A Boy Who Would Be King
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[America today] needs someone with common sense and business acumen, someone who can truly lead America back to what has made us great in the past.... We need someone with a proven track record in business who understands greatness, someone who can rally us to the standard of excellence we once epitomized and explain what needs to be done.... When I started speaking out, I had no idea what the reaction would be. I know I'm a great builder, I've built buildings all over the world. I've had tremendous success. But I hadn't fully exposed my political thoughts and ideas to restore America's greatness. I also knew that the Trump brand is one of the world's great icons of quality and excellence....I know how to deal with complex issues and how to bring together all the various elements necessary for success. I've done it for years and have built a great company and a massive net worth.
-Donald Trump, from the preface to Great Again
This passage from a reissued campaign book (Great Again, formerly Crippled America) was probably transcribed and elaborated from an interview with a ghostwriter—Donald Trump doesn't read books and he certainly doesn't write them. But it does capture a few key aspects of his huckster appeal. One is thematic: past greatness, with all its ethnic, economic and cultural implications. Another is technique: word and idea repetition, an effective method for a salesman, an unconquerable compulsion for a narcissist. Finally, there's his reputation as a business man, the thing that makes everything else possible: all of that money and the ability, glamour and success it implies.But thirteen years ago Donald Trump's so-called financial “empire” was a shambles and he was heavily in debt. Trump has never been as rich as he pretends to be, but his finances were especially bad in the last decade of the twentieth century. The Trump Corporation had been in the red for eight years straight (and would be for two more), and though Trump was still making a lot of money – it's usually his partners and the businesses that depend on him who suffer for his mistakes – his net worth was a fraction of what he claimed. He'd been through a half dozen bankruptcies and he'd sold off two of his three privately held Atlantic City casinos to his own public company, which had lost $1 billion since its inception in 1995.Then Donald Trump was saved by television. A reality TV producer, Mark Burnett of Survivor fame, pitched him the idea of a show where teams of aspiring young business people would compete for a job at one of Trump's companies. Trump would winnow the field down episode by episode until a winner was crowned. Trump had been playing the media to get coverage for decades, but as Burnett persuasively argued, the show would allow Trump to cut out the middleman. “Burnett pressed Trump on the power of TV to shape reputations,” write Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in Trump Revealed, a comprehensive and well-reported account of Trump's life:
Trump had been famous for more than a generation, but a TV show of his own would allow him to mold his image as never before, giving Americans the chance to see him in a way they perceived as unmediated. Without a show of one's own, Burnett believed, a celebrity is but a product of editors' headlines and journalists' takes. Being the star of a show would let Trump remake himself as he saw fit.
For Trump, that meant a chance to hawk his wares and flaunt his money: “My jet's going to be in every episode,” he told NBC's public relations chief, Jim Dowd. “The Taj [casino] is going to be featured. Even if it doesn't get ratings, it's still going to be great for my brand.” And it was.The first season averaged 20 million viewers an episode and Trump used his ballooning fame to sell his name to companies that produced everything from furniture, clothing and cologne (Success by Trump) to steaks (at the Sharper Image) and buildings (contrary to popular belief, most “Trump” buildings merely license the name). More importantly, because of The Apprentice millions of people still believe that Donald Trump is a competent, magnificently successful builder of skyscrapers, condos and casinos. If they didn't, this flagrantly unqualified man would never have gotten a realistic shot at the presidency.Apprentice, Kranish and Fisher write, “changed Trump's trajectory almost immediately.” Dowd recalls the reaction after the show debuted:
People on the street embraced him. He was mobbed. And all of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking, the old New York Post image of him with the wives and the parties. He was a hero and he had not been one before. He told me, “I've got the real estate and hotel and golf niche, I've got the name recognition, but I don't have the love and respect of Middle America.” Now he did. That was the bridge to the [2016] campaign.
