I was correct about the media. I quickly did an online search and discovered that there were a bunch of articles picking up on thedirty.com’s lead, including a feature in a publication called Life & Style with the heading “Did Donald Cheat” and two pages of photographs of Trump, Melania, and the dyed-blonde porn star, who self-evidently had breast implants.
Knowing Trump would be pissed, I started to work the phones on behalf of the Boss, calling the woman who I’d learned was peddling the Daniels story, a self-styled agent for women with dirt to sell on celebrities and wealthy men named Gina Rodriguez, and issuing a standard form threat: stop this story immediately. Then I emailed the general counsel of Life & Style magazine and demanded the story be retracted, but it was too late, because it had gone to press.
When Davidson sent me Daniels’s denial letter I printed it out, wrote one for Trump along the same lines, and made my way to the Boss’s office again. He was on the phone but I could tell he was agitated about my current mission, and keeping word from reaching his wife.
“So what do you have for me?” he asked, ending his call abruptly.
“A copy of Stormy’s letter,” I said, passing it to him. “Your statement will be short and mirror her denial.”
“Good, Michael,” he said, eyeing the document. “Let me know when the lawyer gets that article taken down, if he can. Make sure you keep this letter in case I need it to be sent upstairs. You understand.”
“I do,” I said, knowing he was referring to his wife. “Don’t forget I’m married to an Eastern European woman too. They don’t play around when it comes to this kind of stuff.”
Trump nodded knowingly, sharing the male resignation to the ways of women, but I also could tell he was eager to tell me the true story. As I’d suspected, he couldn’t resist taking credit for bedding a porn star; he wanted me to think he was still a stud, I could tell. Trump’s meticulous caution when it came to insulating himself from getting caught in any of his many, many scams and deceptions was thrown to the wind in favor of a moment of pleasure in a sexual brag—like he’d be caught doing four years hence on Access Hollywood. To me, he looked like a little kid caught in a lie; I knew he’d slept with Daniels. I thought I’d give him a little nudge, but I figured his juvenile impulse would kick in regardless.
“Ok, Boss,” I finally said. “What really happened here?”
“I got stuck going to a charity thing in Utah,” he sighed. “I was there with Big Ben Roethlisberger,” referring to the Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback and Super Bowl winner. “When these two girls came over to us. When we found out that Stormy was a porn star—can you believe they call them stars?—Big Ben was in heat. The only problem for him was that he was standing next to Trump and all they wanted was Trump. Can you believe it? Big Ben is like this big, amazing quarterback, but all she wanted was Trump.”
Trump held up the photo of Daniels in the thedirty.com article and shook his head sadly. The recent image of her showed a woman in her early thirties, pretty in a vah-voom kind of way, but not exactly a study in classy restraint and style, as Trump preferred in his wife and daughters, but his taste for blue-collar pleasures apparently extended to the fairer sex.
“She didn’t look like this back then,” he said. “That’s the problem with time. It’s not good to anyone. You should’ve seen Big Ben going after her. But all they wanted was Trump.”
I nodded in agreement. He constantly referred to himself in the third person, a trait that I saw as a quirk at the time, but in hindsight was the indication of dissociative egomania that should have served as a warning. The big point he was making, I knew, was that he’d been in a competition with an NFL star quarterback for the attention of a porn star and the reality TV star was going to win any such showdown, as least in his reckoning. Winning was always, always, always Trump’s top priority, no matter the price, less a competitive streak than a compulsion that has led the nation and maybe even the world to the brink of disaster.
Trump told me that he’d offered to get Stormy Daniels on The Apprentice, no doubt the real reason that she’d been interested in Trump in the first place. As we all know now, Daniels was a canny operator with an eye on the main prize, so why wouldn’t she be interested in networking with a network star and real estate tycoon? Porn was sex in return for money, a transaction Trump could understand, and she must’ve been chasing a taste of his power and prestige as she submitted to the advances of an obese and hulking married man nearly three times her age in a hotel in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
The Boss said that he’d been unable to convince NBC and Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, that it was a good idea to have a porn star on the show. Daniels was more than a porn star, as we’ve all discovered: she wrote and directed the films with a certain flair, and she’d managed to start with nothing in life and turn herself into a celebrity, of a kind, or I should say of a kind that Trump was attracted to. Pro wrestling, porn stars, Kentucky Fried Chicken—there was a consistency to his appetites.
