When 1983 was about to turn into 1984, my mother decided to tell me about fascism. I was five years old.
“This is a year everyone has been waiting for, Sarah,” she said. “A long time ago, a guy named George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 that was about a society where everyone lied, where people would tell you that two plus two equaled five and you had to believe it, and no one had freedom except for the people in charge, who were called Big Brother, and Big Brother was always spying on you to make sure you didn’t think for yourself. This is a really famous book! It’s older than I am. And now I can’t believe it’s really going to be 1984.”
“What do you mean, it’s really going to be 1984?” I asked, horrified. “All the stuff in that book is going to happen?”
“No, it’s just a book,” said my mother, a public school English teacher with a dubious sense of appropriate topics for small children. “It’s a made-up story about what he imagined the future would be like, because George Orwell lived during a terrible time, and he wanted to make sure we didn’t live in a terrible time. So he warned everyone about what could happen in 1984 if people didn’t watch out.”
I took this in like I had taken in all the other political information I picked up from adult conversations, including my belief that Ronald Reagan was literally a puppet, which I found both alarming and cool. The idea that a dead famous writer had fantasized about this year of 1984, the very year I was about to start writing as the date at the top of my kindergarten homework, seemed incredible.
When you are a young child, you have no sense of anything that happened before you existed unless it is explicitly spelled out. Even then, your grasp of time is tenuous. I remember when my own daughter was five and she asked me whether any of the Harry Potter books had come out before she was born and was shocked to hear nearly all of them had.
“Did any other books come out before I was born?” she asked. “Books that aren’t Harry Potter?”
“Um … yes.”
“How many?”
“Like … millions. Tens of millions of books came out before you were born.”
“Wait, so you’re telling me that all this stuff was just happening in the world without me in it?!” my daughter exclaimed, amazed and appalled.
I felt the same sense of wonder about 1984, and I wanted to read it so that I could see if any of this Orwell guy’s predictions panned out. (My mother did not let me read 1984 as a five-year-old, and I remain grateful that the internet did not yet exist.) I was intrigued that someone had worried enough about the future to invent his own fictional version. I wondered what had happened in the past that was so horrific that it compelled him to imagine a world of lies and control. I remember writing “2 + 2 = 5” on my kindergarten homework, below where I had written “1984,” to see if anything would happen.
On November 15, 1984, The Washington Post published an article called DONALD TRUMP, HOLDING ALL THE CARDS: THE TOWER! THE TEAM! THE MONEY! THE FUTURE!1 It described the thirty-eight-year-old real estate tycoon as having ambitions far beyond business. He was destined for politics, the article claimed, and sought to determine the fate of the world.
This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets. He wants to be the negotiator. He says he has never acted on his nuclear concern. But he says that his good friend Roy Cohn, the flamboyant Republican lawyer, has told him this interview is a perfect time to start.
“Some people have an ability to negotiate,” he says. “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.”
He would know what to ask the Russians for, he says. But he would rather not tip his hand publicly. “In the event anything happens with respect to me, I wouldn’t want to make my opinions public,” he says. “I’d rather keep those thoughts to myself or save them for whoever else is chosen …
“It’s something that somebody should do that knows how to negotiate and not the kind of representatives that I have seen in the past.”
He could learn about missiles, quickly, he says.
“It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles … I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation … You know who really wants me to do this? Roy … I’d do it in a second.”
The 1984 Washington Post piece is the first mention of Trump’s desire to build an alliance with Russia, a goal that would structure his next thirty years. While the author appears to regard this scenario as an amusing fantasy, it has now become a dangerous reality, and the piece prompts questions about how Trump’s interests were propelled in this direction. The answer lies in Roy Cohn, one of the most notorious figures in US political history: a vicious Republican operative who had worked as an adviser for Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and New York City crime families while insinuating himself into and manipulating national media.2 Before becoming Trump’s mentor, Cohn was best known for prompting lawyer Joseph Welch to utter the famous phrase “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” to McCarthy in response to Cohn’s ceaseless slander.
Cohn had long ago shunned the mantle of decency, viewing it as an obstacle to power. Power was information—its closed-door accumulation, its careful release—and information was different than truth. Cohn took Trump under his wing in 1973 when he defended Trump and his real estate developer father, Fred, in a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice after they discovered the Trump Organization had refused to rent thirty-nine properties to black New Yorkers.3 With Cohn’s aid, Trump countersued the US government for $100 million, asserting that the charges were “irresponsible and baseless”4—a ploy the judge of the case called “a media gimmick done for local consumption.”5 The countersuit was dismissed and the Trumps were ordered to change their discriminatory housing practices (which they did not) but Trump remained drawn to Cohn’s shamelessness. Cohn trained him in the strategy he refined under McCarthy and Nixon: counterattack, lie, threaten, sue, and never back down.
Cohn understood the power of the court of public opinion to outweigh the court of law. Media was a weapon: a well-timed bomb, a scalpel to carve a façade. In 1976, Trump got his first profile in The New York Times. They described him in glowing terms:
He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth “more than $200 million.”