Political analysts underestimated the validating effect of so much exposure on a restless population conditioned to hyperbole in advertising and entertainment, and sick of the stage-managed nothingness of American politics. And Trump knew how to take advantage of that cynicism.If he has any talent at all, it's the ability to read an audience, and Trump has read his aging white audience well. He says what no one else in politics will say, and he says it simply, forcefully, and repetitively, confounding the Washington establishment like a stun grenade at a dinner party. Trump also knows how to manipulate the press, which went along for the ride because Trump meant ratings: they would cover any rally or speaking appearance knowing there was a good chance he would say something controversial, banking on the knowledge that their audience was making the exact same calculation. One estimate found that Trump obtained about $2 billion worth of free air time this way. Out of this stuff Donald Trump has improvised a surprisingly potent reactionary campaign with a distinctly authoritarian flavor.Nearly every position he holds today is in direct contradiction to something he has said in the past, whether you measure time in years or even hours. At this late stage of the campaign, he's already backtracked (and in some cases turned about again) on much of what he's promised to do. But his audience, having heard what it wants to hear, refuses to make the connection between his behavior and his words. Most of Trump's business ventures have failed or underperformed, and his greatest business triumphs were more the result of lies, corruption, political connections, and slick marketing, than any business savvy. But his audience does not believe, or does not care, that the official narrative of the life of Donald Trump is a threadbare tissue of lies. Nevertheless, it's a life worth examining.
“Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story.”
-from the “About the Author” section of Great Again
Donald J. Trump is not the very definition of the American success story. But there are several quintessentially American themes in his life-story. Greed, materialism, and hubris, sure, but there are other notes as well.
When a mortgage firm called Lehrenkrauss & Co. was broken up amid charges of fraud, Trump and a partner scooped up a subsidiary that held title to many distressed properties. Trump used that information to buy houses facing foreclosure, expanding his real estate holdings with properties bought on the cheap from people who had little choice other than to sell.
Fred met Mary in 1936. They wed quickly and began having children. Trump was becoming one of the most prolific builders in the outer boroughs, with all the economic and political clout that implied. Their fourth child, Donald, was born in 1946, and he would make great use of those tools as he built his own real estate empire.School-age friends and teachers remember Donald Trump as a “headstrong” child, which is what polite people say when they're talking about a bully. They recall him hurling spitballs, flashing surly looks at teachers, and beating up other children. Macho credentials of any kind impress Trump, and, being a natural prevaricator, tales of his toughness have grown in his own telling. He claims in 1987's The Art of the Deal that he punched his music teacher in the face and gave him a “black eye” because “I didn't think he knew anything about music, and I almost got expelled. I'm not proud of that, but it's clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.” But no one – his friends and teachers – remembered the incident, and when the authors of Trump Revealed pointed that out to him, Trump temporized: “When I say 'punch,' when you're that age, nobody punches very hard. But I was very rambunctious in school.” That part, at least, his music teacher did not dispute: “When that kid was ten,” he recalled, “even then he was a little shit.”
photo by Gage SkidmoreHe is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth more than $200 million.
But the truth was Trump reported less than $25,000 in income that year, and even his father's holdings may not have been worth that much. Rich Trump, however, is a better story than kinda rich Trump, and until he ran for President the ranks of media skeptics were confined to a few intrepid reporters, allowing Trump to burnish his reputation in the eyes of the public.For all his money and his tacky, nouveau riche estates, there is no ornament more important to Trump than a woman. In one of the book's best passages, Kranish and Fisher explain how he used them:
Women have defined Trump as much as any project or property. The Trump brand's primary product line was a menu of ways to fulfill the workingman's vision of a titan's lifestyle, and Trump sold his products—casinos, hotels, condos—in part by surrounding himself with symbols of the high life, most especially beautiful women. The image Trump cultivated had no place for subtlety. He cared about how things looked, and he carefully created pictures, elegantly staged tableaux of beauty, positioning his dates, his girlfriends, his wives, and his children as avatars of wealth, all dress and posed to impress the common man... And he loved a certain sort of woman: models, pageant winners, would be actresses.... As Trump grew older, the age gap grew bigger. Publicly, the women grew quieter, too.
