Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  He told her he was sure.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  Law and Order

  The man who would be president rose from his tall, thickly cushioned leather desk chair, buttoned his suit jacket, and waved his visitors to follow along: “Come on, boys, I have something to show you.” He ushered us from his lushly carpeted office in Trump Tower, with its breathtaking view of Central Park and the majestic Plaza Hotel, across the hall to a windowless room, not five steps away. “I just discovered this,” he said, pointing at the conference table that took up most of the room. He swept his arm over the table, beckoning us to inspect. Every inch of the table’s surface was filled with stacks of magazines. “All from the last four months,” he said, and on every cover of every magazine, there he was, Donald J. Trump, smiling or waving or scowling or pouting, but always him.

  “Cover of Time, three times in four months,” he said. “No one ever before. It’s amazing.” There he was on the New York Times Magazine, and on Esquire and on Rolling Stone and on and on, the man who was about to be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president, his success (or his notoriety) emblazoned on magazine after magazine. He was very much impressed. He was all sunshine on this June day, an exemplar of the power of positive thinking, the core of the theology that he’d grown up with in Fred Trump’s office and the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s church. In this moment, Donald Trump was the can-do dealmaker, the tough decider, the ebullient kid who, as his sister put it, was “just a nice boy from Queens.” A few moments later, he would switch gears and show us his other side, also a classically American streak, this one darker, with a trace of paranoia and a dash of despair. This was the author of Crippled America, the truth teller who told huge crowds, “We don’t have a country anymore,” the prideful tycoon who now threatened to sue us even as he said how much he was enjoying our interviews. Both aspects of Trump seemed to be the stuff of fiction, of characters who were written to capture the hopes and ambitions of a great, young nation, but also its fears, doubts, and jealousies.

  Even after we’d spent hours talking to him—a frequently frustrating process in which he took any and all questions, but often offered disjointed, truncated answers that had nothing to do with the questions—Trump seemed not quite real, a character he had built to enhance his business empire, a construct designed to be at once an everyman and an impossibly high-flying king of Manhattan, an avatar of American riches. Trump was charming, yet forever on the make, like Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 movie with Andy Griffith as a folksy but ultimately cynical Arkansas traveler who soars from a filthy jail cell to the pinnacle of American celebrity and political power. Trump was a natural-born populist, like Howard Beale, the TV anchorman from Network, the 1976 film in which the newsman rallies the nation to open their windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Trump was at times naive yet wise, like Chauncey Gardiner, the dim gardener whose unwitting folk wisdom turned him into a possible presidential contender in Being There (1979).

  Real people had fascinated Americans in similar ways during trying periods throughout the last century—voices that appealed to the idea that foreigners or The Other were responsible for the nation’s troubles: Father Charles Coughlin, the priest who used his nationwide radio show in the 1930s to deliver an America First message laced with assaults on Jews; and George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for president in the 1960s and ’70s as a populist preaching that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republicans and the Democrats; and Patrick Buchanan, the Washington insider and presidential candidate who encouraged voters in the 1990s to rise up as “peasants with pitchforks” to take their country back from politicians who had failed to stop illegal immigration and the ravages of free trade. These men had appealed to the darker aspect of the American personality, the flip side to Billy Graham’s confident theology of good deeds and righteous capitalism, Martin Luther King Jr.’s march to the mountaintop of justice and fairness, and Barack Obama’s promise of hope and change.

  Trump believed—like so many great Americans real and imagined, such as Steve Jobs or Jay Gatsby—in the unlimited, unequaled power of the individual to achieve nearly anything. And like many other products of the uniquely American machinery of celebrity, Trump believed that his fame and success would catapult him to a level of power that he deserved because he had made so much money. He believed that just by walking into a room, just by reflecting the passions of a crowd, he could shift the course of events. He could, for example, make America great again. “Believe me,” he had beckoned crowds throughout the campaign. “Believe me.”

  • • •

  IMPROBABLE DIDN’T BEGIN TO describe what he had achieved. Angry outsiders had run for president before, had even collected a respectable protest vote, but now, in Cleveland in July, in the arena where LeBron James had just led the Cavaliers to the city’s first sports championship in half a century, Donald Trump was going to be crowned the Republican nominee for president. He remained a polarizing, troubling figure for many—four of the five previous GOP nominees for president had decided not to attend the convention, along with many of the party’s most prominent figures—but Trump was determined to put on a show that would break the mold and put him on the road to victory. On the convention’s opening night, after a long series of speeches by actors and soldiers bashing Hillary Clinton, by parents whose children had been killed by illegal immigrants, and by black police officials and politicians who declared that it was blue lives that mattered, the stage was cleared and Queen’s triumphant “We Are the Champions” poured out over the PA system.

