9

MO TRUMP MO PROBLEMS

I like having friends, but I like having enemies more.

—DONALD J. TRUMP

THERE WAS ONCE A sleepy little town about an hour south of Los Angeles perched on palm-sweaty cliffs overlooking the blue Pacific called Rancho Palos Verdes. It was a wonderful place to take a nap. Most of the bars closed at 11:30—in the morning. With mostly rich, retired, Republican seniors living in it, Rancho Palos Verdes was about the most peaceful burg you might ever find in all of southern California.

Was, that is, until Donald Trump showed up.

It all started with a thunderous roar. “It sounded like this massive incredible rumbling,” remembers singer Tom Sullivan, who lives there. “The ground was shaking under us.”

But it wasn’t an earthquake. It was the sound of a golf hole sliding into the sea. It was June 2, 1999, six weeks before the much-ballyhooed Pete Dye–designed Ocean Trails Golf Club was supposed to open. Most of the 496-yard, cliff-hanging 18th hole was just… gone. The project built by two brothers—Ken and Bob Zuckerman—was now officially screwed.

Eventually, they’d file for bankruptcy. A few years after that, riding to the rescue, came the new buyer, Donald J. Trump.

The town was delighted. This was 2002 and Trump wasn’t a TV star then. All they knew was that he was an East Coast tycoon who jetted around on a 737 with his name on it, had fine spun-red hair, and was usually standing next to his latest knockout wife. They also knew he had a very thick checkbook and a love of golf and would probably rebuild the course in a swanky way. They immediately invited him to town to celebrate this wonderful new relationship. Only Rancho Palos Verdes had no idea they’d just gotten in the ring with a brawler.

Even as a kid, Donald Trump relished a good fight, sought them out, thrived on them. He was that very bad combination: very big and thin-skinned. He’d pull girls’ hair. He’d pound his baseball bat into the ground. He’d bully smaller kids. “In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal. “I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled.” He spent so much time in detention, he got the nickname “DT.” Worse, no matter how much trouble he got in, Double Down always came back for twice as much.

At 13, his parents sent him to New York Military Academy, hoping it might smooth him out. It didn’t. Donald came out of military school fists up. His thirst for scrapping can’t be quenched. “My rule is when attacked, fire back 10 times harder,” he once said. And he’s not talking about for a while. He’s talking forever.

Trump likes talking tough. Likes to tweet about kicking Joe Biden’s ass. Likes to poo-poo NFL anti-spearing rules to protect players’ brains as “ruining the game.” Likes telling 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey hero Mike Eruzione that he liked the NHL better “when they didn’t wear helmets.” (To which Eruzione replied, “Without helmets, a lot of players you watch would be in the hospital today.”)

Fistfights in golf are rare, but Trump likes telling about the time he punched a guy out at Winged Foot. “It was this big handsome asshole,” Trump told me. “And he was just being a complete jerk! So I sink this putt on the ninth hole to win the match and then I turn and just coldcock him, just knock him out right there on the green!… They ended up suspending both of us. I was back off suspension after two weeks and he never got back in.”

A couple questions: (a) How do you win a match on the ninth hole? (b) If Trump just suddenly swung and punched, why did the other guy get booted? (c) And why for good?

Besides, that’s not how some people at Winged Foot tell it. “First of all, Trump is not well liked at Winged Foot,” says member Bill Fugazy, who has known Trump for years and whose late father also knew him there. “He’s just bad news to be around, a weird guy. It’s hard for him to get a game. So when it happened, he was playing by himself.

“The turn there is on 10, not 9. So he goes into the bar to have a quick soda, then goes to the 11th hole. But the guys ahead of him were just getting on the tee. One of them goes, ‘Donald, what do you think you’re doing?’ Trump goes, ‘Playing through.’ The guy goes, ‘Yeah? Well, usually you ask permission for that. That’s kinda rude.’ Words were exchanged. Trump goes, ‘Get the fuck out of my way.’ This guy goes, ‘Who you talking to?’ Trump shoves him and leaves the course. He was brought in and suspended. The other guy wasn’t suspended. Why should he be? He didn’t do anything.”