In the days ahead, thedirty.com took down the story and it drifted into the ether. Trump wasn’t a presidential candidate and his celebrity was barely B-List, truth be told, and it looked like it would stay that way forever, so the currency of the potential scandal quickly dropped in value, as I explained to the Boss. The story was irrelevant and it would quietly and quickly die, I told him. With the mutual denials, the lone remaining concern was that his wife might catch wind of what really amounted to little more than a rumor. Even then, both of us knew, the fallback position was that Mrs. Trump was like countless wives of wealthy men in America and around the world. She knew her husband almost certainly cheated on her, but she’d made her peace with the deal she’d entered into with Trump. She could know it was true, in her heart, but she didn’t want to know. Like her husband, she relied on plausible deniability. That was where I came in, as Trump’s fixer, as he and I both understood intuitively: I was the buffer, offering both the Boss and his long-suffering wife a way to live a lie.
But as Trump looked at the photo of Daniels, it was impossible not to see him reminiscing, in the same way he’d talked about Jill Harth, an aging lion recalling his conquests in the wild, knowing that those glory days were rapidly disappearing into distant memories.
“Man, she would have been great for ratings,” Trump said, now with a heavy sigh. “And great for me.”
“Not if Melania found out,” I said.
“That’s for sure,” he said. “Now get out of here and go finish this. Let me know if anything new happens.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Chapter Eight
That’s What Friends Are For
Why does Donald Trump have no friends? Perhaps the story of the Trump Winery in 2011 will shed some light on the matter of what it’s like to be his “friend.” For years, Trump had been friends with John Kluge, a media conglomerate billionaire in the 1980s, and once one of the wealthiest and best-known men in America; he’d topped the Forbes list as the richest man in the world in 1984. Kluge had accumulated the collection of independent TV stations that would eventually be put together to form the Fox network under Rupert Murdoch, and Kluge had moved in the same social circles in Palm Beach and New York that Trump inhabited.
Kluge also shared the Boss’s propensity for messy divorces. By the 1980s, Kluge’s third wife was named Patricia, a former nude model with a faux upper-class British accent who’d married a man nearly three decades older than her, only, inevitably, to get divorced a few years later. In the settlement, the former Mrs. Kluge took possession of a house in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Albemarle, along with a cash settlement of $100 million. The house wasn’t a mansion, it was whatever was bigger and more impressive than that—more like a castle. The forty-five-room colossus was surrounded by more than 200 acres that she turned into a vineyard making fine sparkling wines, a high prestige, high-risk business. Like many divorcees or widows of we
althy men, she had expensive property and fancy jewelry and tastes, but not enough income to maintain the lifestyle she’d become accustomed to after she sold the rights to her annuity, so she ran up a mountain of debt that she couldn’t sustain in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. Leveraging the vineyard to take out more and more loans, her wine company was soon forced into default by its bank.
By 2010, she’d been compelled to hold two auctions to sell jewelry and furniture, raising $15 million, but even that sum hadn’t kept Patricia Kluge from having to declare bankruptcy. This was a classic example of how Trump read the newspaper, for deals and opportunities, not the news; he’d figured she had to be a billionaire, so he was amazed when he came across reports of her destitute status. When she came to Trump Tower to meet the Boss in 2011, it was instantly obvious to him that she was in deep trouble—and she was going to be in even deeper trouble in short order.
