The FRONTLINE Interviews

Andrea Bernstein

Author, American Oligarchs

Andrea Bernstein is a political journalist who has covered six national elections. She is co-host of the podcast Trump, Inc., and the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on June 11, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Trump and 1970s New York

Let’s start with Donald Trump is about to be launched, or launch himself into Manhattan.It’s the ’70s, mid-70s, late ’70s.Can you give me a sense of how rotten the Big Apple was in those days?What was going on financially in city government?The drug scene?The racial scene?Whatever it is, the economic climate?

Right.So there are a number of things that are going on in New York City in the early 1970s.The manufacturing base, which had boomed after World War II, especially in New York—New York was the No. 1 manufacturing city—began to fade, and a million jobs were lost.New York City found itself in the position of a company that was losing its customer base.And the mayor of New York City, Abe Beame, went to Congress and pled for money.He said, “We are too big to fail.”And a number of other big-city mayors went, and they said, “Federal government, you cannot let your cities fail because we are the engine of the economy, and you need to help us out.”

And this is the moment at which President Gerald Ford didn’t precisely say “Drop dead” to New York City, but effectively he did.He said that the federal government was not going to bail out New York City.

This is the fall of 1973, when Donald Trump decides he’s going to make his big move into Manhattan.And the city is flailing.White people are beginning to move out in droves.There are scare tactics.There is race baiting.And there is also a whole lot of federal money that is being given to encourage the development of the suburbs and white flight.

So there’s a lot of money in the system from the federal government out in the suburbs.Meanwhile—

Right.There are these huge incentives for people to build out in the suburbs.What that means is that development money is not coming into the city.White people are fleeing.The federal government is putting the city in a position of facing bankruptcy.Ultimately, the city gets bailed out by the teachers’ union, but it is a really dire, dire period for New York City.

And this is the point at which Donald Trump comes in, in this atmosphere, and switches over from his father’s business, which is bread-and-butter working and middle-class apartments for people in Brooklyn and Queens and the outer boroughs of New York City, sort of out at the end of the subway line.And Donald Trump decides he’s going to make his move in Manhattan.

And he does this, really—

What’s he like at this moment?Before he comes in, who is that Donald Trump?

I think it’s a really good question, who is Donald Trump in 1973, because obviously he’s not the Donald Trump we know now.But he is his father’s son.He is someone who has been steeped in the real estate business.He has been running his father’s apartment complexes out on Coney Island and out in Queens, collecting rents, having a real hands-on approach.And he is also around this time in the early ’70s accused by the Justice Department, in one of his very first newspaper headlines, of racial discrimination.And there is a point at which, in this article in The New York Times, it says the Justice Department is accusing Donald J. Trump, president of the Trump Organization, of discriminating against Black people in renting apartments in Brooklyn and Queens.

Now, there’s a whole other thing to say about that, but just to continue with this trajectory of Manhattan, that’s the sort of backdrop for him to get into Manhattan.And the city is emptying out, and he has his ideas—he has his eyes on the Commodore Hotel, which is now the Grand Hyatt, right near Grand Central Terminal.And this building, this hotel was owned by Penn Central Railroad, which is facing its own bankruptcy problems, because one of the other byproducts of World War II was the car culture, a very difficult time for the railroads, and they’re selling off their properties.And Donald Trump says, “That’s the one I want.”

He doesn’t have financing.He doesn’t have state approvals.But he has one thing: He has political connections.And he is able to set up this deal, which the city bills as, or the state bills as a special new program, but isn’t a special new program.It is just a giveaway to Donald Trump, a tax giveaway.And he makes the argument: “The city needs me because the city needs this development.No one wants to come to the city anymore”—by which he means white people.And he starts using a trope, which he uses throughout his career, which is to say: “This area is blighted.”“Blight” is generally code for white people won’t come there anymore.And he uses it over and over and over again to try to get federal, or city or state financing.

And he does it in this case.He makes the argument that the city should help him out because he’s going to help this blighted neighborhood around Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, which is obviously at the center of Manhattan and may have been going through some hard times.And he gets what amounted to, before the city finally finished this particular abatement this spring, a $400 million tax break, taxpayer subsidy for this initial development in New York City.