Or, as Trump put it to Esquire magazine in 1991: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”Trump hired models to attend functions with him, and the parties he threw maintained a strict 3 to 2 ratio of women to men. He went into the beauty pageant and modeling businesses. “What I do is successful because of the aesthetics,” he said. “People love my buildings and my pageants.” An example of Trump’s aesthetics can be found in the Miss Universe contest: he bragged that the “bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up” after he took over. One Miss USA contestant recalled that Trump “inspected us closer than any general ever inspected a platoon.” Trump was also accused of sexual harassment, excluding black contestants from the parties he threw, and breaches of contract. Like so many of the lawsuits against him, Trump settled these complaints out of court, settlements that were designed to prevent the claimants from speaking about the issue again. He applied the same treatment to his wives: they were required to sign confidentiality agreements.Trump's first wife was Ivana Winklmayer, and naturally he lied about their backstory, claiming that he first saw her at the 1976 Olympic games in Montreal, and that she was a former member of Czechoslovakia's Olympic ski team in 1972. Later he claimed she was an alternate on the team. (She was neither.) Trump proposed to her on New Years Eve 1976, and they had their first child exactly one year later. In between they married, but first Trump required Ivana to sign a prenuptial agreement (this, like many other things, on the advice of Roy Cohn, who negotiated with Ivana's lawyer). Ivana had a flair for publicity as well, and they carried out their acrimonious negotiations in public through the city's gossip sheets.Trump's mistreatment of his first wife is legendary. There was his womanizing, an activity whose risk he compared with being a soldier in Southeast Asia: “It is,” he bragged, “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” Trump put Ivana in charge of one of his casinos, and when it didn't do well (in no small part thanks to his own incompetence), he fired her and sent her to manage one of his hotels in Manhattan. Then he humiliated her at a farewell ceremony in front of her former employees. “Look at this,” he carped into the microphone. “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 to take care of this place.” At the same time Trump was carrying on a very public affair with the model Marla Maples, whom he pressured into an interview where she was made to brag that Trump was the “best sex I've ever had.” In his first book, 1987's The Art of the Deal, he expounded on the kind of women he found useful: “For a man to be successful,” Trump wrote, “he needs support at home, just like my father had from my mother, not someone who's always griping and bitching.”About that book: after Trump Revealed went to press, The Art of the Deal's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, decided to break his silence about what he'd observed working with Trump. The resulting article, by the redoubtable Jane Mayer, is discomfiting because its source is so authoritative. Back in the mid 80s Schwartz had written an article about Trump’s attempt to strong-arm tenants, who were living in rent-controlled apartments, out of a building he wanted to develop (his tactics included ignoring maintenance requests and threatening to shelter homeless people in vacant apartments). The article was not positive, but Trump hung it on his wall because it made him look tough. He offered Schwartz a lot of money to ghostwrite his first book. Schwartz, a liberal, vacillated but ultimately decided to take the paycheck.What he found was an overgrown child (“pathologically impulsive and self-centered,” in Mayer’s words) who couldn’t keep his attention focused on questions related to the book for more than a few moments. Schwartz tried for weeks to get something out of him. He became so desperate he went with Trump on vacation, thinking there would be fewer distractions, but Trump still couldn't focus. Schwartz had discovered one of Trump’s “essential characteristics”: “He has no attention span… Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn't seem to be fully understood. It's implicit in a lot of what people write, but it's never explicit—or, at least, I haven't seen it. And that is that it's impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then....” At that “Schwartz trailed off,” Mayer writes, “shaking his head in amazement.”Schwartz hit upon an idea: in lieu of those useless interviews, he’d follow Trump through the day, listen in on his phone calls, sit in on his meetings, and gather his information that way. Trump loved the idea (“If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in,” Schwartz said, “he would have been even happier”), and Schwartz spent the next 18 months at his side. He describes Trump as a man with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance… That’s why he so prefers TV as his first new source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” It's no surprise that Trump reportedly had trouble focusing during preparation for the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, and it showed in his performance. (Trump was coached by the former Fox News executive and sexual predator, Roger Ailes.)One of Trump’s other essential characteristics, one with which we’re all now familiar, is the ease with which he lies. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true…. He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Schwartz recognized in Trump’s business dealings what his political opponents have been slow to learn: that most people are “constrained by the truth,” and Trump’s indifference to truth gives him “a strange advantage.” This helps to explain why Trump was able to maintain an aura of success during the 1990s and early 2000s when the record shows anything but, and how he gets away with lying so often today: the media largely didn’t care about his lying before he announced his run for President, and his supporters haven’t cared about it since. In each case the listener heard what they needed to hear.For Trump, the decade and a half before he started The Apprentice was largely about managing failure in business while still making money for himself. He began the 1990s with only 3 of his 22 properties making a profit and a net worth of under $300 million, far less than he claimed. But in the business world, the ludicrous playboy image he had built for himself acted like a firewall: his creditors, who forced him to sell much of his property and enter into several managed bankruptcies (“one of the great deals,” Trump calls it), were lenient because they figured his name, and the customers it brought in, would still be useful. Trump also used his own public company to wrench money out of his struggling properties, selling two of his casinos to it and netting himself a $7 million annual salary. At the same time he involved himself in a number of foolish and unsavory enterprises, from purchasing a sports team in the USFL (a soon-to-be defunct competitor to the NFL), to taking over an airline, which lost business because many women refused to use a company owned by a notorious sexist. Trump also suggested that Mike Tyson be allowed to remain free after his rape conviction so he could continue to make money on the boxing events held at his casinos.Trump's business model was beginning to shift, even before his reality television show aired, into licensing and away from construction. With the newfound popularity conferred by his show, Trump slapped his name on dozens of products, from food to clothing to buildings (recall that most “Trump” buildings are not constructed or owned by Trump or his company). It was the perfect business model for him: no matter the quality of the product, what it did, or whether it was profitable, he always got paid and the risk was shouldered by others.
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Tax these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes and let America's economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore.
It's very tempting to mistake this for ideological consistency, but what it really reflects is consistency of opportunity: jingoism is always a popular attitude in American politics. If Trump believed what he said he wouldn't have switched parties seven times over the next two and a half decades. Trump has actually been a Democrat several times; the Clintons attended his third wedding and he even endorsed Hillary Clinton's 2000 campaign for the Senate.
“This election is a total sham and a travesty.”“Let's fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice!”“We can't let this happen. The world is laughing at us.”“We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!”
This election had an ominous footnote, too: “Twelve days after the 2012 election,” the authors write, “Trump filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a phrase he wanted to be his own: Make America Great Again.” In 2015, he finally committed.
The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.... from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks.... even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business.... The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.
-Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal
A lot of people were encouraging me to speak out, and I realized that with my well-known success story and record of building residential and office buildings and developing public spaces—all the while accumulating personal wealth—I could inspire people to help create the most massive turnaround in American history.
-Donald Trump, Great Again
Trump had several important political advantages in 2016. He may be a phony, but so were all of his opponents – the oleaginous Ted Cruz, the vacant Mark Rubio, the bland, entitled Jeb Bush, the lurching, desperate Chris Christie – and Trump's brand of phoniness had the advantage of being fresh. “He's not afraid,” one of his supporters told a Washington Post reporter at an early rally. “He's not a politician.” His opponents were politicians, though, and very conventional ones at that. They could read the polls. They didn't expect Trump's popularity to last, but while it did they were determined to pay him court in order to woo his followers after he dropped out of the race. As the primary wore on and Trump racked up victories, each nursed the fugitive hope that if enough of his opponents dropped out, he might have the space to take down Trump. Pundits kept claiming that Trump had a ceiling: 25 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent in the primaries, but as his opponents quit his numbers kept going up. Today, in the general election, against another compromised, conventional politician, Trump’s ceiling is now somewhere above 40 percent, within arm’s reach of the Oval Office.Trump’s campaign style is extremely unconventional. Decisions are made on the fly with a handful of advisers and family members while they watch cable TV. He does very little of the one-on-one “retail politics” that conventional campaigns are supposed to involve, preferring interviews and call-ins with the press and large rallies where he can extemporize at length about the country, people he doesn’t like, and himself. Some of his favorite targets are the reporters covering his campaign. Fenced off in a press area, Trump will direct the crowd to boo at the “horrible people” reporting and filming from the floor. The crowds usually oblige with screaming, middle fingers, taunts, sexist insults, threats of violence and even actual violence (and some of Trump’s campaign workers have taken part in this as well). As Trump says about the media in his vile, self-absorbed, and painfully repetitive book, Great Again:
I've definitely met people at both the very top as well as the lowest end of the food chain. I mean, the very bottom: they are horrible human beings, they are dishonest. I've seen these so-called journalists flat-out lie. I say that because incompetence doesn't' begin to explain the inaccurate stories they have written. There is no other explanation.