A “friend” approaching Trump for assistance in a time of need was making a mistake of epic proportions. Trump doesn’t help people, he preys on them, and buying the estates of the formerly super wealthy was a specialty of his, as his purchase of Mar-a-Lago illustrated; beating down the price and taking advantage of people who’d once been wealthier than the Boss gave him a kind of existential and karmic thrill. His crocodile tears and fake empathy for the downfallen ex-wife of a recently deceased good friend were preposterous, as I could see his mind was spinning a million miles an hour trying to figure out how to acquire the property for the lowest possible number.
She was trying to sell the house and vineyard at auction for $100 million, but Trump told me there was no way he was going to pay that much, nor would anyone else. He was going to get it cheap and his method of approach to such matters was to find a point of weakness to exploit. In this case, the Kluges had an adopted son who was also in financial distress, a common occurrence in wealthy families, Trump told me; every family has a weak link, he believed. Trump learned that the land near the vineyard, including more than 200 acres that had to be crossed to get to the estate, was held in a trust for Mrs. Kluge’s only son.
“Kluge’s son is a complete mess,” Trump told me, as he explained what he’d done. “He was desperate for money. So I bought the right of first refusal to acquire the land next to the vineyard for $500,000. Now I have a lien on the son’s interest and he won’t be able to do anything with the property unless it goes to me.”
Holy shit, I thought: classic Trump. He’d identified the weak link in his adversary—because that’s what Patricia Kluge really was to him by now—and he was going to exploit it.
“Are you serious, Boss?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Trump said. “They can do whatever they want with the land but they will have to deal with me. It’s complicated, but the land and house are split into separate entities, and the land is the real value. The house is worth very little without the land surrounding it. Trust me, I am going to own this property on the cheap.”
Trump greedily flicked through a portfolio of photographs of Albemarle and the rolling hills of Virginia. The place really was spectacular.
“This will be my next acquisition,” he said. “Trump Winery.”
Applying the brutal logic of New York real estate, Trump arranged for “No Trespassing” signs to be put up all along the road to greet visitors to the estate and he let the grass go un-mowed so that anyone driving up to view the potential investment would have to wonder about the manner in which the gateway property was kept, thus damaging the valuation and functionality of the estate as a place of business.
With a lien on the adjacent land, and no takers on land at the exorbitant price, coupled with a derelict neighboring property, Trump approached the bank then holding the remaining Kluge land through bankruptcy. By then Kluge had gone bankrupt, making her even more vulnerable—as Trump knew from personal experience. Control of the land with the right-of-way easement for the only access to the estate did indeed make Trump the only possible buyer, the bank had to reluctantly admit. The bank was trapped, selling him the underlying land of the vineyard for $6.2 million, plus $1.7 million for the equipment and inventory, far less than the $16 million paid at the foreclosure auction.
This left the house, which was a separate parcel of property, and Trump had a plan for this stage of the game, as well.
“You know, Michael, I’m the only possible buyer for the house, too,” Trump said.
“I agree that the house has to be part of the land,” I said. “But they could sell to someone who doesn’t care about the acreage in the front of the house.
“No chance,” Trump barked, opening up a map of the parcels of land to show me. “You drive in from the front gate. It’s a fifty-acre drive up to the house. I own all the land in front and on the sides of the house. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to build a wall.”
“A wall?” I asked. “For what reason?”
“I’m going to build a wall right in front of the house,” Trump said. “I’m going to put up a twenty-foot concrete wall with Trump Winery painted every twenty feet in massive letters. Can you imagine waking up in Kluge’s mansion and looking out the fucking bedroom window and all you see is a concrete wall with my name on it?”
Trump laughed.
“Now, there’s a real fucking selling point,” he said.
“Holy shit,” I said, out loud this time. “You just made a $50 million house worthless. Even worse for the bank, they have to maintain the house to make sure it’s salable in the meantime. They’re going have to spend real money.”
“Exactly,” Trump said triumphantly. “I’m speaking to the bank later today. By the end of the day I’ll own the whole fucking thing.”
And so it came to pass. Trump bought the house for $6.7 million, making the total purchase price for the entire estate less than $13 million, when the asking price had been more than $100 million. There was an undeniable kind of genius to Trump’s approach, a completely amoral will to win, no matter the cost—in this case, essentially taking away the Kluges’ son’s inheritance in one fell swoop.
