TrumpNation

In a world of more than six billion people, there are only 587 billionaires. It’s an exclusive club. Would you like to join us?

—DONALD TRUMP, THINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE

By 1993, with his casinos in hock, most of his real estate holdings either forfeit or stagnant, and his father slipping into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, Donald, at the age of forty-seven, had run out of money. There were no funds left to keep him aloft, and as the bare-bones operation he maintained on Fifth Avenue started to grind to a halt he ordered Nick Ribis, the Trump Organization’s president, to call his siblings and ask for a handout from their trusts. Donald needed about $10 million to fund his living and office expenses, but he had no collateral to provide his brother and sisters, all three of whom wanted a guarantee that he would repay them.

The Trump children’s share of their father’s fortune amounted to about $35 million each, and Donald’s siblings demanded that the developer sign a promissory note pledging future distributions from his trust fund against the $10 million he wanted to borrow.

Donald got his loan, but about a year later he was almost broke again. When he went to the trough the second time, he asked his siblings for $20 million more. Robert Trump, who briefly oversaw Donald’s casinos before fleeing the pressure of working for his brother to take over Fred’s real estate operation, balked. Desperate to scrape some money together, Donald asked Alan Marcus, one of his advisers, to contact his brother-in-law, John Barry, and see if he could intervene with Robert and his other siblings.

“John and I spoke about it a few times,” Marcus told me. “In fact, we spoke about it in the conference room in Trump Tower. John then went around and addressed it with the family.”1

Barry successfully lobbied other members of the Trump clan and another handout was arranged, with Donald agreeing again that whatever he failed to pay back would be taken out of his share of Fred’s estate.

“We would have literally closed down,” said another former member of the Trump Organization familiar with Donald’s efforts to keep the company afloat. “The key would have been in the door and there would have been no more Donald Trump. The family saved him.”²

Donald disagreed with this version of events. “I had zero borrowings from the estate,” he told me. “I give you my word.”³

But Marcus and two other executives who worked closely with Donald all said that the family’s financial lifeline gave the developer the support he needed to get through the rough waters separating his early years of overblown, overhyped acquisitions and the later years of small, sedate deals preceding his resurrection on The Apprentice. Both of Donald’s parents died during that time, he parried with Ivana Trump in a bitter divorce battle that hinged on properly valuing his dwindling assets, he remarried and divorced again, and then he did what anyone else in his situation would do when confronted with limited options—he ran for president of the United States.

Before Donald could get to phase two of his career he had to muscle his way through the dismantling of his business empire and a thorny financial restructuring with his bankers and bondholders that left him on the precipice of personal and corporate bankruptcy. As bankers who once fell over one another to throw money at him now lined up for their share of what was left over, Donald scrambled to hang on to whatever he could while maintaining his facade as America’s most savvy entrepreneur. And in terms of maintaining his popular mojo, Donald proved to be remarkably resilient.

But the footrace that Donald’s debt negotiations entailed in the early to mid-1990s landed him in the uncomfortable position of becoming something worse than a has-been; it brought him face-to-face with a specter who haunted all of Manhattan real estate’s highfliers: William Zeckendorf Sr., the larger-than-life developer who fell to earth.

Zeckendorf “was a great, flamboyant guy who got crushed because of his appetite and his, you know, everything. But he was a great asset to the city. He was responsible for so many good jobs, but he ended up getting crushed,” Donald told me. “You always have to watch that. I study him because you don’t want the fate that happened to Bill Zeckendorf Sr. to happen to yourself. You don’t want that … He could have done things that would have made him great. He was a great guy who ended badly, and that’s not good.

“When I was in trouble in the early ’90s, I went around and—you know, a lot of people couldn’t believe I did this because they think I have an ego—I went around and openly told people I was worth minus $900 million. Because how are you going to make a deal with the banks when you are telling people you are worth millions of dollars, and, ‘By the way, I want you to discount the shit out of the loan.’ So I would openly tell people that I was worth minus $900 million. And then I was able to make a deal with the banks.”4

Donald also gained two other insights into how financial dissolution could become a topsy-turvy process easily bent to his own devices. The first revelation was that when borrowers owed so much money that they resembled a foundering, third-world country that was simply too big to fail, banks wouldn’t let them fail. The second revelation was that the bankruptcy process itself gave failed businesspeople ample buoyancy to levitate out of their own graves.

For Donald, all of this meant that the threat of walking away from what he owed, combined with as much artful dodging as possible, allowed him to attach himself to his casinos, the one part of his crumbling domain that promised financial salvation.

“You can delay these people for years from getting [what you own],” he said of his bankers and other creditors. “You understand: They can’t get it. It takes years legally to get it.”5

To survive a process as tortuous and unpredictable as a debt workout, however, requires a large dose of gumption. And Donald had gumption in spades.

“You’re out there alone. I mean, it’s not fun,” he advised me. “It was like an exact opposite. I went from being a boy wonder, boy genius, to this fucking guy who has nothing but problems. And the sad part is, there were many other people in my same position but nobody gave a fuck about them … That’s the negative to visibility.”

In September 1982, with Trump Tower a year away from completion, Forbes magazine published the Forbes 400, its annual list of America’s wealthiest individuals and families, for the first time. (In 1918 Forbes had produced a list of America’s thirty richest people, but that was a onetime event.) Chock-full of anecdotes about how the rich got rich and what they did with their richly deserved riches, the Forbes 400 was financial pornography of the most voyeuristic and delicious sort.

While there was a refreshing inclusiveness about the list (Mafia treasurer Meyer Lansky made the inaugural tally, for example), some on the roster held rank upon the loosest of foundations. For those whose wealth was based on a stake in a publicly traded company, calculating their Forbesworthiness was relatively straightforward—put a value on their stock. But for those with privately held money who weren’t a Rockefeller, Mellon, du Pont, or Kennedy, the process of ascertaining their fortunes was trickier. Forbes relied on those people to willingly fork over an honest and somewhat exact self-appraisal of their wealth.

It also turned out that some big buckaroos, understandably averse to the avalanche of phone calls from charities or scamsters that would follow such publicity, loathed being on the list. Forrest Mars Sr., patriarch of one of the world’s largest candy fortunes, actively kept his photo out of the press and, like others in his rarefied class, did not cooperate with Forbes’s researchers. Even Malcolm Forbes himself did not provide his list makers with an assessment of his wealth. Since he owned the magazine, no one bothered trying to guess. Forbes put Forbes in the four hundredth spot, without an estimate of his net worth.

