by Donald Trump
Disappointing behavior by people in the press occurs on both sides of the aisle. A conservative commentator on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer, was really hitting me hard last spring. He couldn’t believe I was #1 in the polls and kept knocking me. Now, you have to understand, he didn’t know me, he never met me. But one day on Bill O’Reilly’s show, Krauthammer hit me so hard it was ridiculous. He said mine was a joke candidacy or something to that effect. So O’Reilly sent Jesse Watters to New Hampshire to get my response. I let Krauthammer have it. I was very tough, some would say vicious, but I was tough because Krauthammer had been tough to me.
The next day I turned on the show and they didn’t air my response. I called O’Reilly and said, “Bill, what happened? Krauthammer can talk about me but I can’t talk about him?” Bill gave me what I considered a weak reason as to why he wouldn’t play my response and I left it at that. I think Bill O’Reilly is terrific, and I think Greta Van Susteren, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto are as well. These are outstanding people who get big ratings and do a fantastic job. But in this case I thought Bill was wrong. I should have been allowed to rebut Krauthammer as a matter of fairness.
In any case, there’s a reason Fox News has such high quality programs and phenomenal ratings. His name is Roger Ailes. Whether some people like it or not, Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News, working together with Rupert Murdoch, is one of the great geniuses in television history. Roger can look at a person and instantly tell whether that individual will grab ratings. In addition to O’Reilly, Van Susteren, Hannity, and Cavuto, Roger has numerous others who do amazing work. People like Bret Baier. I also love the team on Fox and Friends with Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade. They’re smart, quick, funny, and really know what’s going on. The Fox morning show is a tremendous success due to its three talented hosts and the wonderful Roger Ailes. I really enjoy being on it.
Guys like Ailes understand that ratings rule. When I have friends with television shows that aren’t doing well, they just can’t understand why they’re being canceled. I tell them this: I have learned that entertainment is a very simple business. You can be a horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get ratings, you are a king. If you don’t get ratings, you are immediately canceled and nothing else will matter.
I happen to get ratings, and always have. Larry King used to tell me, “You get the highest ratings.” Everybody wants me to be on their show, not because they like me, not because I’m handsome and have great hair, but because I get ratings. To tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t want to be provocative, and in many cases I try not to be provocative. But I think the reason millions of people follow my views on world events is because they know I understand that our country is being ripped off by OPEC, China, and other countries. They know America is in big trouble if we don’t get back on the right track. And they know I’m not afraid to tell it like it is. It’s not that they like or love me—it’s that they respect what I have to say, believe the same thing themselves, and know that I’m right.
I’m also told that many people have a general interest in the details of my life and the people I work with in show business, particularly since they’ve seen all the amazing talent I’ve had on Celebrity Apprentice. It’s always fun to see the kinds of questions people ask in the letters and emails my office receives. I enjoy working with stars and seeing their careers grow.
One of the most interesting and special people I’ve gotten to know is Lady Gaga. About five years ago, when she was a total unknown, Lady Gaga was the entertainment for the Miss Universe Pageant, which was held that year in Vietnam. I own the Miss Universe Pageant and have made it very, very successful. One day my people came to me and told me about a young woman they called Lady Gaga who nobody had ever heard of. We put her on as the entertainer in the middle of the pageant, which is broadcast internationally. I thought, “Wow, she is really, really good.” The next day, it was crazy. Everybody was talking about how good Lady Gaga was—“Who is she, where is she? She’s going to be someone big, she’s amazing!” Well, she became a big star and maybe she became a star because I put her on the Miss Universe Pageant. It’s very possible, who knows what would have happened without it, because she caused a sensation.
A couple years later, she opened in New York and was hotter than ever at Radio City Music Hall. I was there and happened to be sitting with a large group of very major celebrities. I won’t mention their names because I’m not looking to embarrass anybody. Gaga gave a fantastic performance and, after she was finished, her manager came and shouted, “Mr. Trump, Gaga wants to see you, but only you, nobody else can come.” Now, here you have major singers, musicians, and television personalities and the manager is shouting to me, “Mr. Trump, only you and nobody else.” I went back with my wife, Melania, and talked to Lady Gaga for about forty-five minutes. She’s a fantastic person, solid as a rock, and I’m very proud of her success because I really believe I had at least something to do with it.
No matter if you’re talking about media from the entertainment world or news shows, the media bookers all try to get me on their programs to help boost their ratings. Because I operate in both entertainment TV and current events shows, I have a keen understanding of how various moves affect ratings. For instance, I told Jeff Zucker, who previously ran NBC, “Jeff, don’t move Jay Leno. He’s #1 in the evening and when you are #1, you don’t move. In fact, not only is he #1, he is a strong #1. Don’t move Jay Leno—it is a terrible mistake.”
I warned them that it would be the first time in history somebody’s going to be taken out of the #1 position and moved and told them it would turn Leno into the equivalent of a lame duck president. In any event, they did it and Conan went on. To put it mildly, it didn’t work. Jay went back to his original time and has never been the same again. His show’s ratings are way down from what they were—he has never fully recovered.
