DONALD J. TRUMP WAS BORN ON JUNE 14, 1946, THE FOURTH child of a big family. He had a father, Frederick Christ Trump, a real-estate developer; a mother, Mary Anne, maiden name MacLeod; and four human brothers and sisters.
He also had a fifth sibling, a phantom conjoined twin: American commercial television.
Five days after Donald was born, the first televised heavyweight boxing championship bout was broadcast from Yankee Stadium. More than 140,000 people tuned in to see Joe Louis defeat Billy Conn for the second time. Their first fight, in 1941, was considered an all-time classic. The 1946 rematch was a disappointment, a sluggish battle between two aging once-greats.
But as a cultural event, it was epochal. It was on television, available to an audience greater than could jam into any arena. Seeing the fight, however lousy, was a kind of magic that viewers were just learning to process, like the early moviegoers terrified that an oncoming train would drive off the screen and flatten them. According to a “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, some Greenwich Village bar patrons watching on TV “were carried away by the illusion that they were actually at the stadium. ‘Hit him, Billy!’ cried a partisan spectator. ‘G’wan, you think he can hear you?’ retorted a realist.”
The description of the viewing party gives you a sense of how alien a technology television was in 1946. The reporter describes the screen, “or what we will call the screen, though we are told that what we saw was the end of a big electronic tube of some sort.” When the program switched from close-ups of the fighters to a distant panorama of Yankee Stadium, the patrons complained and the bar owner fiddled with a dial, as if believing he could change the camera angle himself.
Like Donald, TV was still a baby in 1946. Its eyes were barely blinking. Its first major pop phenomenon, Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, which would sell television sets from coast to coast, was still two years away. “Prime time” as a concept didn’t exist. Only one network, NBC, aired programs at night. One of them was I Love to Eat, a fifteen-minute cooking show on Friday nights starring the cook and author James Beard and Elsie the Borden cow.
Donald Trump and TV would grow up together. They would be partners. They would share a temperament and a heartbeat.
IN HIS FIRST BOOK, Trump: The Art of the Deal, Trump spends little time on his childhood. The last memory he shares about that part of his life recalls his mother, an elegant woman with a lofted nimbus of hair that anticipated her son’s future coiffure, enraptured by the TV in 1953:
I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he’d say. “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” My mother didn’t even look up.
In his book, Trump remembers the incident as an example of the difference between his two parents: Fred, “excited only by competence and efficiency,” and Mary, who was captivated by “the dramatic and the grand.”
But the contrast here is also between two businesses, real estate and television.
Fred Trump’s business is real estate—as ancient, concrete, and analog an enterprise as there is in human civilization. You have one physical body. You need to house it. It can take up only one space at a time. If you live in Queens, you might move from Forest Hills to Flushing for a better deal, but you’re less likely to move to Arizona for the same reason, not without dramatically changing your life.
The business of real estate is the business of mastering and leveraging the availability of space. There is only so much land in New York City. There is only one Yankee Stadium.
Television is as much the opposite of that business as can be. Real estate is the business of scarcity. Television is the business of ubiquity.
Mass communication in general, and TV in particular, changes the relation of people to space. The introduction of the telegraph in the 1800s means that information is detached from the speed at which a human body can travel. Now you no longer need to be in a place to know what just happened there. The effect is both unifying and alienating. In Neil Postman’s words, this change throws the “information-action ratio” out of whack: you can know about events that are happening but that you cannot witness or affect. The telegraph collapses distance; then the telephone collapses it further; and radio collapses it further still.
But television does more than collapse space. It creates a second space, visible to the eye, that exists in more than one place at once. Suddenly there isn’t just one Yankee Stadium. Now there are tens of thousands—eventually there will be millions.
Actually, that’s not right. There is still only one of this new Yankee Stadium, the Yankee Stadium of TV. But it exists in thousands and thousands of places at the same time, the way that God does, or Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. You and your neighbor and a guy in Brooklyn and somebody in Philadelphia are all equally in it at the same time, watching Joe Louis pummel Billy Conn. You sit in the same seat. The punches land for you at the same time and from the same angle.
From this point on, it would be as Don DeLillo later put it in White Noise: “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.”
Before this time in history, this kind of space, distributed point by point throughout the world, existed only metaphorically. An embassy allowed you to stand on the soil of your country, step across a threshold, and stand on the soil of a country thousands of miles away. A church, that most ancient of multimedia outlets, was premised on the idea that people would enter different buildings in different places and commune as part of one entity, The Church.