Some people lobbied more actively against having their fortunes outed. After the first list was published, one millionaire, Kenneth Davis, sued Forbes to prevent his name from being on the Forbes 400. But a federal judge, David Belew, ruled against him in 1983. “A very significant proportion of our national wealth, land and industry is controlled by the Forbes 400,” Judge Belew ruled. “Money is power and the wealthy wield great power and influence economically, socially and politically in this country and the American public has a right to know who they are.”6

Others offered a more streetwise assessment of what the Forbes 400 was all about. The Hunt brothers of Texas, scions of an oil fortune who eventually lost billions after trying to illegally corner the silver market, made light of the list in 1983 after a congressional investigation revealed that they were very rich, but not as rich as Forbes had thought. Between year one and year two of the list, Lamar Hunt’s wealth, according to Forbes, dropped from $1 billion to $500 million.

“Last year, I thought it was one of the greatest jokes I ever heard,” Hunt said of the first Forbes list. “They create in the public mind some fairy tale type of situation.”⁷

Nelson Bunker Hunt, sitting before a government panel grilling him about his silver purchases, told members of Congress that he really didn’t know how much he was worth. Nor, he said, did he feel a pressing need to figure that out.

“A fellow asked me that once, and I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Hunt related. “But I do know people who know how much they are worth generally aren’t worth much.”8

Nonetheless, the Forbes 400 drew scads of attention from the very moment it was published. The list became capitalism’s Rosetta stone, a decoding device for divining the American Way. Even prominent economists parsed it for social truths.

“At a trivial level, it is almost impossible not to be interested in Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 400 wealthiest individuals, minimum net worth $150 million, and 82 wealthiest families, minimum net worth $200 million,” observed Lester Thurow, an MIT economist, of the 1983 list. “Subconsciously, we read their biographies hoping to find the elixir that will add us to the list. While the elixir—a rich father—is to be found (all of the 82 families and 241 of the 400 wealthiest individuals inherited all or a major part of their fortunes), it doesn’t help most of us to point this out to our fathers.

“Standard economics, after all, assumes that people accumulate wealth solely to provide future consumption privileges for themselves and their children.… But the standard assumption is incorrect,” Professor Thurow continued. “Future consumption is not the motive that leads to large accumulations of wealth. If the 12 billionaires on the Forbes list were to treat their wealth as an annuity to be consumed before death, they would have to spend $630,000 a day for the rest of their lives. Clearly they do not have enough time left to spend their money, much less enjoy it.

“Great wealth is accumulated to acquire economic power. Wealth makes you an economic mover and shaker. Projects will happen, or not happen, depending upon your decisions. It allows you to influence the political process—elect yourself or others—and remold society in accordance with your views. It makes you an important person, courted by people inside and outside your family. Perhaps this explains why some people try to persuade Forbes that they are wealthy enough to merit inclusion.”9

This, then, was the dividing line: Those who were secure enough not to reveal their wealth abhorred the Forbes 400, or at least tried to avoid it; those who were less secure, needed to keep score, and had their identities wrapped up in the concept of billionairedom, turned the list into a white-collar fetish. For the latter group, to be off the Forbes 400 represented emotional and social exile. Donald, paradoxically, was a loner who did not want to live in exile. He was obsessed with the Forbes list. And his propensity for inflation, matched with Forbes’s aversion to hiring the sizable staff it might need to accurately assess the wealth of each of its designated four hundred (as well as the advertising and publicity windfall the magazine enjoyed after inventing the list), got Donald on the magazine’s inaugural list in 1982. Forbes gave Donald an undefined share of a family fortune the magazine estimated at $200 million—at a time when all Donald owned personally was a half interest in the Grand Hyatt and a share of the yet-to-be completed Trump Tower. That same year, New Jersey regulators gave a more realistic assessment of Donald’s finances in his casino licensing report. The report said Donald earned a $100,000 salary working for his father in 1982, had $6,000 in savings, got a $1 million commission on the Grand Hyatt deal, and had a $35 million unsecured line of bank credit—in other words, short on cash and in debt up to his eyeballs.¹⁰

Donald and the Forbes 400 were mutually reinforcing. The more Donald’s verbal fortune rose, the more often he received prominent mentions in Forbes. The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became. The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400—which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches. In some years, Donald insisted on impossibly high figures for his net worth and then, in a faux fit of complaining, settled for an estimate that Forbes convinced itself was conservative—even though it was often wildly high anyway. The one gap in this mating dance was 1990 to 1995, when Donald didn’t appear on the list at all. Forbes was apparently so chastened by the $2.6 billion difference in its estimate of Donald’s wealth between 1989 and 1990 that the magazine needed a six-year hiatus before it had the confidence to begin helping him inflate his verbal fortune again.

Forbes’s odes to Donald went like this over the years:

1982—Wealth: Share of Fred’s estimated $200 million fortune. Forbes explains: “Consummate self-promoter. Building Trump Tower next to Tiffany’s. Angling for Atlantic City casino.” Forbes quotes Donald: “‘Man is the most vicious of animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.’” Forbes explains further: “… fortune estimated at over $200 million. Donald claims $500 million.”

1983—Wealth: Share of Fred’s estimated $400 million fortune. (Author’s note: Observe that although 1982 to 1983 was a particularly brutal recession year, the Trump family’s real estate fortune doubles!)

1984—Wealth: Fred has $200 million, Donald has $400 million.

1985—Rank: 51; Wealth: $600 million. (Donald becomes a solo Forbes 400 act; Fred disappears from list.)

1986—Rank: 50; Wealth: $700 million.

1987—Rank: 63; Wealth: $850 million.

1988—Rank: 44; Wealth: $1 billion.

1989—Rank: 26; Wealth: $1.7 billion. (Author’s note: Observe that Donald’s wealth has grown by $1.1 billion during a four-year period when he was borrowing huge sums to buy money-losing properties.)

1990—Dropped from the list! Forbes explains: “In 1990 the rich have been getting poorer. Trump is the most noteworthy loser. Once a billionaire, Trump’s net worth may actually have dropped to zero.” (That makes things clearer. Was he ever a billionaire? Maybe his net worth just stayed the same? Maybe it always had been zero? In later years, but not this year, Forbes acknowledges that Donald had a negative net worth of $900 million in 1990—that is, he was $900 million below zero.)

1991—AWOL.

1992—AWOL.

