Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  The burial, Trump said, was “by far the toughest day of my life.” His father had been his best friend. His death made Donald take stock of his own life. Trump, rarely introspective, said in an interview for this book that he felt “loneliness and responsibility, because I was really close to my father.” He began to see himself differently, not just as the new family patriarch or as a builder, but as someone who could help shape the world.

  Trump received a condolence letter from John F. Kennedy Jr., who had been three years old when his father, President Kennedy, was killed by an assassin’s bullet. “No matter where you are in life, losing a parent changes you,” wrote Kennedy, whose celebrity in New York at the time rivaled Trump’s, and who was often urged by Democrats to run for office. On the same day that Trump opened the note, Kennedy, then thirty-eight years old, died when an airplane he was piloting crashed, also killing the passengers: his wife and his sister-in-law. Trump, then fifty-three years old, saw parallels between the Trumps and the Kennedys. Hadn’t the glowing obituaries about his father been the kind you’d expect for a major statesman? Years later, Trump would say his father’s death was perhaps what “inwardly” pushed him finally to decide he wanted to be president. The decision had been years in the making.

  • • •

  “DO YOU HAVE ANY political connections?” gossip columnist Rona Barrett asked Trump in unaired parts of a 1980 interview, nearly two decades before Fred Trump’s funeral.

  “I really say no,” Trump said. “I absolutely say no.” Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment, wearing a charcoal suit and oversize tie with diagonal stripes. The interview—likely his first on network television—was part of an NBC special, “Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich.” Trump wanted to promote Trump Tower, but Barrett had picked up on something else: Trump’s competitive instincts and desire for power. When she asked about his willingness to make controversial decisions, Trump abruptly turned the conversation to what he saw as a lack of leadership in the United States. Gas prices were soaring and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been seized at the US embassy were still being held hostage in Iran while, according to Trump, “we just sit back and take everybody’s abuse. . . . I just don’t feel the country is going forward in the proper direction.”

  The interview was taped one month before the presidential election. Trump had donated to President Jimmy Carter while helping his challenger, Ronald Reagan, raise money. Reagan, a former actor, ran for the White House employing a memorable slogan: Let’s Make America Great Again. Barrett was taken aback by Trump’s pivot to politics. “Would you like to be president of the United States?” she asked.

  No, he said. Politics was a “mean life. . . . Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today because of television. He was not a handsome man, and he did not smile at all.” Trump said he knew people who would be “excellent” presidents because they were “extraordinarily brilliant . . . very, very confident . . . and have the respect of everybody.” None of them would seek the office because of the media scrutiny, which he called a tragedy. “One man could turn this country around. The one proper president could turn this country around.”

  • • •

  TRUMP WAS NO POLITICAL naïf. He and his father had thrived in New York City’s pay-to-play culture for years, in part by cultivating local elected officials. Trump almost always answered political operatives’ calls for money. His criterion was simple: he wanted a winner, someone who would be an ally once in office. Sometimes he donated to opposing candidates in the same local race. He showed no concern about a candidate’s views or political party. “He wanted someone who was going to continue to climb . . . and someone he was going to have a relationship [with] over that time,” said longtime New York Democratic consultant George Arzt, who over the years asked Trump to support several candidates.

  In the late 1980s, Trump’s largesse caught the attention of a New York State commission examining possible political corruption. Armed with subpoena power, the commission called Trump to testify in March 1988. Under oath, Trump acknowledged that political donations had been a routine part of his business for nearly two decades. He gave so generously that he sometimes lost track of the amounts. When an attorney for the commission asked him to verify that he had given $150,000 to local candidates in 1985 alone, Trump responded, “I really don’t know. I assume that is correct, yes.”

  The amount Trump donated in 1985 was equal to three times the annual limit for individuals ($50,000), or thirty times higher than the cap for companies ($5,000), under New York state law. But Trump “circumvented” the law, a state commission found, by spreading the donations among eighteen subsidiary companies. Each had a different name—such as Shore Haven Apartments No. 2, Inc., Shore Haven Apartments No. 3, Inc., and Shore Haven Apartments No. 6, Inc.—but Trump had significant control over all of them. He told the commissioners he didn’t know “the exact reason” it was done this way; it was how his lawyers had said to do it.

  Trump found other ways, too, to give candidates financial help. In June 1985, he guaranteed a $50,000 loan to the campaign of Andrew Stein, a Democrat who was running to be New York’s City Council president. Six months later, with the debt still unsettled, Trump paid it off. Trump told commissioners that he had expected Stein’s campaign to pay off the loan and only learned that it would come out of his pocket when the loan came due. More than thirty years later, Stein said in an interview that he did not recall the loan, but that developers were close to city officials at the time.

