The traits that elevated Donald Trump to the White House are the traits of America. It was not a country of a culture and language of its own; but a land of dreams and discovery, of aspiration and mystery, with its carefully devised mythos of freedom and opportunity. The legend was the future and not the past. America’s rise to greatness has been a mélange of toil, fortune, and heroism, but with a touch of the gimcrack and of the illusory: where dream and sham sometimes conjoin. Many great American personalities combined these elements to some degree in their own personalities. Jefferson was partially a poseur; Hamilton an impetuous adventurer; Aaron Burr a scoundrel; Fremont, MacArthur, Halsey, and Patton were swashbuckling egotists and to a degree myth-makers. FDR was in part a political trickster of extraordinary virtuosity. The Kennedys, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan (a genuine man but full of Hollywood tinsel too), even the Clintons, and Donald Trump all have admirable qualities and have rendered great service, but none has been an altogether straight arrow. Many of the most hallowed events in American history were neither inevitable nor as nobly intended as they have been presented. It has rarely been George Washington and the cherry tree or Honest Abe splitting rails, and when it goes wrong, as with Aaron Burr, or Nixon in his second term, it can go badly wrong.
Like the country he represents, Donald Trump possesses the optimism to persevere and succeed, the confidence to affront tradition and convention, a genius for spectacle, and a firm belief in common sense and the common man.
His rise, like America’s, has been vertiginous. His proclamation of making America great again echoes a longstanding American belief that this nation’s greatness was predestined and would be ever-expanding. That greatness has been put at risk on many occasions, and in the last twenty years, Americans have been prone to ever greater self-doubt about America’s virtues and prospects. Nothing has done more to divide Americans than the Left’s rejection of the traditional melting pot in favor of identity politics, magnifying the grievances of atomized “minority groups,” delegitimizing American history, and casting doubt on the entire American enterprise, though always in the name of perfecting it. For a long time, this insidious trend has been largely unopposed—until Donald Trump gave voice to those tens of millions of Americans who opposed it and thought they were losing their country and were largely ignored or forgotten.
Donald Trump’s nature has always been to believe that almost anything can be achieved—that almost any obstacle and challenge can be overcome—through very hard work and cunning. It is also his nature, honed by the rough and tumble of his career, including observing his father’s business, to believe that no competitive activity beyond the playing field (if that) is quite as pristine as represented. He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths. He sees most political correctness as peddled by the media and the establishment, as sham and hypocrisy.
Trump is untroubled by what he calls his “truthful hyperbole” and “alternate facts” that are “essentially true.” Trump rarely tells outright lies, such as the media endlessly impute to him, and a political leader who fudges facts is hardly unprecedented. For Trump, establishing the facts of a matter is as much a competition as anything else.
Trump is widely, and correctly, seen as leading a populist movement, meaning an expression of middle- and working-class and agrarian discontent, and remedies of the non-revolutionary Left, or as in this case, of pragmatic and humane conservatism. Though the United States has, historically, been fertile populist ground, it has never in America been escalated into revolution. Even the struggle for independence was preeminently an act of secession, challenging remote British rule and establishing local self-government. It did not overturn the socioeconomic organization of the country. Likewise, the Civil War was not so much a revolution as a second war of secession, seeking the retention of slave-holding and with the Confederate Constitution modeled on the United States Constitution. While populist and apparently shoot-from-the-hip in its spontaneity and boosterism (“It will be huge!”), the Trump campaign of 2016 was very carefully calibrated and rather conservative, but not at all extreme.
Just as Mrs. Clinton kept the party of Roosevelt and his successors out of the hands of the wild-eyed Left led by the loopy Democratic Marxist senator Bernie Sanders, Trump threw out the bathwater of the indistinct, post-Reagan Republican establishment without fumbling the gurgling infant, the GOP itself, into the hands of the often agile paleoconservative smoothie, Senator Ted Cruz. Trump’s election program was really moderate conservatism, which he successfully sold to centrists and Reagan Democrats as a mighty improvement on Obaman quasi-socialist declinism, and with polemical pyrotechnics about illegal immigration and law enforcement, to right-wing and Tea Party elements as radical change. In the brilliant American tradition of political hucksterism that has almost always attended even the noblest official American causes, Donald Trump sold the same political agenda, dressed in different packaging, to the Center and to the Right.