Flair. It’s one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite words, and both he, his friends and his enemies use it when describing his way of life as well as his business style as New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter of the middle 1970’s.6
The 1973 discrimination lawsuit that had once dominated headlines got only a passing mention in the piece, which is so rapturous it feels like it was written by Donald Trump. This, too, shows Cohn’s sway. By the 1970s, Cohn had established a close relationship with New York’s leading gossip columnists and reporters, leaking newspapers information to humiliate and smear his foes. When journalists deviated from his desires, he threatened them with litigation and violence.7 Often the threats arrived in the form of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), which can silence targets for decades. Over the next thirty years, Trump would use these tactics himself or order his new lawyers—lackluster litigators whom he bemoaned could never compare to his beloved Roy Cohn, who died in 19868—to employ them.
Trump’s connection to Cohn ran deep, comprising a rare relationship of trust outside his family circle. Why Trump, whose inherited fortune opened the door to an array of social possibilities, chose arguably the worst person in America to be his best friend remains unknown. Renowned Village Voice journalist Wayne Barrett, the foremost chronicler of Trump’s corruption in the 1980s and 1990s, described Cohn in July 2016 as “incandescent evil … enough to make you rush back to church, the Satanic feeling that he would give you … he was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.”9
In December 2016, Barrett, alarmed by Trump’s win, elaborated on Cohn’s influence: “Roy Cohn was the most satanic figure I ever met in my life. He was almost reptilian. I think he’s going to handle the swearing-in at the inauguration. They’re not going to bring a judge, they’re going to have Roy. And then Roy’s going to go back to the White House and fuck a 12-year-old. In the Oval Office.”10 Barrett died the night before Trump’s inauguration.
Cohn’s cousin, David Marcus, says that Cohn was sexually attracted to Trump, though there is no public indication that the attraction was mutual.11 What is not disputed is their closeness: Trump and Cohn would call each other fifteen to twenty times a day. They were inseparable in New York work and nightlife, and Cohn widened Trump’s political horizons.12 In the early 1980s, Cohn introduced Trump to two of his protégés, a pair of GOP operatives who would become both lifelong colleagues of Trump and indicted subjects in the Russian influence investigation: Roger Stone, a Nixon acolyte who managed Trump’s 2000, 2012, and 2016 presidential campaigns; and Paul Manafort, a GOP operative who in 1980, with Stone and Charles Black, started a D.C. lobbying firm that represented the world’s most brutal dictators and guerilla groups.
That in 1984 Roy Cohn sought to have Donald Trump discuss nuclear weapons policy with the USSR—America’s primary adversary—should have prompted alarm at the time and still should today. As a principal architect of the 1950s Red Scare, Cohn had built his reputation as an opponent of the Soviet Union, and his ambitions for Trump seemed to belie his lifelong opposition to what President Reagan called “the Evil Empire.” But Cohn—a Jewish anti-Semite, a gay homophobe, and a debt-laden power broker—was often not what he seemed.13
Aside from the mention of his lust for a nuclear arsenal, the Washington Post piece was typical of 1980s articles on Trump, emphasizing his real estate deals, his model wife, and his alleged internal struggle over socialites labeling him “nouveau riche.” The glittery press profiles served to mask darker deeds, as did the gleaming exterior of his landmark building, Trump Tower, which had become a fledgling dorm for the Russian mafia. In 1984, one year after the tower’s completion, Soviet army veteran David Bogatin purchased five luxury condos for six million dollars—a purchase so substantial that Trump made sure to personally oversee the closing.14 In 1987, Bogatin admitted he had purchased the Trump Tower condos “to launder money, to shelter and hide assets,” and a Senate investigation revealed him to be a leading figure in the Russian mafia.15 The Russian mafia had been growing in New York City due to a wave of Soviet émigrés and a crackdown on the Italian mob by then prosecutor and Trump friend Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, who became the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York in 1983, waged a tactical war against New York’s five organized crime families so successful that even the Italian government gave him a medal.16 But the near elimination of the Italian mafia only cleared the way for Russian criminal domination. Among the émigré mobsters hovering in Trump’s orbit was Bogatin’s brother, Jacob, a partner of Semion Mogilevich, a Russian money launderer who soon became—and likely remains—the most powerful criminal in the world.
There was no mention of Trump’s criminal ties in the Washington Post puff piece, a pattern of omission that is blinding in hindsight. Maybe the paper did not know about them, despite his mentor, Cohn, being a well-known mafia fixer. Maybe they did not want to find out.
There is a photo of Roy Cohn in 1984, sitting cross-legged on his apartment floor, cradling a framed picture of himself with Donald Trump while surrounded by his vast collection of frogs, many of which, like Cohn himself, have faces that resemble Pepe, the cartoon frog plastered on websites by Roger Stone and other Trump backers in the 2016 election.17 Trump grins out from Cohn’s golden frame, caressed by the spin master tied to the mafia, to the GOP, to the media, to the Soviets. Who knew 1984 would feel so Orwellian thirty-five years later? Very likely, Roy Cohn did.
On January 27, 2011, Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. He warned of an unprecedented menace that threatened to end democracy in the United States and destabilize the entire world. He called it “The Evolving Organized Crime Threat”:
The playing field has changed. We have seen a shift from regional families with a clear structure, to flat, fluid networks with global reach. These international enterprises are more anonymous and more sophisticated. Rather than running discrete operations, on their own turf, they are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish.
We are investigating groups in Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East. And we are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed.
They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military. These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.
This is not “The Sopranos,” with six guys sitting in a diner, shaking down a local business owner for 50 dollars a week. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.
These crimes are not easily categorized. Nor can the damage, the dollar loss, or the ripple effects be easily calculated. It is much like a Venn diagram, where one crime intersects with another, in different jurisdictions, and with different groups.