1993—AWOL. (These are the times that try men’s souls. Hang in there, Donald.)

1994—AWOL.

1995—AWOL.

1996—He’s back! Rank: 373; Wealth: $450 million. Forbes explains: “Trump, polite but unhappy, phoning from his plane: ‘You’re putting me on at $450 million? I’ve got that much in stock market assets alone. There’s 100% of Trump Tower, 100% of the new Nike store—they’re paying $10 million a year in rent!’ Add it all up, said Trump, and his net worth is ‘in the $2 billion range, probably over $2 billion.’” (Don’t worry, Donald, one year from now Forbes will help you find another easy $1 billion.)

1997—Rank: 105; Wealth: $1.4 billion. Forbes explains: “The art of the comeback? With New York City real estate sizzling, the irrepressible Donald is back to billionairedom.… Net worth was negative $900 million 1990, but the Donald now claims to have $500 million in cash alone. Disputes our estimate. ‘The real number,’ he insists, ‘is $3.7 billion.’”

1998—Rank: 121; Wealth: $1.5 billion. Forbes explains: “Unstoppable salesman, master of hyperbole. Net worth was negative $900 million 1990, now claims our estimate is low by a factor of 3: ‘The number is closer to $5 billion.’”

1999—Rank: 145; Wealth: $1.6 billion. Forbes explains: “We love Donald. He returns our calls. He usually pays for lunch. He even estimates his own net worth ($4.5 billion). But no matter how hard we try, we just can’t prove it.”

2000—Rank: 167; Wealth: $1.7 billion. Forbes explains: “In The Donald’s world, worth more than $5 billion. Back on Earth, worth considerably less.”

2001—Rank: 110; Wealth: $1.8 billion.

2002—Rank: 92; Wealth: $1.9 billion.

2003—Rank: 71; Wealth: $2.5 billion.

2004—Rank: 189; Wealth: $2.6 billion. Forbes explains: “America’s love affair with The Donald reaching impossibly new highs; his reality show, The Apprentice, was prime-time television’s highest-rated series last year.… After nearly defaulting on its debt obligations, Trump’s gaming properties to reorganize.… No matter. For Donald, real estate is where his real wealth lies. Over 18 million square feet of prime Manhattan space.” (Author’s note: We’ll have fun with this Forbes audit later in our text.)

Forbes, if not entirely skeptical of Donald, had, of course, grown accustomed to his intense lobbying.

“There are a couple of guys who call and say you’re low on other guys, but Trump is one of the most glaring examples of someone who constantly calls about himself and says we’re not only low, but low by a multiple,” said Peter Newcomb, a veteran editor of Forbes’s richlist.11

The Forbes 400, of course, has always loomed large in Donald’s imagination.

“When you think of it, I’ve been on that list for a long time. I think they work very hard at the list,” he told me in 2005. “It seems to be that they’re the barometer of individual wealth. It doesn’t really matter. It matters much less to me today than it mattered in the past. In the past, it probably mattered more.”¹²

Donald’s verbal billions were always a topic of conversation whenever we visited. In my first conversation with him, in 1996, he brought up his billions. In early 2004 one of his closest advisers called me to say that Donald was particularly rankled by a story my colleague Eric Dash and I had written in The New York Times. Although the story said that Donald had mismanaged his casino empire to the point of bankruptcy, the adviser conveyed that what really bothered Donald was that we were curious about the true size of his fortune and his self-proclaimed status as Manhattan’s biggest real estate developer.

The Times story noted that another New York developer, Richard LeFrak, whose family controlled acres of apartments and projects around the city, extolled Donald’s virtues as a builder and a real estate marketer, but that LeFrak was more circumspect about whether the Trumpster was New York’s “biggest.” I had called LeFrak at Donald’s suggestion. “He’s a dear friend of mine, but it wouldn’t be accurate for him to say that,” said LeFrak, noting that the LeFrak family owned the most residential units in New York. He added that if Manhattan was considered on its own, separate from the city’s other boroughs, and size was measured in terms of the value of property sold, then Donald might be “up there” in the top tier of developers—though LeFrak was still hesitant to label Donald the biggest.13

When Donald and I spent time together one weekend in early 2005, the subject of his verbal billions inevitably came up. Donald had gamely and openly fielded a diverse range of questions all day, so I was curious to see where he would go when we got to money. When I popped the wealth question, he paused momentarily and scrunched his eyebrows. We had reached a crossroads. Out it came. He pursed his lips a little bit. Out it came. He blinked. Out it came, rising up from deep within him.

“I would say six [billion]. Five to six. Five to six.”¹⁴

Hmmm. The previous August he told me that his net worth was $4 billion to $5 billion. Then, later that same day in August, he said his casino holdings represented 2 percent of his wealth, which at the time gave him a net worth of about $1.7 billion. In the same day, Donald’s own estimates of his wealth differed by as much as $3.3 billion. How could that happen? Was Donald living in his own private zone of wildly escalating daily inflation, a TrumpBolivia? And his $1.7 billion figure in August was well below the $2.6 billion Forbes would credit him when it published its richlist just a couple of months later.

Now Donald was saying he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.

“Five to six. Five to six.”

And on the nightstand in my bedroom at Donald’s Palm Beach club was a glossy brochure that said he was worth $9.5 billion.

When I sat down in a Trump Tower conference room one afternoon with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, he claimed Donald was worth about $6 billion. But the list of assets Weisselberg quoted, all of which were valued in very inflated and optimistic terms and some of which Donald didn’t own, totaled only about $5 billion. Where might the rest have been? “I’m going to go to my office and find that other billion,” Weisselberg assured me.15 Did he ever return? No, he never returned.

A chart detailing Weisselberg’s assessment of Donald’s riches appears opposite, on page 155. This chart left me confused.

So I asked around for guidance. Three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. By anyone’s standards this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought he was remotely close to being a billionaire.

Donald dismissed this as naysaying.

“You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder,” he told me.¹⁶

The real estate question also arose again in early 2005; Donald told me he was the biggest real estate developer in New York, bar none. The biggest. Donald suggested I call another New York real estate honcho, Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, and talk to him about the Trumpster’s edifice complex.