  Suddenly, a dark opening appeared at the back of the stage, and a silhouette emerged. The big suit, the broad shoulders, the shelf of hair—unmistakably Trump, breaking with tradition, instantly juicing what had been a listless crowd. Trump, not expected until the last night of the convention, walked into the light and basked in the waves of cheers and chants, occasionally nodding, flashing thumbs-up, then promising, “We are going to win so big.” He had flown in to introduce his wife, the highlight of the first night’s program, and Melania dazzled the audience with a creamy white dress, an electric smile, and a game attitude as she pushed through her speech in a thick Slovenian accent. But the warm reception in the hall soon soured, as news spread that key portions of her script had been lifted verbatim from Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic convention in 2008. For thirty-six hours, the Trump campaign denied any wrongdoing; only when the media firestorm about the plagiarism would not cease did the speechwriter come forward with a confession and an apology.

  The convention that Trump had envisioned as more entertaining, more fun, and looser than the standard dull recitation of political rhetoric instead played out as a series of gaffes and misfires. From the start, the quest for party unity was marred by open rebellion on the floor, as hundreds of delegates tried to force the GOP to hold a roll call vote on rules that prohibited delegates from voting their conscience, requiring them instead to vote as their state’s primary results mandated. “Roll call vote! Roll call vote!” they chanted, and their microphones went dead. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” one of the rebellion’s leaders, former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, shouted. But despite a voice vote that showed the hall nearly evenly divided, there would be no roll call. The managers of the convention turned up the music, silenced the rambunctious delegates, and, after a delay, announced that although enough state delegations had demanded a roll call to satisfy the rules, three of those delegations had just reversed their decisions, and there was now no longer sufficient demand to require an open vote. “Petty, tyrannical politics,” Cuccinelli sputtered. “This stunt does not fire up the rank and file.”

  Some of the rank and file never needed firing up. “Trump is sent from God!” Jamiel Shaw, the father of a young man who was killed by an illegal immigrant, told the crowd. Across town, at an A
merica First rally of truckers, Teamsters, and listeners of white nationalist radio shows, Evan Hubert, a twenty-four-year-old garbage man from Pennsylvania, said, “I’m ready to see somebody really put his foot down. I know Trump will do something about the Islamic religion and the refugee problem.”

  But many delegates did need convincing. Patty Reiman, a lifelong Republican and a party activist from Wisconsin who spent a break from the convention buying a dress with an elephant pattern, had originally supported Marco Rubio for president, and then Ted Cruz. Now she was, with trepidation, coming around to Trump, “because I want to unify our party.” But she still had misgivings: “His personality was a little harsh. He doesn’t think before he speaks. All I can hope is that he’ll make wonderful appointments. Obviously, I worry.”

  Lori Hack, a homemaker from Peoria, Arizona, was a delegate for Cruz, but her state’s winner-take-all system required her to vote for Trump, the victor in Arizona’s primary. She would not. “I have a conscience,” she said, and she insisted on the right to be an unbound delegate. She said her state’s party chairman disagreed and told her, “You’re done.” She was stripped of her position and replaced by someone willing to vote for Trump. Now she was in the arena, but only as a guest of a fellow anti-Trump Republican from Texas. “That’s fine,” she said, “because I have my conscience.” Hack, forty-four and a born-again Christian and lifelong Republican, feared that Trump would lead the party to defeat or, if elected, plunge the nation into dangerous confrontations around the world. “He’s amoral,” she said. “He’s a pathological liar. He’s a narcissist. If Cruz or Romney had that situation with the [attempted] coup in Turkey [in July], they would think it through. Trump just goes from one view to another, one moment to the next.” It had gotten heated on the floor during the battle over the roll call vote, and Hack saw people shouting at one another. It looked as if things might get physical. She didn’t like what Trump brought out in people: “It’s called a cult. They’re so angry that they’ve lost their judgment. Trump says all the hot things, and it clicks with their anger. But some have woken up to who he really is, I do believe that.” Hack could not bring herself to vote for Clinton; she planned to abstain from the presidential election in November.

  One of Hack’s allies in the battle to stop the Trump nomination, Gary Teal, vice chairman of the Republican Party in the District of Columbia, felt trapped. If he didn’t support the nominee, he’d have to resign his party position. Still, “it’s not at all clear to me that Donald Trump has the skills to calm and encourage an electorate that is on edge, like it was in the late sixties. I’m still in shock that this happened. I’ve spent the last four years writing about how it can’t happen, don’t worry, the American people won’t fall for Trump.” Teal blamed the news media for Trump’s rise, “not because of liberal bias,” he said, “but this was simply the media thinking that if they reported everything he said and did, that would kill his chances—people would see who he really is.” Instead, he said, Trump seemed to have Kryptonite protecting him against the facts; his supporters would rather denounce those who raised questions than diminish their enthusiasm for the man they saw as a blue-collar billionaire. During the campaign, Teal had supported Christie, then Rubio. Now he needed to decide about Trump: “Usually, you fight for your candidate and you try and then the decision is made and you get on board. But I’m not there yet.”