Even better, Trump bragged to me as he celebrated his victory, there were millions of dollars’ worth of excellent wine in the inventory of the vineyard, which he could rebrand as Trump Wines and sell in his golf courses and hotel bars, yet another win.
“What a deal,” Trump said to me. “I just stole the property. In this case someone else’s loss is Trump’s gain.”
He pulled out a bottle of wine.
“Here’s a bottle of red,” Trump said. “Take it home and try it out with Laura. I hear it’s the best sparkling red on the market.”
The story could end there, with Trump putting his son Eric in charge of the vineyard, but that was never how things went at the Trump Organization. Because get this: Trump made Patricia Kluge think he’d done her a favor. Seriously. She was bankrupted and walked away without a penny, her son was essentially disinherited, despite once having a father who was the richest man on the planet, and somehow she was happy with the transaction. I knew Trump had hired her and her current husband to work for Eric at the vineyard, with a one-year contract for $250,000—which he terminated at the end of the year, of course. Kluge had been ripped off by the worst jackal of them all and she didn’t even know it, and probably doesn’t to this day. And she was grateful for being torn to shreds and devoured, a fact that boggled my mind.
“My worst nightmare and personal Armageddon are finally over,” she told the Daily Beast at the time Trump took over her vineyard. “I’m thrilled beyond belief. Now I can finally relax, take a week off, go on vacation.”
That was the real real art of the deal—or steal.
* * *
But don’t get the impression Trump was always or even usually a rational player. He knew how to take advantage of others, but there was an essential foolishness, even idiocy, to insisting on getting his way a
ll the time. Let me give you an example of his ruinous and relentless need to always “win.”
Later in 2011, a lawyer friend of mine in Miami called to say that he was representing the Doral golf club in Miami in its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. He wondered if this was a property that might interest the Trump Organization. I immediately knew this was a prospect the Boss would want to hear about, so I asked my friend to send me the documents related to the Doral. Two large binders arrived the following day via FedEx laying out the details and specifications for the impending sale of the property, one of the most prestigious clubs in the country and the home of the legendary Blue Monster course; it was also the site of a PGA Tournament Trump was desperate to host. I read the terms of the proposed sale with growing excitement: the project didn’t just suit Trump’s portfolio of golf courses, it epitomized the themes of excellence and luxury, together with a ton of history and prestige. Doral wouldn’t just be another golf acquisition, it would become one of the pearls of the Trump Organization.
I picked up the deal books, stepped over to Trump’s office, and knocked on his door, as usual. He waved me in, in the familiar way that happened dozens of times a day, and I sat and told him that I’d bird-dogged a deal through a business associate that put us in the inside position to buy Doral. Trump wasn’t excited—he was thrilled. The look on his face when he got a dose of deal fever was always fun to behold, a mixture of delight and aggression and determination. Hitting the intercom button on his speakerphone, he called for Ivanka to come up from the 25th floor, where the kids each had an office.
I was about to learn another lesson about treachery and Ivanka and how the Trump family operated. For years, I had been very friendly with Ivanka. She was my neighbor at Trump Park Avenue, and when she was single it wasn’t unusual for her to stop over for a casual pasta dinner with my family; she loved my homemade lasagna. We joked around with each other and she enjoyed the banter of business and gossip and the media. She wasn’t like one of the bros, but she was no shrinking flower or delicate debutante; she wanted to be in business with the big boys and her ambition and sharp elbows were evident. But she changed when she got involved with Jared Kushner, the scion of a New Jersey real estate family with its own history of troubles and woes. Kushner was supremely arrogant, a real snob, to be honest, with an exaggerated sense of his importance and intelligence. I would occasionally see him in the gym at Trump Park Avenue, or at the office, but for the most part he kept me at arm’s length—which was more than fine with me.
Disloyal: A Memoir Page 13