Television became a kind of church itself in the 1950s, with televangelists like Fulton J. Sheen, the Catholic bishop and host of Life Is Worth Living, and Rex Humbard, the guitar-strumming preacher who was inspired to hold his electronic revivals by watching a baseball game in the window of an Akron, Ohio, department store in 1952. Trump later recalled watching Billy Graham’s televised Crusades “for hours and hours” with his father.
And the TV show that so enraptured Mrs. Trump and so annoyed her husband was in fact a church service, and controversial at the time for exactly that reason.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, serving for the second time as prime minister, had fought against televising Elizabeth’s coronation. He appealed to the new monarch’s camera-shyness, arguing that it would cheapen and undermine the monarchy to present the ancient ritual “as if it were a theatrical performance.” Kings and queens derived their power, historically, from a special relationship with God. If it ceased to be exclusive, what made them kings and queens?
After a public outcry, Elizabeth and her court at first agreed to a compromise, in which the BBC’s cameras would be allowed “west of the organ screen” at Westminster Abbey, so that commoners could see the processions but not the culmination of the rite. That stance—that some spaces should be eternally private and privileged—was riddled with class symbolism (the masses would be kept out by a figurative barrier at a literal screen). And it did not last long. The monarchy ultimately granted access to the entire ceremony except for the holy anointing.
The broadcast was considered the event that popularized home television in Great Britain. But it was no small show in the United States, either. This being the era before live satellite broadcasts, NBC and CBS raced to get footage back to the United States by plane for delayed viewing, editing the broadcast literally on the fly.
So the Queen’s subjects watched the coronation, and so did the rest of the world, including expatriates like Mary Anne Trump, in her twenty-three-room, colonnaded mansion in Jamaica Estates. Westminster Abbey was annexed into the one-place that materialized in living room after living room. The clergy in their glittering vestments, the queen proceeding from the altar holding scepter and orb, all were public property. The show was a success, and a cataclysm.
This was, in its way, as significant a change in the relationship of governing and governed as the Magna Carta. Media professor Julia Hallam called the TV coronation “a symbolic marker of the beginning of the end of the old society in Britain, a social order based on inherited wealth and the cultural traditions and values of a small minority of the population.”
But the same dynamic was shifting in the United States, whose president’s campaign slogan, “I Like Ike”—derived from a song in the 1950 Irving Berlin musical Call Me Madam—signified the triumph of familiarity over awe. In October 1956, Dwight Eisenhower capped off his reelection campaign with a paid CBS special celebrating his birthday, or “Ike Day.” American-as-apple-pie film star Jimmy Stewart narrated the story of Ike and Mamie’s courtship; legendary stage actress Helen Hayes cut a slice of birthday cake for a young boy to run over to the president, who was shown watching that very TV show with his family in the White House library. The rulers could still rule, but the price of power, and eventually the means to it, would be accessibility.
SO THIS IS THE REALITY that Donald Trump is born into, watching his mother watch the Queen. He’s not quite seven years old. Like any child his age, he’s coming into his awareness of the size of the world. There are the spaces he knows: his house (brand-new, with nine bathrooms), his neighborhood (Jamaica Estates, a planned slice of suburbia in Queens), his school (the private Kew-Forest college-prep institution). There’s his father, who puts up buildings. It’s a business a child can easily grasp. Bulldozers push dirt and men swing hammers. You make a house and it makes you money.
These are the kinds of things that any child in any era learns. But now there’s also this other thing, TV—and it has the entire world inside it! (Including two of his favorite things: jewel-encrusted splendor and men beating the crap out of each other.) It does something to his mother, enraptures her, transports her somehow to the island she was born on across an ocean, to a fantastical ceremony that she and other subjects of the crown have never witnessed. It is seductive, entrancing. No one’s mom spends an entire day ensorcelled by the workings of a construction crane.
Donald is among the first children to learn about this other, virtual space at the same time that he is learning about the physical world. In the 1940s and 1950s, politicians and educators knew that there was a generation coming into this dual knowledge.
To some, it was an opportunity: the home television, like the home computer generations later, was sold in part as an educational tool. “Tomorrow’s children, through the great new medium of Television,” said a 1945 DuMont ad, “will be enrolled in a world university before they leave their cradles.” A military short film about television that same year, besides promising technical jobs in the new industry after the war for GIs (and “costume designing” work for female WAVEs and WACs), imagined that “Television can be the window to the whole world, a medium through which the united nations can better understand each other and live together in the world of tomorrow!”
