By the start of 1999, it was clear the 2000 election would be wide open, with Texas governor George W. Bush, New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, Arizona senator John McCain, and publishing executive Steve Forbes expressing interest. Other candidates who sought the Republican ticket included Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, New Hampshire senator Bob Smith, Elizabeth Dole, Ohio congressman John Kasich, and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, who had twice run for the presidency in the 1990s. Ralph Nader prepared another run, and “radical centrist” Lowell Weicker,1 who had left the Republican Party and won Connecticut’s gubernatorial race in 1990 as an independent, sought a party from which to launch a presidential bid.
As presidential hopefuls began soliciting campaign cash, Roger Stone convinced Trump to consider a run. He argued that an exploration might demonstrate that the mogul had a real chance of winning—and there was a $12.6 million pot in federal matching funds and, possibly, a podium on the debate stage awaiting the Reform Party’s nominee.2
Stone knew Trump needed a policy book if he was to be taken seriously. His rivals were well ahead of him. Bill Bradley had published a memoir in 1996 and a meditation on lessons from his professional basketball experience in 1998. Pat Buchanan authored The Great Betrayal in 1998 and A Republic, Not an Empire, on foreign policy, in 1999, the same year that George W. Bush published an autobiographical collection of stories called A Charge to Keep and John McCain released his family memoir about war, Faith of My Fathers.
Trump did have policy ideas about trade with China and Mexico, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, terrorism, taxes, and healthcare, but the Trump brand was about over-the-top luxury and a mythos of gutsiness in business. The occasional op-ed and full-page advocacy advertisement in the New York Times were not enough to make Trump a convincing political product.
Trump had long said he didn’t think someone like him could win. But if Jesse Ventura could be elected governor, why not Trump for president?
Roger Stone: I saw very early on that he had the capacity to be elected president. I didn’t really care what party. I was just looking for that opportunity. I recognized that the voters would have to reach their saturation point with conventional politics and parties, but I thought that moment was coming. It ultimately came.
Jim Nicholson, Republican National Committee chairman 1997–2001: I had three meetings with Trump—in ’98, in ’99, and then again in 2000. The first two meetings were not very pleasant. He kept me waiting a very long time, and then all I got from him was a lecture about how screwed up we Republicans were, and I did not get any money. He thought we weren’t doing enough about reducing the debt and reducing taxes. We were too caught up on social issues and not enough on economic issues.
Roger Stone: Ross Perot had performed so well, the party was entitled to a $38 million check from the federal government once they nominated a candidate.* You could run for president on other people’s money.
Tucker Carlson, Fox News: That’s always the problem, and Stone will tell you that again and again—“Trump is incredibly cheap, and that’s why he’s rich and I’m not.” Trump hates to spend money. It’s a point of principle for him that the less you spend, the better you are. So the fact that Perot was funding the Reform Party and had the national stage, there was that promise you could run for president on the cheap.
Rick Wilson, Republican political strategist: Roger told him, “Hey, you don’t have to do anything, really. Just get your name out there, it’ll be fun. You’ll be more famous.”
Phil Madsen, Reform Party operative: They were doing exactly what you would be doing if you were thinking about running for president. You’re making contact with people. You’re listening. You’re testing the waters. You’re asking questions. You’re wanting to see what’s going on.
Roger Stone: Yeah, it would be fair to say, and he has said this publicly, Roger was always more enthusiastic about it than I was, and that’s true.
Phil Madsen: The Reform Party was of interest because Ventura had just won. He made history by becoming a third-party candidate. And he was not an independent. This was a true third party.
In early 1999, Stone enlisted a service founded by ghostwriters for Republican presidents, the White House Writers Group, which assigned the job of a Trump policy book to Virginia-based writer Dave Shiflett, who would complete the manuscript in April 1999. The book displays some Trump foreign policy and economic objectives that have carried through the years and some that don’t.
Dave Shiflett, co-author, The America We Deserve: The phone rang and someone asked me if I’d be interested in writing a book for Donald Trump. I said, “What does he want a book written about?” And they said, “He’s writing a book about what he would do if he were president.” At the time he was nothing but a real estate guy, a Manhattan jet-setter. I said, “This would be my first published work of fiction, but I’ll be glad to talk to him about it.”
Roger Stone: We were going after a different constituency. We were running more as a centrist for the Reform Party nomination, hoping to have a candidate to our right and a candidate to our left. That’s why the book Trump published, The America We Deserve, is more centrist on health insurance, on abortion.
Dave Shiflett: That was the first I’d heard of the Reform Party. I guess someone had convinced him he needed a book that contained all his political beliefs. I went up to his office, and it was a lot of fun. It was a little gaudy. It’s got all that pink marble. He had a modeling agency, so you were surrounded by beautiful women. They looked like they’d been cooked up in a laboratory, flawless beauties. Roger was there. He’s the only person whose name I knew. And then he had these three guys who were lawyers or assistants in blue suits. He would tell a joke, and they would all laugh. It was like a B-movie. “That’s a good one boss!”