Donald Trump has never suffered from a lack of confidence, and while he climbed the rickety ladder of American celebrity, he always suspected that the highest political office could be achieved by an unorthodox route. He believed he understood the American people; he had sold them his wares and himself at every socioeconomic echelon, and had long been consistent on some key political subjects: a strong military and law enforcement, education reform, and America-first priorities on trade and immigration. He considered himself a political realist, doubting that most of his presidential predecessors were as impeccably selfless as posterity has portrayed them. Many of these attitudes and beliefs come directly from his personal experience and family history.
The first Trump in America was Donald’s grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf (it is not clear exactly when the family name was changed, perhaps on arrival in America), who came from Germany in 1885 aged sixteen. He made his way west, first to Seattle and then to the Canadian Yukon. He operated restaurants, bars, and hotels catering to prospectors, and the other adventurers of the area. Most accounts allege that he was in fact operating whorehouses and clip joints, sometimes with no lease or title to the land.1 Friedrich moved to the Bronx after marrying his German childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Christ, and bringing her to America. He built up some small real estate holdings, including five vacant lots in New York’s outer boroughs. It was enough to build on. Friedrich died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, aged only forty-nine. Elizabeth, however, lived on into the 1960s, to the age of eighty-five, working for her son, Donald Trump’s father, Fred, collecting the coins from automatic vending and laundry machines in Trump properties.
Donald Trump’s father lived in Queens. One of his early successes was building government-subsidized housing, especially for armed servicemen returning from World War II. He later became a successful builder of middle-class homes in New York’s outer suburbs. He married Mary McLeod, who had emigrated from the sparse and remote Scottish Outer Hebrides island of Lewis, in 1930, when she was eighteen. She worked as a nanny and domestic servant, and met Fred Trump by chance at a party in 1935. It was love at first sight and they were married at a Madison Avenue Presbyterian church on January 11, 1936.
Donald John Trump, the fourth child of Fred and Mary Trump, was born in New York City on June 14, 1946. His sister Maryanne was nine years older, his brother Fred Jr. was seven years older, his sister Elizabeth was four, and another brother, Robert, was born in 1948. He grew up in a commodious Queens twenty-three-room home that crowded its double-lot. His father was always working, and on weekends and holidays sometimes took his children to inspect projects. He was chauffeured everywhere in two Cadillac limousines, license plates FT 1 and FT 2. (These were the first sprouts of a public egotism that in the next fifty years would emblazon the whole world.)
Where Fred was reserved and unsociable (he took a Dale Carnegie course at one point to lighten up a bit),2 Mary was affable and outgoing. The Presbyterian Trumps were churchgoers, lived frugally, worked hard, and were strict enough as parents that when they learned that Donald—an alert, confident, and mischievous child—had been playing with a switchblade, they resolved to send him to New York Military Academy, a Spartan boarding school. Donald adapted quickly, being naturally punctual, organized, hard-working, proud of appearances, and a good athlete. He did well in school and graduated with distinction in 1964.
In the summers, he worked for his father, chauffeuring, running errands, and working in a machine shop. He was thorough and diligent; he became adept at many of the building trades and got along well with his colleagues, despite being the son of the boss.3 He attended Fordham University, and after two years transferred to the Wharton School of Business Administration of the University of Pennsylvania, which had a course in real estate development. He graduated in 1968 and went to work for his father. He had a prodigious work ethic and mastered every aspect of his father’s business, down to cleaning boilers, costing carpeting, and mixing anti-cockroach insecticide himself to avoid the expense of exterminators.
The industrious Trump earned his father’s confidence and in 1972 was named president of The Trump Organization. (His father became chairman.) Donald was only twenty-six, and he moved to a modest mid-town, mid-level Manhattan apartment, making a reverse commute every day to the Trump office on Avenue Z in Brooklyn.
One of their first major challenges was rebutting Justice Department accusations that they had discriminated against African American tenants. Donald hired controversial lawyer Roy Cohn whose cut-throat strategy was: never surrender, counterattack at once, and claim victory no matter what really happened. Cohn advised the Trumps to countersue the U.S. government, which they did. The result was a settlement in which the Trumps admitted no wrongdoing, and in a technique that would become familiar to America and the world, claimed victory (which was neither altogether true nor entirely false).
Roy Cohn had become famous as counsel to red-baiting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the Communist scare of the early fifties, and advised many prominent conservatives, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Francis J. Cardinal Spellman. This was one of Donald’s introductions to politics. In what would become a fateful and even historic relationship, Cohn also introduced Rupert Murdoch to Donald Trump in 1973.
