“There’s a level of brutality in boxing,” Donald Trump told me. “It’s hard to take 300 punches in the face and come back for another round. I remember hearing a champ after a fight say to the cameras, ‘I want to thank the Lord my savior, who gave me the ability to beat the shit out of my opponent.’”
My conversation with Trump took place almost twenty-five years ago when I was traveling around the country with him, researching a story for Vanity Fair. His comment on the brutality of boxing came to mind while I was putting together this book, which is about the opponents who are trying for a knockout punch against President Trump.
At the time of my magazine assignment—toward the end of 1993—Trump was agonizing over whether to marry a five-foot-eight-inch former beauty queen, model, and showgirl named Marla Maples, who was the mother of his baby daughter Tiffany. He had just dug himself out of a massive financial hole—at one point he owed the banks nearly $1 billion—and he was nervous about his plan to take his Atlantic City casinos public.
Trump’s comment about boxing was a metaphor for the beating he was taking in the press for his soap opera divorce from Ivana, the mother of Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka; the bruising negotiations he was having with Marla over a prenuptial agreement;1 and, most painful of all, the grief he was getting from his parents, who opposed his marriage to Marla.
“Ivana still loves you,” his eighty-year-old Scottish-born mother Mary MacLeod Trump told him over a Sunday brunch that I attended with Trump and his parents in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel. “She’d take you back.”
“I know,” said Trump. “I talk to her all the time. At least a couple of times a week. Ivana can’t feel great about my baby with Marla. She can’t be thinking, ‘Isn’t this wonderful.’”
Trump hated talking about marriage; he referred to it as “the big M word.” But he couldn’t avoid it, for sitting across the table from him was his eighty-nine-year-old father, Fred Trump, whom he idolized and who told him that he should stick with Ivana and keep Marla as a mistress “on the Q.T.”
In the end, Trump married Marla in an opulent wedding at the Plaza, which I attended, and my piece ran on the cover of Vanity Fair with the headline “Trump Family Values.” The story corroborated Trump’s claim, which the press continued to discount, that he had achieved a spectacular financial comeback and was on his way to becoming a billionaire. It also laid bare the lurid details of Trump’s rocky relationship with Marla.
“They might love each other,” I wrote, “but they enjoyed torturing each other, too. Donald complained that Marla didn’t show him sufficient appreciation for what he had done for her—making her a celebrity and giving her the good life. . . . Marla knew how to push Donald’s buttons. She taunted him in public for being overweight. She played with the hair on his head, lifting it up and exposing his scalp, and poking fun at his efforts to hide his hair loss. She derided his sexual prowess in front of his friends and associates.”
After Trump read the story, he phoned me.
I braced for the worst.
“I loved your story!” he said. “It was great! You are the first journalist to write that the Trumpster is back!”
Among the many things his enemies always seem to get wrong about Trump is his ability to come back from a beating. It is true that his ego is easily bruised, but during his race for the White House—nineteen walloping months in the ring, to use his boxing trope—he took 300 punches in the face and still “beat the shit out of” his opponents.
Journalists dug through their college history books to find an American politician who had been as reviled as Trump. The name they kept coming up with was Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States.
“In a conversation with Daniel Webster in 1824,” noted Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times, “Thomas Jefferson described Jackson as ‘one of the most unfit men I know of’ to become president of the United States, ‘a dangerous man’ who cannot speak in a civilized manner because he ‘choke[s] with rage,’ a man whose ‘passions are terrible.’ Jefferson feared that the slightest insult from a foreign leader would impel Jackson to declare war.”
Trump didn’t have a Thomas Jefferson to contend with, but he did have plenty of villainous enemies—the Never-Trump crowd in the Republican Party, the media, Hollywood stars and moguls, late-night talk-show hosts, corporate America, college professors, many gays, blacks, and Latinos, and the billion-dollar Hillary Clinton political machine.
His enemies called him every name in the book—a racist, a sexist, an Islamophobe, a homophobe, a transphobe, a xenophobe, a white supremacist, a Nazi, a fascist, a misogynist, an idiot, an ignoramus, a self-promoter, an authoritarian, a blowhard, a jackass, a dummy, a scum, a snake-oil salesman, and on and on.
They said he was nuts, that he displayed the classic traits of a mental illness called narcissistic personality disorder. They said he was a Dr. Strangelove who would destroy decades of U.S. foreign policy, and start World War III. And they said his candidacy was a joke. Charles M. Blow, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote, “Donald Trump has virtually stopped trying to win this election by any conventional metric and is instead stacking logs of grievance on the funeral pyre with the great anticipation of setting it ablaze, if current polls turn out to be predictive.”
What the pollsters—and journalists like Blow—failed to understand was that Trump was the only politician in either party who listened to the voices of marginalized Americans and promised to become their tribune. He didn’t have to bamboozle anybody. Common-sense Americans saw his many flaws. And yet, tens of millions of them were willing to overlook his impulsive, sometimes infantile, often self-defeating behavior because they believed he would make their lives better.