To others it was a threat. The House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee held hearings on violent and immoral TV content in 1952. A few years later, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency took up the case, along with the scourge of comic books. Ophthalmologists worried the new machine might ruin kids’ eyes. Social scientists worried that it would turn them into illiterates or sociopaths. A 1954 study cited “television addiction” as a factor in “mental apathy” and crime, with TV’s “hypnotic and seductive action” detaching children from reality.
Donald Trump was born into this cultural shift like every early baby boomer. But he wasn’t like just every baby boomer. He was a rich kid who lived in a mansion, with a cook and a chauffeur. His family owned a color TV set, an unusual luxury; color broadcasts had only started in the United States in 1954. (A neighbor later recalled that Fred Trump asked to put an antenna on her roof, which was higher than the Trumps’, but would not agree to let her connect it to her own TV.) He was expected by his father to mature into a “killer”—in Fred Trump’s binary and unforgiving worldview, the antithesis of “loser”—and raised to believe that his options were limitless.
Fred Trump had applied a rudimentary form of showmanship in his own work. When a building project was held up by red tape, he organized a photo shoot of a “groundbreaking,” complete with construction equipment and models dressed in bikinis. By making the thing seem, you make the thing real.
This was learned behavior for the elder Trump, a penny-pinching, all-business type with a push-broom mustache and little taste for showboatery. He took a Dale Carnegie course—“Effective Speaking and Human Relations”—to overcome his stiffness and learn to glad-hand people. Carnegie described business relations as a kind of personal reality TV, in which you achieve authenticity through artifice: “He implored followers to use artificial means—study, practice, repetition—to cultivate a sincere smile,” Trump’s biographer Michael D’Antonio writes. Fred was also, as Donald would eventually be, a fan of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, a Christian proto-Oprah who ministered on radio and TV and whose The Power of Positive Thinking presented Christianity as a kind of self-help salesmanship guide.
So young Donald was being exposed to two kinds of American magic, two ways of showing people wonders and making them dream dreams. There was his father’s business, which connected to the American worship of bigness—look how tall I can make this building, look at how vast the country is, how large the portions.
And then this entirely new kind of space, television, virtual but hypnotic, a space that housed people’s minds the way an apartment building houses their bodies.
Real estate. Unreal estate.
What if he could combine them? What if he could use the one as a way into the other?
What if he could have the effect on other people that that coronation—all the glitter, the grandeur, the symbolism—had on his mother?
If you became a builder, there would always be other builders, other houses, other towers. But if you became a celebrity, in this new mass-media space, you could be everywhere at once. If you became famous enough, your head could be the only real estate anybody could live in.
I’M IMAGINING THIS as a eureka moment. Most likely it wasn’t. Trump’s path from his inherited business to show business was gradual. But this was what he was seeing, at not quite the age of seven, as the mass media that would dominate the rest of his life were just emerging. And as Trump would later tell D’Antonio: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”
Certainly, the adult Trump never seemed to evolve much beyond a worldview circumscribed by the TV of his childhood. In a 1994 interview with ABC, he described a view of married life out of a ’50s sitcom: “I don’t want to sound like a chauvinist, but when I come home at night and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.” Jack Webb’s Dragnet (1952), the culmination of longtime efforts by police to improve their portrayal in pop culture, presaged Trump’s 2016 call for “law and order” (a phrase that had been both a slogan of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign and the title of Dragnet’s longest-running TV descendant). Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-scare campaign, covered on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now and in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, introduced Roy Cohn, the thuggish, bullying lawyer and hatchet man who would later become Trump’s mentor in public battling. (Always attack; always deny; never apologize.) Pro wrestling, a favorite of young Donald Trump’s, would figure into his casino and showbiz careers and his campaign theatrics.
But what little boys of the 1950s obsessed over most on TV was a five-part serial on ABC’s Disneyland, starring the rugged, athletic Fess Parker as frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett. It was one of TV’s first legitimate pop-culture crazes, driving a bull market in coonskin caps. The show, introduced by a promo for Disney’s Frontierland park, featuring “tall tales and true from the legendary past,” was a seminal piece of populist mythmaking. In Disney’s telling, “Indian fighter” Crockett, with common sense but not a lot of book learning, brings the decency of rough-and-tumble America to corrupt Washington, DC, before sacrificing himself at the Alamo. The show demonized Native Americans as savages assailing peaceful white settlers and pitted Americans against an invading horde at the Mexican border—not unlike the toxic racial imagery Donald Trump would later campaign and govern with.