If Trump had not been noticeably politically active before, he was certainly interested in politics now. He knew many Vietnam War veterans, particularly among his fellow alumni of the New York Military Academy, and he supported Richard Nixon’s successful appeal to the “Silent Majority” to support his “Vietnamization” of the war that gradually withdrew American forces and replaced them with South Vietnamese, trained, supplied, and heavily supported from the air by the United States.
The Watergate debacle, partly due to Nixon’s mismanagement, caused the evaporation of executive authority and led to the immolation of one of the most successful presidencies in American history. The Democrats in the Congress seized the opportunity to cut off all assistance to South Vietnam and doomed Indochina to the murderous attention of the Viet Minh, Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, and Pathet Lao, and millions perished. As Trump watched the assault on Nixon, the disorderly rout in Vietnam as the Democrats undid Nixon’s “peace with honor,” and the irresolution of the Carter administration, he believed he saw the failure of the self-proclaimed best and brightest, the Eastern Establishment, the Ivy League, and the career State Department. The national media, academia, and the Democratic political establishment celebrated the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate putsch as triumphs of American integrity, but the thirtyish Donald Trump strongly suspected that this was self-serving claptrap thinly masking a series of largely self-induced national disasters. Though under very different circumstances, Trump would become intimately familiar with the shameless guerrilla tactics of the same media, academic, and political elites who had bloodlessly assassinated Nixon. He was forewarned.
In the mid-1970s, New York City was almost bankrupt, a fact that the young Trump saw as an opportunity to pick up property cheaply, never doubting that New York would recover swiftly, and he was assiduous in building political relationships, including with Abraham Beame, a friend of his father’s and soon to become mayor, and Brooklyn Congressman Hugh Carey, who was about to become the Democratic governor of New York, after four terms of Republican Nelson Rockefeller (who became vice president of the United States in 1974).
Donald Trump’s first great real estate score resulted from intensive negotiation and maneuvering over several years after the bankruptcy of the ramshackle and dysfunctional merger of the Northeast’s two largest railroads into Penn Central. Trump made clever and opportunistic side-deals with lawyers for angry shareholders and other interested parties in the terribly complex court proceedings, and emerged with court authorization in 1975 to develop the railway yards along the Manhattan side of the Hudson River, 120 acres from 34th to 60th Streets. In the end, the deal, after unimaginably complicated negotiations, did not proceed, because Trump could not find investors on terms which made him confident of an adequate profit, but it gave him immense publicity, due to his frequent press conferences, extravagant claims, and endless presentation of ambitious architectural renderings. He did ultimately collect on his option, as the City eventually determined to build the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center at the southern end of the yards. As a plausible Manhattan property developer, he had arrived.
Donald did crack the New York market with the acquisition and renovation of the Commodore Hotel and its metamorphosis into the glass-sheathed and completely modernized Park Hyatt. The hotel and the city were so desperate that Trump risked little money and recruited the Hyatt chain owned by Chicago’s Pritzker family; his timing was exemplary.
The area around Grand Central Station had deteriorated; the Commodore was between the railway terminal and the fabled Chrysler Building. Texaco had departed the Chrysler Building, which fell into receivership, and crime was rampant. Business was fleeing to the suburbs, and commuters were coming by car or subway more than trains. Trump was gambling on an immediate revival of a very decrepit area. But he didn’t gamble much. He told Penn Central he had a firm deal with Hyatt before he did, called a press conference in May 1975 to announce that he had signed a deal with the railway to buy the hotel (named after the founder of the New York Central, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt), and he had, but the railway had not yet signed and Trump had not paid the $250,000 option fee, but that did not deter Trump from unveiling elaborate plans for the Commodore, by an architect his father had commissioned. Trump used what looked like a finalized agreement with Penn Central, but wasn’t, to satisfy the city of his bona fides, and the New York municipal legal department, as Trump surmised would be the case, did not scrutinize the agreement diligently enough to realize what it was.