What Donald Owns in NYC	What Donald Says His Stake Is Worth
Trump World Tower	$300 million
845 UN Plaza
Trump Park Avenue	$160 million
59th and Park
40 Wall Street	$155 million
Trump Tower (commercial space/NIKEtown)	$565 million
56th and Fifth

Donald’s Other Projects	What Donald Says They’re Worth
The Apprentice	$100 million
Chicago skyscraper	$300–$350 million
Cash	$500 million
4 golf courses	$800 million
West Side Yards	$1.3 billion
“Other Land” (his term)	$200 million
Las Vegas condominiums	$250–$300 million
Miss Universe	$40–$50 million
“Condo inventory” (his term)	$400 million
Shopping centers	$40–$50 million
Palm Beach real estate	$100 million
“Profit sharing” (his term)	$100 million
Licensing/merchandising Trump name	$40 million

“I don’t think Donald is the biggest guy in New York real estate, but he’s a major player in residential real estate,” Zuckerman told me. “He doesn’t own anything like he did in the ’80s. Everything now he does for a fee and a percentage of the profits and it means that someone else comes up with the money. That limits his upside, but it also limits his downside as well. And he’s established a brand name out of his uninhibited genius for self-promotion … Donald is a character, a genuine New York character.”17

However illusory, it was Donald’s fixation on billionaire bragging rights and real estate prowess—in addition to the financial lifeline his siblings tossed to him—that kept his mojo rising during his brush with financial extinction in the early to mid-1990s. But the Donald who emerged on the other side of his business meltdown was a financial shadow of his earlier, acquisitive, debt-laden self, and would remain so right up to The Apprentice’s debut.

Donald entered the restructuring zone in the fall of 1990, and as the months wore on New Jersey casino auditors offered a gloomy assessment of his prospects.

“The overleveraging of this Organization, particularly in its recent acquisition of non-casino hotel assets, has created [a] crisis atmosphere,” the auditors said of the Trump Organization. “It may very well be that the greatest hope for preserving remaining value lies in a quick and efficient reorganization and workout process—a privatized bankruptcy of sorts—outside the courtroom.”¹⁸

Financial turmoil, of course, didn’t stop Donald from spouting. The all-time howler award for a publication taking his verbal billions at face value belonged to Playboy. In early 1990, just a month before the Taj Mahal opened in Atlantic City and began a slide that would take Donald’s empire down with it, the magazine profiled the developer and said that he had amassed “a fortune his father never dreamed possible,” including “a cash hoard of $900,000,000,” and a “geyser of $50,000,000 a week from his hotel-casinos.”¹⁹

In the real world, New Jersey casino auditors estimated that as of September 1990, Donald was worth about $206 million—almost all of which was tied up in hotels, an airline, casinos, and other properties that were devaluing rapidly or about to be taken away from him. Donald’s cash on hand was only $17 million, and that was dissolving quickly as well.20

Regulators projected Donald’s 1991 income from trusts and rentals at $1.7 million, offset by $9.7 million in debt payments, $6 million in personal business expenses, and $4.5 million to maintain his Trump Tower triplex and estates in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach for the year—meaning he would be about $18.5 million in the hole at the end of 1991. Regulators projected Donald’s income for 1992 to sink to $748,000 and his 1993 income to drop even farther to $296,000—with all of his debt payments and personal expenses continuing to pile up. At the end of 1993 his personal cash shortfall would amount to about $39 million, and there would still be $900 million in personally guaranteed loans hanging over his head.²¹

In the midst of all of this, Donald reached a property settlement with Ivana following their divorce. The March 1991 agreement called for the former Mrs. Trump to get a $10 million payment, the Greenwich estate, $350,000 in annual alimony, $300,000 in annual child support, a $4 million housing allowance, use of some Trump properties, and a $350,000 salary for running the Plaza Hotel. The settlement nearly bankrupted Donald because he didn’t have the $10 million to pay his ex-wife; he ended up using part of the $65 million banks had loaned his business the prior year to pay her.²² Even so, regulators noted that the payment to Ivana “depleted most of Trump’s personal cash.”²³

Throughout early 1991 and into the summer, Donald helped his banks begin to dismantle his holdings so he could pay off $3.4 billion in business debt and release himself from the $900 million in personal arrears attached to that pile. Absent an overhaul, Donald would be wiped out.

The little ray of sunshine in all of this for Donald was that the seismic real estate collapse sweeping the country in the early 1990s left banks with wads of bad loans in their coffers. They could choose to put their borrowers out of business, and be left owning companies they didn’t want to run, or force debtors into messy bankruptcy proceedings that would involve paying whopping legal fees and suffering through years of delays. Neither alternative appealed to banks, and Donald got the first glimmer of this one afternoon in early 1991 when Boston Safe Deposit and Trust, the bank holding the $29 million loan he used to buy his über-yacht, the Trump Princess, called to ask the fallen developer to cough up some cash for an insurance payment.

Donald didn’t have the money for the payment. Nor, having paid Ivana’s divorce settlement, was there a line of credit into which he could tap. If the Boston bank called the loan, the first domino in Donald’s financial universe would fall, triggering the collapse of everything else. So Donald and Stephen Bollenbach, a well-regarded financial adviser he retained to appease the banks and salvage his holdings, gambled. They told the Boston bank that they didn’t plan to make the insurance payment.

“We told them, you got the mortgage payment on it and there’s an insurance payment due so you should make it,” Bollenbach told me. “And they did. I think that’s when we knew that we had some room to maneuver and negotiate.

“It was so complicated that I think Donald had an advantage in terms of knowing where all the pieces fit, whereas many of the creditors had a much more limited view. It became more important to creditors to get a fair share of whatever pie was left, rather than the size of the pie itself.”24

The yacht standoff opened Donald’s eyes as well.

“We said, ‘You pay the fuckin’ insurance. We’re not paying it.’ Half a million dollars worth of insurance annually,” Donald recalled. “They said, ‘We’re not going to pay it, you have an obligation. We’re going to foreclose it and blah, blah, blah. I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck: You pay it.’ And we waited, and the deadline came. And they paid it.

“That was sort of the bottom of the heap. Deep trouble. They could have really done a big number. There was a personal guarantee on the loan,” Donald told me. “My father was a pro, my father knew, like I knew, you don’t personally guarantee. So I wrote a book called The Art of the Deal, which as you know is the biggest of all time. In the book, I say, ‘Never personally guarantee.’ … And I’ve told people I didn’t follow my own advice.”25

Not that the grind of eking out bankruptcy agreements and scrounging around for money fazed Donald. Staring insolvency in the face, he called on that Norman Vincent Peale huzzah inside of himself and accentuated the positive, eliminated the negative, latched on to the affirmative, and didn’t mess with Mr. In-Between.