“There are signs of hope for fresh thinking in both the U.S. and the U.K.,” wrote Conrad Black, the controversial Canadian press lord. “Donald Trump horrifies Canadians as a caricature of the Ugly American of the 1950s vintage: loud, boastful, boorish, ignorant, obscenely materialistic, and illiberal in every respect, as nauseating a personality as he is reassuring to us of our comparative civility, culture, and equability, our inoffensiveness and niceness, if not exactly our style. There is some reason for this judgment of Trump from what we have generally seen of him in public now for 30 years.
“[The] fact that he is doing so well,” Black continued, “must be taken not as a sign of the triumph of the belligerent, clumsy, bullying America the world knows and dislikes, but rather as indicative of the rage of scores of millions of Americans as they work themselves to the bone to stumble from pay cheque to pay cheque with maxed-out credit cards and loud rumors of recession.
“They are angry about rising crime rates, the many thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars that have been squandered in the Middle East to produce an appalling humanitarian crisis, the debasement of the currency and the reduction of their great country to the status of a laughing stock. These are legitimate grievances and for Trump to stare at audiences with an Ozymandian curled lip and say . . . ‘I love the poorly educated people,’ to applause . . . only means that he knew how angry the people were and knew how to give voice to that anger, to be its evocator and its voice.”
I witnessed firsthand how Trump related to voters when I flew with him to his rallies in the American Heartland during the Republican primaries.
“A lot of reporters have asked to travel on my plane, including Bob Woodward,” Trump said when he invited me to fly with him, “and I’ve told them all no. You are the first reporter on my plane. Just so you know—I’m treating you special.”
We had known each other for more than thirty years, but in classic Trump fashion he needed to remind me that in his world—the ruthless world of real estate developers—everything was a transaction. He expected something in return for treating me as special. I made no promises, and he had no advance knowledge of what I would write about him.
Trump traveled light. He was accompanied by Steve Miller, his rail-thin, thirty-one-year-old policy wonk, who handed him printouts of the latest Internet news and called him “Mr. Trump,” never “Donald”; Dan Scavino Jr., forty, who handled his Twitter account and always showed him the tweets before they were sent out so that Trump could edit them, which he frequently did; and Keith Schiller, his long-time personal bodyguard, who was in charge of his traveling wardrobe, which fit into a single large suitcase. Hope Hicks, his twenty-eight-year-old spokeswoman, was at a funeral for a family member and couldn’t make the trip.
Stories about his rallies typically portrayed his supporters as a ragtag army of bigoted white male rednecks who came from a broken America: these people were in trouble financially, their families were being destroyed by drugs, and they felt that their country was being stolen from them by the politically correct.
When I arrived at my first rally, I half expected to see people who looked like the dispossessed Okies in the movie The Grapes of Wrath. Instead, when Trump stepped out on the platform to deliver his speech, he faced a sunny, neatly dressed crowd of men and women, many of whom brought along their kids for a fun family outing. They wore “Make America Great Again” hats and T-shirts and carried “Build the Wall” and “Lock Her Up” placards.
Trump spoke from notes that he had scribbled with a Sharpie on a folded piece of paper while traveling in his plane. But mostly he spoke off the cuff. He told them they were the “forgotten Americans.” They were being cheated by foreigners who outsmarted “our dumb leaders” and stole away millions of American jobs. They were being screwed by elitists who lived on the East and West coasts and ran Washington, and who had become rich at their expense. These elitists, who looked down their noses at the rest of America, had shattered the American Dream.
It was a bleak picture, but Trump promised a rosy future. If he became president, he would put people over politicians in Washington. “You won’t be forgotten any more, I can promise you that,” he said. He would build a wall—“and make Mexico pay for it”—and he would stop the drugs and crime that were spilling over America’s southern border. He would bring back jobs. He would make America safe again, respected again, great again. He would make them all winners.
As I watched the expressions on the faces in the crowd, I was reminded of another rally I had attended years before. It was 1957; I was a copy boy and feature writer at the New York Daily News, and I was assigned to cover Billy Graham’s first Madison Square Garden crusade. A huge crowd turned out to hear the evangelist preach about Sodom and Gomorrah. Graham substituted “New York” for the names of those sinful cities, and he prayed that New York would “have a spiritual resurrection.” At the end of the rally, hundreds of people stood up and, as if in a collective trance, came forward to answer Graham’s call to be born again.
Something similar—if entirely secular—happened at Trump rallies. Judging by the ecstatic look on the faces in his crowds, Trump spoke to a spiritual yearning for an American revival. Trump’s supporters felt that while elites prospered, America itself—its basis, its soul, as a land of opportunity, as a unique culture—was being lost. Trump, they thought, was the one man who fully recognized this threat—and the one man who had the gumption and the ability to actually do something about it.
Everyone—the media, the pollsters, Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisers, and all the other villains who didn’t want to see Trump succeed—missed the fact that Americans were responding to Trump’s call for a remedy to modern evils.