The city, pressed by alleged deadlines and not wishing the deal to lapse and to be blamed for it and hounded by Trump, approved the project, whereupon Hyatt came aboard and Penn Central signed and returned Trump’s offer which he had led the press to believe at his press conference was already an enforceable contract. Even at this point, Trump had no financial backing to carry out the project, and his calls on the banking system for a construction loan were not successful. But he managed to persuade the almost dormant Urban Development Corporation to spare him and Hyatt $400 million of taxes over forty years by a sale-leaseback arrangement, although there was vehement agitation by other hoteliers against such a giveaway, and they claimed that they could do a better deal. Trump bluffed them down before he had the arrangement with Penn Central, and then saw them off after his tax deal with the UDC and the transaction was rushed through. It was a brilliant coup, though practical and commercial challenges remained.
The reconstruction was complicated as the Commodore had deteriorated more seriously than Trump had realized; homeless men squatted in the boiler rooms and rats were so large and numerous they drove out an inadequate number of cats that Trump’s builders had inserted to exterminate them: human and feline reinforcements were deployed.4 Once the project was in hand, the participants had to see it through. It was renovated as a luxury hotel and reopened in 1980 to great fanfare with five hundred fewer bedrooms, but still fourteen hundred, and seventy thousand square feet of retail space. It was a huge success and Trump turned (and deserved) a very fine profit, in several stages. The renovated hotel contributed importantly to the revival of the area. Trump sold his interest to Hyatt in 1996 for $142 million. Given what he managed to conceive and reap in profit on such a small initial stake, by creativity, bravura, and relentless persistence, it is little wonder that he came to believe that he could achieve almost any goal he sought if he understood the components of the challenge.
Donald Trump met Ivana Zelnickova Winklmayr a fugitive from Czech communism, in 1976, in either Montreal or New York, depending on the vintage of the account from Donald or Ivana. Winklmayr was a marriage of convenience to get her through the Iron Curtain and to Canada, and the marriage was virtually dissolved on arrival. There was initially a Trump-propagated myth that she was on the Czech Olympic ski team; she seems to have been a model, though not the “super model” Donald intermittently torqued himself up to allege. Trump was now thirty and with his parents’ fine marriage as an example, he fancied taking a loyal wife for “support at home, not someone who’s always griping and bitching.”5
Ivana seemed to fit that bill and she found him “just a nice all-American kid, tall and smart, lots of energy: very bright and very good-looking.” She claimed not to have noticed that he was also “famous” or “fabulously wealthy.” Their courtship, replete with arguments over a prenuptial agreement, was played out in the gossip columns of New York and the blessed event was an on-again-off-again affair for months as Roy Cohn conducted the financial negotiations. Ivana balked at having to return gifts from Donald if the marriage broke down. Trump conceded that point and agreed to a $100,000 “rainy day fund” that was essentially a checking account set aside for her that she could begin using after one month of wedded bliss. They were married by Norman Vincent Peale, whom Fred and Donald Trump admired and supported for his “Power of Positive Thinking,” at Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church, which they had often attended. It was just before Easter 1977. The reception was at the 21 Club, and was attended by about two hundred people, including the mayor of New York, Abraham Beame. Donald and Ivana would have two sons, Donald Jr. (born 1977) and Eric (born 1984), and a daughter, Ivanka (born 1981).
If Donald was rising, his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was falling. Fred, a former airline pilot, had left the Trump Organization and moved to Florida, where he failed to find success, and then moved back to New York and worked as a maintenance man. He died of chronic alcoholism in September 1981, aged forty-two. It was a great sadness and Donald mourned him, mourns him yet, and redoubled his own determination never to drink.
Trump’s most famous project, which started to germinate in 1978, is now one of the most famous buildings in America—Trump Tower at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, seven hundred feet tall, a splendid glass and brass multi-faceted sawtooth façade with a large atrium. It is one of the largest buildings in the country with a poured concrete, rather than structural steel, skeleton, and a champion of mixed use: retail, office, and residential. Even in the eyes of his critics, it was a splendid building. It was also the first skyscraper in the world whose construction was supervised by a woman, an exceptionally talented engineer, Barbara Res. She and other senior Trump women executives are routinely overlooked by those who delight in accusing Trump of sexism and misogyny. Donald Trump took a three-story, fifty-three-room penthouse of extraordinary opulence for himself and Ivana and Donald Junior.
Throughout this period, Trump was constantly on the move, in his chauffeur-driven car, looking for building sites. He singled out the Bonwit Teller site on Fifth Avenue, found out who owned the lease (the Genesco Corporation), and secured an option to buy out the lease for $25 million. This gave him a blocking position, but he couldn’t do anything without the land, owned by Equitable Life, and the air rights, which were owned by Tiffany and Company, the world-famous jeweler next door. After his success at the Commodore, Trump got from Chase Manhattan a loan to buy Tiffany’s rights and a hundred-million-dollar construction loan, and got the land from Equitable, which had had a happy experience with Trump at the Commodore, in exchange for a half interest in the Trump Tower project.
