AMERICANS DON’T LIKE REAL GOLD. A JEWELER TOLD ME THIS once, when I was shopping for a wedding ring. I didn’t know anything about jewelry, but my mother grew up in Morocco, and she brought a few gold pieces over when she came to America. They were pure gold, or close to it. I loved the richness and depth of them. They looked like they had not just color but heat. I wanted a ring like that.
You don’t want a ring like that, the jeweler told me. Most of the gold they sold was fourteen karat. Cost was an issue—the more gold in your gold, the more expensive it is. Practicality, too: high-karat gold is soft, it wears down, it loses its shape.
But it was also a matter of taste. Fourteen-karat gold—an alloy that’s a bit more than half-gold—is brighter. It’s shiny. It gleams. It announces itself. Pure gold, or near-pure gold, is different. It glows, like an ember. It looks old. Americans are used to the blinding come-on of 14K gold. When we hear the word “gold,” that’s what we think of.
What the jeweler was really saying is that “gold” is two different things. There is the substance of gold and there is the idea of gold. And the idea of gold is far more valuable. Without the arbitrary value we attach to it, gold is just another rock, a number on the periodic table. The more people become used to semi-gold, the kind of gold you can polish and give a mirror finish, the more it defines gold.
So for all relevant purposes—for all the reasons that make “gold” a thing to covet, to fight over, to cement the bonds of love with—half-gold is more gold than pure gold is. That doesn’t make it phony. At least it makes it no more phony than the entire notion of attaching value to a piece of metal that you can’t eat, can’t house yourself in, can’t fashion into a practical tool. What we think of as gold—the idea of gold—is simply a mutual compact to assign worth to a specific element. All gold is fool’s gold.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard described this dynamic in his system of object value. In a consumer society, he said, there are different kinds of value that can attach to a thing. First, there’s functional, or use, value: simply, what you can do with an object. (You could use a gold nugget as a paperweight.) There’s exchange value, what an object is worth in terms of other objects. (An ounce of gold might be worth ten of silver.) There’s symbolic value, the value that one person places on an object in relation to another person. (A gift of a gold ring, e.g., might symbolize fidelity.) Finally, there’s sign value, the value an object has within a system of other objects. (Gold, unlike aluminum or lead, represents success, prestige, class.)
Donald Trump is a Baudrillardian by instinct, if not, I assume, by reading. He has spent a lifetime being the idea of gold. He understood, early in his career, that there was much more upside in playing a businessman than in being a businessman. By performing yourself to match the mental cartoons people generate when they hear the words “wealth” and “success” and “luxury,” you come to represent those things. And thus, anything you’re selling—an apartment, a bottle of water, a political platform—becomes imbued with those things.
If you can do that, you can become more gold than gold itself.
THE TRUMP INTERNATIONAL HOTEL in Las Vegas is sheathed in the barest amount of gold, atoms thin, like the wrapping of a fancy candy bar at a gift shop. For the Trump International in New York, Trump slapped gold-tinted glass on the old Gulf & Western building. Trump Castle, a planned high-rise on Madison Avenue that he abandoned in 1984, was to be ornamented with gold leaf, and would have a moat and drawbridge.
His most important building of all, Trump Tower, was unveiled in 1983. It is made of the idea of gold. The outside is bronze solar glass. This, in certain light, gives its sixty-eight stories—fifty-eight of them real, ten of them figments of Trump’s marketing plan—a golden metallic sheen. The atrium finishes are polished brass. So is the lettering on the nameplate over the entrance, whose height Trump doubled, over the objections of his architect, Der Scutt.
You see the result in the descriptions of Trump Tower in the press: “gold,” “golden,” over and over. Overnight, Trump—helpfully blond himself, a handsome golden boy—became a character as closely associated with that primal symbol of wealth as King Midas or a Bond villain.
Before it is a building, Trump Tower is an advertisement. It is a text. It says: This is money, this is aspiration. It says that this is luxury that must never apologize. (Brass is, literally, brazen.) It clashes with its limestone neighbors, which are genteel, beholden to old proprieties. Architecture critics would call this a failing, but it is also the point. It says, with its jagged angles—designed to give the apartments multiple exposures—that this is aggressive luxury, luxury sharpened to an edge you could cut yourself on. It says, this is not nice, but you want it anyway. It says that it is OK to want it.
It says, in three-foot-tall letters, that all these ideas are “Trump,” and therefore that “Trump” is these ideas.
So it has to be seen, not only on Fifth Avenue but everywhere. It has to be on TV.