  Donald’s business expanded beyond New York in the 1980s—and so did his donations. He gave more than $72,000 to federal candidates in 1988, which was $47,000 more than was permitted under federal law. The Federal Election Commission discovered the infraction years later during an audit and fined him $15,000. “We were going to fight it, but it would have cost more money than the settlement,” Trump said at the time.

  • • •

  MICHAEL DUNBAR, A FURNITURE maker in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, recognized Trump’s ability to connect to the masses. In the spring of 1987, nearly a year before his state’s first-in-the-nation primary, the Republican Party activist was searching for a presidential candidate. Thumbing through the Wall Street Journal, Dunbar became fascinated by Trump’s business acumen and personality. He sent out mailers encouraging Republicans to “draft Trump.” Friends told him the idea was laughable, but Dunbar invited Trump to speak to the local Rotary Club. Trump, intrigued, asked Dunbar to discuss the idea at Trump Tower that summer.

  Dunbar marveled at the opulence of the tower’s lobby, then ascended to the twenty-sixth-floor office, where Trump offered him a Diet Coke as they discussed Dunbar’s pitch: Trump would fly his private helicopter to a New Hampshire airfield, speak to the Rotary crowd at Yoken’s restaurant, and hold a press conference. They had a deal.

  A few weeks later, Trump took out full-page ads opining on foreign policy in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, which was widely read by New Hampshire voters. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” Trump wrote in the ads, which cost a combined $95,000. The advertisement provided an early snapshot of Trump’s political thinking, with ideas that he would repeat in different forms for decades. He questioned why the United States continued to pay for Japan’s and Saudi Arabia’s protection: “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.”

  The image of the rest of the world laughing at US leaders would become an enduring theme in Trump’s political rhetoric. This time, it came in the seventh year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, just weeks before the publication of Trump: The Art of the Deal, in which Trump called Reagan “a smooth performer,” but questioned whether “there
’s anything beneath that smile.” The slap against the president was a surprise; the Trumps had been Goldwater Republicans, and they had raised money for Reagan. Reagan’s approval rating stood at 51 percent, the stock market was booming, and the unemployment rate had dipped below 6 percent for the first time that decade. Yet in Trump’s portrayal, the United States was a sucker in a worldwide hustle.

  Trump had previously said that he was more than capable of pulling off the kind of nuclear-weapons-reduction deal that would become one of Reagan’s proudest achievements. Trump told a Washington Post reporter in 1984 that he dreamed of employing his negotiating skills on nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviets: “Some people have an ability to negotiate. It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.” It didn’t matter that Trump was no expert on missiles. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. . . . I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation.”

  • • •

  ON THE DAY TRUMP’S foreign policy ad appeared, he announced he would go to New Hampshire, the perfect way to stoke political speculation. Trump was asked whether he was running for office. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor, or United States senator,” an unidentified spokesman replied. “He will not comment about the presidency.” The New York Times headline fueled the anticipation: “Trump Gives a Vague Hint of Candidacy.”

  On the bright morning of October 22, 1987, Trump’s helicopter landed at a New Hampshire airfield, where a limousine paid for by Dunbar ferried Trump to Yoken’s restaurant. There, a waiting crowd held placards that said VOTE TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT and VOTE FOR AN EN-“TRUMP”-ENEUR. In his talk, Trump reprised themes from his advertisement. As for the presidency, he said, “We have had enough of the men who say, ‘Vote for me because I am nice.’ I have nothing against nice people, but I personally have had enough of them.”

  But what Trump said to the assembled reporters made Dunbar’s heart sink: “I am not interested in running for president.” Dunbar wondered why Trump had even bothered coming to New Hampshire. Was it just a promotional gambit for his book? Dunbar later received a copy of Trump’s book, inscribed, “To Michael: I really appreciate your friendship—You’ve created a very exciting part of my life—on to the future.” Dunbar hoped he had planted a seed.

  • • •

  TRUMP’S BRIEF FLIRTATION WITH a run for office was over, but his reputed wealth still attracted politicians from both parties. On November 19, 1987, Frank Donatelli, Reagan’s assistant for political and intergovernmental affairs, sent a memo to Tom Griscom, the president’s press secretary, warning that Democrats in Congress wanted Trump to serve as chairman of a fund-raiser. “His fundraising prowess is significant and if he accepts, he could considerably increase the Democratic Party prowess next year,” Reagan’s aide wrote. “It would be most helpful if you would place a phone call to Don Trump today. He has a large ego and would be responsive to your call.”

  Trump declined the Democrats’ invitation to raise money. Prominent Republicans continued to court him as a donor or future candidate. That Christmas, with the presidential race under way, former president Richard Nixon wrote Trump a letter after his wife, Pat, saw the businessman on The Phil Donahue Show: “Dear Donald, I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me you were great. As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!”

  Although he was not a candidate, Trump reveled in the curiosity about his ambitions and emerging political profile. He stepped up his press tour, giving interviews in which he repeated his stance on issues such as trade, inviting questions about his ambitions. “That sounds like political, presidential talk to me,” Oprah Winfrey told Trump when he appeared on her popular talk show in the spring of 1988.

