POSTSCRIPT: UNDERSTANDING DONALD
I’m a very smart person, I could give an answer that’s perfect and everything’s fine and nobody would care about it, nobody would write about it, or I could give an honest answer, which becomes a big story.
—DONALD TRUMP
Meeting with Donald Trump at his office is like performing a walk-on part in a movie. Flooded with natural light from two sides, the space is as bright as a stage set. The star is an aging leading-man type whose face is so plastic-perfect that he doesn’t seem to have any pores. His elaborate hairdo, glowing, swooping, and sprayed into place, announces his identity. The ultimate professional, he delivers time-worn lines so well they almost sound fresh. Think Michael Caine in one of his lesser, late-career films.
As I shake Trump’s hand, I wonder, Will he reach for sanitizer? A handkerchief? Anyone else who was famous for his anxiety about germs might elicit a bit of consideration. But Trump’s penchant for bombast and cruelty—he had recently declared that the elderly actress Kim Novak should “sue her plastic surgeon”—makes it hard to feel much empathy for Trump. We clasp hands and then I watch closely as he slips behind his desk and discreetly brushes his hand against the fine fabric of his expensive suit.
No other businessman in America, and perhaps the world, can turn something so small—a little fear of contamination—into a trait that a stranger has in mind upon meeting him, but then again, there is no other Donald Trump. This is what I tell him during our first meeting in his office, where a brag wall is covered in magazine covers featuring his face and heavyweight Mike Tyson’s championship belt, payment for some debt, lies on the floor. “As far as I can tell, there’s no one who’s been on the stage as long as you and still remains in the public eye,” I add. “Who else is there?”
The world is Trump’s stage, and most of the players from the early years of his celebrity in New York are either faded or gone. Old enemies and friends including Ed Koch, Roy Cohn, Leona Helmsley, and George Steinbrenner are dead. Others, such as Rudy Giuliani, are sometimes visible but generally irrelevant. Meanwhile, the press clippings he receives at the start of each day attest to Trump’s ongoing celebrity, and the quantity and quality of this attention is what interests me. In his wealth and fame he is truly a man for our time, the ultimate expression of certain aspects of the American spirit in the twenty-first century.
Trump says he was prepared to decline my request for a series of formal interviews, and he has only agreed to this meeting because I’m being assisted by the writer Mark D’Agostino, who is helping me with research. Mark reported on him for People magazine and Trump likes him, but as he says, he is only talking to us as a courtesy. We deserve to hear no in person. But this all sounds like salesmanship. No, I couldn’t possibly sell. This property means too much to me. But maybe for you, I could make an exception.
After a bit of talk about Trump’s status as a unique American figure, we agree to half a dozen interview sessions, which would give us time to march through his life in an orderly way. Trump says he’ll do his best to address the past, although he much prefers to discuss the present and, whenever possible, the future. With this decision made, he eases into a monologue.
A fiend for news of all sorts, from celebrity gossip to politics, Trump criticizes Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who had recently approved a $13 billion payment to settle federal cases related to the bank’s role in the financial industry’s meltdown that led to the Great Recession. Trump clearly thinks Dimon is a wimp, and he’s generally disgusted by President Obama, whom he also regards as weak. In our meetings Trump often filled pauses with criticisms of Obama. Often these statements came during walks to the elevator, when the audio recorders were switched off, or they were couched as “off the record.” In two instances when he spoke on the record, Trump veered from a general discussion of “success” to an evaluation of the president. In the first case he said Obama lacked the qualities of a winner and “has had so many losses and people don’t even want to watch him on television.” In the second he said the president was not psychologically tough. “It’s all psychology. If Obama had that psychology, Russia’s Viadimir Putin wouldn’t be eating his lunch. He doesn’t have that psychology and he never will because it’s not in his DNA.”
When Trump spoke about Obama, he sounded personally irritated, which may have been because the White House had ignored his offer to lead the federal response to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill because the admiral in charge “doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Unfortunately Obama’s former senior adviser David Axelrod had revealed this exchange, and Trump’s offer to build a ballroom at the White House, after Donald stopped speaking to me, which made it impossible to follow up on it with him.
Although Trump’s attitude toward Obama was tinged with emotion, he was far more caustic in his remarks about the fourth estate. “There is tremendous dishonesty, tremendous dishonesty, in the press,” he volunteered, naming certain journalists, including Timothy L. O’Brien and Wayne Barrett, as chief offenders. “I believed in the press. And when this guy [Barrett] wrote this way, I realized, ‘Wow, we’ve got a different situation than I thought. This is not an honest business.’ Now I’ve met some great reporters and writers, and I’ve met some really dishonest ones, I mean, some really, really dishonest reporters and writers. O’Brien would be one.” Trump’s most venomous words are reserved for the editor of Vanity Fair, whom he calls “scumbag Graydon Carter.” Trump will mention the man many times, always saying the phrase in a hurry as if it were a single, indivisible word: “Scumbagraydoncarter.”
Considering his lifelong dance of mutual manipulation with the press, Trump’s complaints are more than a little ironic. Few have profited more from the tide of celebrity news that has swamped the public discourse. His analysis is also entirely self-referential. Writers and reporters are worthy, or not, depending on how they have responded to his various pitches. Those who make the purchase are good. Those who don’t are bad. The worst make fun of him or challenge the score Trump posts—$3 billion? $5 billion? $7 billion?—as he speaks of his own riches. When the writer Timothy O’Brien said Trump wasn’t as wealthy as he claimed, Trump sued. He lost, but considering the costs incurred, O’Brien’s publisher lost too. In this case, he doubts we’ll be meeting in court: “It’ll probably be a bad book and I’ll regret doing it. But, okay, I could sue you if it’s bad, but I won’t bother because the book won’t sell. People want positive, inspiring. That’s what you should write if you want a success.”