Protesters interrupt Trump’s rallies so often that it’s become a part of the show: someone stands up and shouts, or silently holds up a sign, and security removes them while Trump shouts orders, hurls insults, and fantasizes about violence:
“Get ‘em out of here!”“In the good old days, this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough.”“You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.”“I’d like to punch him in the face.”“Knock the crap out of him.”“Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court.”
Trump’s dire, vague prognostications about the future of the United States at the rallies, and in his book, set the stage for the vitriol. “America needs to start winning again,” reads the beginning of Chapter 1 in Great Again. “Nobody likes a loser and nobody likes to be bullied. Yet, here we stand today, the greatest superpower on Earth, and everyone is eating our lunch. That’s not winning.” His announcement speech (and hundreds of speeches and press conferences and interviews) began in the same vein: “Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.”The next passage of his improvised speech is now infamous:
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. [Here he stops to take in and acknowledge applause.] When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
This is a good example of how brazenly Trump will lie to cover himself. He addresses this portion of the speech in his book and blames the public outcry on the media: “They don’t care about printing the truth, they don’t want to repeat my entire remarks, and they don’t want to be bothered explaining what I meant.” And then Trump picks out a few words from the speech without himself repeating his “entire remarks” about the subject, which are quoted in full above. “I would never insult Hispanics or any group of people,” writes the man who called a Hispanic contestant in one of his pageants “Miss Housekeeping” (and “Miss Piggy,” because she had gained weight). These rallies and rants capture, in sound and ink, an essential truth about the Trump campaign: it is, as much as anything, an exercise in cathartic hatred.Donald Trump's rise to the Republican nomination for President of the United States has baffled almost everyone, perhaps even Donald Trump. In retrospect, though, he seems like the perfect candidate for his time. America's economic recovery has been weak and deeply iniquitous, its demography is undergoing drastic changes, the threat of terrorism has been inflated far beyond the true danger it represents, and racism has returned to the foreground of national politics. The Republican Party has shrunk and hardened into clutch of white nativists and free market extremists. And the American public, juiced on a diet of news feeds generated by computer algorithms, and inured to the hyperbole of TV news and advertising, has come to the conclusion, with much justification, that its political system is a joke.Who better to represent the red team than a foolish, ignorant, dissembling, self-absorbed bigot with a dash of strong-man charisma?I think one thing that has been so discomfiting for people who, like me, are aghast at the idea of President Trump, is the concrete realization that large swathes of the population don’t really believe in democracy as we understand it. (For minorities and others this is old news.) Trump’s “law and order” campaign – a phrase he repeats constantly for white voters – has nothing to do with justice as we conceive it. Garret Epps put it well when he wrote recently in The Atlantic, while noting that Trump has repeatedly suggested curtailing freedom of the press, that,
In other areas, his program is torture, hostage taking, murder of innocent civilians, treaty repudiation, militarized borders, official embrace of Christianity, exclusion and surveillance of non-favored religious groups, an end to birthright citizenship, racial and religious profiling, violent and unrestrained law enforcement, and mass roundups and deportation.
All of this is compounded by Trump’s vacuousness, ignorance, laziness, bigotry, criminality, misogyny, dumbbell machismo, and his serial fabrications about himself and any subject to which he puts his words. Trump's base, we now realize, has an idea of what America should be, but the underpinnings of that ideal are authoritarian, not democratic; they're tribal, not civic.This is not a foundation for a stable country, much less a prosperous one, but I don't think his supporters realize that. I don't think they understand that a man as incompetent, deceptive, and polarizing as Trump is not going to be able to give them what they want. I don't think they realize that a man with instincts this aggressive isn't going to keep them out of foreign wars. But I also don't think, for the most hardened and resentful among them, that any of the history contained above is going to matter. They're angry and afraid and someone has told them what they want to hear, and the rest of us are in the position of hoping for a victory by someone who has had a role in many of the policies that have left America such an aggressive, unjust, and unequal place.I know one Trump supporter very well. We've been close since we were children. He's smart and he's articulate; he is capable of great kindness. I am certain that he is going to read this. But one of the things that makes this election so horrible for me is, I am just as certain it's not going to make any difference.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.
