Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  Most key players in the Panama City deal suffered losses when the economy crashed and the project stalled. In the bankruptcy agreement, most of the bondholders accepted a significant “haircut”—a reduction in the return on their original investment. As for Trump, instead of making $75 million on hardly any investment, he had made $50 million as of 2016, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The way Trump structured the deal, the “worst thing that can happen is he’s still going to make money,” Khafif said.

  Even after all the troubles, Khafif believed he got a good deal from Trump. After the debt restructuring and with a recovering global economy, the hotel’s business was improving, the condominiums were nearly all sold, and Khafif kept his yacht anchored just off the hotel’s pier.

  “He did what he had to do, and we did what we had to do,” he said in an interview at the Trump Ocean Club tower. “If not, we would not be sitting here in this office, on this floor, because there would be nothing on top of it.”

  • • •

  IN EARLY 2006, RUMORS began to circulate in northeastern Scotland: Trump was thinking about expanding his golf empire to Europe, to Scotland—birthplace of the sport and of his mother, who grew up in a tiny village on the island of Lewis. Trump already owned several golf courses, mostly in warm resort areas of the United States. Now he set his eyes on creating a course that could host the British Open golf championship. A frenzy of expectation broke out in the Scottish press about the potential for a big boost to the country’s economy.

  In late March, Trump confirmed the rumors: after considering more than two hundred locations in Europe, he had fallen in love with an eight-hundred-acre shooting estate along the North Sea, about twelve miles north of Aberdeen, where he now proposed to build “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world” on top of majestic sand dunes. Trump envisioned investing more than $400 million and creating at least four hundred new jobs as part of a project that included two golf courses, a 450-room luxury hotel, and a gated community with hundreds of villas and condos. It was supposed to be the greatest thing to happen to the region since oil was discovered in the 1970s. Even Sean Connery was rumored to be coming. The Aberdeen Evening Express gushed about the possibilities: “Property prices will rocket, millions of pounds will be pumped into the local economy and celebrities will descend.”

  But some local residents proved to be as craggy as the Scottish coastline. Part of the dunes, which shifted with the winds, were protected from development, and environmentalists argued that a big project would irreparably damage the habitat of many local birds and animals. The complications kept coming: an experimental wind farm was already planned for just off the coast, and its turbines, as tall as Big Ben, threatened to ruin Trump’s perfect ocean view. And a handful of neighbors who lived in the footprint of the development weren’t happy to hear that the Trump company wanted them to move if the golf resort was built.

  Trump pronounced himself unfazed by these challenges, yet he warned that if the project became too complicated, he would abandon it. Although the project was widely popular, some skeptics puzzled over why Trump would build a golf course in a spot regularly shrouded in a cold fog. The plan was “fabulous news for the area,” a local columnist wrote, “and also for knitwear manufacturers, who will make a killing when the world’s top players step out on the first tee and feel as though their limbs are being sawn off by a north-east breeze that hasn’t paused for breath since it left the Arctic.”

  That spring, Trump’s private Boeing 727 landed in Aberdeen, greeted by a bagpiper playing “Highland Laddie” and a swarm of reporters. Some thought it odd that Trump kept referring to himself as being not Scottish but “Scotch,” like the whisky; still, most local officials fawned over their ancestral son and did what they could to smooth the way toward approval of his project. The wind farm was scaled back from thirty-three turbines to twenty-three, and Trump scaled up his plans, tripling the budget to nearly $1.5 billion and expanding the development to include a conference center, employee housing, a turf-grass research center, the hotel and spa, thirty-six luxury villas, and more than a thousand residences, all in an area without the infrastructure to handle a big influx of newcomers. A Trump official later promised more than twelve hundred permanent jobs at the resort, plus thousands more playing support roles. Locals were told to expect their property values to go up 20 percent. Construction would be completed by 2012, officials said.