After Trump issues his advice we are dispatched to an outer office to make arrangements with Trump’s chief assistant, Rhona Graff, who presides over a clutch of secretaries who are beautiful in the way of the women who play attractive secretaries on television shows and in movies. Smartly dressed and flawlessly made-up, they are both functional and decorative. Graff sets a date and time for our first session with “Mr. Trump” and agrees to help with introductions to people who know and like him. There’s Trump’s mentor from his days at a military academy and, of course, his grown children, who all work for him. It is hard to escape the feeling that Rhona and Mr. Trump are trying to push me into the role of dutiful pet biographer.
In the elevator Mark and I stand in stunned silence as we descend to the pink-marble lobby of Trump Tower. Over coffee we decide we are glad our subject has agreed to be interviewed, but feel less than optimistic about what this process will yield. Trump famously avoids discussing the past, resists self-analysis, and is doggedly committed to the image he has constructed. He tends to repeat reliable phrases and plays games with information. At one point he said, “You can use this, but don’t say you got it from me,” then shared some tidbit about a recent success. Trump’s use of this technique was noted by Mark Singer in The New Yorker in 1997. He’ll try it again with us many times. Fortunately he has abandoned others, such as posing as a “Trump spokesman” named John Baron—but his use of “off-the-record” remarks must still work because it’s still in his publicity-seeking repertoire.
Trump’s effort at capturing the public’s attention has produced a trail of public statements that would fill many thousands of scrapbook pages. Over time he has been quoted so widely on such a variety of topics that anyone who sought to keep track would feel overwhelmed. When he discussed the “worst president,” was he talking about Republican George W. Bush or Democrat Barack Obama? In fact he said it about both men. Bush was awful because he pursued the war in Iraq. Obama was awful for a host of reasons.2
Over the years Trump has been opposed to gay marriage and in favor of gays serving in the military. He has supported abortion rights and then opposed them.3 More recently he has questioned the overwhelming evidence that human activity is causing the earth’s climate to change—“GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop”—and he has suggested that inoculating children with multivaccine injections could cause autism, a claim without scientific support.4 These positions, and Trump’s pandering to the “birthers” as he repeatedly challenged President Obama’s legitimacy, show that he is willing to say almost anything to gain attention. He promotes everything he does as the greatest, and he practically begs to be mocked when he talks about his wealth, the ratings of his TV show, The Apprentice, or even his own intelligence.
But it is not Trump’s outrageousness that makes him worthy of interest. More important is that he has succeeded, like no one else, in converting celebrity into profit. (No matter how many billions he has, we are still talking about billions.) Somehow he has done this even as a substantial proportion of the population, arguably more than 50 percent, consider him a buffoon if not a menace. What does it say about Trump that he is so undeniably successful by the two measures that matter the most to him—money and fame? And what, pray tell, does it say about us?
* * *
“I went to New York Military Academy for five years, from the year before freshman.”
“So eighth grade on?
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was this?”
“Well, I was very rebellious and my parents thought it would be a good idea. I was very rebellious.”
“How did it evidence itself?”
“I was a very rebellious kind of person. I don’t like to talk about it, actually. But I was a very rebellious person and very set in my ways.”
“In eighth grade?”
“I loved to fight. I always loved to fight.”
“Physical fights?”
“… All types of fights. Any kind of fight, I loved it, including physical, and I was always the best athlete. Something that nobody knew about me.”5
In fact, just about everyone who ever interviewed Trump had surely heard about his athletic prowess. His past exploits on the playing fields and more recent ones on various golf courses are often on his mind. Trump says that if we want to understand him we should speak to Theodore Dobias, his coach and “drill sergeant” at New York Military Academy. Dobias had treated him roughly when he was a boy but also instilled in him a fighting spirit. Trump has often spoken of himself as a military-school product, a fighter, and an athlete, and as he asserts these elements of his identity in our first interview, he lays claim to the highest testosterone level in the room. He is, undoubtedly, hormonally blessed, which would account for his competitive nature. It is also probably true that being bundled off to a military academy where he had to “learn to survive” affected his ability to empathize with others. This may explain his statement that “the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
In the exchange that follows this flash of candor, I tell Trump that many people offer respect to others as a matter of course and withdraw it if offended. He thinks this is “nice” but inconsistent with what life has taught him. “I think I probably expect the worst of people because I’ve seen too much. But I think it’s a very nice trait to have.” Remarkably, for a person sitting on a pile of cash, in a concrete tower with a commanding view of Manhattan, Trump describes his life as a struggle. “Life is about survival,” adds Trump. “It’s always about survival.”
In our roughly ten hours of conversation, Trump reveals the most about himself when he touches on the subjects of competition and human nature. He approaches all of life as an unending contest, which explains why he often uses the word winner when describing himself and calls people he dislikes losers.
“I believe in hard work. I believe in being prepared and all that stuff. But in many respects, the most important thing is an innate ability.”
“And you knew this as a kid?”
“No, I never thought of it as a kid.”
“Do you think you had it even then?”
“Always.”
“When you look back at yourself then?”
“I had it. I always had it.”
At various moments Trump returns to the idea that he is better at many things, from golf to business, because of his genetic gifts. “I’m a big believer in natural ability.” He would even say, “I have a natural ability for land [emphasis added].” This belief in the Trump bloodline would be explained more bluntly by Donald Jr., who says, “I’m a big believer in racehorse theory.” Gesturing upward, to the heavens and his father’s office on the floor above, he adds, “He’s an incredibly accomplished guy, my mother’s incredibly accomplished, she’s an Olympian, so I’d like to believe genetically I’m predisposed to better than average.”
In an era when economic inequality is a growing public concern, genetic superiority is a handy justification for stupendous wealth, whether it is inherited or earned. (In the case of Donald Trump, both apply.) Not surprisingly, social scientists have found that the rich and powerful are more likely than others to credit “innate ability” for their status. But while nature can favor some people, so many forces shape us that settling on one as determinative is a kind of magical thinking. Magical too is the power of positive thinking, the Norman Vincent Peale philosophy that encouraged optimism as a solution to virtually all of life’s problems. Trump imbibed the reverend’s message as a boy at Marble Collegiate Church and has subscribed to his views all of his life. “I am a believer in positive thinking. A big believer,” he says. “But I’m also a big believer in guarding against a downside, because the upside will take care of itself. I’ve always said that.” This is the essential paradox of Trump’s personality. He is the fellow who declares himself “a winner” but also expects conflict and criticism. He said he expects more if he decides to run for president in 2016.