How does this impact you? You may not recognize the source, but you will feel the effects. You might pay more for a gallon of gas. You might pay more for a luxury car from overseas. You will pay more for health care, mortgages, clothes, and food.
Yet we are concerned with more than just the financial impact. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called “iron triangles” of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat …
Last year, we set up two units, called Threat Focus Cells, to target Eurasian organized crime. The first focuses on the Semion Mogilevich Organization; the second on the Brother’s Circle enterprise.
For those of you not familiar with either group, their memberships are large, their reach is global, and their scope of operations is broad, from weapons and drug trafficking to high-stakes fraud and global prostitution. If left unchecked, the resulting impact to our economy and our security will be significant. Indeed, Semion Mogilevich is on the FBI Top Ten Most Wanted List, and he will remain so until he is captured.18
“The Evolving Organized Crime Threat” is the kind of speech that would give you great confidence in Mueller’s abilities were you not reading it about a decade after his predictions became a fixture of American reality. Members of the mob that had taken up residence in Trump Tower in the 1980s—the Semion Mogilevich Organization—are now tied to the White House. This development belies any claim of surprise from federal law enforcement about the threat posed by Trump’s campaign. Instead we are left with institutional failures and unanswered questions.
Mueller’s speech is a blueprint laying out how the Trump team, backed by an organized crime syndicate, and abetted by transnational alliances that would have been unthinkable a decade before, rose to power by blurring the lines between white-collar crime, mafia activity, and state corruption. It describes with uncanny accuracy the economic devastation ordinary Americans experienced from 2008 onward, and attributes it to unfettered criminal corruption that Mueller promised the FBI would combat—but it did not. Under the leadership of James Comey, who replaced Mueller as FBI head in 2013, the FBI removed Mogilevich—the dangerous Russian mafia head who had been ancillary to Trump since the 1980s—from the Ten Most Wanted list in December 2015 and replaced him with a bank robber.19 Comey never explained why Mogilevich’s removal was warranted when Mogilevich was still participating in the same extreme criminal activity that had compelled Mueller to name him a threat so profound “he will remain [on the Ten Most Wanted list] until he is captured” just four years before. The removal of Mogilevich was highly unorthodox: he was only the seventh top-ten fugitive since 1950 to be removed from the list prior to apprehension, death, or dismissal of charges.20 The FBI’s official explanation was that Mogilevich “no longer poses an immediate threat to the public” and that he is residing in a country without an extradition treaty. Yet when the FBI originally placed Mogilevich on the list in October 2009, they noted that “what makes him so dangerous is that he operates without borders.”21 The FBI did not name Mogilevich’s current location, but his unnerving power is that, in many ways, it no longer matters.
Writing Trump’s history is a bizarre exercise in parsing layers of propaganda. There is the propaganda written in real time by Trump’s press lackeys (sometimes with anonymous quotes that were later revealed to be from Trump himself, often made under the alias “John Barron”;22 a real John Barron was the author of a 1974 bestselling book about the KGB). There is the investigative journalism written in real time on Trump’s nefarious financial affairs by journalists who mostly have since died. And there is the media morass of 2015 and 2016, when investigative journalists from Trump’s past were censored, threatened, or generally kept out of the news—while journalists of Trump’s present ignored blatant crimes in favor of an obsessive focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails, a misalignment of priorities that was stoked by the FBI itself.
I remember in 2016 thinking that this parsing of spectacle and propaganda and searching for documentation of the obvious is, ironically, the exact exercise I had to perform as a doctoral student examining materials from the former Soviet Union. It doesn’t feel ironic anymore: American and former Soviet operatives are a linked entity, and prestigious institutions manufacture history in a way that would make George Orwell shudder and Roy Cohn proud. In 2017, The New York Times published an article insinuating that Trump and Manafort had no real relationship until 2016, when Manafort fortuitously appeared in the Trump Tower elevator to charm him, like characters in a rom-com from hell.23 The article did not mention that Manafort had known Trump since the 1980s, had lived in Trump Tower since 2006, and was linked to Trump through Cohn, Stone, and a mafia syndicate intertwined with the Kremlin. To grasp why a Pulitzer Prize–winning paper would cover up that story—an accurate and far more interesting story—in favor of bland falsehoods is key to understanding how Trump operates.
Trump spent 2016 incriminating himself by doing things like asking Russia for Hillary Clinton’s emails at a press conference or getting sued for child rape by a woman who claimed to be a victim of a global trafficking network. But still most of the press did not bite, writing fawning portraits despite the enticement of Trump checking every box of classic tabloid fodder: mafia ties, sex crimes, spies, secret meetings with global elites. Any one of these stories would be ratings gold. When the press works against its own financial interest—as it did by rejecting the harrowing truth of Trump—there is a deeper problem. As described throughout this book, the tactics Cohn devised to tame the press worked all too well.
Roy Cohn died of complications from AIDS in 1986. Trump, true to form, abandoned Cohn when he fell ill, prompting Cohn to proclaim in an interview with Barrett that Trump “pisses ice water.”24 Cohn, true to form, died after being disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation” and being convicted of fraud, fulfilling his dream of dying while owing the US government vast amounts of money.25 He was feted at his funeral by the New York and D.C. celebrities who had legitimized him much in the way future New York and D.C. celebrities would legitimize his protégé, Trump. They didn’t talk about the mafia ties, about the shakedowns, about the political persecution, about the pain Cohn caused his country. He was one of them, of their social class, so he had to be soft-pedaled to the status of loveable goon, much as Roger Stone would go on to be called a “dirty trickster,” or Trump would be embraced as a tabloid amusement.
