by Doug Wead
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBy1CAyH08w
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html
6. https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/405143-michael-moore-trump-ran-for-president-because-he-was-jealous-of
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html
8. https://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/04/06/wsjnbc-poll-a-donald-trump-surprise/
9. https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-cnn-piers-morgan-live-june-1-2011
10. https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-cnn-piers-morgan-live-june-1-2011
11. https://ijr.com/5-times-donald-trump-praised-socialized-healthcare/
12. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/george-will-i-hope-trump-runs-and-gets-shellacked-so-we-can-end-this-charade/
13. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-accepts-barack-obama-was-born-u-s-giuliani-n645371
14. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/curtis-houck/2015/07/02/chris-matthews-voters-trump-because-hes-comic-book-hero-and-sinatra
15. http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/the-last-word/2015-06-15
16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
17. http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/republicans-2016-what-to-do-with-the-donald/
18. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/podcast-totally-subjective-presidential-odds-early-august-edition/
19. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/22/donald-trump-wont-win-republican-presidential-nomination
20. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/presidential-candidates-dashboard.html
21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IA-CkLFVs&t=24s
28. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/opinion/the-seven-dwarfs.html
29. https://time.com/3512769/in-the-latest-issue-10/
5
ERIC TRUMP AND THE JOURNEY TO TRUMP TOWER
“Somebody’s got to tell the truth about all of this. It is really a very special story.”
—ERIC TRUMP1
On March 5, 2019, I took the Amtrak Acela Express from Union Station in Washington, DC, to Penn Station in New York City. I had been interviewing Eric Trump by phone, and he had invited me up to Trump Tower to meet other members of the family and to get a tour at the center of the family business enterprise. If I was going to reconstruct some of the more studied moments of the campaign, including the drama of Election Night, it would be helpful to get the lay of the land.
“It’s so interesting,” Eric told me over the phone. “You have every joker in the world coming out with stories that are boosting the author’s own self-importance or are simply inaccurate. It literally makes me laugh. Some of these people weren’t even there. Some were, but they did not play the roles they said they were playing. Some didn’t give the advice they claimed, and some of them spent time doing more harm than good. Then, all of a sudden, here is a book with them taking credit for winning the election! It’s actually flabbergasting.”
Eric Trump was obviously frustrated. “If you are willing to do this and get this right, this is a story that is unmatched in political history. There has never been an account from my father, or members of the family; you have the opportunity to get this right and do something that is very special.”
Trump Tower is a New York skyscraper that houses private residences, offices, restaurants, and retail shops. It also has numerous floors sealed off from the public. This includes the president’s private residence as well as the Trump Organization’s offices.
As instructed by phone, I walked across the famous gold and brass lobby to a stand by the elevator, where a kindly, trim attendant was waiting. He immediately recognized my name, which actually surprised me. I suppose I was expecting an argumentative, hostile security person, who would scowl at my driver’s license, like the Secret Service at the White House. A high school band was playing in the foyer, just across from the famous golden escalator where Donald and Melania Trump had coasted down to his presidential announcement ceremony. Almost immediately, a cheerful young lady appeared. It was Kim Benza, Eric’s assistant, and she accompanied me on the fast ride up to the twenty-fifth floor.
When the elevator doors opened we faced a counter in front of a black wall with the golden words THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION dramatically spread out across its length.
I was ushered into a waiting room, no doubt one designed for clients and visitors, to soften them up for the business deal that was coming. A Secret Service agent lingered there, and we got into a conversation while I waited. He was obviously assigned to the Trump children, and I had written the book on the subject of presidential children, so we knew many of the same people and were soon exchanging stories.
The walls in this waiting room showcased dramatic pictures of Trump properties around the world, including some of the buildings that Ivanka had described in her conversations with me. But the gaze of any visitor was inevitably drawn to a north wall of windows looking out onto a spectacular view of New York City. One could look down on the canyons of other skyscrapers and then beyond them to the lush green of Central Park. It was a cold but sunny day.
From this vantage point one could easily understand why Donald Trump eventually had to buy the Plaza Hotel. That famous property sat like a toy model on display just below. It must have been a persistent temptation for years to the billionaire businessman before he finally pulled the trigger and bought it in 1988, announcing to the New York Times that “I haven’t purchased a building, I have purchased a masterpiece—the Mona Lisa.”2
Trump would tell me in a subsequent interview that it was best to buy a poorly managed business because then you could improve on it and sell it at a profit. Conversely, he explained, one should never buy an expertly run enterprise, because if you can’t improve on it you may end up selling it at a loss. This, he insisted, was why he had become president of the United States at the perfect time in history. In Trump’s assessment George W. Bush and Barack Obama had driven the country into economic ruin. Fortunately, for him, it made his economic recovery all the more spectacular. But in the case of the Plaza Hotel, now sitting like a dollhouse below me, most believed that Donald Trump had overpaid for the place, spending $850 million in today’s money.