Trump repeatedly hinted that he had already decided to run in 2016, when he would turn seventy, and even mused about the possibility that Mark and I, who are New Hampshire natives, might help him in that politically vital state. It was difficult for us to imagine Trump as a serious candidate and we thought it more likely that his interest was a matter of marketing himself and not true political ambition. In a potential GOP field of roughly twenty, others also seemed to be publicity-seekers. Among them, Trump led the pack when it came to daring. After Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy he sent out a social media message that asked, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” When an uproar ensued, the post disappeared from Trump’s account and his aides explained that he did not write it himself. However the words did garner attention for Trump and likely thrilled the political Right’s most partisan troops.
The power of controversy was never lost on Trump, who considered almost every kind of attention beneficial to his public image. “I think my honesty gets me in trouble,” he explained. “I think I’m so honest that it gets me in trouble. I’m a very smart person, I could give an answer that’s perfect and everything’s fine and nobody would care about it, nobody would write about it, or I could give an honest answer, which becomes a big story.”
“Will that hurt you or help you politically, being that honest and forthright?” asked Mark.
“I think it will help me. I think people are tired of politically correct people, where everything comes out ‘The sun will rise and be beautiful.’ I think people are really tired of politically correct. I just attacked the Central Park Five settlement. Who’s going to do that?… You know what you have to do? You have to fight them then, tooth and nail. Like when I get sued by a lightweight like Schneiderman, a total dope, not respected, driving business out of New York.”
The Central Park Five were the teenagers who had been arrested and charged with the notorious assault and rape of a young woman in Central Park in 1989. Trump had made a singular contribution to the public furor around the case with his full-page newspaper advertisements imploring the state to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.” Freed when DNA evidence proved someone else committed the crime, the men sued, and in 2014 the City of New York paid them a total of $40 million, or $1 million each per year of imprisonment, as a settlement. This event prompted much public soul-searching about the rush to judgment in the case, but Trump called the settlement “a disgrace” and complained, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” When we spoke, at the time of the settlement, Trump said, “I spoke to a detective who is sure that they attacked her.”6
Confident as he was in that New York City detective, Trump was equally dismissive of the state’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The detective was reliable because he backed Trump. Schneiderman was a bad guy because he had filed suit over Trump University, which was not a university but rather an expensive (some paid in excess of $30,000) how-to-get-rich training program. The statute of limitations barred most of the attorney general’s case, but he had been able to proceed on his complaint that Trump operated an unlicensed educational institution.
In our conversations Trump talked of Schneiderman as someone who is “very terrible” and “a stupid guy.” It seemed likely that the attorney general would gain little with his suit. In late 2014 a judge found Trump U. had failed to meet state licensing requirements, but other actions Schneiderman cited in his complaint fell outside various statutes of limitations and would not be considered by the court. The judge delayed assessing a fine against Trump.
More serious for Trump were federal court rulings in the Southern District of California, which allowed two suits brought against Trump and Trump University to proceed. In Cohen v. Trump, a judge permitted anyone in the nation who bought Trump University courses after 2007—thousands of people—to join a class action suit alleging that Trump had violated a civil anti-racketeering statute. In the other, Makaeff v. Trump University, a judge permitted only residents of three states to be involved in a suit initiated by a woman who said she had spent about $60,000 on Trump University offerings. In a countersuit alleging defamation, Trump’s attorneys noted that Makaeff had previously endorsed Trump University. When a judge dismissed the countersuit, he noted in his opinion that “victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced.” Trump’s attorney Jill A. Martin told the press that “there are no facts to support any claim against Mr. Trump. Regardless, and despite having nearly five years to do so, the plaintiffs have been unable to quantify any measure of damages. As a result, we believe that the classes should be decertified and the cases dismissed.” Toward this end, Trump’s team sought to have the cases thrown out of court. They failed, and the parties proceeded toward trial. Although no one could predict the outcome at the courthouse, Trump faced the unpleasant prospect of hardworking people testifying that their experience with Trump University left them feeling like suckers.
Donald Trump may have understood how the plaintiffs felt. In one of his earliest press interviews he had recalled how he had watched various dignitaries, including Robert Moses, overlook the great engineer Othmar Ammann at the ceremony that marked the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964. What young Trump noted was not that Moses and the others had been unfair, but that Ammann was a “sucker,” and Trump vowed to himself that he would never let such a thing happen to him. In the decades that followed, he would make suckers out of lots of people, including New Yorkers who loved the Bonwit Teller friezes, depositors of the banks that enabled his excessive borrowing in the 1980s, and investors who bought stock in his casinos. Depending on your standard, the suckers might also include:
• Voters who considered Trump a serious presidential candidate.
• Birthers who thought he was right about President Obama.
• Buyers who lost money on a busted development in Mexico bearing his name.
• Scottish officials who saw only a tiny fraction of the $1.5 billion development Trump promised if they let him build a golf course on an environmentally vulnerable site.7
Some of the people who bet on Trump and lost are less than sympathetic figures. It’s hard to work up concern for a politician who uses his power to push a project through and then feels let down. In many cases, however, it is not the targets of Trump’s manipulation who matter but the bystanders. With the birther claims, Trump hurt the American people as a whole as he spread a conspiracy theory that was rooted in the irrational fears of those Americans who could not accept the president’s skin color and name. Trump wasn’t solely to blame for this state of affairs. Many program hosts on Fox News encouraged him even as the network’s biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, knocked down the birther arguments.