I was actually doing the Jay Leno Show the night he was told that this move was going to be made and, even though it wasn’t going to take place for five years, I could see that he was devastated, confused, and didn’t know why they were doing it. I didn’t either. It turned out to be possibly the greatest mistake in broadcast history.
Politics and television are nasty businesses. When the two collide, things get even nastier. As an example, Jay Leno—he knocks the hell out of me on the show but always wants me to be on. The interesting thing is, even the ones that really go after me want me on the show for one reason and one reason only: I am a ratings machine.
Still, no matter how good your ratings are, sometimes you can’t stop the press from running stories that are totally false but that they know will grab viewers or readers. To show you how dishonest the press is, I recently sold a house for $7.15 million. It was a house I had built at my great Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles. The home is in a beautiful location fronting the Pacific Ocean with views of the course. This house was originally built for someone else who was unable to get financing from our country’s wonderful banks and defaulted on $1.5 million. The house, which is one of seventy-five lots I own facing the ocean, cost me very little above that amount, so I had the house for almost nothing.
I listed the house for $12 million knowing I couldn’t get anywhere near that but figuring it’s a great way to negotiate. The buyer paid me $7.15 million, which was a substantial profit on that individual parcel.
The dishonest press smelled blood. Headlines raged that I had taken a major haircut on my home, as if I were selling my own personal house, not one of many in the development. In actuality, I had only been inside the house one time for five minutes to check it out. But it didn’t matter. We tried to correct the newspapers, but the Los Angeles Times and others got the story totally wrong. In fact, one reporter told one of my lawyers that he knew we were right, that it wasn’t my personal house, and that he knew the sale was almost all profit. “So why did you write it that way?” my lawyer asked. “Because i
t doesn’t make for a good story,” the reporter told him. That’s how dishonest the press can be.
The Presidency
In all my years in business and participating in politics I’ve never seen the country as divided as it is right now—and I’ve seen bad times. Voters’ hatred of both Democrats and Republicans is beyond anything I have ever witnessed. A great leader can bring America together. But unfortunately for us, Barack Obama is not a leader. So who can the country turn to?
I have been saying for a long time that it is very hard for a truly successful person to run for political office. Your rivals and the press will take every deal you’ve ever made, even the best of them, and make them look bad. You could have built a $7 billion+ net worth, but it doesn’t make any difference, because they will make you look as foolish as possible. A guy like Obama has it much easier. He had never done a deal before except for the purchase of his house which, in my opinion, was not an honest transaction. A smart investigative reporter should definitely look into that because any objective examination of the facts reveals there was definitely something fishy going on. But that was the only deal Obama ever did. He hasn’t done hundreds of deals like very successful people do, where we employ thousands of people and have to manage numerous complex enterprises. So he had an easier go of it.
Mark Burnett, my good friend, partner, and the best producer in television, really wanted me to continue with The Apprentice and not run for president. Mark’s big shows are The Apprentice, Survivor, and now the hit show The Voice. He said, “Donald, I think you would be an incredible president, but you are far too successful to run. You’ve done too many deals and too many things. They’ll go after every single deal you’ve ever done and, even on the best of them, will try to make you look bad.”
So essentially, Mark was voicing what I had been saying for the last two years—that a very successful person cannot run for political office (especially the presidency) and isn’t that sad, because that’s the kind of person and thinking we need to bring the country back.
Either way, when I was leading in the polls, I committed an unforced error. I was asked by a friend to make a speech in Las Vegas in front of a small group. I agreed. A couple hundred people were expected, mostly Republican women, and it was no big deal. Or so I thought. But when they announced that I was going to speak, thousands of people showed up. The owner of the hotel, a great man named Phil Ruffin, one of the smartest investors around, told me it was the most people they had ever packed into the ballroom at the hotel. The place was mobbed. Everybody was happy. They were thrilled, and in the room you had lots of good, tough Las Vegas people who I can’t believe will ever vote for Obama, especially after he told people not to go to Las Vegas.
We had thousands of people there, it turned out to be wild, and I made a mistake. I catered to that crowd. They absolutely loved the speech and I used some foul language which, with that crowd, went over phenomenally well. But unfortunately they had cameras in the room, which I didn’t see, and only those parts of the speech where I used strong language ended up being shown through our nation.
I wish I hadn’t done it. It got a lot of press but some people were turned off by it. I’m not a big curser but it did take place, and I will say the people in the room loved that speech, because we’re not living in a baby world. It’s a rough, mean world where everybody’s out to get everybody else and where other countries are out to get the United States, and they are doing a pretty good job of it. So I got fired up and the crowd did too.
Of course, Joe Biden dropped the f-word in front of the entire media on a stage with the president. But Biden gets a pass because he’s with Obama, and as we all know, Obama can do no wrong in the media’s eyes.