Ironically, Trump must have gazed down on the Plaza Hotel every day, tormented by its fame, telling his children and visitors that the Mills Brothers performed there throughout the 1930s. Truman Capote once threw a party there. Liza Minnelli lived there. Miles Davis performed on its ballroom stage. This was where the Beatles stayed when they visited America. This was the hotel they used for the movie Home Alone 2. As the proud new buyer, Donald Trump would have embraced its illustrious history, never knowing at the time that in fact he himself would now become its most famous connection. Long after the names of its many celebrated residents had passed from memory, buyers and sellers would forever say, “Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, once owned this hotel.”
“Much of what you see in the hotel today,” Eric would tell me, “from the chandeliers that still hang in all the spaces, to the lobby, were all put in by my father and mother. Their fingerprints are all over the fabric of this iconic building.”
By the mid-1990s, his lust for the property sufficiently sated, Donald Trump sold his “Mona Lisa” to an assortment of outside investors. Now it still sits below the windows of his tower, no longer a temptation, more like a trophy from an earlier chapter in his life.
> ERIC TRUMP ON WHY HIS FATHER RAN FOR PRESIDENT
Eric Trump was born January 6, 1984. At thirty-five years of age, he is the third child, after Don Jr. and Ivanka. He is already one of America’s savviest young businessmen, serving as a trustee and vice president of the Trump Organization, running all its hotels, golf properties, commercial and residential buildings, retail spaces, and private estates and the Trump Winery.
Eric has amassed a $300 million net worth on his way to becoming one of New York’s most famous and generous philanthropists, a favorite charity being the Saint Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. There he built the ICU and surgery unit that houses the sickest children on the planet, and it bears the name of the Eric Trump Foundation.
Eric is one of the most personable members of the family, dynamic and a bundle of energy. He is also the tallest Trump, at least for now, standing in at six feet, five inches. His younger brother, Barron, a son from the marriage of Donald and Melania, is only thirteen years of age and is already pushing the numbers skyward. By the time I finish this book, Barron may stand taller than any of them.
My conversations with Eric had begun the month before I made the trip to Trump Tower. I had asked him why he thought his father had finally decided to run for president.
“For years, I could see that my father was very frustrated with politicians in the United States,” he said. “He would read a story in the newspaper and he would just roll his eyes. And I don’t mean to put all of this on Barack Obama; he was just as frustrated with some of the policies and mistakes made by George W. Bush.
“This frustration was especially evident when Obama gave $150 billion to Iran, including $1.7 billion in cash. I can still see him sitting there reading a newspaper. He was shaking his head and saying, ‘What the hell are our politicians doing? What are these stupid people doing? This country doesn’t like America, they do not care about our people, they hate our way of life. What do you think is going to happen to the money?’
“Remember, my dad is a builder. He would often look at the problems in America from that perspective. We have bridges that are collapsing. Our highways are falling apart. Our airports were once the best in the world and now they are terrible. Our politicians are squandering away our country’s money and doing nothing to fix our own nation.
“La Guardia Airport, for example, is a joke. They have garbage cans under collapsed ceiling tiles that have been there for five years, all because they are not willing to fix the roof. It would drive my father, and all of us, to be honest, crazy.
“We have major drug problems.
“We have these endless wars that we weren’t winning, because our politicians handcuffed our great troops.
“The economy wasn’t growing. We had stagnation of wages for sixteen years, and under Obama we had the slowest recovery since the Great Depression.
“I remember my father shaking his head, knowing that our educational system was ranked thirtieth in the world. He took it personally. What were these people doing? What was going on?
“I remember him watching CBS Sixty Minutes one night, and they did a segment on how our nuclear program had deteriorated. They were talking about unusable missiles and our depleted nuclear arsenal. He was just amazed that the US government was allowing journalists from Sixty Minutes to go into the nation’s silos to show the world how vulnerable we were.
“Sometimes he would read stories in the newspaper and would literally shake his head in frustration.
“Doug, this is what made my father run for president of the United States. He didn’t run for president just because he wanted to be president. He did not do it because he wanted to give up an amazing life. He knew no one had the backbone to do what was needed to fix the nonsense that he was reading about every single day. He also knew he was going to shake up the swamp. He was going to make certain politicians very angry, many of the same people who benefit from all of the problems created in Washington, DC. He was using his own money. He did not need lobbyists and the politically connected. He made them all powerless.”
“Well,” I said, “he surely didn’t have to run. And if he had talked about it for such a long time, as you say, then he had to have been told and he had to have known how traumatic, how devastating, it would be. The criticism. The hostility. Even under normal circumstances, let alone with the idea that he was going to change things in a big way.”