Trump saw no downside in his birtherism. In our conversations he repeats that he is interested in running for president again in 2016 because his business experience shows he can deal with “people that are tougher and smarter than the people Obama has to deal with. Believe me.” He considers deal-making to be the measure of a man and adds, “Obama never made a deal except for his house, and if some Republican did that deal, they’d be in the hoosegow—you know what I’m talking about with the house, right?” I tell him, “I have no idea,” but later learn of a fizzled effort to get the press to treat Obama’s purchase of a home in Chicago in 2005 as the product of some shady dealings. Shadiness is in the eyes of the beholder, and in the case of Obama’s home there was little to see.
Looking forward to his own possible campaign in 2016, Trump says he is ready for reporters who would be unstinting in their investigations of his past, from his Vietnam-era draft deferments due to bone spurs to the birther crusade.
“I’ll expose them as being very dishonest, and it may work and it may not. Ultimately it’s hard to beat the press. The press is so dishonest. But I will go after them. It’s hard to beat the press, but the good news is there’s some very honest media. I have Twitter, I have Facebook—between Twitter and Facebook I’ll be at five million people by the time your book comes out. That’s more than the biggest media company.”
In fact, at 2.5 million Trump had a little more than 10 percent of CNN’s following on Twitter. Among other media outfits The New York Times and the BBC both claimed more than double Trump’s total, while Time and the satirical news site The Onion bested him by more than 1.5 million followers. But though he was wrong on the numbers, Trump was right about his main point, which was that he could bypass the gatekeepers in the press to reach people directly with his messages. Trump said he did his own writing online, and given the wide range of tones in his comments, this seemed true. A devoted tweeter, his online statements address everything from a doctor in New York with the Ebola virus—“Obama’s fault”—to the notion that the Big Apple could actually benefit from global warming, if the phenomenon is real, because it suffers from uncomfortable cold snaps in the winter.
Unlike many other prominent businessmen approaching age seventy, Donald Trump is so well versed in pop culture that he is willing and able to comment on the romantic lives of young stars. When actress Kristen Stewart had an affair, he wrote that she had “cheated on” her boyfriend Robert Pattinson “like a dog.” He said that singer Katy Perry should be wary of John Mayer because “he dates and tells.” As a TV star, he understands the importance of keeping up with trends and fashion to remain relevant. He also stays true to his hit-back-harder philosophy.
“Cher said some nasty shit,” says Trump, referring to the singer/actress. “So I took on Cher. I knocked the shit out of her and she never said a thing about me after that. Bette Midler said something. I said, `Bette Midler is unattractive both inside and out.’ Okay. That was the last time. That was it. She was done.”
Midler had joined the backlash against Trump’s offer to pay $5 million to charity if President Obama made public his Harvard transcript. Obama’s supporters considered this demand, which had never been made of any previous president, part and parcel of an insulting effort to delegitimize him. Midler, recalling the fight over Trump’s real estate developments tweeted, “The man who ruined New York seeks to ruin the nation. Show some respect, if not for the man.” She also poked fun at “the terrible dye job” Trump had done on his hair. Cher, in her tweets, complained about Macy’s department store offering Trump-branded wares and called Trump a “LOUDMOUTH RACIST CRETIN, WHO’D LIE LIKE ‘HIS RUG’ TO GET SOME CHEAP PRESS.” She also called him a “flaming asshole.” “Cher should spend more time focusing on her family and dying career!” Trump replied, later adding, “I don’t wear a ‘rug’—it’s mine. And I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.”
These “Twitter wars” demonstrated the perils of an age that finds celebrities expressing themselves in bursts of unmediated opinion. It’s hard to imagine the female stars of a bygone era—Ella Fitzgerald? Patsy Cline?—typing out the words flaming asshole and making the document available to everyone in the world. But it is a fact of the media age that public conversation is being continually degraded. The process, which recalls Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of “defining deviancy down,” has made for more frank, and plainspoken debates but it has also brought everyone closer to the gutter. In this rhetorical environment, victory often goes to the loud and the profane rather than the reasoned and considered. And while Trump may contribute to the decline of civil discourse, he is hardly alone.
Indeed, in their battles with Trump, neither Cher nor Midler comported themselves in a ladylike fashion. In light of this record, Trump would say, “There’s a very unfair double standard” applied to verbal brawls when men and women are at odds. Men hold no obvious advantage in an online dispute, and Twitter wars—has anyone ever won one?—and the Internet abound with examples of both men and women expressing themselves in the least dignified ways. Addressing his critics, Trump adds, “They’ll say, ‘How can you talk about a woman like that?’ Or, ‘How can you talk about somebody like that?’ So she’ll knock my hair, which is fine. It’s fucking my hair. But she’ll say, ‘Oh, he wears the worst wig I’ve ever seen.’ Right? So then I’ll hit her and they’ll say, ‘How can you say something bad about her?’ I say, ‘Well, what did she say about me?’”
In Trump vs. Midler, and Trump vs. Cher, the sides were evenly matched, and Donald did have a point when it came to who struck first. Coming from a man who readily explains that his temperament hasn’t changed much from his days in first grade, his complaint is to be expected. When my colleague Mark broached the subject of Trump’s tweet about Kim Novak at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony—Kim should “sue her plastic surgeon”—Trump also expressed himself in first-grader mode:
Michael: Did you feel bad after that?
Donald: A little bit. But, you know …
Michael: Why did you do it?
Donald: Because if she’s putting herself out there like that … By the way I wasn’t the only one. There was …
Michael: I’m sure everybody noticed it.
Donald: Kim Novak.
Michael: Yeah, but you said it.
Donald: No, I said that she should “sue her plastic surgeon.” Well, in one way …
Michael: Aw, this is … poor old lady.
Donald: No, I don’t know. She’s not old. I mean, she’s …
Michael: She’s like eighty years old.
Donald: I know. I didn’t think I got in trouble. No, I thought some people thought it was great and other people thought … that’s why I have five million people, I guess, you know.
Michael: It was provocative.
Donald: It was provocative, yes.
Michael: So was that an impulse?
Donald: I used to think she was beautiful, by the way.
Michael: She was.
Mark: Oh, she was.
Donald: But she got on the stage and … don’t forget she’s been away. She got on the stage and I said, “Holy shit.”