You said he had political connections as he came in.How did he have them?What were they?

I mean, this goes back—so this is quite an amazing story that goes back to his father, Fred Trump.So in the 1930s, Fred Trump is really struggling.Even though he inherited—Fred Trump did—quite a nest egg from his father Friedrich Trump, who died, as it happens, in the 1918 flu pandemic, even though Fred Trump had inherited a lot of money, he was struggling, and he was working in the supermarket industry.And he gets two big breaks.

And the first big break is he goes into a Brooklyn courtroom and he wants to get a piece of a bankrupt company.And he understands that to get the judge to give it to him, he has to start developing his political connections.So this is the point at which Fred Trump starts to develop his connections with the Brooklyn Democratic political machine.And he gives money, and he goes to dinner, and he hires the people that work for the Democratic Party, the favored people.And he also becomes, at this time, very close to the local federal housing administrator of Brooklyn, who is—which is a politically appointed job, but in the position to designate who was going to get federally backed loans.

Now, this is not necessarily a footnote in Trump family history, because the Federal Housing Administration at that time had codified racial discrimination.It said, “If you don’t segregate your housing, it’s a loan risk for us.”And this was the atmosphere in which Fred Trump becomes a millionaire—in mid-century dollars, not in our dollars—but becomes a millionaire because he’s given so many of these FHA loans to build housing.And he understands that to keep the spigot open, he needs to keep cultivating his political ties.

So he becomes very close to a number of Democratic Party officials.And he particularly becomes close to a political club called the Madison Club in Brooklyn, which is also the club that sort of fostered Abe Beame, the mayor, and it was also the club of Hugh Carey, the governor, both of these figures who were in office at the time that the Trump family, and Donald Trump in particular, got this huge tax break for building this hotel in Manhattan.And when they built the hotel, by the time they started to build it, the city was already on the upswing.

As Fred Sr. sends Donald into, or allows, I guess, Donald, or knows that Donald is going to enter Manhattan, what else does he do for him?What else does he give him so that he has the sort of Midas touch?

There’s this extraordinary meeting with the developer of Penn Central.So here’s Donald Trump.He’s something—he’s around 29 years old.And he says to the developer, he says to the seller of the property, the Penn Central representative: “I can do this.I can sell this property for you.”And there’s a little skepticism because here’s this young guy, and he has a lot of energy, and he has verve, and he has sort of a hunger to build a big thing, but he’s never done it.

And he says: “Well, how do I know you have, in effect, the political juice?I’ll need to see the mayor.”That’s what the seller says.And Donald Trump says, “OK, when do you want to see him?”He says, “Tomorrow, 2:00.”And without checking with anybody, Donald Trump says, “Fine, I’ll pick you up in my limo at 1:30.”And he picks up this man, Ned Eichler, and they go down to City Hall.Fred Trump shows up.Abe Beame puts an arm around the Trumps and says, “Anything they want, they get.”

So this is the way that Donald Trump became a Manhattan developer, was not by having money, not by having experience developing big Manhattan hotels.It was because he had his father’s connections and his connections to the mayor, and the ability to convince people that his idea was a good one, even though it was entirely untested.

Trump and Roy Cohn

When does he cross Roy Cohn’s path?How does he do it, and how does it affect his life in Manhattan at that time?

Donald Trump has never loved a lawyer as much as he loved Roy Cohn.And what happens with Roy Cohn—and this is all around this time, around the time that Donald Trump is thinking about getting into Manhattan and is beginning to put his eye on big parcels of land.This is something that Fred Trump really was kind of skeptical about because it wasn’t Fred Trump’s business model.Fred Trump’s business model was, you build the things, you rent the things, you collect the money.It’s very steady.With the profit you make, you build more things.And Donald Trump took on extraordinary levels of risk compared to his father, and Fred thought Manhattan was too risky.