Before Cohn passed, he managed to teach Trump three key skills: how to swindle money, how to get married for maximum benefit, and—though the purpose behind this agenda was never publicly revealed—how to cozy up to America’s enemies, the greatest one at that time being the Soviets. But most of all, he taught Trump how to construct a new American reality out of the wreckage of the American Dream.
From 1946 until 1974—the first twenty-eight years of Trump’s life—the US economy experienced a period of unparalleled stability and prosperity.26 This was the era in which “the American Dream”—once thought to be a permanent condition of American life, now increasingly recognized as a historical blip—seemed feasible. The American Dream included having a steady job and getting a raise, owning a home, not needing an advanced degree for a career, and if you did, being able to afford one without being saddled with decades of debt.
It was an era when President Harry Truman, then regarded as a moderate Democrat, could put forward an economic “Fair Deal” advocating a widened social safety net that resembles the platform of representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is today maligned as a dangerous radical. It was an era when President Dwight Eisenhower could rail against the military-industrial complex and say things like “This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children” and be thought of as a patriotic, sensible member of the Republican Party.27
It was an era of morality in plans and in speeches, and immorality in laws and practice. The civil rights movement combatted laws denying black Americans their basic rights as whites pursued their precious ambitions. The antiwar movement exposed the rapacious military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned. Journalistic exposés and hearings brought down corrupt actors like Richard Nixon, despite the efforts of future Trump lackeys like Stone to save him.
Economic stability helped make these social movements possible. It gave freedom and fluidity to everyday American life. You could tune in, drop out, and drop back in. You could work, uncredentialed, in a job, and cover the basic cost of living. You could move from place to place and reinvent yourself each time. Meanwhile, regulations curbed the rich from buying politicians and policies like they had in the Gilded Age. This is not to say that 1946 to 1974 was a paradise: especially in the 1960s, it was a time of trauma and hardship on both an individual and structural level, particularly for Americans of color. But it was a time of possibility. It was a time when progress seemed propelled forward—with sacrifice and loss, but onward nonetheless. The lessons of that era were that good ultimately won over evil, that the strength and persistence of the everyday American mattered.
By the mid-1970s, this mind-set had begun to change. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD blared a famous New York Daily News cover from 1975, describing President Gerald Ford’s refusal to give bottomed-out New York a federal bailout. Urban poverty and crime had begun to soar, but the most pernicious development was the one no one knew had started: the structural transformation of income and wages. Until 1979, US worker pay rose with productivity. Starting in 1980, the incomes of the very rich began growing faster than the entire economy, while the poor and middle class began to fall dramatically behind. Growth in worker productivity between 1979 and 2017 grew by 70.3 percent while hourly compensation grew by 11.1 percent.28 (Earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americas grew 343.2 percent by comparison.)
The extreme stratification of income and wealth that began in the late 1970s has now outdone that of the Gilded Age of robber barons. In addition to stripping Americans of opportunities and resources—and shifting expectations, casting survival as an aspiration—it has severely curtailed political movements. Foreigners ask me why American citizens are not out in the streets protesting around the clock, like people did in Hong Kong and South Korea. The answer is that protest is more of a financial risk than a political one, and financial risks form the backbone of modern American terror.
We cannot afford to overcome. We are too busy doing GoFundMe’s for the funerals of our friends whose previous GoFundMe failed to cover their health care. Much as the American Dream is dead, the methods of protest that it enabled are no longer effective—the leverage and fluidity of that era is gone. This does not mean that protest itself is dead, that standing up and fighting back is futile, but that the “iron triangles” about which Mueller warned have strangled our traditional means of self-protection.
We live in the era of the masses versus the mob: but people do not recognize the mob as the mob. In the twenty-first century, the mob both wears suits and files them. The mob is tasteful, and presidential, and—worst of all—legal. We are living in Roy Cohn’s America, directed by his apt pupil, with the aid of a crime syndicate that does not recognize law, freedom, or the sanctity of human life.
In the late 1970s, as Ford told New York to drop dead, Cohn and Trump picked at the city’s corpse like vultures. Manhattan was ready to be torn down and bludgeoned and remade with blood money in concrete: Trump Tower, the Plaza, the many, many casinos. Corporate raiders who would later aid the Trump administration—Carl Icahn, Wilbur Ross, Rupert Murdoch—commenced a national shakedown disguised as economic revival. Scams stretched from Atlantic City to Gary, Indiana, to St. Louis and beyond, to international waters where moguls parked their stolen assets.29 Critical regulations were tossed—the fairness doctrine that had protected media; the labor laws that had protected unions. While there were objections, few recognized the long-term agenda to profit off the damage.
Trump arrived on the national scene right as the nation began to crumble.
In 2016, shortly after Trump was deemed president of the United States, the German publication Bild published a series of documents showing that Trump had not paid federal taxes since 1977—an allegation that echoed a vague claim Hillary Clinton had made during a debate but never fully explained.30 The files came from the Czech security services—essentially, the Stasi of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR), which had been monitoring Donald Trump and his Czech wife, Ivana, since they married in 1977. It was typical of the CSSR to monitor Americans who came onto their radar—particularly rich, powerful, and connected Americans like Donald Trump—and to pass along information to their counterparts in the Soviet Union and in other communist states of the Eastern Bloc. The private information they procured for blackmail purposes is called kompromat.