Mark: It was shocking.
Michael: Did you write that in the moment?
Donald: It was so shocking that you … I did. I wrote it at the moment.
Mark: Okay. That’s what I was wondering. I mean, you’re thinking about the consequences of that when you’re putting yourself out there with that kind of a statement?
Donald: With Twitter you’ll say things that you can regret because you’re doing them instantaneously, okay? But you’re being very honest. That’s nothing compared to me. They’re always knocking the shit out of my hair.
A phone call interrupted us and we never returned to the topic of Novak. Trump did draw criticism for his very public dig, and Novak had felt so bullied and humiliated by his comment and others that she retreated to her home and didn’t go out in public for weeks. The controversy did have a positive side, as it inspired a great deal of public comment about cosmetic procedures, body image, and the modern obsession with youth and appearance. As a man who seems most comfortable when in combat—financial, sporting, verbal—Trump seemed perplexed by the idea that Kim Novak had suffered as a result of his casual remark. But to his credit, he wasn’t put off by the questions about his behavior. Trump hates to talk about the past, but comes alive when challenged in the present, as demonstrated when he once noted, “Interesting session we’re having today.”
* * *
By repeated measures, the majority of Americans don’t like Donald Trump. In 2011, experts at the firm that issues the celebrity Q Score ratings said that for every one person who liked Trump, more than four did not. More recently, in 2014, 61 percent of New Yorkers responding to a Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll said they had an unfavorable view of him. In liberal corners of the Internet Trump’s image is used to illustrate the biggest problem in the economy, which is the steadily widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Yet, people continue to watch his TV show and purchase branded products from him in numbers sufficient to make his fortune grow.8
What Trump understands is that anyone he might offend by, say, calling Obama “Psycho!” rejected him long ago, and those who like him draw nearer when he does this sort of thing. In a nation of 300 million people, a following as small as 20 percent is such an enormous market that he doesn’t need anyone else. This is the same calculus that the Fox cable news network uses as it designs its programming. For many businesses it is better, in a world of almost infinite options, to cultivate a proportionally small but intensely loyal following of repeat customers (or viewers) than to win the mild approval of everyone else.
Trump also understands that even while Americans may suspect the economic game is rigged to favor the rich, they still want to be rich themselves. His rise to prominence in 1978 coincided, almost exactly, with the moment when median wages stopped growing and the earnings of those in the highest ranks took off. At that same time the mass media became swollen with lifestyle and celebrity “news,” a kind of pornography of wealth and fame. As the public feasted on images of excess, Trump’s face was associated with all the tantalizing pleasures that money could buy. Obscured by hype, the facts of his life didn’t matter as much as the idea of him. Anyone who tried to grasp the “real” Trump was likely to fail. As the ninety-two-year-old doyenne of gossip Liz Smith tells me, “I’ve known him forever, and I can’t figure him out.”
* * *
During lunch at the restaurant that occupies the ground floor of her apartment building, Smith recalls the time she suggested that Trump be honored as a “living landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Many of Trump’s friends and enemies have received this award, including Graydon Carter, and Trump had surely contributed as much to the life of the city as such landmarks as Brooke Shields and Tommy Tune. But the conservancy is a stuffy group, said Smith, and they rejected Trump. With the kind of compassion one might show for a poorly behaved boy who received a spanking, Smith says she knows the conservancy hurt Trump’s feelings, and she feels bad about it.9
Boyish, even at his advanced age, Donald Trump can charm in a way that invites kind concern. He once said to me, as he spoke of a good deed, “See, I have a heart.” We were standing at his office door at the time, and I reflexively touched his shoulder and said, “I know.” In that moment I wanted to believe that the bombast is all a joke. Then I remembered the language he uses to attack people who disagree with him. They are, in his words, “ugly” (many, including Arianna Huffington). They are “stupid” (many, including Obama). They are “scumbags” (the above-mentioned Carter and others). They live like “pigs” (Scottish farmer Michael Forbes). And they are “losers” (George Will, Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Mark Cuban, Rihanna, Karl Rove, etc., etc.) The name-calling is more style than substance. Sticks and stones. More significant are all those who have lost money, or peace of mind, in their dealings with Trump. They may not think he has a heart.
* * *
Donald Trump’s cardiac status is an element of an overarching question that writers and filmmakers and even psychologists have long tried to answer. In 2011, William Cohan of The Atlantic magazine explored the puzzle in a piece titled “What Exactly Is Donald Trump’s Deal?” Cohan properly credited Trump as “a skillful developer, a highly creative thinker, and an extraordinary deal maker,” motivated by money as a method of scorekeeping. A year later, writing in the Chicago Tribune, columnist Clarence Page said Trump shows how to turn “audacious and even obnoxious narcissism into pure gold.”10
Trump was offered as a journalist’s paragon of narcissism at least as far back as 1988. The academics and psychologists got involved a few years later and would go on to make the diagnosis of Trump into a kind of professional sport. Trump makes an appearance in texts for the profession, including Abnormal Behavior in the 21st Century and Personality Disorders and Older Adults: Diagnosis, Assessment, and Treatment. He also appears in books for laypeople such as The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement; Help! I’m in Love with a Narcissist; and When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself.11
Many recent books about narcissism echo Christopher Lasch’s landmark Culture of Narcissism (1979), a lament that would have us place Trump in “an age of diminishing expectations.” Lasch saw an epidemic of self-involvement emerging as young adults with a weak sense of identity sought continual affirmation in attention, material comforts, and exciting experiences. What Lasch feared, Donald Trump lived with more verve than anyone else on the planet. Others may have matched him in one category, such as fame. But no one equaled him on all three levels of narcissistic achievement.