So at—in 1973, when Donald Trump has still—hasn’t yet made a name as a real estate developer and is still putting together or still working for his father collecting rents, having a very hands-on connection with the tenants in these Trump properties, which have names like Shore Haven and Beach Haven and Trump Village, Donald Trump is doing all of this.And the Justice Department accuses the Trump family of race discrimination.They accuse them of telling Black tenants there are no vacancies.They accuse them of sending them away.They accuse them of having some buildings that are almost all white, if not all white.

And they file a lawsuit against Donald Trump.And there are depositions.And in the depositions Donald Trump says, “Oh, I don’t keep track over, of which apartments have Blacks and which have whites.”But then at another point in the deposition he says, “Well, these apartments have lots of Black people in them,” which is a sort of mutually contradictory statement of the type that we’ve become used to from Donald Trump.

He also said, “I don’t have anything to do with these decisions.”But at the same time, he was applying for various licenses in which he said: “I had everything to do with the decisions.I oversaw all aspects of renting.”

So he’s very involved, by his own words, in renting apartments in these Trump properties, and along comes the Justice Department, and they have testers, and they say: “We have depositions from employees.We have testers.It’s clear to us that you are not renting to Black people.”

And the Justice Department sues the Trump family.And around this time, Donald Trump, because he has his eyes on Manhattan, decides he has to become a member of a club called Le Club....

And when he goes to the club—this is by his own account in The Art of the Deal—he meets a sort of short man with a flattened nose, and it’s Roy Cohn.And he tells Roy Cohn about the suit, and Roy Cohn says, “Well, I don’t know why you should have to rent to people on welfare,” and, “How is that fair?”And Donald Trump says, “I’m hiring you as my lawyer.”This is by his own account, so we can, take it for what it’s worth.

But he does hire Roy Cohn.And what the Trump family does is, they sue the Justice Department; they countersue.And they have a very aggressive legal strategy.Just a few years prior, another major developer had been charged and had quietly settled, but the Trump family fought back.They sued the Justice Department.They said the Justice Department—they accused them of “Gestapo” tactics, which is another thing that we’ve heard quite recently from the president.

And after a period of time passes, they settle the lawsuit and promised not to discriminate against Black people, which is what the Justice Department had wanted all along.In Trump’s version, it was nothing really happened.But in the Justice Department’s version, it was, “We achieved our goal because they made a promise they wouldn’t discriminate.”

Now, there’s a footnote to that, because the Justice Department actually didn’t think the Trumps were complying and tried to enforce that, and essentially the Trumps ran out the clock until the consent agreement was over.

So the Cohn-Trump relationship, based on this case alone, but certainly many cases and many incidents in the future, yields what level of education for Donald Trump about how to interact with government?

Oh, I think Donald Trump—I mean, he—other than his father, he learned more from Roy Cohn than anyone else.I mean, at the time that Roy Cohn met Donald Trump, he was already—Roy Cohn was already an infamous figure.He had prosecuted the Rosenbergs.He had been Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man.He had returned to New York and was representing various mob figures; those were his clients.He’d been investigated for witness tampering in various states.

So he was already quite a controversial figure at the time that he met Donald Trump.And he was the one who counseled Donald Trump in legal tactics that we see to this day—aggression, countersuing, counterattacking, trying to smear your opponents.And he also showed Donald Trump how to interact with government, how to pay people to get things that he wanted.

Now, we haven’t talked about Trump Tower, but a word about Trump Tower.You will be surprised to hear that when Donald Trump wanted to build Trump Tower, he thought he should get a tax break.Why should he get a tax break?Because the Tower was underutilized.It’s another word like “blight.”Like it wasn’t being properly used, so he should be able to get a tax break.And he—the city denied him the tax break, and he sued, and he lost at the lower-court level.And he went to the Court of Appeals in New York, which is the highest court in New York, and, as Donald Trump related it in The Art of the Deal, Roy Cohn spoke for seven hours before the judges with no notes and won the case.And Donald Trump did get a tax break for Trump Tower, which is at one of the prime real estate spots in Manhattan, after Roy Cohn’s intervention.

So what is the pattern that he is learning from all this, about how government works and how to get what you want from the government?