During the Cold War, Soviet and Soviet-adjacent intelligence services routinely created dossiers on Westerners and used this information to manipulate individuals and influence world affairs.31 US intelligence agencies employed similar tactics, though they deployed them in the USSR in a less aggressive (and arguably less effective) way. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, states that remained authoritarian—including Russia—gave their security services new names while employing the same brutal practices, while states that embraced democracy, like the Czech Republic, began reforms.
Surveillance is to be expected; kompromat is not unique. What is not typical, however, is for documents to claim that, beginning in 1977, Trump would remain “completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years” thanks to a mysterious arrangement between his company and the American government; that he was contractually bound to have three children with Ivana (which he did); and that he was being groomed to run for president in 1988 (which he nearly did).32 Despite repeated demands from officials, Trump has still not released his taxes to the American public. The head of the IRS has not complied with congressional requests.
No member of the US government has commented on the CSSR files, despite the perplexing nature of the claims inside them. The only journalist who did a follow-up on the files’ existence was British reporter Luke Harding. Harding tracked down Czech officials who affirmed that the files were real and told him, “It wasn’t only us who paid attention to him. The first department of the StB (Státní bezpečnost, or Czech security services) were interested in him. I don’t know if the first directorate shared information on Trump with the KGB. I can’t verify or deny.”33
The question of whether Trump, in 1977—at the height of his tutelage under tax-dodger Cohn—struck up some incredible agreement where he would pay no taxes to the United States until 2007 is not just unanswered but unexamined. The answers could be found: the IRS should know. Given the number of times Trump business dealings have fallen under investigation by federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Treasury, other government agencies may know too. But the American people do not. And the question of why we do not know remains as enormous—and as disconcerting—as the information in the Czech files themselves.
The late 1970s ushered in an era in which the rich paid less and less to the government and the poor worked and suffered more. Trump was introduced into the corrupt world he now inhabits and developed the tactics he now employs to evade consequences, just as the world itself was changing to reward white-collar criminals like himself. In the 1980s, he became symbolic of this era and its rapacious greed, but the extent to which he showcases wealth as raw power is distressingly literal. He was not merely an outcome of the economic restructuring ushered in by Reagan’s union-busting and trickle-down economics, and he was not merely a brazen player in the corporate raiding and glitzy rebuilding of New York City. Trump may have been involved in an unparalleled and inexplicable pact with the US government to remain above the law, one that was likely buffered by criminal actors and hostile foreign states. This disturbingly parallels his present-day actions as president.
The Trump administration has been notable for its reverence for criminals and dictators. While designating Canada, Mexico, and the EU to be enemies of the United States, Trump—aided by daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner—sought out an axis of autocrats to take their place. This axis includes Saudi prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, millennial murderer Kim Jong Un, and, of course, Vladimir Putin. Trump rehabilitated domestic criminals as well, using the power of the presidential pardon as a lure and a reward for loyalty, as he did for Republican criminals Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby.
This ongoing image rehab of the worst people in the world mirrors the ethos of the “torturers’ lobby” run by Manafort and Stone in the 1980s—who represented the Philippines’ Marcos family and Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko while moonlighting as operatives for Republican campaigns. It also parallels Trump’s 1980s social network, which included people like billionaire Saudi arms smuggler Adnan Khashoggi, whom Trump befriended and from whom he bought a “surveillance yacht” filled with hidden cameras.34 (In fall 2018, Khashoggi’s nephew, Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, was hacked into pieces with a bone saw by aides of the Saudi government in their Turkish embassy, allegedly under the orders of MBS with information supplied by MBS’s friend, Kushner, after Khashoggi had criticized Trump.35 Adnan Khashoggi is also dead, having passed on in 2017 due to unknown causes.) The same names recur over and over in the sordid Trump saga, indicative of an interconnected web of relationships between politicians, spies, and crime lords that were built in the 1980s and continue to the present day.
Throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that he had nothing to do with Russia, had no ties to the Russian government, and had never made any business deals with Russians. This flew in the face of recent interviews—such as his claim on Fox News in 2014 that Putin had reached out to him during the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013—but also in the face of his 1987 autobiography The Art of the Deal. Cowritten with Tony Schwartz—a ghostwriter who later warned during the 2016 campaign that Trump was a sociopath who would likely bring forth the end of the world if elected—The Art of the Deal could have been subtitled How I Became a Russian Asset.36
“A prominent businessman who does a lot of business with the Soviet Union calls me to keep me posted on a construction project I’m interested in undertaking in Moscow,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal when explaining the origins of his first trip to Russia. “The idea got off the ground after I sat next to the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, at a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, a great businessman who is the son of Estee Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter, it turned out, had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it. One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government. They have asked me to go to Moscow in July.”37
To be clear, doing business with the Russians was not a crime, and there was nothing illegal about visiting the USSR during the glasnost era, when Russia was opening up to the world. Many celebrities did so. Mr. Rogers, for example, also went to the USSR in 1987. The difference is that Mr. Rogers did not then propose plans for Russia and the United States to team up in nuclear arms deals for the purpose of making people suffer, as well as write op-eds decrying the government of the United States upon his return. What Mr. Rogers did in Moscow was unlikely to become a source of rich kompromat, and Mr. Rogers did not spend the rest of his life solidifying his relationships with Russian oligarchs and mafias attempting to sell the neighborhood to the highest bidder.