His radical plan was widely praised, with one exception. He initially said he would keep two friezes and a bronze grill above the door at Bonwit’s, and give them to the Metropolitan Museum in exchange for a generous tax treatment of the gift. In the event, Trump had his crew destroy the objects, claiming they had no value and would have cost more than $30,000 to transport. It was a crude and clumsy move that changed his public relations status in New York and was widely presented as a know-nothing, brutal, destructive act: philistinism as well as bad faith. The New York Times called it “aesthetic vandalism.” He has never explained why he didn’t scoop up the goodwill with the tax deduction. This avoidable blunder and others like it have dogged his career ever since.
The Bonwit building was too tightly enclosed to be reducible with wrecking balls and had to be deconstructed by special work crews. Polish workers were imported without working visas and worked double shifts, seven days a week at below the minimum wage under a threat of deportation. They were agile craftsmen but not a happy workforce. Many resided at the site and there were constant squabbles about back pay. As the job wound up in 1983, The House Wreckers Union sued Trump for deliberately employing undocumented workers under illegal conditions. He denied knowing they were in the country illegally, and the lawsuit was settled confidentially in 1999. The incident reveals Trump to be a tight-fisted, devious employer, a very tenacious litigant, and an efficient and imaginative developer. It was somewhat piquant when, presumably contemplating politics, more than twenty years later, he called illegal immigration “a wrecker’s ball aimed at U.S. taxpayers.”6
There was further controversy over the alleged facts that there were no work-stoppages at Trump Tower, even when there was a city-wide strike in the building trades in 1982. The girlfriend of the local head of the Teamsters’ Union, which controlled the cement trucks, had an apparently free condo in the complex, just below the floors Trump himself occupied. This whole tawdry but comical episode was dragged out in court and the woman in question resorted to hilarious explanations of how she lived so opulently with no income. When the union boss, John Cody, was imprisoned for a racketeering conviction, Trump evicted his girlfriend for non-payment of maintenance fees, and the condo was seized by her creditors and resold. (When asked under oath why her unit was almost unfurnished, she explained that the contents were stored, but she couldn’t remember where: “In America, Brooklyn, who knows where these things go?”) When Cody died in 2001, Trump called the convicted racketeer “a psychopathic crazy bastard…real scum.”7
Trump also built, almost simultaneously, a fine East Side co-op called Trump Plaza, and a complex at Columbus Circle which he called Trump Parc, after a battle with tenants in an elegant limestone building that he wished to fold into the development. Many of the tenants were well-to-do and fiercely resisted Trump’s antics to move them out, such as reducing lighting in the halls and taking lounge chairs out of the lobby, and “offering” to house the homeless, in practice usually hallucinating schizophrenics and drug abusers, in unoccupied units in the complex. These and other controversies, as well as Donald’s (and his critics’) ever more publicized forays into hyperbole (one critic called his Trump Tower penthouse “Louis XIV on LSD” and Donald himself compared his painted ceiling there to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), caused Donald’s fame to soar but the nature of his publicity in the New York media to turn sharply negative. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons depicted Trump in a gigantic yacht cutting a path through small boats, a reference to Trump’s acquisition of a 282-foot yacht formerly owned by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Donald renamed it the Trump Princess and docked it at Atlantic City as a special domain for high rollers at the casinos he would soon buy there. (He doesn’t like boats very much.) The yacht cost $29 million and eight million more in renovations. The New York Times, which had earlier profiled him as a Robert Redford figure whose chief fault was speaking too rapidly, now wrote he would be “a shoo-in for a stupendous unpopularity prize.”8
None of this negative press reduced his ability to command astounding prices for residential units, especially at Trump Tower. While he was regarded by many as a vulgar and garish egomaniac, it was New York, and he was also much admired as an aggressive businessman, a quality developer, and a man with a common touch who bore as a badge of honor the disparagements of the rich and tony of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Gramercy Park. (His early exposure and partial immunization to harsh media treatment would serve him well later in his career.)