We sat down at his desk, and he would talk. He’s cracking jokes, and he took a call from Bob Torricelli, the Torch, the senator from New Jersey. At the time Torricelli was dating Bianca Jagger. So they were talking about Bianca for a minute, and then he hung up. We’d bring up a subject, and he talked in general terms. I was in there for an hour and 45 minutes.
It was a deal where they said, here are the chapters, here’s roughly what they’re going to say, here’s the points we want to make, and I filled in the blanks. He was most animated about terrorism. This was a couple years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, when a bomb went off in the parking garage, so that was most on his mind. He had an uncle at MIT [John G. Trump] who explained to him that somebody could bring a suitcase bomb into Manhattan and that would be the end of Manhattan. And he talked about North Korea and how they must never be allowed to get nuclear weapons or the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States, because they would do it. He also talked about Iran. He said if North Korea gets away with creating those big nuclear problems, you’re going to have the same problem with Iran. Trump’s view was that to get North Korea to the table, you might have to use military force, and you would blow up one facility and say you want to come back to the table? No? Then you blow up another one. He was also very much for single-payer health insurance. That was something that he said he had looked into. Trump didn’t have a whole lot of details about any policy, but he felt that the Canadian system was a good system to emulate.
He was very pro–gay rights, and he liked his entertainment friends, and he talked about Muhammad Ali, how much he liked him, P. Diddy, and all these people. He denounced the murder of Matthew Shepard.
I enjoyed him. It’s like being with a frat house guy. He’s easy enough to get along with. At the time, he had been rumored to be a germophobe, so he seemed like he took special care to shake hands with the people who were there.
Abe Wallach, Trump Organization vice president of acquisitions: In ’99, when he was thinking of running, he was writing position papers and doing a far more traditional campaign. He gave me a stack of material to read over the weekend. I was lying on a mat in my pool reading and fell asleep, and the papers went all over the pool. I gathered them up and put them under some drying machine. When I gave them back to him Monday, he said, “Why are these all in such bad condition?” I just said, “Oh, the dog got to them.” They were just so dull and uninteresting that it put me to sleep. But he was building.
Dave Shiflett: I had turned in the draft for it and I got a call from his assistant, Norma Foerderer. She was a very sharp woman, very piercing, and had a very keen intellect.
Barbara Res, former Trump Organization construction manager: Norma was revered by everybody because she knew how to handle Donald. She knew what he wanted, and she filled his office with women who looked like models.
Dave Shiflett: Norma said, “You need to come up here and talk to me.” I had to get on a plane, fly up there, and go to the office. She said she thought that the tone was too strident and that it needed to be toned down. She didn’t want Donald looking strident. I said, “I thought I’d captured his voice, but it’s no big deal,” and that was it. It was like a three-minute meeting, and I was thinking, did you really need me to come up here to tell me that in person? That was a pain in the ass, but it was that important to her.
Trump’s father, Fred, died from Alzheimer’s disease on June 25, 1999, at age 93. Melania Knauss and Ivanka Trump both attended the funeral at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan four days later.
Andrew Stein: There’s a big difference between Donald and Fred. The other big real estate families were much more low-key. Donald was a showman from the get-go. He always loved the publicity and attention. [Fred] came to see me and said I should stop The Donald from getting so much publicity when he first started to get publicity. I said, “Fred, I’m not taking this contract. There is no way you’re gonna stop Donald from getting a lot of publicity. Forget it. You can just enjoy it, because he’s not gonna stop.”
Barbara Res: I didn’t see his father much on the Hyatt. But when Trump Tower started, he became a thorn in my side. He hated the fact that Donald hired me. Hated it. I was a woman, and I was a kid also. I was only 30 years old. He gave me a hard time: “No, no, no. You don’t know what you’re saying.” That was very much his demeanor. “No, no, no.” He was borderline abusive verbally. He never called me stupid, but he implied it. I think it rubbed off on Donald a lot. Donald was intolerant. Donald thought he knew everything. That was the biggest problem that he sort of got better at was that he thought that he knew everything. Donald had more personal skills than Fred. Fred was not charming. Donald was charming.
Dave Shiflett: One of these rare moments, at least for me, was when he was speaking about his parents, and he talked about their long-standing marriage, and he felt that he had not lived up to that ideal they had set. He talked about his brother who drank himself to death, and then he’s talking about how he himself didn’t drink or smoke, and his parents came up then. His mother lived in the building. He felt that he came up short in that area. That’s the only humility I recall, the only vulnerable thing he was saying.