But that’s getting ahead of the story. The Art of the Deal omitted an important piece of information: Trump was invited to the USSR not only by Dubinin, who died in 2013. He was also invited by Vitaly Churkin, a bureaucrat who rose through the Soviet ranks, strengthened his position as a diplomat in independent Russia, and became Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2006.38 Churkin met again with Trump in 2013 and spent 2016 stridently defending Trump at the United Nations, despite Trump not having been actually criticized by anyone there, in an incident that baffled international observers.39 The details of Trump and Churkin’s relationship, their meetings, and why Churkin defended Trump remain a mystery, because on February 20, 2017, one month after Trump’s inauguration, Churkin died suddenly at the age of sixty-four.
On February 21, 2017, the New York City medical examiner’s office announced that Churkin’s autopsy suggested the need for a toxicology test. Trump’s State Department, with Russia’s backing, immediately issued a gag order and prevented public disclosure of the cause and manner of death.40 Churkin had been the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly and in an unexplained fashion since Trump won the election.41 There has been no follow-up reporting or official investigation of his death, and the documents remain sealed. On the occasions that I have published anything on Churkin—in which I limited my commentary to noting that he had known Trump for decades and had accompanied Dubinin to the initial meeting with Trump—I was besieged with death threats and hit pieces, including from Russian state media, who falsely claimed I said Churkin was murdered by Putin.42
According to The Art of the Deal, on July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow with Ivana, was housed by the Soviet government in Lenin’s suite across from the Kremlin, and began talking deals with the Politburo. (The date is notable; since his inauguration, Russian officials have chosen sentimental American dates—like July 4 and September 11—to fly Trump and his GOP lackeys to Russia.) Journalist Luke Harding notes that the suite Trump stayed in had long been under KGB control and would have been bugged.43 We do not know the details of Trump’s discussions with Soviet officials, but he returned to the United States more determined to form a geopolitical alliance with Russia than ever.44 Later in 1987, he told journalist Ron Rosenbaum that he sought to partner with Russia on nuclear weapons with the aim of threatening other countries into compliance. His dream targets included Pakistan and France.45 Initially skeptical, Rosenbaum was shocked that Trump did seem indeed to have high-level international contacts facilitating his Soviet partnerships. In September, Trump also showcased the anti-American and xenophobic streak that remains part of his politics to this day, taking out full-page ads condemning US policies and claiming that “the world is laughing at America’s politicians.”46 In October, he called America a “failure” in a speech he gave at a rally in pursuit of his new goal: becoming the president of the United States of America.47
In recent years, both the Trump campaign and the mainstream media have portrayed Trump as a political neophyte or outsider, but nothing could be further from the truth. Trump sought elected office for thirty years. He ran for president in 2000, 2012, and 2016, and he nearly ran in 1988 and 1996. His 1988 bid began with a rally held in late 1987 by Republican activist Michael Dunbar and was guided by Roger Stone, who began his first go-round as a Trump presidential adviser. Stone was involved in every Trump presidential run thereafter as well as in Trump’s near-run for New York governor in 2014.48
Trump had one condition for entering a race: his win needed to be preordained. A 1987 Newsweek cover story on Trump paints a damning portrait of Trump’s newly announced presidential ambitions. “He’d love to be president, but only if he were appointed,” one friend told the magazine. John Moore, an attorney who fought a tenant dispute with Trump, warned of the consequences: “He is a dangerous man … he’s the type who’d make the trains run on time.” A friend of Trump’s accurately forecast Trump’s ceaseless ambition: “No achievement can satisfy what he wants. What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas.”49 By winter 1988, Trump had decided to put his electoral aims on hold.50 Perhaps the win he demanded was not yet assured. Pundits have claimed that Trump ran for president in 2016 with the intention to lose: the real goal being to boost his brand and income. Putting aside the patent ridiculousness of Trump agreeing to lose to a woman, and a Clinton at that, this view also misapprehends Trump’s deep need for predetermined outcomes. Trump’s brand may be risk: the high-stakes deal, the bold venture. But for most of his life, Trump has only taken a risk when the reward is guaranteed by others.
Born rich, Trump followed his father, Fred Trump, into the family business to become richer. He remained in his hometown his whole life. His inner circle has been tightly controlled and contained, consisting mainly of his family and his lawyers. His lawyers salvage his businesses not only by exploiting loopholes and requiring NDAs, but by threatening perceived enemies. Trump functions best in scripted reality—supplying his own tabloid fodder, playing a successful version of himself on The Apprentice. He demands attention but shuns scrutiny. Trump needs to be a brand because he’s terrified of being a person.
Much like I do not remember the era of the American Dream, I do not remember a time before Donald Trump. In this respect, I am like most Americans: he has inhabited our collective consciousness for my entire life, which means he has been committing crimes, unpunished, for my entire life. He has been profiting off American pain for my entire life, and American elites—the elites he pretends to condemn—have been enabling him for my entire life. That is the template of expectations for my generation and all that followed: crime committed brazenly is over time redefined as something other than crime. It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.