A NON–NEW YORKER coming to the city for the first time experiences, over and over, the feeling of having walked onto a TV stage. The city is full of places you’ve seen since you were old enough to sit up in front of a TV set. Look: there’s the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree! There’s Wall Street! There’s the Statue of Liberty! They’re famous places, but they’re also, thanks to years of establishing shots and network news B-roll, symbols of intangible concepts. Look: there’s Christmas! There’s money! There’s freedom!
Manhattan real estate is valuable because, if you have the right location, it gives you a space on that mental Monopoly board.
This is why Trump Tower mattered. Not just because it could be worth a lot of money. A lot of developers were bigger than Donald Trump, had more valuable holdings, but west of the Hudson, nobody knew who they were. They were rich, but who saw them being rich, anyway?
Trump Tower was made to be seen. Though it was mainly built and sold for private dwellings—the sales brochure touted a residents’ entryway “totally inaccessible to the public”—it was consciously on display. From the beginning, Trump leveraged celebrity to promote the building. The tenants included Johnny Carson, Sophia Loren, Michael Jackson, and Steven Spielberg. He encouraged the rumor that the newlywed Prince Charles and Princess Diana were interested in an apartment, a story that appeared more real once Buckingham Palace replied with an obligatory, “No comment.” Celebrity aided his business; business aided his celebrity.
Trump Tower also marked the end of whatever distinction there had been between Trump’s private life and public spectacle. He moved into a triplex with his first wife, Ivana, a Czech former model with the golden tone of an awards statuette. The apartment’s Versailles-theme-park décor—gold, gold, GOLD—assured more attention, and magazine photo spreads, and TV pieces, all with eye-popping images that ensured that, whoever might be richer, Donald Trump was the rich guy that you knew, the man whom you associated with the concept of being rich.
FROM ITS ’70S ALLEGIANCE with the underdog, America was developing sympathy for the overdog. Wealth was becoming a form of entertainment. The most conspicuous example was the Robin Leach syndicated program, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The series originated as an offshoot of Leach’s reporting for Entertainment Tonight, where Leach had squabbled with a producer who wanted his celebrity profiles to focus more on the stars’ work. “Hate to tell you,” Leach said, “nobody is interested in listening to Suzanne Somers stretching with Shakespeare in Central Park. They want to see Suzanne Somers in her home, in her bathtub, with lots of bubbles.”
Wealth, in other words, was not just something performers had. It was a performance in itself.
Trump’s early ’80s TV appearances offered a soft-spoken version of his later, bellicose reality-TV character. He created a version of his aspirational self that the mass audience would accept. They would accept greedy and competitive if it was insouciant and entertaining. They would accept ostentation and arrogance if you put on a show, with a half-grin that told them you understood that it was a show. They would accept extravagance and self-indulgence if you let them share it vicariously. They’d laugh off boasting and lying if you telegraphed that you were a rascal, because that let them tell themselves they were smart enough to get the joke.
There was a synergy to the transaction. The audience, after all, wanted this kind of character—a braggart who lived large and said that it was OK to want things—and Trump wanted to play it.
Magazines profiled him like a Hollywood star. Town and Country said, “He thrives on challenges, and to a certain extent, controversy.” In People magazine, he said that he wanted to “put a little show business into the profession” of real estate—friends said that “his ultimate goal” was to head up a TV network—but the piece ended with a dark quote from Trump: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
CULTURE JOURNALIST ANNE HELEN PETERSEN has written that Trump synthesized two modes of celebrity: the “idol of production” (a term from Frankfurt School sociologist Leo Löwenthal), which encompassed business titans like Henry Ford, and the “idol of consumption,” celebrities who get attention for their privilege and lush lives.
Early in the 1980s, Trump posed for the kind of publicity images you’d expect of an industrious real-estate developer, standing at a construction site in a hardhat or looking at blueprints. These images quickly gave way to Donald and Ivana, posing in formal wear at home, amid chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling windows and objets d’art. The first kind of picture is of a man whose job is building. The second is of a man whose job is having.
Trump merged the two with the help of new outlets like The Nikki Haskell Show, a New York cable-TV society program that, like much of the emerging media, put business and entertainment celebrity, uptown and downtown, on the same plane. Haskell, whose opening credits included a shot of her answering the phone in the tub, suds clinging to the receiver, folded fashion, the downtown art scene, and oligarchy into a glitzy whirl. (She introduced kleptocratic Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos as “One of the most amazing women that I think you’ll ever meet . . . the power behind the throne, if you will.”) Trump chatted up Haskell, a pal from his ’70s days at the hotspot Le Club, at his apartment, and she toured the rough space of his new building in a fur coat and helmet. “The location and the view are grand luxe,” she said, “but that’s part of Donald’s style.”