I mean, I think that there are—there are many, many different things that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn that we still see today.One is that he learned how to compromise people.So when they were trying to get the tax break for the Commodore Hotel... they would make contributions to the governor, or they would hire the attorneys for the city comptroller who also had a say in this.So they would put people in a situation where their interests were muddied, and people sort of slipped into this.And then Roy Cohn, and later Donald Trump, understood that because people had put themselves in this role of having conflicts of interest or being somehow complicit or standing to profit, they, the Trumps, could get their way because people could no longer pull back; they could no longer get out of it because they’d said yes so many times that they themselves were at risk if they ever said no.

And that is something that Donald Trump really learned from Roy Cohn: how to get the people around him to compromise themselves so that he could gain power and the upper hand in these real estate deals.

Trump and His Father

He takes the grease provided by his father and the relationships with people like Mayor Beame.I had the impression from something I read or maybe heard in your stuff about this Midas touch, that Fred Sr. loved to tell the world that Donald was—anything he touched turned to gold.

Yeah, he said that.

Tell me that story.

So, I mean, the Trump family was extraordinarily adept at mythmaking.Fred Trump was known for having women in bathing suits at his real estate ribbon-cuttings.He was a showman.And he understood the power of image-making.And he passed that on to his son, to Donald Trump.Donald Trump was also a showman.And there is, in 1973, there is the story about Fred Trump in the real estate section of The New York Times, which was sort of sleepy in those days; it was kind of just a chronicle of what was happening.And somebody who understood image and marketing and branding like Fred Trump did understood that you could use that to promote your business.

And he puts forward his then-young son Donald, blond, and there’s a picture of them out in front of some of their apartments in Brooklyn, and he says, “Anything that Donald Trump touches turns to gold.”And that is actually Donald Trump’s first press in The New York Times.And that went on for decades.There was an article a few years later about how he looked ever so much like Robert Redford.And both Trumps understood the importance of the media and mythmaking in their attempts to build their power.And they understood that those things could help them get things from government officials, those things could help them get money, and that that was an important part of building real estate, as important as erecting buildings. …

Trump and the Central Park Five

During this time, when Trump seems to be very concerned about, I guess, race—there’s no other word for it—Central Park Five happens.Can you tell me what happened there and what his response was?

So this is a really interesting turning point for Donald Trump, because although he had been political in the sense that Donald Trump went to the rubber chicken dinners and Donald Trump made the contributions and Donald Trump would hire the lawyers and insurance brokers that the Democratic Party liked, and that was a sort of cycle of power that he participated in, he hadn’t been ideologically political.Now, he had clearly—his father’s business before him and then his own business had been based on the money they could make from white flight and from using code words like “welfare” and “blight” and “underutilization,” which everybody understood to mean properties were not available as they should be to white people.

So that was Donald Trump’s business model.It was the way he had come up.It was sort of what he had his eye on when he went into Manhattan.And what happens is that he starts to think about running for politics himself and getting involved in New York political life sometime in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, in 1987, was when Donald Trump went up to New Hampshire and people greeted him with signs that said “Donald Trump for President.”This was something that had been organized by an acolyte of Roy Cohn, Roger Stone, who’s a figure that sort of came back into prominence.

So he is thinking about himself as a political figure.And at this time in New York, this is the Bonfire of the Vanities era, there is sort of open racism.There is this horrible—sometime in this era, there’s a number of really sort of awful race-based crimes.And the racial polarization is growing and growing and growing in New York.And it’s important to remember that sort of even though the economy had been growing in New York in the 1980s, it was still very rough around the edges.

Violent crime was high, and this young jogger is raped in Central Park, this young white woman.And these five young Black [and Latino] boys from the neighborhood become accused.They’re later exonerated.But Donald Trump puts out a newspaper ad that they should face the death penalty.And this happens at a time when he is thinking about how he would position himself as a political figure.

Now we know, obviously, he doesn’t do that for a long, long time, but it shows where his ideological bent was very early in his career, at a time when most people thought of him as sort of the playboy, fun guy, gambler, a risk taker but in a good way, like a sort of lovable rogue.