  Trump’s convention was not designed to get people like Teal there. It was night after night of delectable sweets for true believers. A National Rifle Association executive got a prime-time slot to talk about how “a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court means your right to own a firearm is gone.” For hour upon hour, the subject was Crooked Hillary, Lying Hillary, Elitist Hillary. One night, the party presented a film titled Hillary the Horrible. Each night, the vitriol that poured out against Clinton grew coarser, louder, ever more threatening. The venom and vulgarities being hawked at T-shirt stands on Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland—HILLARY FOR PRISON was among the milder slogans—leached into Quicken Loans Arena and morphed into chants of “Lock her up!” Chris Christie played the role of prosecutor, leading the delighted crowd in full-throated verdicts of “Guilty!” as he detailed Clinton’s purported crimes—her use of a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state, her support for improved relations with Cuba, her push for a nuclear power deal with Iran. A Montana delegate called for Clinton to be hanged; a New Hampshire state representative and Trump adviser said Clinton should be shot by a firing squad.

  Modeled after Richard Nixon’s emphasis on law and order at the 1968 convention, Trump’s four-evening program presented TV viewers with a vision of a country in deep trouble, unsafe, weak, governed by rigged systems and by people who had dishonest, even evil intentions. Speakers described a country that had lost respect abroad and hope at home, a country nearly at the mercy of what Trump called “barbarian” terrorists. It was a gloomy picture of a nation in decline, a society that had lost its identity. Except for the attacks on Clinton, the approach won a tepid response inside the convention hall: in one delegation after another, the party faithful sat on their hands or folded their arms or shook their heads. This, many said, was not how to win an election. Nor was it the way to make America great again.

  The emotional peak of the first night was a series of testimonials by people who had been powerfully affected by the 2012 terrorist attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya. “I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son,” said Patricia Smith, whose son Sean worked for the State Department at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi. But as Smith spoke, the audience most likely to be moved by her speech, the millions of conservatives who were watching on Fox News, instead heard Donald Trump phone into Bill O’Reilly’s show—a programming faux pas that Republican strategists said would never have happened in a better-organized campaign. Even O’Reilly seemed surprised that Trump would preempt his own convention. “I think the strategy is, Donald Trump is it,” O’Reilly said.

  After Melania’s speech, she and Donald flew home to New York. He had, he said, no interest in hanging out with political types.

  • • •

  THE HOME BASE DONALD returned to was his incongruously serene office high above the cacophony of Fifth Avenue. On his desk, a portrait of a confident Fred Trump faced Donald, the father posing for strangers, giving nothing away. The last three presidents had struggled fairly publicly with their fathers. Clinton and Obama wrote and talked about their feelings of abandonment. Their resolve to prove themselves helped propel their meteoric ascents, tempered by a charisma perhaps born of their lifelong need to win the attention and love missing from their upbringing. At a later stage in life, George W. Bush similarly struggled with the shadow cast by the failure of his father’s presidency; he, too, chose a road on which he might make right the disappointments of his father’s journey. All three of those presidents, to one degree or another, openly carried burdens from their parents’ lives. Trump admitted to no such troubles. He had never been very forthcoming about the texture of his home life. His father, he would admit, was sometimes distant—“his life was business . . . a very content person”—but ultimately a loving, strong figure. Trump had reduced his story of his mother, even more of a mystery to outsiders, to less than a sentence: “very warm . . . great sense of pageantry . . . very beautiful.” Donald Trump had walled off the pain in his past, hid it behind a never-ending show about himself.

  The rest of the desk was devoted to Donald, the stacks of magazines featuring his image, the morning’s news clippings about himself. Yet in an office dedicated almost entirely to celebrating Trump’s success and performance, nothing spoke to the man’s private passions or predilections, nothing to indicate a hobby, an artistic interest, a literary bent, a statement about his credo, his crises, or his dreams. In one of his books, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, he had asserted that visionary business leaders succeed “because they are narcissists who devote their talent with unrelenting f
ocus to achieving their dreams, even if it’s sometimes at the expense of those around them.” He approvingly quoted a writer who said, “Successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world.”

  He had reached the pinnacle of American politics virtually without allies, rising in opposition to the party structure. More than any other major figure in modern presidential politics, he seemed allergic to ideology. He had won the nomination with an impossibly tiny campaign staff, a core of half a dozen loyalists, most of them newcomers to presidential politics. His most valued consultants were his children and their spouses.

  He had never really had close friends. As far back as 1980, he had told TV interviewer Rona Barrett, “My business is so all-encompassing that I don’t really get the pleasure of being with friends that much, frankly.” She pressed him: Whom would you call if you were in trouble and your family wasn’t around? “Maybe I’d call you, Rona,” he said. Thirty-six years later, asked again, for this book, about his friendships, Trump said after a considerable, unusual pause, “Well, it’s an interesting question. Most of my friendships are business related because those are the only people I meet. The people I meet, really, I guess I could say socially, when you go out to a charity event or something . . . I have people that I haven’t spoken to in years, but I think they’re friends.” And he named—he put the names off the record—three men he had had business dealings with two or more decades before, men he had only rarely seen in recent years. Trump continued, “I mean, I think I have a lot of friends, but they’re not friends like perhaps other people have friends, where they’re together all the time and they go out to dinner all the time.” But was there anyone he would turn to if he had a personal problem, or some doubt about himself or something he’d done? “More of my family,” Trump said. “I have a lot of good relationships. I have good enemies, too, which is okay. But I think more of my family than others.”