New York real estate, in the early 1980s, embraced grand luxe. Leona Helmsley, the president of the Helmsley hotel company, starred in a series of glossy ads for her properties, styled like Renaissance paintings of decadence: Helmsley swathed in gowns and frills, the rooms accented with gilt and crystal, a harpist in the background. The ads touted the plush towels and bathroom phones, but also centered Helmsley as the personification of luxury and self-indulgence: “It’s the only Palace in the world,” said an ad for the Helmsley Palace, “where the Queen stands guard.” (It is maybe a sign of the different standards for ambitious men and women that Helmsley and Trump both became 1980s symbols of arrogance and greed, but she went down in history as the detested, bullying “Queen of Mean” while he became a TV star and president.)
In Trump Tower, Trump found an amphitheater of himself. He lived on the top, his offices were in the middle, his name loomed over the street. It was the kind of unitary dwelling/HQ/monument we’re used to seeing in a comic book superhero’s lair, or a supervillain’s. (Trump Tower, with its jagged forbidding exterior, was used in the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises as the business headquarters of Bruce Wayne, the billionaire vigilante.) So hermetic was Trump’s elevator-commute existence that, when a BBC interviewer asked him in a 2010 documentary, “Don’t you need fresh air?” he said, “I get it. We pump it into the building.”
The most theatrical aspect of the tower, however, was the public atrium, constructed in a deal with the city that allowed Trump to build around twenty additional floors. Liveried footmen guarded the entrance; a waterfall sluiced down one of the imported marble walls. Escalators crisscrossed each other, up to high-end retail, down to a food court. Everywhere you looked, you were reflected in brass and glass. It was luxury-signifier overload, rich, rich, rich, the visual equivalent of chasing a seventy-two-piece box of chocolate truffles with a tub of foie gras.
Thrown open to tourists, the atrium made “Trump” a destination, like Disney. You could walk in and rest your feet; you might shop or you might not; but you would take home with you an impression and an association.
And if you didn’t, you saw it on TV. You saw it in profiles of its developer. You saw it in Elvis Costello’s video for “This Town” (starring a Donald Trump look-alike) and in Bobby Brown’s video for “On Our Own,” from the Ghostbusters II soundtrack, in which Trump walks out to see a massive projection of Brown dancing on the side of the building. You saw it in a 1988 Saturday Night Live parody of “Gift of the Magi”—the title, “A Trump Christmas,” in gold letters—where Donald (Phil Hartman) sells his yacht to buy Ivana Trump (Jan Hooks) a set of gold-plated doors for her mansion with “TRUMP” spelled out in diamonds on them, and she sells her mansion to buy a solid-gold anchor for his yacht. You saw it in a 1980s “New York Edition” of the game Monopoly, in which Trump Tower has the most valuable space on the board, once occupied by Boardwalk.
It became added, with Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty, to the permanent mental map of the average American. Look: There’s ambition! There’s comfort! There’s everything that I want!
THE PUBLIC-TV home-improvement show This Old House premiered in 1979, a bridge between the do-it-yourself, back-to-the-land, Whole Earth Catalog sensibility of the baby boomers’ youth and their acquisitive middle years. Unlike Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, it wasn’t “house porn,” exactly; more like house sex education. It catered to a generation of homeowners who saw a value in rediscovering neighborhoods, finding homes with good bones and history, and bringing them back to life.
During one 1983 episode, host Bob Vila takes a break from the season’s project—an economically sensible, solar-powered house in Brookline, Massachusetts—to take the audience on an unusual field trip, “to a place where cost is no object.”
Vila meets Der Scutt at the entrance of the newly opened Trump Tower. They walk in, and—wham, that atrium. As Scutt talks about selecting the Breccia Pernice marble from Verona, Italy, Vila is awed. “It isn’t just architecture,” the host wonders. “It’s an experience, a feeling.”
Ivana Trump takes him on a tour of some model apartments. “This is really deluxe!” Vila exclaims. “I feel like I should have black tie on.” The furnishings alone, we’re told, cost a cool quarter-million dollars.
The richness of the furnishings is something, as are the 1980s aesthetics: mirrored walls, sectional couches, ferns. Also striking is how gendered the sales pitch is. There’s “masculine” leather throughout the unit, Ivana points out, but the master bedroom is “feminine, the woman will be very comfortable here.” The bathroom has black polished stone finishes that “you can still soften up with flowers on the pattern. The man and the woman are feeling very good here.”