“He has this very optimistic approach to the world. I would have been looking for the nearest building to jump off of and he just remained upbeat all of the time,” said Bollenbach. “I never suspected that he lost a moment’s sleep.”²⁶

Donald’s lenders became increasingly pliant as the debt talks continued. And Bollenbach decided that in exchange for giving up all of his major real estate holdings, as well as the Trump Shuttle, the yacht, and other assorted moneylosers Donald had overpaid for in the 1980s, he could strip away most of the debt Donald owed and give him a shot at holding on to the casinos—a business that barely passed the sniff test with most of the banks and one that they certainly didn’t want to own and operate.

Of course, Donald’s struggles did leave some people gloating, particularly real estate competitors who had grown weary of his shtick—most particularly competitors with acid in their veins. Leona Helmsley, whose husband, Harry, had been a role model for Donald when he entered the Manhattan real estate market, unleashed a torrent of abuse on Donald in the early 1990s (thus assuring herself a spot alongside Ed Koch and Steve Wynn in the If-Donald-Smacks-You-Smack-Him-Right-Back Hall of Fame).

In the course of a 1990 interview with Playboy, Ms. Helmsley referred to Donald’s then girlfriend Marla Maples as “Marpa Meeple,” “Marble Maple,” “Marlo Mipple,” “whatever her name is,” “Maple Marble,” “Maypo Marla,” and “Marla Mipple,” before savaging Donald’s budgeting abilities.

“Donald Trump is no Harry Helmsley. Can you imagine Harry assuming $2 billion in debt and guaranteeing $500 million of it personally?” Ms. Helmsley asked. “Egomaniac. Just plain stupid. All so he could have his little airplane, his little hotel and his little boat. He’s great at playing O.P.M.—Other People’s Money. Why not? It’s not his. Then the egomaniac has the nerve to think that putting his name on everything makes it better. You watch: He’s going to be left flat on his can and it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”27

Ms. Helmsley’s fusillade was inspired by Donald’s own broadside against her several months earlier, also in Playboy.

“Leona Helmsley. She is a vicious, horrible woman who systematically destroyed the Helmsley name,” Donald opined. “Also, Leona was not a great businesswoman but a very bad one.

“She set the women’s movement back fifty years. She is a living nightmare, and to be married to her must be like living in hell,” Donald added for good measure. “She’s out of her mind. Leona Helmsley is a truly evil human being. She treated employees worse than any human being I’ve ever witnessed and I’ve dealt with some of the toughest human beings alive.”²⁸

Donald said you ruined your husband’s good name, Ms. Helmsley. What of it?

“I’m sure that his father, a respectable man in real estate, is enthralled with what his son has done to his name,” she retorted. “He’s smeared it. I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized.”

Ms. Helmsley even offered Ivana a dollop of advice on how she had mishandled Marla.

“I wouldn’t have done what Ivana’s done,” she said. “I wouldn’t leave a young, good-looking, very rich husband alone to work in Atlantic City four days a week. Gorgeous girls go after a cripple if they hear he’s got billions.”²⁹

Several years later Donald got the last word in.

“Leona is without question one of the truly mean people around,” he observed. “She is, in fact, the Queen of Mean. A mean sucker and dangerous, no question.”30

Donald’s gift for penning best sellers also waned during his flirtation with bankruptcy. His sequel to The Art of the Deal, a book called Trump: Surviving at the Top, was on The New York Times bestseller list for seven weeks after it debuted in 1990, but bookstores returned about half of its initial five-hundred-thousand-copy printing to Random House, its publisher. Another of Donald’s non-fiction works of fiction, Surviving had these untruths to say about his airline, the Trump Shuttle: “The Shuttle is now profitable. Frankly, I’m glad I saved it. I’m proud of the way it’s been improved. It is now the best.”³¹ Surviving also offered a perplexing take on Donald’s view of the Forbes 400.

“It always amazed me that people pay so much attention to Forbes magazine,” wrote Donald, who always paid a lot of attention to Forbes magazine. “Every year the Forbes 400 comes out, and people talk about it as if it were a rigorously researched compilation of America’s wealthiest people, instead of what it really is: a sloppy, highly arbitrary estimate of certain people’s net worth.”³²

Which “certain people”? Was this Donald’s attempt to follow one of the key rules his book expounded for surviving at the top: “Be Honest”? Hard to tell. (Other Surviving rules included “Be Disciplined,” “Don’t Think You’re So Smart You Can Go it Alone,” and “Stay Close to Home.”) The New York Times reported at the time that publishers concerned about the slumping marketability of celebrity tell-alls like Surviving began saying “that they don’t want a ‘Trump’ on their hands.”³³

Donald managed to weather the slings and arrows of Ms. Helmsley and other doubters during these lean years and hunkered down with his bankers and with his debts.

One of the first restructuring meetings in early 1991 took place one evening in a Citibank office near Fifth Avenue, where more than three dozen bankers were waiting for Donald to arrive. Donald was throwing a party on his yacht—which he couldn’t afford to maintain—to celebrate his ownership of the Trump Shuttle—which he shouldn’t have bought to begin with, which had lost money, and which the banks were going to force him to sell.

“The call was made to Mr. Trump for him to attend the meeting. And he said, ‘I cannot attend the meeting because tonight we’re having a party,’” recalled Harvey Miller, a lawyer representing Citibank. “And he was told in a very gentle fashion that it was very important that he go to this meeting. And he said, ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah [the bankers responded], really.’

“About a half hour later, Donald arrived with his whole team. Including his brother, his lawyers, the accountants, some other advisers, and I think they had come straight from the yacht. Donald then went around, like a true politician, to shake hands with everybody there. And by the time he got finished, people had already settled in around the table in their chairs. And when he got finished, he looked around, and there was no empty chair, and he suddenly looked up, and he said, ‘Is this what it is like being poor?’ I think that was sort of a revelation to him that there was something serious going on here.

“Donald listened and said that he would cooperate fully. I’m not sure if it was that meeting or thereafter where he started talking about his future with casinos. That’s really where he wanted to devote his time and attention. And then that was followed by trying to figure out all of Donald’s projects, financial positions, et cetera,” Miller recalled. “And that’s when it was discovered that he had all of these different projects with different banks, and that each bank syndicate had different collateral. And basically, that’s what saved Donald. It was spread out.”34

As the negotiations progressed, Donald’s bankers looked for every alternative they could find to bankruptcy, because none of the banks wanted to contend with the mess that would ensue if the talks collapsed. And the Trumpster kept singing a happy tune. “He was always upbeat,” Miller said. “One thing I’ll say about Donald, he was never depressed.”