Although his detractors are repulsed, Trump would say that in his aggressive pursuits he is a true expression of the American ideal. He does represent aspects of well-established cultural norms. Repeated studies have determined that Americans do value individualism more than other peoples and are more willing to call attention to themselves. We revere those who take risks in pursuit of the big score, even when they fail, and we tolerate wide gaps in wealth, health, and even life expectancy to preserve our chance to become winners, no matter the odds. We are also inclined to brag and promote ourselves at a level that would be unseemly anywhere else. Donald Trump may blow his horn a little louder than other Americans, but he is playing the right tune.12
Present at the beginning of his run, when he was defining himself as an emblem of his age, Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, recalls herself as a naïve, young woman who wasn’t especially interested in wealth or fame when she left Czechoslovakia for Montreal in the 1970s. She lived with a boyfriend and worked as a model and ski instructor. She says that indeed she was a competitor in the 1972 Sapporo Olympics and “finished seventh in the downhill,” but no record of this seems to exist. According to Sports-Reference.com, Bernadette Zurbriggen of Switzerland placed seventh in the downhill, and no one named Ivana competed at all. No Czech skiers, male or female, even traveled to the games.
Ivana makes her Olympic claim and describes her early life during an interview at her town house on the East Side of Manhattan, half a block from Central Park. Once as famous as her husband, she has retreated from public life. In our time together she speaks in a soft, halting voice. She moves slowly, and her face seems almost frozen by cosmetic intervention. About her years immediately before Donald, she says:
“I was instructing the top guys or girls in ski school. And then I would go back home to Montreal and modeling.”
“Did you like your life then?”
“Yes.”
“Were you happy?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have a strong ambition to be very wealthy or very famous?”
“Not at all.”
Ivana readily recalls happier episodes from the early years of her marriage to Donald, and the details of her successes as his business partner. She’s direct about the woman Donald left her for, saying, “She’s a stupid girl. She doesn’t have a brain.” But when I ask what she thinks motivates her former husband, she struggles to answer and says, “I think he wants to be noticed.” A moment later, when I ask if she feels she has “figured out” Donald, she first says, “Yeah, I figured it out,” then adds, “Well, I really don’t know.”
Ivana survived a hurricane named Donald but is, twenty years after her divorce from him, still a little off-balance. The Trump children are more forthright in their evaluations of their father. Eric, the youngest son of Donald and Ivana, says, “There’s no more all-American guy than him.” He says that his father is “a supergenius in a very, very practical way” who could be compared with Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. More careful in her replies to my questions, Ivanka interprets her father’s id-driven behavior as, not meanness, but candor. “He is going to say exactly what he is thinking. He doesn’t need to hear what the question is or the story is in advance so he can craft an answer.” Donald Jr. is more expansive:
“Listen, he’s a polarizing guy. Okay? There is no question. There are not guys out there that probably say, ‘Yeah, Trump’s okay.’ There are guys that say, ‘I love Trump! He’s the greatest guy in the world!’ Or he’s their least favorite human being in the whole world. That said, that person who hates Trump the most still wants to get their picture with him when he walks by. That person still wants to shake his hand. That person is still sort of mesmerized by him in his presence.”
More than his siblings, Donald Jr. is willing to offer a more rounded assessment of the whole matter of growing up Trump. He recalls that when he was young he asked to be sent to boarding school to escape the glare of publicity during his parents’ divorce. He recognizes that his father contributed substantially to the modern media frenzy over celebrities, which encourages outlandish statements and has normalized events that would have once been shocking:
“He himself was one of the figures that changed the way the media looks at celebrity, the way that media treats the sort of brashness of what’s reported today. The boundary line has grown—there really is nothing off-limits anymore. It doesn’t matter who you are or what it is, there is no boundary. Some of the covers of the New York Post at the time [of the Donald/Ivana divorce] were probably what made a big part of that switch—but now it’s commonplace. But when you think of this stuff in 1989, 1990, that’s a long time ago. And before that it was a very different world. He’s definitely someone that’s formed what media is today because of it.”
Seen in the light of a mediated age, which requires extreme efforts to gain attention, Donald Trump Sr.’s self-promotion, displays of wealth, and even his hair make sense for someone who is intent on being noticed. Poke fun if you will, but the painstakingly constructed swoosh and artificial glow of Trump’s coiffure make him instantly recognizable. Without it, he might stand in front of Trump Tower and escape notice. With it, he is mobbed. His hair has drawing power, even if he didn’t set out, in the beginning, to cultivate a billboard atop his head. In the beginning he sought to escape looking bald. But he was, as usual, ahead of the culture. In the years after Trump adopted his style, cosmetic surgery, hair replacement, skin-smoothing injections, and unnatural hair color were adopted by women and men in all social classes. Instead of something shameful, these vanities became enviable signs of wealth and status that people discussed quite openly. Ask Donald Trump about his hair and he’s likely to invite you to pull on it. (I declined.)
In all of his posturing and style, Trump is perfectly in sync with his generation, whom Tom Wolfe skewered in his 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade.” As the country, and Trump’s cohort, passed through various stages—Studio 54 glitz, Reagan-era glamour, late-eighties retrenchment, postnineties inequality—Trump was in step. This uncanny consistency leads Donald Jr. to argue that his father is not more persona than person, insisting, “It’s not an act. It’s not ‘How can I wake up and be more like Donald Trump today?’ You can’t do that for thirty-five years. You can do that for a few weeks, but not for thirty-five years.”
* * *
In the winter of his life, Donald Trump remains fully committed to his pursuits, which include fighting, consuming, and marking the planet with his name. He finds nothing shameful in this but, when prodded, will admit to just a bit of self-doubt. In one of our talks he asks, “Have you ever heard of Peggy Lee? ‘Is That All There Is?’ It’s a great song because I’ve had these tremendous successes and then I’m off to the next one because it’s, like, ‘Huh, is that all there is?’ That’s a great song actually, a very interesting song, especially sung by her, because she had such a troubled life.”
