YOU ACTUALLY CAN’T SPELL AMERICA WITHOUT “ME”

I remember the day this all began, the “journey to the presidency,” as my daughter Ivanka calls it. It was a really, really fantastic day, one of the best days of my entire life. I’ve had so many great days—the day my mom finally made my father stop calling me “the Grouchy Little Homo,” the day my net worth got bigger than his, the day of my first 60 Minutes appearance (before CBS News was fake news), the day The Apprentice got 28.1 million viewers, the days each of my five children were born, including Tiffany. So many phenomenal, incredible days.

It was in January 1986, the day the space shuttle blew up, so tragic, but I was in a fabulous mood. My first casino in Atlantic City was doing unbelievably great, making so much money, and I’d just made a great deal to take it over and make it more successful by renaming it Trump Plaza. I was in my thirties, and I’d just met one of my future wives, Marla Maples, who was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, and at that time a nine-plus in the looks department, to be perfectly frank. I was in Palm Beach, my wife Ivana was doing her thing, and I drove my Rolls-Royce over to The Breakers hotel to visit the legendary genius Roy Cohn, my extremely tough lawyer and personal friend. Roy kept a suite at The Breakers, which had recently refused to let me buy two penthouses and combine them, the morons, because they’d now be so valuable as historic residences. In the dozen years I’d known Roy, he had taught me about the importance of maintaining a strong, great suntan all year long, but I remember that day he was very pale, I guess he was sick by then, AIDS, sad, so I decided to cheer him up by driving him down to Mar-a-Lago for a tour of the place.

I’d just closed on Mar-a-Lago—it was such an amazing deal, one of the best deals I ever made, not the biggest but one of the most outstanding. I bought it for a fraction of what I’d offered only a few months earlier, because I told the owners I’d acquired the whole beach directly behind the house and could totally block their view with a new building, which basically meant selling to me or nobody. (That wasn’t completely true, but they were weak and scared—to be perfectly honest, like so many people born into money who aren’t Trumps, and even some who are.) And one of the sellers, the B-list snob actress Dina Merrill, was such an unbelievable un-PC-word to me. In fact, by the way, since they were technically a foundation, letting me take them to the cleaners, even though I hadn’t actually closed on the beachfront lot, people told me it was probably some kind of fiduciary crime on their part.

Anyway, there I was with Roy Cohn, who respected me greatly, at Mar-a-Lago, the most beautiful, amazing, prestigious home in Florida, one of the most beautiful and prestigious in the United States or the entire Western Hemisphere, probably in the whole world. Which I now owned, for almost nothing. It was totally empty, except for the Hispanics and the African Americans—great people scrubbing off the mold and hatcheting the lizards and so forth.

“My Xanadu, right?” I said. Roy understood I meant William Randolph Hearst’s house in my favorite movie, Citizen Kane, because like me, Roy was very smart, Ivy League but not a phony. He mentioned that Marjorie Merriweather Post, the Shredded Wheat and Honey Bunches of Oats heiress who built Mar-a-Lago, had meant it to be used by American presidents as a Winter White House. Most presidents, then just like now, couldn’t afford extremely nice homes of their own, not even to rent.

“YOU KNOW WHAT, ROY?” I said. We were standing on one of the beautiful marble verandas—it’s covered in fifteenth-century Spanish tiles, that’s the 1400s, when Spain and those people were on top, each tile now worth $25,000, half a million pesos apiece—and I was looking out at the ocean, not in a sad way, but more kind of a wise way. “It’s really a shame that Donald Trump can’t ever be president,” I said. “Not that I’d necessarily want to be. My life is better than a president’s in a lot of ways, much better. In most ways. Did you know Reagan only makes two hundred grand a year? But what I hate is that because of that one law I can’t be president, only because of that stupid, ridiculous law.”

Roy was rubbing one of the carved stone griffins, the weird little gay royal dragon things all around Mar-a-Lago. “What ‘law’? You mean the problem with that punk in Atlantic City? Don’t worry about him. Forget him. He’s gone. He doesn’t exist. Literally.”

“No, no,” I said, “because of my mom. Because she’s from Scotland.”

Roy explained that all these years I’d had it wrong—a foreign parent doesn’t mean you can’t become president. Article something, clause whatever.

“Wow,” I said. “Wow. And in a few months I turn forty. You know what that means.”

“You’re dumping Ivana? Fine. Don’t tell her until after we get the new postnup drafted and signed.”

“No, it means I’ll be old enough to run for president! Nothing stopping me! Mar-a-Lago could actually be my Winter White House someday, Roy!”

“You can be elected president now, Don. The minimum age is thirty-five, not forty. Same article, same clause.” Even with the AIDS, Roy had a very brilliant legal mind.

HE WAS MY MENTOR, AND I WAS HIS JOHN F. KENNEDY, IF JOSEPH KENNEDY HAD BEEN GAY AND JEWISH AND HIS SON HAD BEEN PROTESTANT.

At that moment, I saw a whole new direction my life could go, all kinds of new angles I could play. Roy died a few months later, but people have told me he actually died much happier after he knew he had cleared the way for my greatest deal and greatest achievement of all—that he was my mentor, and I was his John F. Kennedy, if Joseph Kennedy had been gay and Jewish and his son had been Protestant. Proud that someday I would, you know, make America great again. But also so I could prove once and for all, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Trump is an important man the world should never ignore or laugh at. A great American winner at business? Sure. A sexy guy who attracted a thousand beautiful ladies, supermodels and entertainers and many others? Definitely. More importantly, a highly intelligent and strongly trustworthy leader who people really, really, really admire, who millions and eventually billions of people would really, really, really love and respect forever.

That was the day, almost thirty-two years ago, when my brand was just beginning to become a very hot brand, long before it was the hottest brand in the world, I realized that you actually can’t spell America without me. Literally. Which is so amazing when you think about it.