Moving to the bedroom, Ivana asks Vila to imagine himself “lying on the bed watching your television” while across the room, at a built-in dressing table complete with shiny gold-tone telephone, “your wife can be in here using this cabinet for the makeup, answering the mail, for the reading—doesn’t disturb the partner.”*
Afterward, Vila stops in the atrium for a few words with Trump. He’s more assured and swaggering than the smooth, soft-spoken Trump we saw with Tom Brokaw three years ago. He brags, not about the building’s sales but its publicity: the architecture reviews and how many tourists have visited the atrium since its opening.
The episode is the early ’80s in miniature, the sensibility of the 1970s yielding to something new and brazen. Watching this earnest public-TV program slaver over Trump’s Mammon temple is like watching a college literature professor, freshly back from the nuclear-freeze protest, wash his used Volvo in the driveway while craning his neck wistfully at his neighbor’s new Porsche.
THE IMAGE OF THE 1980S as “the decade of greed” is well established: Dallas, Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, junk bonds, yuppies, BMWs, sushi. But the 1980s weren’t a decade that celebrated money, exactly. They were a decade that celebrated wanting.
The 1980s economic boom was real enough. But it was more real for some than others. The average American household’s income, in relative terms, peaked in the early 1970s. The postwar mass prosperity of the middle class was, in a way, the economic equivalent of the postwar peak of the mass-media audience—an era of common experience that had no parallel before or since. The few decades after World War II were a time of Americans more or less watching the same things and Americans (at least in the broad middle) more or less having the same things.
The income of the top one percent of Americans roughly doubled over the course of the 1980s. Everyone else? They wanted, and they stretched.
As the sociologist Juliet B. Schor observed in The Overspent American, people set their consumption habits by comparing themselves to other people. Once, that meant neighbors and family members—people physically close by, and thus probably closer in income. But in a TV age, the comparisons are everywhere, and they are not flattering. It’s not simply a matter of seeing the Carringtons living large on Dynasty. It’s also—as TV begins to be targeted more toward desirable advertising demographics—seeing more commercials aimed at white-collar professionals, for products they can afford.
Most people believe that all they want are the necessities. But when your references change, “necessity” changes. Beginning in the 1980s, in Schor’s words, American lifestyles were driven by more “upward comparison,” and “middle-class Americans were acquiring at a greater rate than any previous generation.”
Two things, in other words, were happening at once. The middle class was shrinking and becoming more precarious, a trend that would continue for decades. At the same time, the aspiration to be middle class—the shared “American dream” of mere security, a house, a garage, college for the kids—was replaced by the shoot-the-moon dream of riches, or, failing that, an espresso machine, an imported car, whatever totems of class ascendance you could manage.
Thorstein Veblen identified the idea of “conspicuous consumption” at the end of the nineteenth century in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Once a society has prospered beyond a certain point, people spend not just out of necessity but also to establish their place in the social hierarchy. Once there is no longer an aristocracy, you get your status from what you have, and more important, what you seem to have. You also get your sense of self-worth from what you see others to have, which means it’s possible—and as inequality rises, probable—to have more and feel like you have less.
So the “materialistic” culture of the 1980s isn’t for the benefit of the world’s Gordon Gekkos. Rich people never needed permission to be rich. But pop culture gave the not-rich, after the egalitarian 1960s and 1970s, permission to want.
THERE’S A NOSE-PRESSED-TO-THE-GLASS feel to 1980s pop culture, in the movies, in soap operas, and in pop music, which, with the birth of MTV in 1981, became another aspect of television.
If the aesthetic of ’60s rock was that even millionaire superstars should look like bikers, MTV was about glam aspiration. MTV videos were built to inspire coveting the same way commercials were—as short-form TV, they used many of the same devices, and after all, they were ads themselves, for artists and albums. In her close read of 1980s MTV, Rocking Around the Clock, E. Ann Kaplan wrote that most videos of the time “assume an upper middle-class-ambience.” When they showed working-class life, it was as something to escape, a plight, an embarrassment.
The sensibility was aspirational and avaricious. It was Duran Duran cavorting with models on the deck of a yacht in the video for “Rio.” It was David Bowie, who had variously adopted personae as a rock-star alien and an androgyne, re-reinventing himself as a tailored, chic dandy with a golden pompadour and exquisite pastel suits. (Yesterday glitter rock, today gold cufflinks.) Madonna’s video for “Material Girl,” a takeoff on Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, sent up the gold-digger stereotype—but the song’s title became Madonna’s unironic MTV nickname. Even hairball Texas bluesmen ZZ Top became style icons, giving a car valet a makeover and the keys to a souped-up classic jalopy in the video for “Sharp Dressed Man.” (“Silk suit, black tie / I don’t need a reason why.”)†
MTV was both niche TV—something just for the kids, as opposed to Ed Sullivan’s something for everyone—and national in a way that the biggest radio station couldn’t be. “We’ll be doing for TV what FM did for radio,” pronounced vee-jay Mark Goodman, sitting cross-legged on a table, during the channel’s opening broadcast. Unlike many previous pop-music phenomena, which sprang up in cities, MTV spread first to suburbs and rural areas, where cable had reached fastest. (“Narrowcasting” to suburban white kids, the channel took years to pay much attention to genres like rap.)