Before Trump, most of New York’s great landlords and developers tried to avoid personal publicity, but Trump believed he was developing not only buildings but a mighty brand that could be translated into widespread success. He wasn’t interested in, as he called it, just “collecting rent.” He had bigger dreams than that. (He also had personal experience of collecting rent. As a summer job, he once collected rent for his father. He learned, he told me, not to stand in front of the tenant’s door, because a summons for rent could be met by gunfire.)
Trump reasoned that all publicity was good publicity and that even the negative media attention revealed him as a formidable, if ruthless and not entirely ethical, operator. The Tower was an instant success and all units were pre-sold for $277 million, retiring all debt before the building opened. It continues to be a much-admired building. The early unit buyers included Steven Spielberg, Michael Jackson, and Johnny Carson, and the retail space was taken up by high-end luxury tenants like Mondi, Harry Winston, and Asprey.
In 1983, Trump paid $9 million for the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football league, which was a second tier to the National Football League, and played in the spring and early summer to avoid direct competition with it. But Trump immediately began raiding the NFL for players, called for direct competition with the NFL, and had Roy Cohn sue the NFL for $1.32 billion for monopolistic practices. Trump testified effectively at the trial, but, although jurors agreed that the NFL was a monopoly, they failed to find any harm or damage, and awarded one dollar to the plaintiff. As was his practice, Donald claimed a moral victory, but soon abandoned being a football team owner, having apparently lost around $20 million in the process. He had considered it part of the enabling costs to build a splendid, multi-sport, all-weather stadium for the New York area, but that did not happen. None of the metropolitan area’s nine major league franchises in baseball, football, basketball, or hockey could be enticed.
His next commercial foray was into the casino business. Trump discovered that the Hilton chain of 150 hotels made more than a third of its profits from two large hotels in Las Vegas. When New Jersey voted to legalize gambling, he hoped New York would do the same. Politics, however, made that unlikely, especially after the Abscam scandal,9 so he made further reconnaissance trips to Atlantic City. Trump selected a site, bought out the previous owners, and gained a license (giving Norman Vincent Peale as a character reference).
To finance it, he set up a partnership with Holiday Inn. Together they built the Trump Plaza in 1984, with sixty thousand feet of casino floor space, making it one of the biggest casinos in the world. When, two years later, Hilton’s casino license application was denied, Trump bought that property, with Manufacturers Hanover Bank providing $320 million of financing for what became the Trump Castle.
Holiday Inn, however, was less than enchanted by Trump’s acquisition, putting their partner in direct competition a couple of miles away. After a merciless media war between Trump and Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn cut and ran, and Trump became New Jersey’s leading casino owner; the Trump Plaza became the Trump Palace; and Trump reaped an enormous profit on his greenmail stock-trading, even after subtracting related legal expenses (including a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in which he, typically, admitted no guilt but paid a fine. If it had been a strong case, he would have faced the SEC rather than the FCC).
In December 1985, Donald Trump bought the formidable Mar-a-Lago estate of Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in Palm Beach, Florida. He paid only $8 million for the sumptuous house, less than its original cost to build, and turned it into a club and a money-spinning property, as well as, eventually, a presidential winter residence. Across the Inland Waterway from Mar-a-Lago, he also bought a distressed condominium project, for just two thirds of the value of the mortgage on it, and renamed it the Trump Plaza of the Palm Beaches. It, however, was a less successful investment.
The bonanza in Atlantic City coincided with a rise in New York real estate values and in 1986 Forbes Magazine rated Donald Trump, just forty, the fiftieth wealthiest man in America, with a net worth of $700 million, and that was not counting any of his father’s $200 million or more.
Trump’s addiction to the casino industry after his initial successes was almost fatal. Presumably intoxicated with his impressive gains and vindicated intuition, in 1988 he paid $365 million, almost all of it borrowed, to buy routes and aircraft from Eastern Airlines and to run a shuttle service between Washington, New York, and Boston. Almost simultaneously, he borrowed $407 million to buy the illustrious Plaza Hotel. And then he reached for his third casino in Atlantic City, the gigantic, half-completed Taj Mahal. It was being constructed by Resorts International, when the controlling shareholder of that company, James Crosby, died and the company lost its way. Trump bought stock from some of Crosby’s heirs. While Trump’s entourage was cautious, he thought that with the Trump Palace and Trump Castle, he would dominate gambling on the East Coast. In 1986, however, because of intense competition and indifferent management, Atlantic City’s casinos generated $2.5 billion in revenue but only $74 million in profit; it was not a high-margin business and needed rationalization. In February 1988, Trump assured the Casino Control Commission of New Jersey that he could easily finance the completion of the Taj, a planned one-thousand-room hotel with immense and opulent gambling facilities, without resorting to junk bonds.