Nor did he let the Trump Organization staffers get depressed. To give them a boost, he claims he became a sloganeer, a preacher, and very Pealesque.

“The bad time was from 1992 to 1995 and I had an expression: ‘Survive till ’95,’ Donald recalled. “I’d tell my staff: You motherfuckers, survive till ’95. I used to go around preaching it.”35

In a June 1992 conference call, Donald’s bondholders debated whether they should seize the Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City because Donald was about to miss a debt payment. The Washington Post obtained a tape recording of the discussions and discovered that Donald’s bondholders also wanted to avoid bankruptcy. One participant in the call warned that a bankruptcy was “a huge wild card” that would be a “really drawn out, very, very nasty process.” Most of the bondholders “expressed contempt for the way Trump had managed the casino. But their cynicism about the bankruptcy system outweighed their cynicism about Trump,” the Post reported.

The Post story noted that Warren Foss, who was advising the bondholders, thought it wise to pay Donald a $1.4 million annual management fee at the Castle, if only to buy off his support so they could all avoid bankruptcy court.

“What is he providing for the million and a half?” one bondholder asked, as participants on the conference call broke into laughter.

“We hope as little as possible,” Foss replied, prompting even louder guffaws. “We hope it becomes characterized as a non-management fee.”³⁶

Unbeknownst to his creditors, Donald was just as worried about a bankruptcy as they were. He later told me that he wanted to avoid bankruptcy at all costs because he felt it would permanently taint him as a failure or a quitter.

“I did a lot of workouts in those days on behalf of Chase, with a lot of real estate developers who had similar problems, and big ones,” said Sanford Morhouse, an attorney representing Chase Manhattan bank in the Trump negotiations. “Almost all of them, at one point or another in that era, filed for bankruptcy protection. And Donald, to his credit, did not.”37

Donald also looked to Fred for support, which his father, steadfast and true, provided him despite the onset of Alzheimer’s.

“People would say: ‘Oh, Donald’s in trouble.’ And they used to love it, you know, because, you know, they’re jealous assholes,” he told me. “They would go to my father and say, ‘Oh your son bit off more than he could chew. He’s in trouble. He’s in trouble.’ And my father would say, ‘Don’t worry about Donald. Bet the ranch, he’ll never be in trouble. Donald will be fine.’”³⁸

By 1992, dozens of banks had written off several hundred million dollars in loans to Donald, his Atlantic City bondholders had agreed to forgo debt payments for five years, and Donald had whittled down his mammoth personal debts to $155 million by forfeiting his yacht, his jet, his 50 percent stake in the Grand Hyatt, and the Trump Shuttle. The Trump Organization now owed $2.2 billion instead of $3.4 billion. A year later Donald’s personal debts fell to $115 million, but he had barely enough cash to remain in business, spurring his call to his siblings to rescue him with a financial handout guaranteed by his share of Fred’s estate.³⁹ Two years later, in 1995, Donald narrowly averted personal bankruptcy yet again when the deadline arrived for paying back all of the $115 million; he got out of that corner when his banks gave him another three years to pay back the debt.⁴⁰

“Sure, it crushed my ego, my pride,” Donald wrote of this period in his third nonfiction work of fiction, The Art of the Comeback. “I hated having to go to the bankers with my hat in my hand. And yes, my lifestyle was a little cramped for a while. I guess that’s all important. But getting a deal on the table—without filing for bankruptcy—was the most important thing of all.”⁴¹

Huge chunks of what Donald had in Manhattan fell into other hands. Chase Manhattan, which loaned Donald $200 million to help pay the $115 million purchase price of the West Side Yards and then watched the property bleed about $23.5 million a year in carrying costs, forced a sale of the prized tract to a Hong Kong development group in 1994 for about $85 million.42

Letting go of the site where he had planned the world’s tallest building, and even eventually forged a partnership with community groups to get it zoned, tore at Donald. Just four years earlier he had spoken glowingly of the site’s prospects in a television interview with Larry King.

“It’s an opportunity to build a city within the greatest city, and I don’t think anybody’s ever had that opportunity,” he said.⁴³

Though Donald would claim after the Yards were sold that he remained a principal owner of the site where he once planned to erect Television City, property records and condominium offering plans for the parcel did not list him as such.⁴⁴

According to former members of the Trump Organization, Donald didn’t retain any ownership of the site—the Hong Kong group merely promised to give him a 20 to 30 percent cut of the profits once the site was completely developed. Until that time, the Asian investors kept Donald on to do what he did best: build. They gave him a modest construction fee and a management fee to oversee the development. They also allowed him to slap his name on the buildings that eventually rose on the Yards because his well-known moniker allowed them to charge a premium for their condos. Retained for his building expertise and his marquee value, Donald was a glorified landlord on the site; he no longer controlled it.⁴⁵

Of course, giving up the West Side Yards to his bankers and to other developers wasn’t Donald’s only option. In 1989 William Zeckendorf Jr., son of the once high-flying developer, offered him $550 million for the site. Although closing documents were prepared and ready to be signed, at the last minute Donald decided not to sell. The real estate slump set in shortly after that, and potential buyers disappeared.46 As much as he liked to buy, Donald found it almost impossible to sell, even when extraordinary deals came his way.

As bankers continued to dismantle Donald’s empire, he hoped to retain control of the Plaza Hotel, the jewel at 59th and Fifth that he bought in 1988, and Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach manse. But Citibank, which loaned Donald the $425 million he used to buy the Plaza for $407.5 million, took control of the hotel and sold it for $325 million in 1995.⁴⁷ Donald had better luck in Palm Beach. After a game of chicken with his Mar-a-Lago lender—and with the help of a new mortgage loan from a politically connected New York construction union—Donald held on to the estate.

Meanwhile, Bollenbach departed the Trump Organization and Nick Ribis, the company’s president, took over the job of keeping Donald focused on his Atlantic City casinos. Miracle of miracles, the angel of Donald’s deliverance from the purgatory of bankruptcy and unrequited debts turned out to be … the stock market!