  But in 2007, the local planning council turned down the plan, in a close vote decided by a council member who said Trump’s application didn’t back up his grand promises of economic prosperity. Scottish law allowed Trump to appeal the decision or revise and resubmit his plans. Instead, he threatened to move the project to Ireland. Scottish officials quickly rushed to calm the waters, announcing that the national government would handle the application and hold an extensive public hearing.

  By the time the public inquiry started, in June 2008, the US recession had hit, but although the collapse of the real estate market eventually forced the Trump Organization to delay or cancel several projects, Trump stuck with the Scotland plan. On his way to testify at the hearing, Trump stopped for about three hours on Lewis, where his mother was born and lived until she was eighteen and moved to New York in search of work. The visit was Trump’s first since he was a toddler, and cheeky reporters at a press conference near a castle peppered him with questions about whether his visit was just a clumsy case of pandering to the locals. His older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, came to his defense: “My mother would be so proud to see Donald here today. She would be so proud to see what he’s done, all the good he’s done and the TV star that he is. I’m here not because of these things, but because he’s my brother. I love him. He’s never forgotten where he comes from and he comes from here. This is a man I revere. He’s a nice guy and he’s funny, too.”

  The next day, Trump testified for several hours. “The world is in chaos,” he said, and the housing portion of the development might have to wait until after the economy recovered, but he promised to see the project through. He claimed to know more about the environment than his consultants did, though he admitted he had not read their reports. “In life, you can only read so much,” he said. He promised to preserve the dunes, but when the councillor who had cast the deciding vote against his permit accused Trump of failing to understand the property or its environmental fragility, Trump snapped back, “Nobody has ever told me that I don’t know how to buy property before. You’re the first one. I have done very well buying property. Thanks for the advice.”

  In November 2008, Trump got the green light. But he still had to win over neighbors who thought he was trying to shortchange them. The largest parcel was owned by Michael Forbes, a farmer, fisherman, quarry worker, and jack-of-all-trades who lived with his wife in a farmhouse surrounded by a collection of outbuildings. “He lives like a pig,” Trump said at one point. Forbes refused to sell—the words NO MORE TRUMP LIES appeared on the side of one of his farm buildings—and Trump began to pursue using compulsory purchase, a process, similar to eminent domain in the United States, by which he could force some neighbors out of their homes. Trump said he didn’t want the views from his luxury hotel “obliterated by a slum.”

  Scots had a centuries-long history of fighting against compulsory purchase, and they took after Trump with a vengeance; a group of activists purchased a piece of Forbes’s land and piled their names onto a deed, complicating efforts to seize the property. Although elected leaders had bent to Trump’s demands in the past, they stood firm against kicking Scots off their own land to make way for a private business. It appeared the two sides would be forced to live alongside one another—and not peacefully. Outside the home of David and Moira Milne, who resided in a converted coast guard station on a hill above the golf course, Trump’s staff planted a row of trees in front of the sea-facing windows, blocking the family’s views. When the first stand of trees died, the staff ripped them out and planted a seco
nd batch. The Trump workers also blocked in Susie and John Munro’s cottage, constructing a two-story-high hill in their front yard, then adding a fence and locked gate. Whenever it rained, their yard filled with water and their steep dirt road turned into a mudslide.

  Despite the skirmishes over land, construction of the golf course proceeded apace, and when it opened in 2012, even critics admitted it was beautiful, meandering through the stabilized sand dunes with sweeping views of the coastline and North Sea. Trump considered it his masterpiece, comparing it to a treasured multimillion-dollar painting. But he had halted work on the resort itself in protest of the wind farm, which was still moving forward. Trump warned that the wind turbines were ruinous, and he took out ads in the local press criticizing the project. He traveled to Scotland again to testify at a hearing, accusing the Scottish government of luring him into investing in their country on the false promise that the turbines would never be built—an assertion the officials denied. In 2013, Trump sued the Scottish government and watched his popularity plummet in a country that had once embraced him as one of its own.