But Trump’s marriage and his casino ventures were both beginning to fail. His wife, Ivana, was in charge of the Trump Castle Casino, and the property had gone into loss. His casino group manager, the astute Stephen Hyde, and Ivana did not get on. Ivana worked hard and had some aptitude for the business, but Donald decided to pack her off to run the Plaza Hotel, hoping for better results. He was also having an affair with Marla Maples, a startlingly attractive woman, almost a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, and a former homecoming queen and second-level model from Dalton, Georgia, “the carpet capital of America.” It didn’t splash into public view until 1989, but there was considerable strain on both the marital and business relationship of the Trumps. At her parting ceremony from the Trump Castle Casino, Ivana became emotional and wept. it was the occasion for one of Donald’s more déclassé performances. He told the gathered employees: “Look at this. I had to buy a $350 million hotel just to get her out of here and look at how she’s crying. Now that’s why I’m sending her back to New York. I don’t need this, some woman crying. I need somebody strong in here.”10
Trump got his way with the commission, but his privatization bid for Resorts International was challenged by television star and producer Merv Griffin, who put up a 245-million-dollar competing offer. They compromised, with Griffin taking Resorts International’s existing casinos in Atlantic City and Trump getting the Taj Mahal as part of the deal. Banks were not conspicuously enthused, and Trump had to cut both the costs of his hotel and stoop to the issuance of $675 million of the junk bonds he had promised to avoid, at a scorching yield of 14 percent.
By acquiring airlines, the Plaza Hotel, and the Taj Mahal, Trump was rolling the dice like his casino patrons, and the odds were not appreciably better.
That didn’t stop him from placing more bets on a continuation of the Reagan economic boom. In January 1985, Trump had bought the Penn Central yards from 34th Street to 60th Street along the Hudson riverside, on which he had negotiated an option ten years before. He proposed a fantastically vast project, Television City, including the world’s tallest building, 1,910 feet high, a row of seven other buildings of approximately eighty stories, and an immense new studio for NBC, which had proclaimed that it had grown too large for Rockefeller Center and needed to move.
In the spring of 1986, to dramatize his competence to undertake this great project, he engaged in an acerbic public exchange with the combative mayor of New York, Ed Koch, over the city’s inability to get the Wollman ice rink in Central Park back into active use. It had been idle for more than three years and the renovation was $7 million over allotted cost. He offered to get the rink working in four months and at cost and Koch accepted in very sarcastic and skeptical terms. Trump recruited a team that had just built the new arena for Montreal’s frequently world champion hockey team Les Canadiens. Trump outdid himself in holding press conferences for every stage of the proceedings—laying pipe, pouring cement, and so forth—and delivered the rink in functioning order two months early and $750,000 under budget. It was a tremendous public relations success, but not a wise tactic for recruiting the mayor’s support of Television City, without which, the project could not proceed.
Koch finally approved Trump’s application for the Television City project but under tax terms that gave it no prospect for economic success, even after it was pared down significantly from Trump’s original extraordinary plan. Trump pulled out and blamed NBC also (it had opted to stay in enlarged premises at Rockefeller Center). He and Koch were worthy adversaries as verbal jousters. Koch had denounced those who voted for other candidates in the Democratic primary for governor of New York in 1982, as rubes living amongst “cows and pigs, and forests,” not a great vote winner upstate. In this case, Trump called Koch a “moron” and said he should be impeached for involvement in the customary financial skullduggery of New York municipal officials. Koch responded with high amusement that Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig,” and warmed to the theme, accusing him of greed and repeating: “Piggy, piggy, piggy.” Trump rode the mayor for a while, offering to speed up the renovation of Central Park Zoo and taking out full-page advertisements in the New York newspapers attacking Koch’s softness and placatory statements when a young woman was brutally raped and nearly killed in Central Park.
A few weeks later he began what would prove a very successful side-career as a promoter of championship prize fights, starting in Atlantic City with a bout between Michael Spinks and Gary Cooney. It was in Atlantic City also, that he developed his interest in beauty pageants, where he would become a great impresario.