In my opinion, our president is totally overrated both as a person and as a campaigner. The press has given a false impression of him as a brilliant student (which he was not), a brilliant leader (which he is not), and a campaigner the likes of which we have not seen in many years. Yet now many Democrats are suffering buyer’s remorse and wish they had elected Hillary Clinton instead.
Regardless, the Republicans are going to have a very tough race. Obama is harnessing all of the negativity he created and flipping it back on the people—a very smart, if cynical, strategy. I’ve never seen anything like it. The guy is willing to rip the country in half to win. Sadly, it may prove to be a winning strategy. If I were doing as badly as he is, I would realize it is my only road to victory.
I love my life and businesses, so I would rather not run for president. When people say I should run as an Independent, I remind them that it’s very hard for an Independent to win, though perhaps easier than ever before. Still, if the economy continues to be bad (which I think it will, due to incompetent leadership) and Republicans pick the wrong candidate (which I hope they won’t), I can’t completely rule out a run. Most people have never heard of a very stupid law—called equal time—that prevents someone with a major television show from running for political office. So Obama is allowed to go on television every day and can fly around the country any time he wants at taxpayer expense, but I’m not allowed to do The Apprentice and run for office at the same time. You tell me, is that right? Were it not for that ridiculous law I would probably be running for president right now and having a good time doing it—because America has tremendous potential, unbelievable potential, and it is being wasted.
I distinctly remember when I made my decision to sign for another season of The Apprentice, which put my run for the presidency on hold. It was a Friday about 7:00 p.m., and Melania was watching Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, or one of the various entertainment shows she enjoys and frankly so do I. I sat down at the dinner table with the television blaring and watched as some of the biggest actors and actresses in Hollywood were hoping that their networks would pick up their show for another season. You see, the following Monday, NBC was having its big “Upfront” where they and the other networks announce their schedules for the year. So this was a tough time for actors because they wanted to know if their shows were going to be renewed.
As Melania and I were watching, I’m seeing these big stars saying, “I hope they renew our show, our show is so great, our cast is so amazing, the ratings are okay.” Everything was, “I hope, I hope, I hope,” and I’m watching these major actors almost begging. That’s when I said to my wife, “You know, baby, it’s amazing. I have a show that is a big success and I have the president of the network calling me all day long saying, ‘Donald, Donald, we want you, we love you.’” In addition to that, I had a great guy named Steve Burke at Comcast saying to me something like, “Donald, we’d like you to renew, we’d like you to go for another season or whatever you want, please renew.” So I am saying to myself, here these network executives are calling me on an hourly basis wanting me to renew my contract for another season of a two-hour hit show on primetime Sunday, and I am telling them no and yet I come home and I watch the entertainment shows and all of these big name actors and actresses are hoping beyond hope that they are going to be renewed. At that precise moment I got a call from Steve Burke reiterating the fact that they would love to have me sign the contract. Right then and there I said to my wife, “Baby, you know what? This is ridiculous. I’m going to sign the contract with NBC.”
My wife, Melania, who is considered by many, including me, to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, has amazing instincts. For years I would ask her whether or not I could run and win. And she would say, “Donald, people love you, but they wouldn’t vote for you for president.” When I asked her why, she said, “You’re a little wild and a little too controversial. They respect you, they think you’re really smart—the smartest of all—but enough people just wouldn’t vote for you.”
So she told me this for a long period of time and then recently, as she’s watching political news on television and seeing all the things that are wrong with our country, she looks at me and says, “Darling, you know you’d win if you r
an, don’t you?” I said, “What do you mean? You always told me I couldn’t win.” She said, “But now you could win, and maybe even easily. People really want you. I see it on the streets. People want you and they really need you.”
This was a great compliment coming from a very smart woman.
Some people have yet to realize how serious I was and am about running for the White House. In fact I was so close that I had already prepared the Public Financial Disclosure Report required of a presidential candidate. That’s a big deal because the Trump Organization is a private company, and people don’t know what I’m really worth. So I had the independent firm Predictive, which is used by government agencies and top companies like GM, Visa, Pfizer, and others, prepare valuations on branding, and we filled out the other areas of the long and complex presidential Public Financial Disclosure Report. So my forms were already completed when I told NBC I’d renew. I was ready to sign and submit the papers, which were completed in strict compliance with the instructions. Rather than waste the forms (and who knows, I may be filing them sometime later), I thought I would share the most important three pages with you in this book. These are three of the many pages of the completed submittal. The third summary page is probably the most important.
My primary reason for running for the presidency would be to straighten out the mess Obama has made of our country. I have built a truly great company, one with unbelievable assets and locations that I believe are about as good as it gets. We have great asset value, cash flow, and very little debt. I want the American people to see this, because ultimately our country is, in a certain way, the exact opposite of my company. And whether it’s me or someone else, we need the kind of thinking that can produce this kind of success. For the sophisticated financial people who already know me, these numbers come as no surprise. For the miserable, petty, jealous wannabes who knowingly fabricate stories about me, maybe this will shut them up.