“I’ve said it a million times,” Eric answered. “This is a guy that didn’t need to run for president. He had every politician seeking his favor. He could do any deal he wanted to do around the world. He had freedom. He wasn’t getting hit from investigations, political harassment, fake news like he is now. He was the last guy that needed to do this.”
I wondered why he hadn’t run for president before, and Eric thought it had a lot to do with the maturation of the second generation of the Trump Organization.
“It is obvious that he was frustrated. For a very long time, but he was primarily a businessman, and the company was his primary responsibility. I think he hoped some political figure would step forward who would actually have common sense and backbone. At that point, Don, Ivanka, and I were not ready to take on the responsibility of the Trump Organization. In 2016, we were, and all the stars aligned. That was part of it.”
It became apparent that the run for president would not only be a journey for Donald Trump, it would also a moment that involved the whole family.
“I want to put this thing in context,” Eric Trump said. “It wasn’t an easy decision. I remember being in the office when NBC was offering hundreds of millions of dollars to do seasons fifteen and sixteen of The Apprentice. They wanted to sign him and all of us for another two or three years. We were all part of the show at that point, and it was a tremendous success. I remember him looking at the executives who were in the meeting saying, ‘You know what, I am not willing to do this right now.’ By the look on their faces, it was clear that it was the first time they had ever been rejected when that kind of money was on the table.
“Very soon after the meeting with NBC, we had the famous family meeting in Trump Tower. I will never forget him saying, ‘Kids, let’s give this a go, I am going to do this!’” Obviously that started the whole thing. ‘He could say, ‘I’ve made billions of dollars in my life. I’ve succeeded at everything I have ever done and I am going to jump into it.’”
SO WHAT’S A CAUCUS?
“When we started out we had no one, Doug; we had no one that believed in him. We had no one that believed in the family. When he gave that speech, day one, at Trump Tower, we were there, standing right next to him, as he announced for the presidency. And soon we would be out there fighting in every state.
“We spoke at all the caucuses. And this is funny—no one knew what caucuses were. I remember driving to our first caucus location in our first state of Iowa. I asked the political team, ‘Guys what the hell is a caucus?’ This is not something we did as a family. We built hotels, residential buildings. We know operations, management and business. The political world was brand new to all of us.
“They said, ‘Well, you are going to be speaking at a large high school in Sioux City.’ It is the biggest series of gyms I have ever seen in my life, with overflow cafeterias and other assembly rooms, all filled with people.
“They continued, ‘It is going to be you, and candidates or representatives from every campaign: Jeb Bush’s campaign manager, Ted Cruz’s comms director, candidates themselves. You are going to have exactly five minutes, not a second more, because they will cut you off. You are going to pitch your candidate and they will be pitching theirs.’
“As it turns out, I ran from gym to gym, room to room, talking about why I thought my father would do an incredible job and why he was in the fight and why the country needed him. We knew nothing about politics at that point, but we were humans. We represented family and love. America could read through the others. Paid campaign operatives. Paid politicians.
“We were just getting started. We had not won anything yet. But the movement was beginning. It was incredible. The whole thing was incredible.
“The passion we were seeing in the states was amazing. Ted Cruz, who spent many years of his life preparing for that moment, went on to beat us in Iowa, but the engines were ignited and the momentum at our backs was indescribable. People were fed up with politics. They wanted results. And that core base would grow into a national movement.
“As it turned out, just before the Iowa caucuses reporters accused the Ted Cruz campaign of calling caucus goers and telling them that Ben Carson was dropping out. Carson was splitting the Cruz vote, so that little political play helped him win. But we were off and running.” In the following weeks, candidate Trump would go on to secure the Republican nomination in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. From that point on, the campaign proceeded full steam ahead, never looking back.
“I had a similar experience in Nevada. I went to speak at one of the caucuses and wasn’t even able to make it into the assembly room. There was a line, maybe five hundred yards long, four to five people wide, and as I was walking in, I was immediately noticed. I took a picture with every single person in that line, half of which were wearing Make America Great Again hats. And virtually all of them were saying that they were honored to be voting for my father. I took pictures for almost three hours that night the entire time, thinking that this movement was unstoppable.
“I remember my father calling me as I was on my way home, to meet him at Trump International Hotel and Tower Las Vegas. He asked how it felt. And I said ‘Pop, I don’t know how we don’t win this by a large margin.’ I told him the story and that I didn’t even have the chance to address the masses. He said, ‘What do you mean you didn’t talk?’
“I said, ‘I got cornered by the crowd. I ended up taking selfies with every single person on the way into the place. The enthusiasm was incredible, and honestly I was more effective at just taking selfies and talking to people and saying hi to the kids. People were giving me hugs.’