My mother, like other bored thirtysomethings of her generation, was fascinated with the Trumps, and hate-watched them as a hobby. She subscribed to Spy magazine, a publication dedicated to mocking and exposing the hypocrisies and crimes of elites. Spy ran in-depth investigatory pieces on Trump’s financial shakedowns, international circle of corruption, and marital abuses. Despite the snarkiness of Spy, these were serious articles, and they traveled to an unlikely audience due to the popularity of the magazine, which my mom saw as Mad magazine for adults. You did not need to be a media insider or a political operative to know the dirt on Trump in the 1980s. I grew up in a house where the most fought-over magazine was TV Guide; we were ordinary people. But because of Spy, my family knew all about Trump’s filthy lucre. “Sarah, what the fuck,” my mother texted me in 2016, “why is no one reporting all the shit we knew about him when you were little? I need to find my Spys!”
Once a year, when I was a child, my mom would drive my sister and me to New York City to go sightseeing. This was a big deal, as we rarely ventured more than twenty minutes from our home, much less to places other people went for pleasure. Every time we would go to New York City, my mom would park the car near Trump Tower so we could walk in and use the public bathroom and “show Trump what we think of him!” Trump was synonymous with all that was terrible about America: greed, cruelty, stupidity, rich people. I remember giggling at the glitzy restrooms, an enthusiastic participant in my mom’s immature defiance of a world we could never enter.
There’s a bizarre tendency in New York media to, even now, position Trump as a “man of the people”: to posit that because he grew up as a mere millionaire real estate scion in Queens, he should be viewed as downtrodden because he was not raised as an even richer scion in Manhattan. No ordinary person has this view. By “ordinary people,” I mean people like my mom—a public school English teacher who enjoyed mocking a decadent asshole. By “ordinary,” I mean people like the innocent teenagers in the Central Park Five, whose reputation and lives Trump worked to destroy. By “ordinary,” I mean pretty much anyone in the tristate area who read Spy, or the New York City tabloids, or who watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and thought he was both a jackass and a joke—which meant basically all Americans by the time his bankruptcies and first divorce hit in the early 1990s. By “ordinary,” I mean everyone who did not know Trump personally and therefore could not be bribed or blackmailed by him or his inner circle. We were the useless people, the free people.
That a significant number of today’s high-profile journalists did know the Trump family personally is cause for concern. We now live in a world where products of nepotism inundate industries like journalism, a field often reporting on other products of nepotism in business and politics. These powerful sectors of society have been overtaken by connections rather than merit, and dynasties rather than unbiased workforces. These conditions do not guarantee that coverage must be terrible. While wealth does not indicate merit, it also does not inherently destroy it. Any person can choose to do a good job and tell the truth. But the domination of nepotistic elites in national media over the past two decades has warped public perception of what “ordinary people” thought of Trump, and of what information about his corruption is thought fit to print. The transformation of the media into an industry for elites who may not recognize white-collar corruption as abnormal—or who may be reluctant to upset their family or social circles by revealing a crime—is described in depth over the next few chapters.
The late 1980s brought a flurry of accountability for Wall Street criminals and dirty Republicans—Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley, the felons of the Iran Contra cases—but Trump was not among the indicted. However, he did not escape the bottoming out of the greed decade unscathed. By the end of the 1980s, Trump properties had gone bankrupt, and some were tarnished by their connection to tragedies and crimes—such as the 1989 freak helicopter crash that killed top executives running his dying Taj Mahal casino. (Trump callously blamed his financial ruin on their deaths.)51 In 1990, Wall Street bond house Salomon Brothers advised clients to bail on Trump Castle. In 1991, Trump declared bankruptcy, and by 1992, he had lost all his signature properties, with the exception of Trump Tower. He sold Khashoggi’s surveillance yacht, which he had renamed the Trump Princess.
Trump’s marital life imploded at the same time he lost his fortune, and his divorce from Ivana prompted a tide of tabloid tales. The media coverage of this era is notable because of the sense of profound relief that emerges from mainstream publications, which, unlike Spy and Wayne Barrett’s reporting at The Village Voice, had been functioning as flacks for reasons yet to be entirely discerned. A 1990 New York magazine profile confesses that media coverage stemmed from both laziness and the ceaseless drive of both Donald and Ivana to make themselves available, even if the reporting was unflattering and the ratings were low:
“The deep secret of all Trump coverage is that it is cost-effective news—Nielsen ratings and newsstand sales aside. Everything is easily available: the lawyers’ statements by fax, the PR quote for the day, the file footage of all the principals, the photo opportunities at convenient midtown locations—near news offices and TV studios. Trump vs Trump is accessible. That’s why it may run forever,” wrote Edwin Diamond in a March 1990 column titled “Bonfire of the Inanities.”
That was 1990. Now transpose this internal logic into a world where national media is conglomerated in elite coastal cities like New York, digital and cable stories must be produced in a frenzied 24/7 cycle, fact-checking is on the wane, and the lines between news and entertainment—and truth and reality—have blurred, creating an infotainment nexus driven as much by the need to fill space and kill time as it is by the desire to make money. That is the media world that Trump inhabited in later decades, one whose vulnerabilities he understood intimately, for he had helped create them.