  “I just don’t think I really have the inclination to do it,” Trump said. “I just probably wouldn’t do it, Oprah, but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening in this country. And if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally.” If he did run, he added, he would have a “helluva chance of winning.”

  A few months later, Trump attended his first Republican convention, as George H. W. Bush accepted the party’s nomination for the presidency. During an interview on CNN, talk show host Larry King asked Trump why he was there. Trump said he wanted to see “how the system works.” Next came the questions that would follow Trump for decades: How would he classify his politics? King wanted to know if Trump classified himself as an “Eastern Republican” or a “Rockefeller/Chase Manhattan Republican,” shorthand for the liberal wing of the GOP.

  “I never thought about it in those terms,” Trump replied.

  “How about a ‘Bush Republican’?” King asked.

  Trump, who regularly boasted of his great wealth, responded by casting himself as a man of the people: “You know, wealthy people don’t like me because I’m competing against them all the time and I like to win. The fact is, I go down the streets of New York and the people that really like me are the taxi drivers and the workers.”

  “Then why are you a Republican?”

  “I have no idea. I’m a Republican because I just believe in certain principles of the Republican Party.”

  • • •

  THAT FALL, BUSH BEAT his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, in part by portraying him as weak on crime. A pro-Bush political committee ran ads featuring Willie Horton, a black man who had raped a twenty-seven-year-old white woman while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison when Dukakis was governor. The Bush campaign then ran ads that referred to the issue without mentioning Horton’s name. The combination proved powerful. The ads worked, critics said, by fueling racial tension and fear.

  Months later, Trump seized on a notorious crime that threatened to divide New York along racial lines. On April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old white investment banker, went for a jog in Central Park. As she made her way from her Upper East Side park entrance north toward Harlem, Meili was attacked, bound with her own shirt, beaten with a rock, raped, and left for dead in a pool of her own blood. Doctors told reporters it was not clear if she would live. If she did, brain damage was a near certainty. The Central Park jogger, as she become known, would remain unconscious for nearly two weeks.

  Five boys, four black and one Hispanic, ages fourteen to sixteen, were arrested. Two weeks after the crime, millions of New Yorkers reading the city’s four major newspapers—the New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, and Newsday—were greeted with a full-page ad paid for by Trump. “Bring back the death penalty,” he wrote, warning of “roving bands of wild criminals.” Trump used the horrific crime as an opportunity to attack Mayor Ed Koch. Trump had been considering running against Koch in the Democratic primary and had long feuded with the mayor over tax abatements Trump wanted for a proposed development. Trump had called the mayor a “moron,” and Koch had said Trump was “greedy.”

  Now, Trump used the Central Park jogger case to further ridicule his rival. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote in the ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

  Many blacks saw in Trump’s ads not just opportunism, but also racism. The Reverend Al Sharpton, then president of an organization called the United African Movement, called on Trump to apologize publicly for what Sharpton called a “hatemongering ad.” The day the ads ran, Trump said in TV interviews that the teenagers arrested for the rape symbolized New York’s problems. Trump presented himself as an everyman who had the money and courage to speak freely without fear of economic consequences or damage to his reputation: “You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally. You better believe it.”

  Trump
insisted he was no racist. With tension swirling around the issue, Trump appeared later that year on an NBC special called the “Racial Attitudes and Consciousness Exam,” hosted by Bryant Gumbel. “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” Trump said on the program. “I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.” Movie director Spike Lee called Trump’s assertion “garbage.”

  The jogger would survive the brutal beating but suffered permanent damage. The young men were convicted and served six to thirteen years in prison. But years later, a career criminal confessed to the rape, providing a DNA match. The convictions were overturned, and the city paid $41 million to settle a wrongful imprisonment suit that the men had filed. Trump called the settlement “a disgrace,” refused to apologize, and said, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” He said he wouldn’t have given them “a dime” and insisted “they owe the taxpayers of the City of New York an apology for taking money out of their pockets like candy from a baby.” Decades later, one of the falsely accused men, Yusef Salaam, called Trump “a hateful person” who had rushed to judgment and inflamed tensions in the city. “Donald Trump, he was the fire starter,” Salaam said.

  Trump didn’t run for mayor. Manhattan’s borough president, David Dinkins, beat Koch in the Democratic primary and went on to become the first African American to hold the city’s highest office.

  • • •

  IN THE YEAR AFTER the Central Park rape, Trump was consumed by his affair with Marla Maples and his struggle to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. If Trump had any political ambitions, they had been put on hold. In response to rumors that he might run for governor of New York, Trump told Larry King in 1990 that he had “zero interest. . . . Can you imagine me running for office? Wouldn’t you say I’m a little controversial for that?”