MTV’s commercialism always had a prophylactic dose of irony. Many of its early on-air promos were parodies of consumer culture, like a faux-beer ad that urged viewers to “pop open an MTV.” It was kidding-not-kidding commercialism, self-conscious about the druglike lure of sitting down and watching hour after hour of videos—while reminding you to keep doing it.
One of the most popular 1980s music videos was exactly in this tradition—both a repudiation and an embrace of MTV’s material culture. “Money for Nothing,” a 1985 single from the British band Dire Straits, is one of those ’80s songs—“Thriller,” “Take On Me”—that it’s hard to think of separate from its video.
The song was about videos, actually, the feelings of awe, hunger, and inadequacy they inspired. It opens with MTV’s slogan, “I want my MTV,” sung as a haunting mantra by Sting, the song’s cowriter. The video combines concert footage with a story involving two 3-D animated figures. Over the opening bars, a tall, thin man watches the band on TV, entranced, his jaw dropping open, until he levitates from his chair and floats into the TV set.
Dire Straits’s Mark Knopfler has said the song’s lyrics came to him at an appliance store, where one of the employees was grousing about the music videos playing on a wall of TVs. The video takes us inside the store, where the narrator—a hulking Archie Bunker type with a cigar dangling from his mouth—enviously watches the same “yo-yos” we’re watching on MTV: Dire Straits on stage, a rock star with his own airplane, a half-naked woman pulling up her stockings. “That ain’t working,” he marvels. “That’s the way you do it.” The chorus details his own job, hauling expensive appliances—refrigerators, TVs—for a lot less money.
The video plays, three decades later, like a concert opening act for Trumpism. There’s the blue-collar white guy grumbling, not just that these entertainers have so much more than him, but that they are valued so much more than him. And for what? For something that’s not even work. What do they risk? How much does their job hurt?
And who are you in all this, the American kid watching “Money for Nothing” in 1985? The video doesn’t push you to identify with the proto-MAGA narrator, jealous, crudely homophobic. But you’re not the band, either, looking down from a giant-screen TV at the delivery guys while singing about stupid poor people who don’t think music is real work. Maybe you’re the narrator’s skinny pal, who cranes his neck around his angry friend to see the screen, while mouthing, “I want my MTV.”
THAT ATTITUDE—the yearning, wanting to be let in—was a constant of 1980s culture. The 1980 best seller The Official Preppy Handbook, was a mock taxonomy of the country-club set—the same people roasted, that same year, in Caddyshack. Rich with charts, diagrams, and lists—the right clothing, the right schools, the right names—it was a guide to the class system of a country that purported to be class-free. The book is written in a tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-anthropological voice. (From a diagram about preppy college clothing: “For the first time they are in a community of many different types of people, and this very functional uniform helps them to identify one another in the crowd.”) Reading it with tongue in cheek was optional, though, and it swaddled a generation in plaid skirts and alligator polo shirts.
Eventually, this winking satire of the upper class gave way in ’80s culture to an unironic and unsubtle celebration. In NBC’s Diff’rent Strokes (1978–86), a wealthy widower took in the two sons of his dying African American housekeeper as his own. ABC’s Webster (1983) had almost the same Daddy Warbucks premise and racial dynamic, with a rich married couple adopting a cuddly black child. Risky Business (1983) and the movies of John Hughes popularized well-to-do kids getting in nonpermanent trouble in the upscale Chicago suburbs. (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—in which Matthew Broderick plays a day of hooky that ends in the crashing of his friend’s father’s Ferrari—is basically a reminder to loosen up and enjoy life a little before you grow up and make a pile of money like your parents.)
America’s favorite not-a-preppy preppy in the 1980s was Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) in NBC’s Family Ties. The sitcom was a kind of politics- and generation-flipped version of All in the Family, in which Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker had butted heads with his young, liberal daughter and son-in-law. In Family Ties, the parents were the liberals, and the establishment: he a public-TV manager, she an architect.
The show was intended, like most family sitcoms of the time, to focus on the parents. It gently mocked Alex for his conservatism and obsession with money. (In an early episode, he becomes outraged when his parents let his younger sister redo a bad dice roll in a game of Monopoly: “This is a sin against capitalism!”)