Trump has offered his observations about the Peggy Lee line to other interviewers, which makes me think that he keeps it in reserve for a moment when he’s supposed to demonstrate self-awareness. Later when I read over a transcript of the interview, it becomes obvious that what he says next is more telling. Referring to Lee’s lyric I say, “Do you ask yourself that sometimes too?” He replies:
“No, I don’t want to think about it! I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see. I don’t like to analyze myself. I don’t like to think too much about the past—other than to learn. The only thing I like about the past is to learn from it, because if you make a mistake, you want to learn from it. Now, I’d much rather learn from other people making mistakes. I read a lot. I read a lot of stories about success and failure, because it’s much cheaper to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own. I can tell you of many, many mistakes that people made, and that’s much better than if I make those mistakes. So the thing I like about the past is you can learn from people’s mistakes and also learn from people’s triumphs.”
“You said you read a lot. Is there something that has influenced you a lot?”
“Well, when I say I read a lot, I’m talking about current reading of the press and the media. I would love to read. I’ve had many bestsellers as you know, and The Art of the Deal was one of the biggest-selling books of all time—that’s really what started this whole thing, I think, Trump: The Art of the Deal. Now in all fairness, it became a number-one bestseller for many, many months, and the reason is because of what I had done before. So I was well-known before I did the Art of the Deal, but that was a big breakthrough. I think the tremendous success of The Apprentice becoming the number-one show on television, that was a big break for me.”
A linguist or psychologist could write at length on Trump’s conversational style. After the briefest reflection, he slams the door on introspection and turns immediately to consider other people and their failures. A mention of books leads him to discuss his own book and its sales and then the corresponding success of his TV show. Invariably he looks for ways to turn the conversation to the theme of his triumphs. In fairness, our conversation is about him, but it’s hard to escape noticing that even as he notes a genuine success, he can’t resist exagerrating. Trump: The Art of the Deal sold well, but an “all-time” bestseller it is not.
Untangling any single Trump claim, like his reference to his book, requires great effort and generally yields little of value, though it can be amusing to challenge him on certain claims. When he told me the western coast of Ireland is like “Florida” and a certain Scottish farm is called “a killing field,” I got him to admit that both statements were products of his own mind, and nothing more. However, while the specifics of his assertions do not matter, his compulsive effort to present—and have others accept—his view of himself and the world he inhabits does. If Trump is, as his son says, authentically Trump, then all of this effort is sincere and necessary to his self-concept. I would have liked to ask Trump about this, but after I interviewed his son, and his second wife, Marla Maples, who spoke of him in glowing terms, Rhona Graff called a halt to our sessions. The reason? I had spoken to someone on the Trump list of enemies, the writer Harry Hurt, who had offended Trump way back in 1993. I had mentioned to Marla Maples that I had spoken to him. It seemed she had then shared this fact with her ex.
Left to conclude my study without Trump, I could reflect on the challenges of his childhood. His mother had been sickly; his father was demanding and often absent. Both abandoned him to a military school that was, by modern definitions, brutal. Yet his parents also provided him with ample support, and he would be the first to insist they were loving and generous. Other factors must be weighed. Foremost seems to be the extraordinary time Trump occupied. In 1946, the year he was born, America was on the cusp of a prosperity the world had never before seen. An explosion of mass media was making image-making and celebrity elements of daily life. A fiercely intelligent child, growing up rich and privileged at this time, would think that anything was possible. Add enormous ambition, and he would try to achieve it.
The factors that influenced Trump’s development were present in the lives of many of his peers, whom Christopher Lasch found to represent the culture of narcissism. But Lasch doesn’t suggest that these souls are worthy of contempt, even though they often injure others. They are, themselves, harmed by a spiritually hollow society that exalts and rewards the self-promoter and the supersalesman while relegating everyone else to isolated anonymity. In the time since Lasch made his argument, the forces he observed have grown more powerful, and the financial rewards to those who can harness them have increased. The result has been an epidemic of narcissism and its component parts, which include grandiosity and self-loathing. Taken together, these feelings produce both the insatiable desire to be seen as a winner and dread of being regarded as a loser.
For Lasch’s literary descendants, the Trump represented in so many accounts is the prime example of the pathology of our age. But none of these works consider him fully. Yes, he can be boorish and obnoxious and is unnecessarily cruel. But considering the world as he found it, Trump should also be regarded as a genuinely successful man who triumphed in the winner-take-all game. He is a living expression of the values of his time. Wealthy and universally recognized, he established himself in the public mind first as a developer, but went on to occupy two more prominent (some would say similar) positions—game-show host and politician. In these roles the self that he constructed came to fit him perfectly. With cameras forever fixing him in technology’s version of the pool where Narcissus saw his reflection, he should be excused for thinking he has some sort of magic inside him.
Certain that he was special and superior, Trump finally decided to offer his leadership skills to the United States of America and the wider world. On June 16, 2015, hundreds gathered in the atrium of Trump Tower and waited for him to ride down the escalator to the strains of the Neil Young anthem—“Rockin’ in the Free World.” Filled with painful allusions to social dislocation, the dystopian lyrics of the song contrasted with the stirring beat and powerful chords sounded by the guitars in the recording. However they matched the view of the nation’s condition that Trump would paint in his speech.
Waving and signaling thumbs up, Trump was preceded on the stairs by his wife, Melania, who stood as motionless as a mannequin as the escalator carried her to the ground floor. In the cheering crowd, Marla Maples’ former publicist Chuck Jones watched with a sense of wonder and appreciation. He felt that Trump had a real shot at the nomination and would vote for him if he got the chance. (He was also relieved that security guards had permitted him to enter the lobby.)
Trump offered roughly forty minutes of stream-of-consciousness commentary beginning with complaints about how Japan, China, and Mexico take advantage of the United States. “When do we beat Mexico at the border?” asked Trump, blending immigration with trade. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” added Trump, who then paused for a smattering of applause. “Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, these aren’t the best and the finest. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
“But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.” Trump’s solution? He would “build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”
In the course of his remarks, Trump often sounded sour notes—“the American dream is dead”—and he lurched from economic issues to terrorism to nuclear-treaty negotiations to health care. In each case, he argued that President Obama and others were not capable leaders, but that he would be up to any presidential task. The difference came down to his skills as a negotiator, he noted, as well as raw talent and God’s favor. “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created,” said Trump. “Our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”
When Trump concluded his remarks he glanced skyward, raised his hand, and Neil Young’s song began to play again. He then looked to his right to see members of his family glide onto the stage. The women each appeared with finely colored hair ranging from brassy to subtle blond. The men wore fine dark suits. He embraced each, rather stiffly, and altogether, they could have been mistaken for models gathered to be photographed for a clothing catalog. After a few minutes of posing for the cameras, the group departed and the crowd dispersed.