But he enters one of the most divisive places you can go, especially in a big city, at that time.What does he learn?What is he doing?Yes, he’s putting a toe in the water, but it’s almost like trying things out.And he can afford to.

I mean, then as now, Donald Trump lived in a bubble.So one can only imagine he gets a very positive feedback loop from the real estate world, from the bankers that he’s dealing with, that he’s right to be, if you will, tough on crime, to call for—to call for the death penalty in this case. …

Trump and Giuliani

He comes across another figure in New York who eventually will have quite a political history himself, and that’s Rudy Giuliani.They run together.They fight with each other for a while.They go back and forth across the landscape in New York, and eventually nationally.Tell me about Rudy Giuliani around that time, and then we’ll bring Donald Trump in.

So Rudy Giuliani, in the 1980s, is this ambitious federal prosecutor who becomes—whois an advocate and a proponent of law and order and of cracking down on crime, but also who is somebody that made real strides in breaking up the mob in New York.He personally prosecuted a mob case that was widely believed to have really broken the spine of the mob in New York.He prosecuted Wall Street wrongdoers at a time when that really wasn’t common.And he was seen as somebody who cracked down on white-collar crime.In fact, he personally tried a case against Stanley Friedman, who was Roy Cohn’s law partner.Stanley Friedman had also been a political figure.He was sentenced to one of the longest prison sentences of anybody in politics in New York after being tried by Rudy Giuliani.And that was who he was when he was United States attorney.

And in 1989, he runs for mayor.And there was this early tape of him at the time, which I’ve studied, and he sort of looks like a G-man teleported from the 1950s.He has this very sort of close-cropped haircut, dark suit, narrow tie, and he is articulating this vision of himself.

Rudy Giuliani runs for mayor in 1989, and he had expected he was going to be running against Ed Koch, who had sort of weathered a number of his own corruption scandals.But instead he was running against David Dinkins, who was running to be the first African American mayor of New York.And Rudy Giuliani gets the support of the police union in this context of an extremely racially polarized city in which the homicide rate is approaching 2,000 a year, which, by comparison, today it’s now in the 100s.So there was this incredibly high crime rate.There was Rudy Giuliani speaking in his own racially coded language running against the person who wanted to be the first Black mayor.

Trump did have a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani that year, but in the end he sort of pulls back his support because Trump understands that all of his deals depend on the support of a lot of Democratic officials, and it’s probably not a good idea for him to not get on their side.So he does, and he pulls back his support.

But then Rudy Giuliani runs again and Trump supports him, and Rudy Giuliani becomes the mayor...And he also gets support from Giuliani’s housing agency to get more federally backed loans, this time for a luxury project on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and he insists that this area of upper Manhattan, this area of the Upper West Side of Manhattan is blighted, so therefore he should be entitled to some $300 million-plus in federally backed loans.

He doesn’t get it, but he got the support of the Giuliani administration.He hires a lobbyist who’s very close to Rudy Giuliani, and he gets some other things—he gets to build his tower near the United Nations much higher than he otherwise would have been able to, and he also applies for a tax abatement for that building.So he has—he’s currying favor with Rudy Giuliani.He’s becoming close to Rudy Giuliani at a time when Rudy Giuliani, who has just defeated the city’s first Black mayor, is running a very racially polarized administration, where he is beset by various incidents of police violence.In one of the incidents where a man was killed, Giuliani said that the man was no altar boy; he was, in fact, an altar boy.

And he—this was the kind of language that Giuliani was using, and this was the context for Donald Trump’s increasing articulation of a view of a polarized political world.

They’re also the same, if you look at the pictures of them in those days, hanging out together with a couple of jackhammers, opening up one building site or another, they seem like the same kind of New York guys—young, brash.

Yeah, I think they are the same kind of New York guys.I mean, they’re both from the outer boroughs.They’re very similar in age.They—although Donald Trump, you can’t really hear it now, at that time he had quite an accent.For example, he would say ah-pot-ments.And his voice was different then.And it’s true.

Now, Giuliani was really a law-and-order guy, and Donald Trump was a rule breaker at that time.He was going to Studio 54, he was going to clubs, he was saying outré things on The Howard Stern Show.He was playing up his image of a bad boy.