So no punch-out?

“Who’s he gonna punch?” Fugazy says. “He’s got tiny spongey hands. He couldn’t punch anybody.”

As Trump got older and started making too many millions to go around punching people, he decided suing them in court was the next best thing. It’s another chance to fight and win. Even better, if he loses, he can always say it was rigged, or the judge was crooked, or Hispanic. Or he can settle and not have to admit he lost at all.

Trump loves suing like he loves red ties. He’ll sue over anything: flagpoles, trees, hedges, fences, berms, neighbors’ yards, roads, streets, sidewalks, taxes, fees, airplane noise, helicopter pads, property lines, university scams, water, drainage, unpaid bills, half-paid bills, too much rent, not enough rent, stolen deposits, zoning, the environment, courses he’s built, courses he didn’t, deals he made, deals he didn’t, paintings of himself, donations, schools, his announced net worth, and his actual net worth. He’s sued friends, enemies, partners, and rivals. Trump has sued and been sued by just about everybody. According to USA Today, as of mid-2016, Trump had been part of more than 3,500 lawsuits in his life. That’s almost 50 lawsuits a year, since birth.

Don’t most sports billionaires tangle themselves up in that many lawsuits? Isn’t that just part of the game at that level? “Not me,” says Mark Cuban. “In my whole life, I’ve been sued twice, I think.”

Poor little Rancho Palos Verdes had no idea about any of that when Trump showed up to their packed town hall to celebrate this new and imperfect union of town and golf course. Trump walked to the podium to cheers and immediately gave the citizens a hint of the fuckery to come.

He started with a reference to the last course he’d rebuilt—Trump Westchester in New York. “If you had called the mayor of Briarcliff Manor five years ago and asked him, ‘Whaddya think of Trump?’ his answer probably wouldn’t have been not so great [sic]. We were fighting them really hard. But if you call him now, he’d say it’s the finest relationship they’ve ever had.… Everybody in the town loves us.”

That would’ve been news that day to then-mayor of Briarcliff Manor, Bill Vescio, considering Trump has barely ever stopped suing his 38,000-person town, or insulting him on Twitter, or telling people not to vote for him since the day he bought the place. As I write this, Trump is suing the town again, this time over taxes.

That moment at the podium in Rancho Palos Verdes was the start of 16 years of chaos—Trump versus Rancho Palos Verdes, a 10-round knockout fight.

Round 1: Trump v. Schools

Turns out, much to Trump’s surprise, he hadn’t quite bought the entire golf course. Some of it—basically the 15th hole—still belonged to the Rancho Palos Verdes (RPV) school district. Without it, Trump would have a back eight.

Trump flipped. He started calling the superintendent of schools at the time, Ira Toibin, to tell him how unfair it was and how they’d hidden this information from him and how he might sue and how they needed to fix this immediately, if not sooner. He’d call Toibin at home, work, everywhere. “I must’ve had six personal phone calls with Mr. Trump,” says Toibin, a very buttoned-up sort of man who, at press time, was again the RPV school superintendent. “He hadn’t read the paperwork. It was such a lucrative deal, he hadn’t really read it. He didn’t know who we were at all. He kept wanting to negotiate [a buyout] with me. But I kept saying, ‘I don’t negotiate, Mr. Trump. I have our attorney do that for us.’”

That attorney would become a pain in Trump’s famous neck. He was the school district’s very determined Milan Smith, who wound up publicly calling Trump “arrogant” and “pompous.”

“I have never had any contact with any human being who appears to be so self-absorbed and so impressed with himself,” Smith told a tiny beach paper called The Easy Reader. “He’s kind of like a big bag of wind.”

One time, Trump got up at an RPV town meeting and called Smith an “obnoxious asshole.” In this sedate little town, these were words that you just never heard. Wait until the book clubs heard about it! But calling Smith an “obnoxious asshole” turned out to be a very bad idea for Trump, since The Obnoxious Asshole is now a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the body that overturned Trump’s first Muslim-country travel ban.

