn’t just because I am a nice person but because millions of people listen to what I say and know I 'get it.' Some magazines have said I am the single most important endorsement a presidential candidate can have. I don’t know if that’s true but it wouldn’t surprise me." On Osama bin Laden: "It’s wonderful that we got him, but what sane person would have decided otherwise? Why does Obama get so much credit? I know that’s not politically correct to say, but if somebody can explain that to me, I would be very grateful. Our military deserves all the credit, not Obama." On the president's mockery of him at the White House Correspondent's Dinner: "While I shouldn’t admit this, I don’t mind being the center of attention, especially on such an evening. I loved it!" he writes. "I didn’t quite know how to react. Should I be laughing? Smiling? Frowning? I wasn’t sure so I decided to keep a straight face, with a few little smiles every once in a while because I knew the cameras were on me." On Rick Perry: "Every time I speak to him he is so forceful and strong that I have actually said to him: 'Rick, why can’t you act this way during the debates?' He said, 'Donald, the debates are just not my thing.' So I said, 'Why don’t you pretend you are someplace else? You gotta act different. You are getting killed in the debates.'" More choice quotes about himself: "I was quickly No. 1 in the polls." "I am a ratings machine." "It is very hard for a truly successful person to run for office." In interviews with all three publications, the Donald did not rule out re-entering the presidential race as an independent, and even went so far as to say he would consider an independent run if he doesn't like the Republican nominee.