But is that playing up an image, or is that actually who he was?

Both.It was both.He both was a bad boy and a rule breaker and liked people to know it, because it’s, then as now, a way of expressing power, that you can get away with breaking rules and doing things wrong.And once you get away with it one time, then everybody who has let you do it has given you more power to do it the next time.

Did they share a common vision of law and order?

Well, you know, I feel like if you’re going back to New York City in the 1990s, yes, kind of.But Donald Trump was not a super—I mean, he just—the advertisement about the Central Park Five notwithstanding, he just wasn’t super-involved in the policy part of politics.He was involved in—politics for him was this really kind of oligarchic model of government, which was—that is, as a wealthy guy would give money to government figures who would then return the favor by enabling him to get many millions more back for his business.

And so he was very political in that sense, but he wasn’t political in the sense of he sort of had to speak out on every issue as he does today.And they were really few and far between until the time that he really began to seriously think about running for president.

Trump’s Investments in Atlantic City

So before we get there, let’s take him down to Atlantic City.

He runs into another institution besides the government, although there’s certainly for sure the gaming commission and a government.But that’s the banks.As he starts to get increasingly in trouble, especially on the Taj, or primarily on the Taj, take me to what happens to the failures, the “too big to fail” Donald Trump, and what that reveals about the man who would be [elected] as our president.

Well, it’s important to remember, Donald Trump in New Jersey was a slightly different person from Donald Trump in New York.In New York, Donald Trump was always Fred Trump’s son, and there’s a sort of class of New York real estate society that referred to him then—and some still do—as The Kid.And in New Jersey, he was Donald Trump, glamorous New York real estate developer.And his sister was a federal prosecutor.And then, with his help, she becomes a federal judge.And her husband is this very sort of established lobbyist lawyer in New Jersey.So he is a different kind of person when he gets to Atlantic City.

But nevertheless, his business model is totally unsustainable because he keeps building casinos.And one of the things that’s clear when you go through all of the records and the reports of the Casino Control Commission and the gaming commission is that he kept bedazzling them and making them believe he could continue to make money, even though his own—his casinos were cannibalizing his other casinos.And he kept convincing the gaming commission and the bankers, “No, no, no, not a problem; I can do it.”

And like many people in politics, bankers were taken in, and they gave loans to Donald Trump that they later regretted, hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which he personally guaranteed.And they sort of went along with the beautifully spun tales and the promises, and they thought, yes, we will all make a lot money.

And then it happens that it all crashes, because it was going to crash.You can’t have three casinos.And many of them had actually poor business plans.It was unclear who their market audience was.One of Donald Trump’s hotels singularly for Atlantic City lost money on slots, which no one else was doing.

So he crashes, and the banks say, “You have to pay us back,” and he almost loses everything.He almost loses the name Trump.And there’s a banker, and his name is Wilbur Ross, and he says to all the other bankers, “We actually have to keep the name Trump because the name Trump is an asset; it’s what’s going to enable us to build up this business back and get some of our money back.”And it is because of Wilbur Ross that the Trump Organization was able to remain so named in Atlantic City, and Trump was able to refinance and restructure these deals with the banks.

Now, it’s worth saying that after that, he could not get any financing from mainstream United States banks, and he still can’t, because they were burnt so badly and lost so much money in Atlantic City on Donald Trump’s big gamble.

What is that all about, Andrea?All the stories you’ve just told us, what do you think—first, what is the composite of that as we head toward his presidency in our conversation, but also what is it about?Where is it coming from?

Well, in the real estate development world, I mean, it’s a kind of—it’s not like a—it’s not like a business like selling rakes or any number of other things you could think of.It’s an entirely transactional business where you have two parties, usually, just to simplify it.Just to boil it down to the simplest elements, there are two parties.One person gains by the other person losing.Every dollar that one person loses, somebody wins.And this is Donald Trump’s business model.It’s a zero-sum game.