Trump’s complaint was that Smith wanted too much for the missing land—$5 million. Trump wanted to pay $1 million. Smith was as immovable as an Easter Island statue. So Trump kept calling Toibin.

“He’d call and yell at me, using a lot of swear words. [Toibin doesn’t swear, so you’ll have to fill in with your imagination.] ‘You guys are trying to rip me off! It’s not worth $5 million! Come to New York and negotiate with me!’ I kept telling him, ‘Donald, this money will go to kids’ educations, to kids’ facilities. Plus, the state will match it. So it’s $10 million for the kids. Think of it as a donation.”

“This is ‘Trump-change’ for him,” Smith said, knowing perhaps that nobody can run a golf course shaped like a donut. In the end, Trump paid the $5 million. But he never forgot it.

Round 2: Trump v. Patriotism

Trying to stiff school kids will get you some nasty PR in a small town, but Trump bounced back with a great idea: patriotism. Trump is very good at clubbing people over the head with his patriotism. (See: NFL.) He immediately put up a 70-foot flagpole in front of his clubhouse with a flag that could nicely cover Mount Rushmore. Giant flag poles are a standard trick Trump uses at his clubs. When he first tried it, at Mar-a-Lago, he complained that he absolutely had to have a massive flagpole because, as his attorneys wrote, a smaller one “would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s… patriotism.” Just so you know, Donald J. Trump’s patriotism is exactly 100 feet high. One hundred and ten feet? No.

Rancho Palos Verdes was almost entirely Republican, but this mother of all flagpoles was just way too much and well over the city’s allowed limit. The city told him to cut it down to 26 feet or get rid of it. Trump refused. It went to the city council for debate.

That sound you just heard was the trap door slamming. Trump ran, not walked, to the papers to complain that the city was infringing on his patriotism. What kind of country is this where they make a man feel bad for putting up an American flag? And it’s true, nobody is more patriotic than Donald Trump, except for perhaps when there’s a military draft going on. The city looked bad. The town split in two over it, with the giant-flag crowd far outweighing the but-that’s-ridiculous crowd. They let Trump keep the pole, and the flag, just like it was.

Only RPV city councilman Steve Wolowicz, a lifetime Republican, seemed to get what was happening. “I have to offer congratulations to all of us,” he said, “for providing the very type of publicity that a real estate developer seeks.”

Round 3: Trump v. Laundry

It started with Tiger Woods. In 2007, the actor Michael Douglas was holding an annual celebrity pro-am tournament and schmoozefest at Trump Los Angeles, and they said Woods was going to show up. That’s when Trump took a look at the distant houses 360 yards from the tees at his practice range and decided they were very ugly. He had a long row of 10-foot-high ficus trees planted in front of them so nobody would have to look at the houses while hitting their practice shots—not Tiger, not Douglas, not Catherine Zeta-Jones, nobody. The problem with the trees is that they blocked the homeowners’ views of the ocean, a view they’d paid dearly to have. Trump’s people said it was just temporary, but long after the tournament, the ficus trees were still there.

Complaints started pouring into the city. The council decided to meet with Trump about it—at the “ugly” houses themselves. Yes, Trump would be going inside these homes.

The whole gaggle walked from the Trump Los Angeles driving range to the eye-offending abodes and the view-blocking trees. Along the way, Trump called these very expensive, ocean-front, gated homes “horrendous” and “ugly” and “awful.” Then he walked into the backyard of the one belonging to a resident named Jessica Leeds. There were towels drying on the balcony railing from a recent trip to the beach. With Ms. Leeds standing there, Trump said, “Your house looks like shit.” Also: “This house is ugly. My customers shouldn’t have to look at your ugly house.” I don’t know about you, but if I ever talked that way to somebody inside their house, my mom would’ve whacked me with a frying pan. Yet nobody stopped Trump, nobody upbraided him, nobody made him apologize. It was all too awkward for polite little Rancho Palos Verdes.