Even as the national real estate bubble was bursting, fresh funds began rushing onto Wall Street, fueling a historical run-up in both the stock market and initial public offerings of often barely viable companies. Between 1980 and 1995 the total annual value of IPOs leaped from $1.4 billion to $30.2 billion (in 1993 alone, IPOs worth $58 billion took flight).⁴⁸

Although some high-quality companies like Microsoft went public in that crop of IPOs, a large portion were little stinkers. Of all new companies that went public between 1985 and 1995, only half were still trading in 1995. Even promising companies went on wild IPO rides: Netscape, the pioneering but unprofitable Web browsing concern, went public in 1995 at $28 a share, was trading at $171 three months later, and then fell to $57 by the end of 1996.⁴⁹

If you had a good story and a prominent name, it suddenly became quite easy to sell stock. And it turned out, against all odds, that investors were willing to gamble on Donald’s name—even though they were getting a chief executive whose sense of his responsibilities as the steward of a publicly traded firm and the guardian of other people’s money were somewhat ill defined.

“Something gnawed at me, and I knew what it was—the whole head-of-a-public-company routine,” Donald wrote in Surviving at the Top, relating his previous experience as a manager of Resorts. “Although I certainly agreed with the theory of stockholder-owned corporations and was absolutely committed to fulfilling my fiduciary duties, I personally didn’t like answering to a board of directors.”50

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Donald and Ribis managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts traded at $14 a share and, along with a fresh bond offering, the new company raised about $295 million. When Donald later folded the Taj into Trump Hotels, he was able to foist $795 million of that casino’s debt onto the backs of his new shareholders.

Voilà, in one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald and the Trumpster went from gaming the bankruptcy system to gaming the world of publicly traded companies.

Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

Even so, Trump Hotels’ shares rose to about $36 in 1996, giving Donald, who owned 25 percent of the shares, a stake worth about $290 million. With little real estate left to speak of in Manhattan, Donald’s wealth was centered on his casinos.51 Bollenbach, now running Hilton Hotels, was amazed.

“I didn’t think anyone could do it,” he said in 1996, before slightly inflating Donald’s newfound wealth. “I know of no other case of someone going from almost a billion down to over half a billion in net worth.”⁵²

Indeed, Bollenbach was so impressed that, according to three people familiar with the offer, he tried to buy Trump Hotels in 1996. He offered Donald about $39.50 a share for Trump Hotels in a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Donald wanted $45 a share.

Donald wouldn’t budge, and Bollenbach went on to purchase another company that became one of Donald’s most troublesome competitors in Atlantic City.

“He’s the worst seller ever,” the person familiar with the talks said of Donald. “That’s why he’ll constantly get hurt, because he just won’t let go. There’s something emotional that won’t allow him to do it … He always believed there’s another penny behind every offer he gets, so he won’t let go.”⁵³

In the years after Donald failed to sell Trump Hotels, its stock price tanked. Had he tried to pare down some $1.8 billion in debt smothering the casino company, and spruced up the operation, he might have ridden a reignited gambling boom and grown his newly seeded fortune. Instead, Trump Hotels, which never earned a profit in any year between 1995 and 2005, became Donald’s private stockpile of ready cash.

Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”⁵⁴

Lo and behold, Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth. A later valuation by Trump Hotels itself pegged the Castle’s true price at $314 million. Nonetheless, Trump Hotels paid $490 million, sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered. In 1996 alone, the shares fell to $12 from $35.50.55 About a decade later, the New York Stock Exchange delisted the shares entirely and any kid with a quarter could buy the stock.

When I interviewed Donald in 1996, he was effusive about his casinos and somehow seemed to forget that he owned very little property in Manhattan anymore.

“The thing people don’t know about me is … Donald Trump is in two businesses,” he told me. “I’m not in one. You take a Wynn, a Circus Circus, they’re in one business. I’m in two businesses. I’m probably the biggest in real estate in New York and it’s a big business.… I own most of my stuff. I own one hundred percent of Trump Tower. My buildings I own, for the most part.… I have this huge company that’s real estate. I also have this huge company that’s gambling. So I have two huge companies.”⁵⁶

Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996. The hefty payout wasn’t a surprise to one compensation analyst interviewed about the package.

“It’s bad, but you wouldn’t expect any less from Don Trump, would you?” offered Graef “Bud” Crystal, an expert on corporate pay, at the time. “Don Trump’s a pig is not a breaking news story. Don Trump’s a pig has been the story from day one. That’s been, I think, why many of his enterprises have collapsed.”⁵⁷

While investors didn’t seem to mind Donald’s shenanigans at Trump Hotels, some journalists cataloged the fun and games. Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”58 In a separate development, regulators later questioned how the company was managing its accounts. In 2002 the Securities and Exchange Commission imposed a cease-and-desist order on Trump Hotels for producing “misleading” financial statements in an earlier quarter.⁵⁹

Though Donald seemed preoccupied with finding different ways to loot Trump Hotels, he made time in 1999 to mount a run for the presidency. America needed him!

Donald said he was inspired to make a stab at public service by former wrestling star and bodybuilder Jesse Ventura’s successful run for governor of Minnesota. Ventura’s “breakthrough in Minnesota caused me to start thinking about the role people outside government must play to help our country,” Donald intoned.⁶⁰ Guided by Roy Cohn’s former acolyte, political strategist Roger Stone, Donald’s political platform was no-nonsense: good schools, safe streets, national security, economic growth, and an improved Social Security system. Stone commissioned a poll to test Donald’s viability as a candidate, and Donald wrote about the results in his 2000 campaign treatise, The America We Deserve.

“It was no surprise to me that 97 percent of the American people knew who I was,” he wrote. “It was also no surprise that I was particularly popular with some segments of the American population. Working people, African Americans, Latinos, and people making under $25,000 a year all had a favorable opinion. Rich people did not like me. Rich people who don’t know me never like me. Rich people who know me like me.”⁶¹

Donald jumped into the race as a candidate in Ross Perot’s Reform Party, but shortly after Ventura left the party, Trump left the race. Still, Donald’s words echoed through the voting booths.

“I’m not worried about whether or not the intellectual/journalistic/political establishment thinks I’ve got the stuff to talk about saving the American Dream,” Donald offered. “I believe in the American Dream. My business experience shows me that it works, and I want to do everything possible to see that regular Americans can enjoy the same opportunity for success and security that I have had.

“Maybe our next great leader—one with the cunning of Franklin Roosevelt, the guts of Harry Truman, the resilience of Richard Nixon, and the optimism of Ronald Reagan—is walking down Fifth Avenue right now, straight through the heart of this land of dreamers and shakers—this land that I love.”62

Gosh.