And that is the way he has always acted, that so long as he wins, it’s fine.And by bringing enough people along with him, he keeps winning.In many, many cases, his deals are a failure.In many cases, customers or buyers or associates or partners lose.But he wins.And so long as he wins, he’s able to keep going to the next deal.

And I think that one of the things that we are seeing—one of the things that we’re seeing now is that he doesn’t really have any backing in a situation or understanding of a situation with how to construct a deal where everybody wins.

Trump and the ‘Crisis Presidency’

Let’s go to what I think of as the crisis presidency these last almost four years.What of the real estate dealer?What of the Donald Trump you’ve chased and read about and maybe even knew?What of that has emerged in the governance of America in the last three and a half years?

I mean, I think everything.He has brought everything with him, including sometimes the same people.But … he views the world where there are winners and losers, us and them.And the circle of “us: is his family and his close associates and people who pay him money.And everybody else, we have seen in his—in this administration, he treats as dispensable.Could be Democratic members of Congress.Could be immigrants.Could be Muslims.Could be women.Could be you name it.Could be any group of people, so long as it’s not his inner group.

So one of the things we see in his administration, this “us and them” thing, is exactly the way it was in real estate.It’s “we win, and it doesn’t matter if everybody else loses, so long as we keep winning.”So you may ask yourself, well, how does he keep getting to do deals when everybody understands what a risk it is?And one of the things I understood, or really came to understand in the course of writing my book, is the way that people around him would be seduced.They would be seduced by the glamour and the excitement.There were many people who Donald Trump sued or threatened to sue that he then hired, and they thought, well, what have I got to lose?It’s more interesting than my current job as a real estate analyst; I can always go back to that.It’s much more interesting than my current job as a city commissioner.And then Donald Trump would get people to go along with him.

In his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Michael Cohen described this.And he talked about how Donald Trump would sort of move the bar an inch, and he would say, “Cross it.”And then Michael Cohen would do it.And then he would move it further, and Michael Cohen would still cross.And then he would move it further, and Michael Cohen would cross it again, until he realized he was so far in, he couldn’t get out.He was so compromised that he always had to say yes to Donald Trump.

And I think this is an exact description of his administration and the way he works with Congress, that people keep going along with him.And he demands it of them.And when he doesn’t get it, we see the retribution—whether it be on Twitter, whether it be financing political opponents, whether it be icing people out.These are all parts of Donald Trump’s playbook that we see over and over again.

The Choice Between Biden and Trump

The last question I usually ask, I always ask people when we’re doing this film, for this particular film, is, what’s the choice between these two men?

I think that one of the things that’s really interesting about Donald Trump is most of what he does is no secret.He—we can see his thinking; we can see his actions, we can see the way he governs.It’s all out in the open.And he’s made several things very, very clear as president: One of them is that government should do for other wealthy people what it did for him when he was a private businessman, so it should help them get richer, it should roll back regulations, it should give them tax cuts, but that there isn’t a fundamental need for government in the way that Donald Trump runs it.And we’ve seen the gutting of agency after agency, from the State Department to various health agencies to even the National Weather Service; all kinds of agencies that are being gutted, that are losing personnel, that are not really seen as essential because they aren’t doing those things that Donald Trump understood government to do.

So we see that.And we see the consequences of a president who has cut so much of government and also done so much to cut the idea that there should be a government.And he—we’ve seen the ways at which he’s gotten these permission structures, for example, from various wings of the Republican Party that people were shocked that were supporting him, but he has given them their court appointments.So people say: “Well, I mean, I don’t like everything he does.I don’t like his tweets, but I do fundamentally like the fact that he has appointed extremely conservative judges.”

So he’s made his series of bargains, as he does.This is just the way he behaved as a private businessman—in which people buy into his way of doing things and then find themselves unable to pull back.

One of the things that we’ve found in our reporting is that the—Trump has got so much control over the Republican Party that it’s down to not even giving information, which—polling data, which would be useful to Republicans running for office down the ticket.It has become all structured around him and his reelection, and has become another tool for him to exert power.

So what we see in this presidency is Donald Trump breaking rules and norms, acting like a private businessman, making decisions that then fit the few, as he did as a private businessman, and continuing to consolidate his power.