But by the second season Alex had run away with the series. Alex offered an image of a young America that was running away from his lefty parents’ ideals, but—because Alex was good at heart—would be fine for it. Key to his appeal was that he wasn’t a rich kid himself. As the son of a liberal, middle-class, Ohio family who wanted to be rich, he gave the audience permission to want it too.
Permission to want came from the top as well, in the persons of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The Carter White House had practiced a hair-shirt abstemiousness, which reflected the moralism of the president and the blue-collarism of ’70s culture. The era of the Georgian peanut-farmer president had coincided with a boomlet in Southern working-class-hero culture: Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 country hit, “Take This Job and Shove It,” rebel trucker movies like Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Convoy (1978), the CB-radio craze, in which homebound amateurs learned and celebrated the lingo of long-haul eighteen-wheeler drivers. After his election, Carter announced in an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters that he’d proudly wear blue jeans in the White House.
Ronald Reagan wore his denim performatively, to clear brush on his 688-acre Santa Barbara ranch. In Washington, the Reagans transformed the White House, as though exorcising the 1970s themselves with a cleansing powerwash of money. The Reagans luxuriated in black tie and designer gowns and gave the White House a $44-million-plus facelift. Nancy Reagan—herself a screen star who appeared with Ron in 1957’s Hellcats of the Navy—became the public face of the Hollywoodization of the executive residence. She also became a target: it was she, not her husband, who was blasted for putting on nouveau-riche airs by replacing the White House china. But the First Couple successfully amplified the message of the age, that living ostentatiously was the sign you’d made it to the top.
America spent the decade craning its neck upward.
WITH A BUSINESS-FRIENDLY government and a wealth-friendly pop culture, the idea followed that a businessman might be the best person to run the country. One of the first such pushes was the result of a best-selling, self-valorizing book by a celebrity tycoon.
The number-one nonfiction book in 1984 and 1985, Iacocca: An Autobiography, by the former auto executive Lee Iacocca, was in many ways a standard business bio. It opens with a Horatio Alger story of Iacocca’s birth to immigrant parents in Pennsylvania, working his way up from an engineering job to the executive suite. The hero arc of the book, already mythologized in the media, was his saving Chrysler from failure in 1979, partly by arranging a bailout with Congress.
More important, Iacocca was a TV star, whom Americans knew best for his car commercials. Cars were enmeshed with American identity—“It’s not just a car, it’s your freedom,” went a GM Mr. Goodwrench ad—and by the early 1980s, they stood for anxiety and siege. Foreign cars were swamping the market. The angst echoed in movies like Mr. Mom (1983), about a suburban Detroit man who loses his engineering job at Ford and—horrors—has to stay home and take care of his kids. Were we losing (not just our dominance but, as Mr. Mom implied, our national manhood)? Were the other guys better than us? In a 1982 Chrysler LeBaron spot, Iacocca—sounding the sort of competitive nationalism that resurfaced with Trump—defended his American cars: “I challenge you to compare their quality and technology to anything that comes out of Germany or Japan.” It was a sales pitch and a pep talk: we whipped their asses in The Big War, and we will whip their asses on the assembly line!
The last section of Iacocca turns to politics, with a closing chapter whose title rings familiar: “Making America Great Again.” By modern conservative standards it has a friendly attitude toward industrial policy: “Government planning doesn’t have to mean socialism.” But its implied broad arguments are that the best kind of person to face America’s challenges is a businessman, and the best kind of businessman for that job is a celebrity.
Iacocca ultimately turned down efforts to draft him for president in 1988. But his burst of fame argued that the business of America was business, and the business of businessmen, if they had bigger aspirations, was entertainment.
Donald Trump, famously, would have a book too: The Art of the Deal, in 1987, which claimed the penthouse floor on the New York Times best seller list for thirteen weeks. It built on years of headline-grabbing coups, like his feuds with New York mayor Ed Koch, to take his celebrity national. (The important thing about a best-selling celeb book, after all, is that it gets you on TV.) The book was his attempt to have his own Iacocca, but it was also an answer to the dutiful civic-spiritedness of books like Iacocca.
Trump in The Art of the Deal, unlike Iacocca, doesn’t couch his success in homilies of responsibility. He doesn’t deserve what he has because he’s a good person. He deserves what he has because he has it. He says that success is not nice, a message amplified in his talk and in the Sauron’s-castle aesthetic of Trump Tower. It’s like reading the autobiography of a Tyrannosaurus rex, whose final moral is: freshly killed flesh is delicious.