In later chapters, I describe how this loss of leverage in the media occurred, and how Trump capitalized on it, but it is critical to observe how early the seeds of destruction were planted—and that the media reaped the harvest of its own demise. One of the most striking examples is the coverage of the divorce itself. In 1990, Trump was brought low after decades of flagrant highs, and journalists pounced. Roy Cohn was dead and no longer a threat, and so Trump exposés abounded as Ivana opened up her own world to the press. These included scathing early 1990s Vanity Fair profiles, including one in which twelve-year-old Donald Trump Jr. told a reporter that Trump did not love him, did not love himself, but only loved his money;52 to the 1993 book Lost Tycoon by Harry Hurt III, which declared that Trump did not know how to have sex with women and describes Ivana purchasing a book on female orgasms and announcing “I have to give this to The Donald; he can never find the spots.”53 From the start of the marriage, their terrible sex life, wrote Hurt, had sent Trump running back to Roy Cohn, who was forced to write a new prenup to placate the sexually unsatisfied Ivana. Hurt’s book paints a disturbing picture of Trump’s conception of love and consensual sexual relations.
The worst revelation of Hurt’s book is one that was made in Ivana’s 1990 divorce deposition and reemerged during the 2016 campaign: Ivana had said at the time of her divorce that Trump, angered by a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot conducted by a doctor Ivana recommended, grabbed her, pulled out hair from her own scalp, bellowed, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!,” and raped her. The deposition papers describe a terrified Ivana hiding in a closet in the hours after the rape, emerging in the morning to find Trump sneering at her, asking: “Does it hurt?” (Before Hurt’s book was published, Ivana had retracted her testimony, saying she was not raped “in a literal or criminal sense.”)
When Trump’s 2016 campaign began to pick up steam, making Hurt worry he may become the candidate, Hurt asked his publisher, Norton, to reissue Lost Tycoon. But they told him the thirty-three-year-old book was now “too dangerous to publish.”54 Hurt ended up republishing it himself on Kindle to try to get the word out. In 2015, a Daily Beast reporter wrote a piece detailing the alleged rape of Ivana and was threatened by Trump’s aspiring Roy Cohn replacement, lawyer and future felon Michael Cohen.55
“What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” Cohen told the Daily Beast reporter. “You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up … for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet … you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money. You’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”56
These threats were reported in The Daily Beast along with details of the rape. But they did not make it into most mainstream coverage of Trump. Hurt tried to get the story of Trump’s history of sexual assault on cable news, only to have CNN cancel on him multiple times—until the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape forced the topic into the public eye. In winter 2019, in his federal testimony, Michael Cohen admitted to making at least five hundred threats under Trump’s orders for over a decade, describing him as akin to a mafia boss—without using the word “mafia” itself.57
Other reporters who had covered Trump’s early criminal history were silenced. Acclaimed journalist David Cay Johnston, author of multiple bestsellers about Trump, noted that in addition to refusing to cover the rape of Ivana, the 2016 press would not report on Trump’s documented ties to organized crime:
“If people knew more of the truth about Trump and what he’s doing to our government, we’d be seeing more protests,” he told The Nation.58 “For example, they have no idea about his years of dealings with a confessed drug trafficker. [The trafficker is Joseph Weichselbaum, indicted in 1985 for running a cocaine ring, who lived in Trump Plaza and was defended to the judge by Trump as a character witness in court; after serving a minor sentence, Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower, purchasing a $2.4 million apartment in cash.] And my fellow journalists didn’t report that; I offered them all the documents and they wouldn’t print it.”
Trump covers up crime with scandal. That is his main propaganda tactic, the one few seem to be able to discern. He would rather be seen as a married man who had an affair than a man who raped his wife and assaulted countless women and girls. He would rather be seen as an overconfident tycoon racking up bankruptcies than a skilled and powerful man associated with the mafia running a series of shakedowns for foreign backers. He would rather be a president mocked as an idiot in a “Make America Great Again” cap than be known as a vindictive traitor who seeks to strip America down and sell it for parts. The crimes are much worse than the scandals, but the media will always take the scandal bait.
The public, having been assured that it’s just scandal, it’s just Trump being Trump, will then surrender its own demands for accountability. This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them. “Normalcy bias” is the psychological counterpart to “American exceptionalism.” You can see these dual myths at play in every massive American oversight turned tragedy, from 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis. (Notably, you see many of the same elite scammers, men who profit off the good faith that informs normalcy bias, in each of these atrocities as well.)
But no one held Trump accountable—not in the 1980s, not now. That is to say, no one held Trump accountable in a meaningful way, the only way he and his criminal kind recognize: indictment and imprisonment. He remained a distant folk villain, a TV and tabloid monster, a threat outside my orbit. I could walk in and out of Trump Tower as a little girl and not feel afraid. It never crossed my mind that, thirty years later, this man would endanger my life.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past,” Orwell wrote in 1984. “Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.”59
We are living in the future Orwell warned about; I am living in the 1984 my mother laughingly assured me did not exist. I am writing this book to report the past in its full truth, in the hope that an understanding of the past will impact the future. That is the hope of every journalist who documents abuses of power. But I write under the rule of a tabloid tyrant. I write about a New York past from a Missouri present; I write with a memory that it is my own job to doubt, because I have seen how the media is made. I have seen how this monster is fed. I remember absorbing its myths as a child. I have found the crimes under the scandal and struggled to bring them to public light—to make them part of “whatever the records and the memories agree upon,” so that we at least know what we are fighting.
I wrote in the beginning of this chapter: “When you are a young child, you have no sense of anything that happened before you existed unless it is explicitly spelled out.” The horror of the present is realizing that many adults had no sense of what was really going on during my 1980s childhood either—and that those who did know, and lived to tell the tale, are the ones who stole the future.