It was also, not that any kid watching it at the time was aware of it, a metastory about an early American politician who had constructed his own myth, aided by the media of his day. Crockett published an autobiography and was the subject of the 1831 play Lion of the West, both of which exaggerated his frontier derring-do and made him into a larger-than-life hero. Disney revived the myth for a new century. The second episode of the series, “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” ends with Parker striding into the House of Representatives—wearing the furry cap that the real-life Crockett didn’t—to protest Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 as unfair. An oily politician warns him he’s “committing political suicide.” “You know what I think about your kind of politics?” Crockett says, and punches out the smug Easterner.
Here in miniature is the political archetype that Trump would act out sixty years later: the plain-talkin’ red-blooded American who cuts the crap and settles arguments like men do. The adult Donald Trump would prefer play-acted fisticuffs, like a scripted battle he fought with World Wrestling Entertainment boss Vince McMahon at WrestleMania in 2007. But violent rhetoric was essential to his campaign rallies and his presidency, such as when he tweeted a video of the staged McMahon fight, edited by user “HanAssholeSolo” on Reddit to show the CNN logo over McMahon’s face.*
The young Donald had a more literal interest in violence. Classmates recalled him as a bully, and after Fred Trump discovered his son’s collection of switchblades—inspired by West Side Story, the 1957 musical about a gang war between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks—his father sent him to military boarding school. There, Trump developed a less G-rated pop-culture influence: Playboy magazine.
The Playboy of the 1960s offered an expression of sex that was both debauched and sanitized. The founder, Hugh Hefner, described the Playboy Bunny as “a young, healthy, simple girl . . . She is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.” The columnist Katharine Whitehorn called Playboy “a Midwestern Methodist’s vision of sin.”
“That’s how we learned about women,” his classmate Sandy McIntosh recalled for a PBS documentary. “That’s why getting out of military school was difficult. You had to realize you couldn’t just follow the Playboy philosophy.”
Or maybe you could. Maybe you could make a career out of it. Much of Trump’s celebrity life—a rich man in a tux, living in a gilded pad on top of a gold tower and dating supermodels—could have been extracted directly from the imaginings of a horny fourteen-year-old poring over a nudie mag at an all-boys’ boarding school.
And in a way, the later Trump persona was a kind of mash-up of the two poles of his 1950s and early ’60s pop culture of choice—the lounge-lizard hedonism of his military school Playboys slathered on top of the traditionalism of network TV: Father Knows Best, but with a little something on the side for father. All the benefits of the patriarchy; none of the boring moral responsibility.
You can see much of Trump’s early life as an attempt to construct a self out of bits of pop culture, fitfully trying to reconcile the business heir he was fated to be with the fantasy of an eternal adolescent. When he graduated military school, according to The Art of the Deal, he considered going to film school at the University of Southern California: “I was attracted to the glamour of the movies, and I admired guys like Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, and most of all Louis B. Mayer, whom I considered great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Notice the examples he gives. Not, say, Kubrick or Huston or Hitchcock, but the studio heads behind the directors. Even in his unrealized Hollywood fantasy, he remains daddy’s boy. Notice, too, the reason he gives for not going. Another author might have used this detail as a kind of Rosebud—the story of the would-be artist, pressured into going into dad’s business, who would never stop trying to recapture what might have been. This is not in Trump’s self-conception. If he made a decision, it had to be because it was the right one. Real estate was the smarter choice.
And quite likely it was, for him. Trump may have loved the movies, but has not, in life, ever come off as much of a cineaste. In a 1997 profile, Mark Singer of The New Yorker, traveling on Trump’s plane, recalled that he popped in a videotape of Michael—starring John Travolta as the archangel Michael come to Earth—got bored after twenty minutes, and changed to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport, which he had his son Eric shave down from two hours to forty-five minutes by fast-forwarding to all the fight scenes. In a 2002 interview with documentarian Errol Morris, he concluded that the message of Citizen Kane was that Charles Foster Kane needed to “find another woman.”
Performing himself, though: that he could do. Better to be himself, but a celebrity. Better to find a way to take the job that was handed to him and make it a performance. Better to find a way to convince people that business was as legitimate a path to celebrity as entertainment, that indeed it was entertainment, that making deals was making art.
SO NO FILM SCHOOL. Fordham University. Transfer to Wharton. Back to New York, back to dad’s office.