  The legal battle went on until late 2015, when England’s highest court ruled against Trump. The resort, named Trump International Golf Links, would be completed—with the wind farm. Any good feeling once attached to the Scottish development seemed sharply diminished as Trump’s statements about Muslims and immigrants during his presidential campaign led to protests and petitions against him in Scotland. Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen rescinded an honorary degree it had given Trump in 2010. When a petition that called for Trump to be barred from Great Britain collected more than half a million signatures, the highest concentration of signatories lived in the Aberdeen area. When Trump broke off his campaign in June 2016 to preside over the ceremonial opening of his second resort in Scotland, Trump Turnberry, the country’s first minister declined to attend.

  Trump continued to insist that the people of Scotland loved him. Indeed, he said, his golf course near Aberdeen was a blueprint for how he would operate as president: “When I first arrived on the scene in Aberdeen, the people of Scotland were testing me to see just how serious I was—just like the citizens in the United States have done about my race for the White House. I had to win them over—I had to convince them that I meant business and that I had their best interests in mind. Well, Scotland has already been won—and so will the United States.”

  15

  * * *

  Showman

  Money, money, money!” the singer wailed as Donald Trump strutted down a runway and climbed into a ring at the center of a throbbing mass of eighty thousand wrestling fans in Detroit. Pumping his fist, Trump raised his chin and pursed his lips, a proto-gladiator in white shirt, light pink tie, and blue suit. His glazed hair, swept into its familiar blond swirl, glistened beneath the arena’s bright lights. After more than thirty years in the public realm, a journey that had taken him from real estate to global fame, Trump was still cultivating new audiences. When he wasn’t hawking condos or casinos, he was busy building his own celebrity, the unique persona of a billionaire who could poke fun at himself, a plutocrat with a penchant for popular appeal. In addition to television and movie roles, he went on the lecture circuit, earning $100,000 per appearance at motivational seminars hosted by Tony Robbins. Trump advised a crowd in St. Louis that paranoia was crucial to success. “Now that sounds terrible,” Trump said. “But you have to realize that people—sadly, sadly—are very vicious. You think we’re so different from the lions in the jungle?” He told another group, “When a person screws you, screw them back fifteen times harder.”

  To reach the millions of Americans hooked on the comic-book fantasy world of professional wrestling, Trump agreed in 2007 to costar in a garish showdown entitled “Battle of the Billionaires.” Choreographed by a team of scriptwriters, Trump and Vince McMahon, WrestleMania’s impresario, were to duel for a prize that defined the outer reaches of the absurd: the right to shave the other’s studiously curated coiffure. Neither man would actually fight, leaving that, for the most part, to two proxies. Trump’s was Bobby Lashley, an African American with mountainous shoulders and a head as smooth as a cue ball. McMahon’s representative was a tattooed muscle mass known as Umaga, who called himself the Samoan Bulldozer.

  The alliance with McMahon began in the late eighties when Trump hosted WrestleMania IV and V at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Trump loved the big crowds and overwrought pageantry and posed for photographs with the wrestlers Hulk Hogan and André the Giant. “Battle of the Billionaires” was an opportunity to merge huge audiences from The Apprentice and WrestleMania, and McMahon and Trump delighted in promoting the moment. In the weeks before their duel, the two businessmen staged several appetite-whetting encounters, the first of which occurred as McMahon honored himself at an over-the-top “Fan Appreciation Night” in Dallas.

  High above the arena, Trump’s face suddenly appeared on an oversize screen. “You claim that you tell your audience what they want, what they like, and all that nonsense,” Trump bellowed. “They want value. Who knows more about value than me, Vince?” In the next moment, money fell from the ceiling—a shower of dollar bills—fluttering into spectators’ outstretched hands. “Look up at the sky, Vince, look at that!” Trump shouted as the crowd screamed. “Now that’s the way you show appreciation!” McMahon, his face twisted in feigned rage, growled, “Donald, you embarrassed me!”