On the morning after Trump’s announcement, editors of the New York Daily News added a red nose and lips to his picture and plastered it on the front page of the paper under the headline, “Clown Runs for Prez.” Other subheads read, “Trump Throws Rubber Nose in GOP Ring” and “Ad Libs Circus Speech to Formally Announce.” Comedians had a field day with many of Trump’s statements. David Letterman, the former talk-show host, emerged from retirement to present his “Top Ten” list of “Interesting Facts About Donald Trump.” Among them was the “fact” was that “during sex he calls out his own name.” Jon Stewart, who was about to leave his long-running gig as host of The Daily Show crowed, “Thank you, Donald Trump, for making my last six weeks the best six weeks. He is putting me in some kind of comedy hospice where I’m getting straight morphine.”
But while Trump’s announcement was fodder for comics, his comments on Mexico and immigration disturbed those who understood the facts surrounding the issue. In actuality, illegal immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than others, and Mexican Americans had long experience with violence and disruption at the hands of those who deemed them to be lawbreakers. In the early part of the twentieth century, dozens of Mexican Americans were lynched. In 1943, American military men conducted organized attacks on Mexican American youths in the so-called Zoot Suit Riots. In the 1950s and 1960s, government agents periodically swept through Mexican American neighborhoods to make mass arrests. This history informed reactions among Latino leaders who consider Trump’s comments to be dangerously inflammatory.
Among Trump’s business partners, the concern about his comments was more practical than political. With Latinos making up the single largest ethnic group in the country, his harsh words would alienate millions of consumers. With this in mind, executives at NBC announced that the network would no longer feature Trump on The Apprentice, and the Univision Spanish-language TV network canceled its deal to air his Miss Universe pageant. Other Trump partners including Serta, Macy’s, and the Perfumania fragrance company severed ties with him. The Professional Golf Association of America pulled a tournament from one of his courses. The sports TV network ESPN also withdrew a tournament from a Trump course and NASCAR, the stock-car racing outfit, canceled plans for an event at a Trump property in Florida.
As partners left him, the Trump brand was dented and his company’s revenues were affected. However, as a multibillionaire, he could afford the losses. When Republican rivals including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Lindsay Graham criticized his statements, Trump dismissed them as weak on the immigration issue. Many mainstream Republican leaders were concerned about Latino voters, few of whom supported the GOP in 2008 and 2012. Trump blithely predicted he would eventually win over these voters. In the meantime, he was happy to enjoy the rabid support of Republicans who approved of what he was saying.
More ordinary politicians, pundits, and journalists struggled to explain Trump’s early success and parse his statements. Few understood the psychological background to his pursuit. For Trump, who by his own estimate was the same person he was as a needy child, there would never be enough power, attention, or wealth. Then there was the style of his rhetoric and reasoning. Trump spoke in such a disjointed and ungrammatical way that fact-checking his statement was an exercise in futility. Consider just the opening lines from a transcript of his address:
So nice, thank you very much. That’s really nice. Thank you. It’s great to be at Trump Tower. It’s great to be in a wonderful city, New York. And it’s an honor to have everybody here.
This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this. And, I can tell, some of the candidates, they went in. They didn’t know the air-conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs.
They didn’t know the room was too big, because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Aside from his “thank you’s,” it is impossible to determine just what Trump was trying to say, although he clearly wanted to mention his opponents in the primary race and compare them to sweating dogs who couldn’t deal with the threat of the Islamic terrorist group ISIS. Accented in Trump’s tough-guy tone, these statements communicated the feeling of plain-spoken English but were more like the deliberate doublespeak of carnival barkers. In fact, his message was so convoluted that listeners would have to fill in much of the meaning themselves. How, for example, would he bill Mexico for a border fence? This didn’t seem to matter to him. Also, it didn’t matter to Trump that he has changed his mind on abortion rights, moving from being “very pro-choice” to “very pro-life.” Nor did it matter to him that he had shifted from favoring universal health care to opposing health-care reform under President Obama. What did matter was his own belief in the natural abilities handed down to him by his German and Scottish forebears.
Approaching age seventy, Trump also possessed a fortune great enough to fund a presidential run without any help from donors. However, he was running out of time. If he was ever going to be president, the time was 2016. If he spent $50 or $100 million on the effort to win the nomination it would actually be a less-than-extravagant indulgence for a man of his means. If he lost, the experience of participating in debates and barnstorming around the country would be invigorating and ego affirming. If he won, he could extend the experience through the general election and, perhaps, move into the one residence in the nation that he might imagine is more prestigious than Trump Tower.
* * *
A few years ago, some in the psychiatric profession proposed that narcissism, which had long been regarded as malignant, be reconsidered. “Narcissism is not a disease,” suggested psychiatrist Peter Freed of Columbia University. “It’s an evolutionary strategy that can be incredibly successful—when it works.”13 Who would better represent this successful strategy than Trump? Consider the flourishing of all-about-me technologies that have been adopted by so many hundreds of millions of people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even the selfie photographs that bloom by the millions online are all expressions of the kind of self-promotion that Trump has practiced for profit throughout his life. The only difference is that he did it first, and on a much grander scale.
In a world where many habitually broadcast photographs of their sandwiches just before they are eaten, we no longer agree that intense self-regard is a sign that something is wrong. It may, instead, be a reasonable reaction to life in a society where extension of the self, through media, is an accepted way to escape feeling insignificant. Donald Trump is not a man apart. He is, instead, merely one of us writ large. Given his intense desire to distinguish himself as special, if not sui generis, he is likely to find this conclusion disturbing. It is, for the rest of us too.