How Donald Trump rose from real estate scion to TV ‘boss’

GWEN IFILL:

Tonight, however, we continue our series exploring Donald Trump's life, his transformation from a borough kid in Queens to a presidential contender who has taken the party by storm.

In this second installment, we look at the rise of the Trump brand, the boom, the bankruptcies, and his celebrity reemergence.

Long before his name became a household one, Donald Trump, fresh out of business school, was already drawn to Manhattan's flashiest lights, those on the Great White Way.

MICHAEL D’ANTONIO, Trump Biographer:

He was always intrigued by performance, and the very first business activity he really got involved with was the production of a Broadway play.

GWEN IFILL:

That's author Michael D'Antonio. The play, which Trump backed in 1970, was "Paris Is Out." But the theatrical venture closed almost as quickly as it opened, so Trump retreated to his roots.

MICHAEL D’ANTONIO:

When he eventually turned toward the family business in real estate in the early 1970s, he was determined to use celebrity to help build the business. And I think he understood that you could be a real estate developer in Manhattan and also be famous.

GWEN IFILL:

Enter Donald Trump, the builder: cushioned against risk by his father's wealth and political connections, yet still longing for a piece of Manhattan glamour.

Writer Gwenda Blair:

GWENDA BLAIR, Author, "The Trumps": When Donald came to Manhattan in the mid-'70s, New York City was in terrible financial straits, on the verge of bankruptcy. The people who dealt with him in those early days said he just jumped through the phone. He was so competitive, so ambitious, so eager, that he just jumped into the spotlight. Every possibility to get any kind of attention, he went for it.

GWEN IFILL:

His first major project was the old Commodore Hotel, a crumbling eyesore in the heart of the city that sat abandoned next to Grand Central Station.

Author Timothy O’Brien:

TIMOTHY O'BRIEN, Author, "TrumpNation": He partnered on it with the Pritzker family that owned the Hyatt hotel chain. The Grand Hyatt was really Donald Trump coming onto the scene in New York, and Donald Trump first coming into the public eye.

GWENDA BLAIR:

This was shiny, glass, lots of brass, stuck out in the middle of Manhattan. And this began his whole career of exaggeration, truthful hyperbole, as he calls it, in which everything he does is the best, the best of the best, the biggest of the biggest.

GWEN IFILL:

Before the project was even completed, The New York Times was already branding Trump New York's number one real estate promoter, describing him in one profile as tall, lean and blond, and resembling Robert Redford.

He rapidly climbed New York's social ladder, becoming a regular in its most exclusive clubs, hobnobbing with movie stars and models, like Ivana Zelnickova, who he married in 1977.

MICHAEL D’ANTONIO:

This was his ambition, to find just the right beautiful young woman who would fill out the picture of the successful man on the rise. He followed her back to Canada, where she lived, and courted her pretty avidly. And before you know it, Ivana is being presented with a prenuptial agreement that will set the parameters for her marriage to Donald and her partnership with him.

GWEN IFILL:

But controversy followed Trump wherever he went, including public outcry over what was to become his signature property, Fifth Avenue's Trump Tower. The old building facade had historic limestone friezes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to preserve, but that would've added time to the project.

TIMOTHY O’BRIEN:

Donald is a notoriously impatient person, and so, in the dead of night one night, he brought in a team of illegal Polish migrant workers, who sledgehammered the friezes into dust and took them down. So, embedded in this triumph that is Trump Tower is also this early warning sign that you have someone who doesn't really play well with the other children, and is willing to literally pound something into dust to get his own way.

GWEN IFILL:

As banks continued to open their coffers with loans, he went on a shopping spree.

TIMOTHY O’BRIEN:

He used this gigantic free piggy bank, essentially, to buy an airline, the Trump Shuttle, to buy a hotel, the Plaza Hotel, to buy a football team, the USFL Generals. And then, when he goes into Atlantic City, he ultimately acquires a whole string of casinos there, using borrowed money as well.

GWEN IFILL:

Those casinos, and many of his other businesses, closed one by one, often amid bankruptcy claims and unpaid debt.

In 1989, Trump played a controversial role in one of the decade's most notorious crime cases, when five black teenagers were accused of attacking a white female jogger in Central Park. Trump stirred what quickly became a boiling pot over criminal justice and race, weighing on in the pages of The New York Daily News.

GWENDA BLAIR:

The case of the Central Park jogger, he took out a full-page ad demanding that whoever did this should be sent to the death chamber, the kids who were arrested, and later exonerated, by the way.

GWEN IFILL:

None of this slowed Trump's rise. In fact, the New York tabloids thrived on his exploits, breathlessly tracking his marriages to Ivana and Marla Maples, his divorces from both, and now, his third and current marriage to Melania Trump. Then, in 2004:

DONALD TRUMP (R), Presidential Candidate: You're fired.

GWEN IFILL:

The Trump brand found its ideal niche, in a wildly popular prime-time program that celebrated everything he had come to represent.

DONALD TRUMP:

I'm looking for the apprentice.

GWEN IFILL:

Wealth, celebrity, business success and toughness.

GWENDA BLAIR:

He began "The Apprentice," and that turned out to be terrific for him.

It let him be in American living rooms every week being the boss, being the guy in charge, being the guy who hires people and fires people. When he first started that, was he thinking, aha, straight off to the White House? We can't say. But, certainly, 10 years in, that whole decade of people seeing him as the boss, as the CEO, has certainly made the idea of his moving into the Oval Office seem a matter of course.

GWEN IFILL:

From the corner office to the Oval Office suddenly didn't seem that far a leap.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

And part of a fascinating series of looks at the life of Donald Trump.