Even as he was starting out in real estate, Trump angled to combine his business with show business. At age twenty-three he approached Broadway producer David Black and offered to bankroll half of his next play in exchange for billing above the title as a producer.
Paris Is Out! was a fluffy domestic comedy starring Yiddish theater star Molly Picon and Sam Levene (the original Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls) as a bickering middle-aged couple considering a trip to Europe. As Black recalled, Trump was curious about the business side of the production and how it could save money. He wasn’t particularly driven by passion for the play itself.
That was just as well. The producers avoided previews to insulate Paris from critics. In Clive Barnes’s eventual New York Times review after its 1970 opening, you could maybe see a glimpse of the future divide between Trump’s fan base and elite opinion: “I know some people who might enjoy it more than King Lear. They are probably people who shouldn’t go to the theater.”
Paris Is Out! was itself out after 112 performances, and Trump gave up on Broadway, including a plan to coproduce W.C., a Mickey Rooney/Bernadette Peters musical about W. C. Fields. (“It’s a crummy business,” he told GQ in 1984, recalling the play’s failure, though in his retelling he was “sort of a semiproducer.”) “I am going to go into real estate,” he would later recall thinking, “and I am going to put show business into real estate.”
Over the 1970s, the city fell into an economic pall, a baroque sleazy funk that would be immortalized in pop culture—Ford told it figuratively to drop dead, Son of Sam did the killing literally, and the Rolling Stones set the decline to music in “Shattered.” Trump was eventually able to take advantage of the depressed economy, striking a deal in 1975 to buy the grand, in-decline Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal.
And the persona of Donald Trump went into construction alongside businessman Trump—really, the celebrity lifestyle came before he had done much of anything to be famous for. Trump joined Le Club, a Euro-oriented nightclub that functioned as a basking rock for the famous and fame-hungry. Trump befriended McCarthy’s former henchman Roy Cohn and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and met a string of women.
The paradox of any club scene is that its value comes from both being exclusive and being public. A scene is worth nothing if anyone can be part of it, and it’s worth nothing if no one knows that you’re part of it. Donald Trump wanted the things an ambitious twentysomething in his position wanted—money, access, sex—but he also wanted to be seen to have those things.
This is what entertainment celebrities did, employing press agents and cultivating columnists to make sure that their private lives became public in ways that advantaged them. For an actress, a musician, a comedian, there was of course a direct career incentive for this: to give the audience a taste of a personal connection that they could maintain by buying tickets and albums.
For a businessman, the value of celebrity was less certain. American businessmen historically didn’t make compelling superstars. Their performance was their work. They modeled seriousness and reliability, and they benefited from being a little stiff. There were exceptions—P. T. Barnum, notably—but even Barnum was in the business of selling a show, not being the show. Walt Disney depended on a public persona to sell dreams, but he distinguished between his self and his persona. “I’m not Walt Disney,” he said. “I do a lot of things Walt Disney wouldn’t do. Walt Disney doesn’t smoke, I smoke. Walt Disney doesn’t drink, I drink.”
One exception was Hugh Hefner, who built the Playboy brand in large part by being the Playboy brand. He used the bunnies as a personal harem. He lived in the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles—a fusion of the personal and commercial in his life that Trump would echo later, living above the store at Trump Tower, which like the Mansion was equal parts home, headquarters, and metonym. Hefner popularized the product, mainstreamed it, and enhanced its appeal by being its most famous customer.
Trump never lost his fascination with Playboy—he would make cameos in softcore Playboy videos, interviewing and snapping photographs of models, and once tried to convince the magazine to run a “Girls of Trump” spread featuring his female staffers. Years later, Trump recognized the connection between his brand and Hef’s on season 6 of The Apprentice by throwing a cocktail party at the Mansion for the team that won a challenge.
Before the party, Hefner—dressed in character, in his smoking jacket—told the team a story that, but for the subject matter, could have come straight out of a chamber of commerce speech, about starting his business with “$600 that I borrowed” and a pinup-calendar picture of Marilyn Monroe. Then it was off to poolside, where the team—seven women and two men—hung out with “30 or 40” Playmates, in bikinis and bunny ears, until Trump showed up to bestow his blessing. After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, Hefner, by then a ninety-year-old Priapus, hailed it in an essay as the triumph of “The Conservative Sex Movement.”
With Hefner as a progenitor, then, you could see what Trump was doing in the 1970s as becoming a pornographer of real estate. Early on, he saw a value in cultivating a famous image the way Hollywood starlets did in the past. And like social-media stars would in the future, he did it before he’d done much to be famous for. Whether by grand design or instinctive hunger, he acted on the assumption that another plane of existence—that holy Westminster Abbey of mediaspace—was his true home, and he needed to get there.