They said a lot more at the next council meeting. One man got up at the meeting and said, “Since purchasing this property, the Trump Organization has done what they want, how they want and when they want it with complete disregard for its governing authorities.”

The council voted unanimously to force Trump to take down the trees. Even Trump’s Winnebago full of lawyers couldn’t fix it. Trump lost and issued his standard quote for such occasions: “We’ve been treated very unfairly.”

The whole tree trick is SOP for Trump golf. At his Doral resort, more than 2,500 residents complained that Trump had put up high trees that blocked their views. Some of them got so mad they started ripping them apart at night. Trump sued five middle-class Doral homeowners who bordered his property for $15,000 each.

“There are behaviors in people’s backyards that are inconsistent with a world-class set of golf courses like Donald Trump is attempting to create,” a Trump spokesman said. That must’ve been a great surprise to the neighbors. They had no idea they were part of a world-class set of golf courses. Come to think of it, they weren’t. They had zero to do with it. Most of them didn’t even play golf. What were their horrible behaviors? “Playing music, drinking alcohol, and hanging out undergarments on their clotheslines.”

The nerve.

Round 4: Trump v. Dead People

The way Trump sees it, you can’t very well play Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles and drink Trump bottled water and buy Trump golf balls unless you drive up Donald Trump National Drive first. He wanted to rename the road leading to his club from Ocean Trails Drive to that name, but the city had rules about that kind of thing. You had to be dead to get a street named after you, and by all accounts, Trump was not dead. Trump sued, because Trump is very serious about putting his name on things.

The squabble over the street was stirred into a whole other bubbling cauldron of trouble…

Round 5: Trump v. Homes

Trump had a desire to start building lots of homes on his property, which wasn’t part of the deal. The city rejected him. Trump sued for $100 million, accusing the city council of fraud and violating his due process. The council, exhausted and Trump-weary, decided to try a new tactic. Give in on half his demands and hold fast to the ones that really matter, and maybe, somehow, he’ll take that as a win. On this case, he did. He got his eponymous road, but lost on the houses.

Round 6: Trump v. Time

When you go to any Trump golf property, you’ll notice there are always a gazillion framed articles and magazine covers about… (wait for it)… Trump. But not long after Trump Los Angeles opened, a Washington Post reporter noticed something odd at the club. There was a Time magazine Man of the Year cover with Trump’s picture on it. Except it was fake. The date on it was March 1, 2009, a date Time didn’t publish a magazine. The closest magazine to that date had Kate Winslet on the cover. Trump had never been Man of the Year. It seemed very unfair. He tweeted:

The Time Magazine list of the 100 Most Influential People is a joke and stunt of a magazine that will, like Newsweek, soon be dead. Bad list!

Once the fake Man of the Year cover was discovered at Trump Los Angeles, people started reporting fake Man of the Year covers at other courses—five of his clubs in all, including clubs in Scotland and Ireland. Trump’s people ended up taking them all down, but why? Shouldn’t winning 18 fake club championships automatically win you fake Time Man of the Year?

Round 7: Trump v. Taxes

Some people like to drive to Cape Canaveral for rocket launches. I like to watch Trump tell people what he’s put into his golf courses. It’s classic Trump Bump.

It usually starts at $100 million. “I’m putting $100 million into this course,” he’ll say. “By the time I’m done, it’ll be the most expensive course in the world.” Then it will balloon. Soon it will be “$150 million,” then “$200 million,” and eventually it’ll top out at “$250 million,” although he once said he put “$325 million” into Trump Aberdeen. If you paved every fairway in gold, and lined the cups with diamonds, you couldn’t spend $325 million on a golf course.

At Trump Los Angeles, Trump worked his way up to “$264 million” sunk into the course. That’s a lie so full of hot air it could float the Queen Mary. Course appraiser Larry Hirsh actually LOL’d when I told him the $264 million figure. “I guess anything is possible,” he said. “But for somebody to put $264 million into a golf course would be a very, very big challenge.” Saying you put $264 million into a golf course is like saying you went to the fridge and made yourself a $50,000 sandwich. We know it’s a lie because not long after Trump announced the $264 million figure, his lawyers were suing the L.A. County Assessor’s office for its assessment of the course. They said it was only worth $10 million. So, Trump was only off by $254 million.