The book is finally, like Trump Tower itself, a product and a brand-extension exercise. The brand that he is extending is not simply about success, though there is that. It’s about always wanting more, flaunting, being shameless. If the message of Iacocca is that to be governed by its author would mean being governed by common sense and fiscal responsibility, The Art of the Deal suggests that to be governed by Donald Trump would be to be governed by an empowering shamelessness.
There is no lip service to the greater good, though there is occasionally lip service against it. By way of praising the loyalty of his mentor Roy Cohn, the corrupt legal fixer who taught him to fight dirty and never admit defeat, he adds, “Just compare that with all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty.” The implication is not just that Trump believes loyalty is better than integrity. It’s that he doesn’t believe integrity is a real thing—it’s just a put-on that phonies “boast about” to make themselves look good while they stab you in the back. Nobody really has integrity, come on! What kind of loser would want it?
Even though The Art of the Deal is organized, after some introductory biography, as the story of various wheeling-and-dealing efforts, it’s really a work by a businessman who insists on being seen as a kind of artist. Trump’s project—rebranding business as a form of creativity—was a sort of dilettante’s answer to the pop art of Andy Warhol. Warhol found a beauty in publicity images and commercial objects, which he imbued with the power one gives to holy icons and symbols. In his work, Marilyn Monroe was a celebrity, and so was Chairman Mao, and so was the Brillo box. He made concrete an idea of George W. S. Trow’s: “The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola. Is any man as well-loved as this soft drink is?”
In 1981 Trump met Warhol—where else?—at a birthday party for Cohn, a fellow clubber at Studio 54. They later discussed the artist’s doing a portrait of Trump Tower to hang in the building. Warhol, excited, painted eight samples, in different colors—“a mistake,” he wrote in his diary, because the choice seemed to confuse Donald and Ivana, and “Mr. Trump was very upset that it wasn’t color-coordinated.”
But Trump kept a fond opinion of one particular Warhol quote, which he repeated in his book Think Like a Billionaire and, thrice, in Think Like a Champion: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
BRANDING, AS PRACTICED BY TRUMP in the ’80s, was the transformation of business into iconography. The true product was not the building but the name hanging on the outside. He boasted to GQ in 1984 about watching on TV as tennis champ Martina Navratilova, having won the US Open, announced that she would spend her winnings on an apartment at Trump Plaza. Whenever his name got repeated—TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, like Warhol’s Marilyn—it created another phantom facsimile of him in the public consciousness, slapped down another brass-plated brick on the “luxury,” “money,” and “winning” region of every viewer’s mental map.
So his business became less about real estate and more about the idea of Trump, which was the idea of the 1980s. He bought the New Jersey Generals, a franchise in the short-lived United States Football League. Before the league died in 1985, he proposed a “Galaxy Bowl,” with the USFL’s champ playing the NFL’s. What that really meant was creating a TV show bigger than the Super Bowl, which is the biggest TV show there is.
He opened casinos in Atlantic City, like the Trump Taj Mahal (“Where wonders never cease,” as the operators were required to answer calls), whose bathrooms offered T-shaped plastic shampoo bottles. Millions of middle-class tourists would walk by, or into, Trump-branded dream palaces built like vision-board manifestations of the way they’d live if they hit the jackpot, if only, if only. He bought the Eastern Air Lines shuttle and renamed it the Trump Shuttle, a flying billboard carrying his stylized T up and down the Eastern seaboard. He rebuilt Wollman Rink in Central Park, which put his name in the heart of the heart of New York. He tried to sell NBC on a headquarters and studios in a massive development on Manhattan’s West Side, called Television City.
Trump knew what images of gilt demanded attention, as if he learned it watching his mother mesmerized by Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. He bought Mar-a-Lago, a 128-room Spanish-tiled, gold-ceilinged mansion in Florida. He bought a 281-foot yacht from the Sultan of Brunei. They were, he told Playboy, “props for the show. The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”
The dividend of these investments was publicity. Jimmy Breslin, the Newsday columnist, described it with awed exasperation: “Trump bought reporters, from morning paper to nightly news, with two minutes of purring on the phone,” he wrote. “He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night.”
Playgirl magazine named him to its 1986 list of the ten sexiest men in America, along with Michael J. Fox and Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Trump became a fixture on TV, where he’d play down his reputation for getting into fights, which actually burnished it. He told 60 Minutes in 1985 that he didn’t believe that he was as “sinister” as portrayed—which was a way of saying that you are sinister, but with a smile. He wouldn’t bring up his own worth, but his interviewers would make an estimate—$3 billion? $4 billion?—and he’d grin without discouraging it, which was a way of saying “at least that.” He’d say, as he did to Brokaw, that he wasn’t really in the business for the money, which was a way of getting to say “money.”