Meanwhile, back on Fifth Avenue, Donald had already spent time carving out a new niche for himself in New York real estate. One of his acquaintances from his restructuring talks launched his new career. Sanford Morhouse, the attorney representing Chase in the negotiations, had taken a liking to Donald during the talks and decided to introduce him to his acquaintances at General Electric. In 1994 GE was looking for someone to refurbish the old Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Morhouse thought that Donald fit the bill and pushed for him at GE.

“At the end of the day, he’s a tremendously talented and smart and experienced builder,” said Morhouse. “The common description of Donald is that he is a great salesman. He is a great salesman, but he also happens to be a very, very good builder. He’s smart and he works hard.”

GE brought Donald aboard and, according to one person with direct knowledge of the deal, paid him a management fee of about $25 million to oversee the rehabilitation of the property. Like the Asian investors who bought the West Side Yards, GE found value in letting Donald put his name on the building and gave him a cut of the condo sales. Presto, the renovated skyscraper was christened Trump International Hotel and Tower. Even though Donald didn’t own the building, it later flashed across the opening credits of The Apprentice as if he did.

Donald does own 40 Wall Street, which he spent about $35 million to buy and refurbish in 1996. The building has about $145 million in debt attached to it, and New York City assessors value the property at about $90 million. Donald values it at $400 million.63 He also owns Trump World Tower, which a South Korean conglomerate financed before Donald bought out its interest for about $25 million, according to records of the deal (Donald’s financial adviser, Weisselberg, originally told me that the South Koreans gave their interest away to Donald for free—which, had it been true, would have been an unusual example of charitable giving by a major corporation). And he owns Trump Park Avenue, which GE financed initially. Donald then borrowed $140 million to buy out GE; the building has yet to sell out, but Donald projects total sales of about $300 million.

Donald’s recent golf course ventures have produced some sterling new courses, but the value the Trump Organization assigns those deals appears to be hyperinflated. Donald’s Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County—he doesn’t own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.⁶⁴

Donald doesn’t control other Manhattan properties that bear his name or are closely associated with him today, including Trump Tower (where he still owns his own triplex and some commercial space below). As Zuckerman noted, Donald gets the financial backing of other people who give him a cut of the action to make sure projects arrive properly at the finish line.

Forbes, in bestowing a $2.6 billion fortune on Donald in its 2004 richlist, credited Donald with owning eighteen million square feet of Manhattan property, which certainly is an impossibility. On one occasion Donald told me that the West Side Yards, which he doesn’t own, will have ten million square feet of salable space when the site, now known as Riverside South, is completed (Weisselberg told me the site actually would have about five million square feet of salable space 65). However measured, the Yards was by far the biggest property in Donald’s former Manhattan real estate portfolio. Forbes described the Yards in its 2004 assessment of Donald’s holdings as “an 80-acre parcel bought for $80 million in 1985,” when it is, in fact, a 72-acre parcel bought for $115 million in 1985 and sold to others for about $85 million in 1994. Donald gets a management fee of about $2 million a year to oversee the property, and a cut of the profits after all sixteen of the project’s buildings are completed and the group he sold it to gets all of its expenses repaid.⁶⁶

In June 2005, the Asian investors who controlled the West Side Yards sold the entire site for $1.8 billion—about half the amount that Donald had told me it was worth. Although Donald told me that the site was debt free when the Asians sold it, others involved in the transaction said the Yards carried a substantial amount of debt and expenses that had to be deducted from the sale price. Although Donald declined to detail how much money he realized personally on the sale, it was certainly a fraction of the $1.3 billion he had told me that the Yards would add to his bank account after a sale. The sale further undermined Donald’s already flimsy claim to being Manhattan’s biggest real estate developer.

Between 2000 and 2004 Forbes allowed Donald’s verbal billions to grow by $1 billion, a period when the stock market bubble burst, his stake in his casinos—his most valuable asset until The Apprentice came along—had fallen in value to $7 million (around $300 million less than Bollenbach would have paid him for it), and, despite Manhattan’s red-hot real estate market, Donald owned much less real estate there than he let on.

Donald said that his casinos’ myriad problems—no profits, suffocating debt, disappearing cash—did not mean that he had failed in Atlantic City. Instead, he described his management of the casinos as an “entrepreneurial” success, defining entrepreneurial as his ability to take cash out of the casino company and use it for other things.

“Entrepreneurially, not as a person who drives up stock but as a private person, it’s been a very good deal,” he told me. “In many years, it’s been good.

“I’ve loved Atlantic City. It’s been very good to me and I’ve been very good to it. But it’s been disappointing in the sense that things could have been done, which would have made it unbelievable,” Donald added. “Various politicians and others decided to go a different route and that’s too bad because it was a great opportunity. If I would have worked Atlantic City the way I worked real estate, I would probably be the biggest casino company in the world rather than just a nice company, et cetera, et cetera.”67

There was, of course, a method to Donald’s madness. His ability to float above the wreckage of his financial miscues and magically add zeroes to his bank account ensured that he remained an object of fascination. Besides, as an Idahoan named Bill Cope pointed out in The Boise Weekly in 2005, Donald did have an authentic bond with some members of the Forbes 400.

“Lucky billionaires. They don’t have to worry about reality as you and I know it,” he wrote. “So they have all this extra time to dream up new ways to make reality more to their liking.

“We hundredaires and thousandaires are so fascinated with billionaires: that power they have over their own reality. It’s not because they’re so good looking, and it’s certainly not because they have such pleasing personalities. Just try to imagine Donald Trump without all his money, and basically we’d be talking about a guy who couldn’t pick up a drunk hooker at a Holiday Inn happy hour,” Cope added. “If I’m jealous, it’s because billionaires are like, well … they’re like hippies in a way, aren’t they? Hippies with Lear jets. People that rich sort of float above the normal flow of human events, hovering over a sea of trials and tribulations and bad credit ratings without ever getting wet. That’s it, they’re like hovercraft. Hippy hovercraft.”⁶⁸

TrumpQuiz #7

If you’re a billionaire encountering unexpected and sudden poverty, you should:

1)	Beg.
2)	Borrow.
3)	Steal.
4)	Accentuate the positive.
5)	Eliminate the negative.
6)	Latch on to the affirmative.
7)	Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.
8)	Repeal The Art of the Deal for a presidential seal.
9)	Play the Wheel of Fortune acronym game: IPO.
10)	Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
11)	Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too.
12)	Meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.
13)	Make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss.
14)	Force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”