At the same time as the corporate tussle with Merv Griffin over Resorts International, Trump’s marital and romantic pressures finally surged into the public domain and became a serious distraction. In February 1990, after rumors had been intense but unpublished for months, Ivana gave the story to Liz Smith, veteran columnist of the New York Daily News, while Donald was in Japan trying to sell the Plaza Hotel and watching a Mike Tyson prizefight. With the News story out, the New York Post—which had had the story but had been restrained from publishing by its owner, Peter Kalikow, who was a friend of Trump’s—leapt into the fray and the two newspapers competed for which would give the most column inches to the Trump affair. Marla’s and Ivana’s photos and statistics were published and compared, as if they were two prizefighters before a championship bout. The News divided celebrities according to which side they were allegedly on: Cher, Elton John, and Frank Sinatra sided with Donald and Marla; Calvin Klein, Oprah Winfrey, and Princess Diana sided with Ivana; President and Mrs. Bush were undecided. (Almost all of this was rank fabrication.) The Post came back with an alleged remark of Marla’s about Donald: “Best sex I’ve ever had.” The controversy was stoked up by a semi-public confrontation between Ivana and Marla at a café on Aspen Mountain in early 1990. When rumors swirled that their relationship was falling apart, Trump, pretending to be his publicist rather than himself, responded to a call from a Post reporter and said that Trump had split with Marla but had lots of possible replacements, including Carla Bruni (future first lady of France) and Madonna. Not only did Trump glory in all the vulgar tabloid attention, but it apparently boosted his brand. All the publicity coincided with increased revenues at his casinos and at the Plaza Hotel.
Donald and Marla eventually married at the Plaza in December 1993, with a thousand guests in attendance. Howard Stern, the opinionated and outrageous radio personality, said he thought the marriage would last “four months.” Retired football star O. J. Simpson said that if this marriage lasted, “anyone’s relationship can work.” (He was accused of murdering his ex-wife six months later, but was acquitted.) The Times’ acid comment on the wedding was that there “wasn’t a wet eye in the house.” Trump announced that the caviar at the reception had cost him $690,000. It was far from a fairy-tale match. The newly-weds’ daughter, Tiffany, Donald Trump’s fourth child, was born two months before, and the marriage continued for six years, though there was never any suggestion of perfect marital bliss, and there were always rumors of alleged infidelities.11 It must be said that Ivana’s next marriage took place at Mar-a-Lago and that both Ivana and Marla, as ex-wives, have always spoken well of Donald Trump, and he has had nothing but praise for them.
In the autumn of 1987, Trump published his first book, The Art of the Deal, which established him as a bestselling author in that prototypical American genre of self-help success books. Coauthored with Tony Schwartz of New York Magazine, who had been very critical of Trump at times, the book was released in a splashy ceremony at Trump Tower. Gwenda Blair, an unsympathetic biographer of Trump, wrote that the book was a celebration of “one of the most showy, self-involved, and seductive voices of the era.”12 (She hadn’t seen anything yet.) Throughout the late ‘80s, Trump appeared on television interview programs like Larry King Live, and Oprah Winfrey, and as a critic of the country’s incumbents, began laying out the foundation of what would eventually become his presidential platform. As if to prove the point, Trump let it be known that he might have presidential ambitions. At the time, his presidential ambitions were preposterous and seemed like rank hucksterism. It need hardly be added that they proved not to be entirely risible.
He had offered, several years before, to serve as an armaments negotiator opposite the Soviet Union. He was evidently oblivious to the fact that this required considerable technical military and scientific background, and wasn’t like foreclosing buildings, maneuvering for building permits, and accommodating or defeating recalcitrant union leaders in the New York building trades.
In the lead-up to the 1988 elections, Trump took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times with a statement that began: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s foreign defense policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”13 He also gave a speech in New Hampshire, did a little polling, and distributed “I (heart) Donald Trump,” as in “I (Love) New York,” bumper stickers. The newspaper outburst was a bit rich, given that he was essentially slagging off Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, and Caspar Weinberger, who had won the arms race and were about to win the Cold War.
Trump later claimed that he only did all this to promote book sales. The book was a sequence of eleven steps to wealth, a simplistic primer livened up with vicious attacks on enemies like Mayor Koch (“pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent”) and wild flights of egotism (“Deals are my art form”). Though it was vituperatively trashed by critics, it sold more than a million hardcover copies.
More important, Trump was in fact thinking seriously about politics. He had tasted the intoxicating honey of a presidential challenge, the beginnings of Potomac fever. The affliction would not go away for long and would possess him entirely eventually.