Meanwhile, he found a national platform in the new breed of talk shows, which shared the tabloids’ thirst for controversy and put personal issues—self-esteem, self-help—on the same level as politics. They thrived on conflict, and Trump supplied it. The same fall that The Art of the Deal came out, he took out a full-page newspaper ad complaining that allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia were “taking advantage” of the United States, a refrain that would become one basis for his campaign thirty years later.
Phil Donahue greeted him on Donahue as the perfect combination of the era’s values—“You’re a businessman, and you’re a star.” Trump also went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which sounded the constant refrain—from Oprah’s own story of overcoming poverty and abuse to her later endorsement of pop-philosophy books like The Secret—that by envisioning a thing, you can make it real.
Ronald Reagan had already established, going from movie star to governor to president, that entertainment was America’s first language. The decade’s culture said that money was its first objective. Donahue and Oprah—both of which raised the idea that Trump might run for president—took for granted that mastery of money and the media was a qualification for office.
ONE OF TRUMP’S LAST brand extensions of the 1980s was Trump: The Game, released in 1989 by Milton Bradley. According to Jeffrey Breslow, the game’s designer, Trump agreed to the pitch immediately—one imagines they had him at “Trump”—supplying his brand, his face, and the game’s ethos. The cover of the original box features an airbrushed portrait of Trump beneath the slogan, in gold print: “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!”
Trump: The Game is Monopoly with a size fetish. The lowest denomination of cash is $10 million. You buy properties and businesses (a convention center, an airline) at auction, then—the part where the game’s design meets Trump’s image—you sell and trade them in a “deal making” round.
The gameplay isn’t especially original, but you weren’t really meant to buy it for the gameplay. “A huge percentage of those games were never taken out of the box,” Breslow told the Washington Post. “It was bought as a gift item, a novelty, a curiosity.” People bought it, hundreds of thousands of copies, to buy a piece of Trump. His name is on nearly every game piece: the cash, the cards, the T-shaped tokens. (The game die also has a T in place of 6, the highest number.) In the rulebook, Trump—or whoever wrote the copy—greets you: “I invite you to live the fantasy! Feel the power! And make the deals!”
To say that the game had few creative ideas is not to say that it had no ideas. Board games are nothing but ideas. Like a reality-TV show, a board game is human experience condensed into totems, rules, and implied lessons. The game Life, launched in the postwar prosperity of 1960, invites players to get a good job, fill up your big car with children, and die with the most money. Simple games like Chutes and Ladders teach children about bad behavior and consequences.
Monopoly, the most direct inspiration of Trump: The Game, originated with The Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904 by the activist Elizabeth Magie to argue the dangers of unchecked capitalism. It had two sets of rules, one in which players competed to crush one another by controlling property (and “absolute necessities” like bread and clothing), another in which everyone prospered by agreeing to an egalitarian “Single Tax.”
It was a didactic utopian tract for the whole family. Its flaw, of course, was misunderstanding the ideology of gameplay. The great unwritten rule of most games is that crushing your fellow man is fun. People preferred the mean rules.
Parker Brothers developed the game we know today during the Great Depression. Monopoly took out the moral judgment and sold itself with a fanciful story of having been created by an unemployed salesman to entertain and support his family, drawing on memories of happier times spent in Atlantic City. It was The Landlord’s Game de-preachified, the warnings of predatory business replaced by a backstory of scrappy boot-strapism that fit the “Happy Days Are Here Again” pep-talk spirit of the 1930s. Its mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, with his top hat and tuxedo, was a proto-Donald Trump: a picture of wealth in broad cartoon strokes understandable to kids of all ages.
Trump: The Game—like “Donald Trump,” the 1980s multimedia character—put the predation back into the game and declared that, lo, it was good. It was one piece of a larger game, which was to place one name in every enterprise with a mainline to the American appetite: TRUMP—a horn blast, a dominant suit of cards, a verb meaning “to defeat.” Its message was that wanting was good, that getting was good, that beating your enemies was good, and that all that was good was Trump. I invite you to live the fantasy!
No matter how successful you are, you can never own all the real estate in the world, or suck up all the cash. But if you can, in the unreal estate of pop culture, become the symbol for those things, you can own the idea of real estate, the idea of money.
There’s a word for that. They call it a monopoly.
* The image—a man who likes to recline in the bedroom and watch his television and not be disturbed by “the woman”—is purely hypothetical, I’m sure.
† Three decades later, “Sharp Dressed Man” would be the theme song for Duck Dynasty, a reality show about backwoods Louisiana millionaires, one of whose stars would speak at Donald Trump’s nominating convention.