Round 8: Trump v. Dye

The only problem with Trump Los Angeles is that it sucks. It’s a monotonous layout. It’s back and forth, forth and back, every hole but one running parallel to the ocean, every ball bouncing toward the ocean, every putt breaking toward the ocean, until, eventually, you want to jump in the ocean. And that doesn’t even count the three horrid waterfalls it opened with. Once you play it, you’ll see why the LPGA only played one year on it and bolted.

“I only played 14 holes of it,” says Scottish golf architect David McLay Kidd, who designed Bandon Dunes. “I got so tediously bored that I walked in. It’s narrow. It’s blind. It’s contrived.… Donald Trump’s answer is always spend more money, build more, more cart paths, more waterfalls. Sometimes what’s required is restraint.”

That might be why Pete Dye, the original designer, made Trump take his name off the course.

“I met with Mr. Trump and we discussed his branding and redesign concepts for Ocean Trails,” says Perry Dye, Pete’s son. “We ‘agreed to disagree’—as is now very hard to do with President Trump.… He wanted waterfalls.… We felt that… was unnecessary, as all 18 holes already look at the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island.”

It doesn’t help, either, that a single round at Trump Los Angeles costs $300.

Trump is right though: The views of the Pacific are incredible. Luckily, the California Coastal Commission forced Trump to keep the hiking trails in and around the course open, so you can see it all for free.

Round 9: Trump v. Charity

On the official website for Trump Los Angeles, there used to be a page telling you how Trump Los Angeles had given over $5 million to charity since their opening. There was a list of over 200 causes it had donated to, and, hey, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all opened our hearts and wallets like Trump L.A.?

The only problem was they actually hadn’t donated anywhere near $5 million. In a lengthy investigation, NPR could only document $800,000 in donations, and most of that was free rounds and free brunches.

In fact, of the 200 organizations the club listed, 17 said they couldn’t find any record of a donation of any kind from the club, and 26 others couldn’t be proven one way or the other. Many of them weren’t even charities at all, like the LAPD Homicide Bureau.

Here you go, boys—free fingerprint kits. On us!

Some didn’t exist at all—Downed Officers Fund, Sing for the Heart, Simply Not Simple. Those were listed, but they were all fake. So somebody was zooming somebody.

The Trump Organization did not return calls to NPR or to me on this subject, but did take out the bogus $5 million claim and 86’d the list.

Round 10: Trump v. Women

Like his golf courses and clubhouses, Trump wants everything to be a 10, including the women he employs at them, according to a lawsuit filed by women who worked at his course in Rancho Palos Verdes.

According to them, Trump insisted on “good-looking women” to hold down his hostess stands and his waitress jobs. “I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were ‘not pretty enough’ and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” swore Hayley Strozier, who was the director of catering at the club until 2008. That was backed up by restaurant manager Sue Kwiatkowski, who said that one time, he took her aside and said, “I want you to get some good-looking hostesses here. People like to see good-looking people when they come in.”

He likes them to be young, too, according to Lucy Messerschmidt, a then-hostess who said she got yanked from the schedule whenever Trump was on the premises. Stacia Solis testified that younger, prettier waitresses would be assigned to serve Trump’s table, even if they weren’t the best. One male employee testified he never saw a male waiter serve Trump. One female supervisor refused to fire a female employee even though her boss said Trump wanted her gone because she was “fat.”

Trump settled that mess for $475,000, though he admitted no guilt.

So, 15 years later, after all the lawsuits, nastiness, and Excedrin headaches, how does the very Republican enclave of Rancho Palos Verdes, California, feel now about Donald Trump?

Well, in 2008, it voted for John McCain, in 2012 for Mitt Romney, and in 2016, overwhelmingly, for Hillary Clinton.