  In Portland, on another night, before another rabid crowd, two curvaceous brunettes accompanied Trump into the arena, where he and McMahon signed a “contract” to duel. McMahon said he would win because of the size of his own “grapefruits,” an apparent reference to his testicles. “Your grapefruits are no match for my Trump Towers,” Trump replied. The crowd roared. “You want some, Vince?” Trump snarled. He pushed McMahon over a conference table, catapulting him into a backward somersault. The crowd cheered as the announcer shouted, “Donald Trump just shoved Mr. McMahon on his billionaire butt!”

  During another appearance, Trump ratcheted up the rhetoric: “I’m taller than you, I’m better-looking than you, I’m stronger than you. . . . I will kick your ass.” At their final joint appearance before the match, Trump smacked McMahon in the face after the promoter playfully touched Trump’s cheek. “I gave him a wallop,” Trump boasted afterward, promising that their upcoming clash would “escalate.” Trump relished his role, following the commands of the scriptwriters and producers as he navigated a new audience. “He was working crowds who weren’t going to take kindly to an outsider,” said Court Bauer, who wrote the script for “Battle of the Billionaires.” “He had to win them over, and he did, very effectively and very quickly. He knew how to read a crowd and manipulate them. You’re trying to convert them from viewers to customers, to get them to buy the ticket, to buy pay-per-view.”

  Trump’s success with WrestleMania’s audience, Bauer said, was propelled by his ability to speak the language of an average American while evoking vast wealth: “What Donald stands for is aspirational, and that’s what it is for wrestling fans—‘I can’t do it at work, but I can do it vicariously through the wrestlers.’ Donald talks blue collar, but he has the world. He’s been selling people on that dream for a long time.” Trump also won over the audience with his willingness to play his role to the max. In Detroit, he jumped on McMahon and, after they tumbled to the ground, punched him in the face. “The hostile takeover of Donald Trump on Vince McMahon!” the announcer shouted. When “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, a retired wrestler who was the event’s referee, performed his signature Stunner move on Trump, kicking him in the stomach and decking him, Trump “was game to do it all,” Bauer said. “He exceeded all expectations. We never thought he’d do any of that stuff.”

  The “Battle of the Billionaires” culminated with Lashley mauling Umaga, giving Trump the right to scalp McMahon at the center of the ring. His lips twisted in a fiendish grin, Trump performed the procedure with both an electric shaver and a razor and shaving cr
eam. The following morning, McMahon appeared on the Today show, bald and with a black eye, purportedly the result of a Trump punch. Feigning humiliation, the promoter articulated what was perhaps the showdown’s single undeniable truth: “Donald Trump is a great entertainer.”

  • • •

  THE DOORBELL RINGS AND a butler announces the famous couple’s arrival: “Sir, it is my esteemed pleasure to introduce Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump!” Donald and Marla Maples step through the doorway, surprising the studio audience and millions of viewers watching the television sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. “It’s The Donald! Oh my God!” a character exclaims before fainting. Another grabs Donald’s hand and gushes, “You look much richer in person!”

  By 1994, when he appeared on Fresh Prince, the comedy that launched Will Smith’s acting career, Trump’s fame as a real estate developer and bestselling author had made him a coveted novelty in Hollywood. Producers clamored for Trump to lend their shows and movies a moment of authenticity by performing as himself, the world’s best-known tycoon, a boyishly handsome showman of outsize wealth and ego. Instead of new skyscrapers and casinos, Trump was selling only himself in cameos in movies such as Zoolander and Home Alone 2, and on sitcoms such as The Drew Carey Show and Fran Drescher’s The Nanny. His earliest appearances included a role in Ghosts Can’t Do It, a film in which he tells the character played by Bo Derek, “In this room, there are knives sharp enough to cut you to the bone, and hearts cold enough to eat yours as hors d’oeuvres.”