THE FIRST GATEWAY was print. In 1970s New York, celebrity journalism was booming. Andy Warhol had launched Interview in 1969. People metamorphosed from a section of Time magazine into its own publication in 1974, and it quickly became more important to Time Inc.’s business than its parent. Rupert Murdoch, the Australian tabloid mogul who dreamt in 144-point headlines, bought the sleepy, historically liberal New York Post, reversed its politics, and revived the New York City gossip trade.
Trump learned to work gossip columnists, who were happy to run juicy items with a single source, which source, very often, would be Donald Trump. Former Newsday gossip columnist A. J. Benza said Trump would offer nightlife tips—“who said what, where was the pussy”—as long as you helped script his media character: “Regardless of what you mentioned, he never really cared as long as you said the word ‘billionaire.’ ”
If you covered Trump long enough, you knew that he lied, but he made good copy. “Like an elephant in your bathtub, he’s very hard to ignore,” New York Post Page Six gossip Susan Mulcahy put it. He was charming and flirty and golden-boy handsome. Daily News columnist Liz Smith recalled being courted: “Donald would always gather me up under his arm and say to whoever might be near, ‘She’s the greatest! Isn’t she the greatest?’ This was silly and embarrassing and he did it with everybody else as well.”
Trump’s big early coup—the print launch of the character “Donald Trump”—was a 1976 profile in the New York Times that read like a write-up of a screen heartthrob. “He is tall, lean and blond,” feature writer Judy Klemesrud described him, “with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford.” (I doubt that any sentence, including any set of his wedding vows or his swearing in by the chief justice of the United States, ever gave Donald Trump as much pleasure.) His conspicuous hedonism paid off in the first paragraph: “He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs.”
The article is a trove of Trump lies and flimflam. He takes Klemesrud—a society reporter who grew up in Iowa and depicted Trump’s Manhattan in awed terms—around the city in a chauffeured Cadillac. (It was actually leased by his father, a detail that does not make the article.) He graduated “first in his class” at Wharton. (The school’s newspaper later debunked this.) He is worth “more than $200 million.” (He was claiming his dad’s wealth as his own.) His ancestry is “Swedish.” (His father’s family was German, his mother’s Scottish.) Perhaps the funniest line in retrospect is a kind of fib familiar from Hollywood profiles: Trump, Klemesrud writes deadpan, “says he is publicity shy.”
Controversial! Brash! Sexy! A brand is born.
A BRAND FOR WHAT, though? These are not attributes you’d traditionally associate with real estate, which appealed to permanence and stability and the hearth. You certainly wouldn’t use this brand to sell public housing for Fred Trump in the outer boroughs. It wasn’t even, traditionally, the kind of imagery you would associate with luxury real estate in Manhattan.
But by 1976, you were, increasingly, speaking to an audience of Trump’s generation, who were sold products not so much on the argument of value or quality but as a means of self-expression. In their early decades, TV and TV advertising, like the culture in which they operated, affirmed the values of the community and the pleasure of belonging. You drank Pepsi, in the early 1960s, to belong to the “Pepsi Generation.” You ate at Burger King, by the mid 1970s, in order to “Have It Your Way.” Christopher Lasch diagnosed 1970s society, in The Culture of Narcissism, with a combination of self-absorption, insecurity, and craving for recognition—a kind of individualism run amok that was reflected, among other places, in marketing. “By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life,” Lasch wrote, “and by associating them with the glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement.”
To this market, it might make sense to brand a home not as homey, but sexy, exciting, special—just like you. Didn’t you deserve it? Shouldn’t your home be a kind of stage?
I don’t pretend to know whether Trump was being prescient or a savant, whether he took the celebrity approach out of a savvy sense of the zeitgeist or simply because he didn’t know how to be any other way. Maybe Trump adapted himself to his era. Maybe he was molded by it. Or maybe he was just born at the right time—a few decades before, maybe, he would have ended up Fred Trump’s loudmouthed, peacocky son, besotted with glamour, too full of himself to make a respectable go at business.
Adopting a celebrity persona to speak to an era of narcissism is something that a promotional genius might do. It’s also something a narcissist might do. Either way, it’s what Donald Trump did. Having failed as a producer, he made himself the production.
* Ironically, Trump was using the clip—an edited video of a phony fight—to denounce CNN as a “fraud.”