We haven’t really talked about it today, but I think one of the defining features of his presidency is the way so many checks and balances have fallen away over the course of his presidency.So congressional oversight; journalism has become much more difficult because he gives out so little information about what he’s doing; and even the courts have endorsed some of his measures, that people would have been very surprised at the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, about enabling of executive power.

So I think the choice before people really is, do they want more of that?Do they want more consolidation of power in the executive branch?Do they want more of an ideology of “us and them," which we’ve seen only—the latest manifestation comes into the way Trump is treating police brutality, racism.He views the world as somebody other than him is trying to beat him down, and his only possibility for winning is to beat that person down first.

And I think that’s the question before us is, do people endorse that system and—or, do they want something else?

And Mr. Biden?What does he offer?

Well, I haven’t been covering the Biden campaign.But I mean, obviously what Biden offers is, what he says he offers is a belief in government.And I have no reason to disbelieve that.I mean, he has been in office for a long time.He’s obviously not in office now, but he was in office for a long time and took a wide array of positions, some of which are certainly out of step with the times now, particularly fighting crime, race relations, things he would surely—well, I’ll just end the sentence there: He’s done many things that have been controversial and that he’ll have to live with.I mean, there are other things as a senator from Delaware in terms of helping sort of protect the secrecy laws in Delaware that enabled a lot of foreign money to move into the United States.

So he has a long career that he will have to live with and that he will have to reckon with, but he does seem to have a fundamental belief in checks and balances and in an idea of government as a place where, sort of like we were talking about after the Second World War, where government—where people were seen that they need to pay their taxes—where people understood that they needed to pay their taxes because we were all in it together.That is something that the Trump family as individuals and Trump as president has really broken down.But it’s something that Joe Biden has indicated through his career that he believes in, a sense of fairness and a sense that government should exist, and there should be a system of checks and balances and in a world where opposing views can coexist.

Trump and the Separation of Powers

When Donald Trump comes in as president, there’s an assumption that the separation of powers, the bureaucracy, the experts, that it’s sort of insurmountable institutional Washington that this guy is not going to be able to bend to his will, and as you’ve described where it ends up at the end of it.What is the skill that he brings from New York City and his dad and Roy Cohn and all of this experience that he ends up by the end of his first term having a real impact on changing the way people thought it was going to play out?

Well, I think—so when the framers set up the Constitution, they understood that there would be a human desire to act corruptly and to try to profit off of government.And so they tried to put in structures that would understand that that exists, not try to eliminate the desire, but to eliminate the ability for government to reward that kind of behavior.Even before, I mean, decades before Donald Trump became president, that was eroding.There became many, many, many more ways for people to profit from government.

And what Donald Trump brought to Washington was the sense that he just had to convince enough of the people for enough of the time so he could get to a situation where he was going to win, no matter what, and that they might lose, but that was OK, because that’s how it had always been in real estate.

And he did this in the same way, would just sort of pick people off—senators, opposition.He would give people things that they felt they had to say yes to if they wanted to keep their own jobs, if they wanted to stay in office, and then they were with him and couldn’t walk away from him, because while that was happening, he would consolidate so many other mechanisms of power.

So what are the checks and balances?Well, they are other branches of Congress.They are the courts.The courts he has responded to in a way that has—completely comes from the Roy Cohn playbook, which is: Be aggressive; attack your opponents; run out the clock.Just keep appealing and appealing and appealing so that effectively justice delayed is justice denied.And he has done this with any number of subpoenas he doesn’t want to answer or investigations he doesn’t want to cooperate with.He just keeps suing.He keeps losing, but he keeps suing.And it’s a way to gum up the system.And it also means that the courts can’t oversee him.

And then we see what’s happened with freedom of the press.I mean, he attacks journalists as enemies of the people.And he has uttered—I think The Washington Post’s most recent count is—according to The Washington Post, by the time Donald Trump leaves office, he will probably have uttered 25,000 lies and misstatements, which is extraordinary.But by him exercising control over language in this way, what he does is he just makes all of the coverage of him suspect.And it’s a way that he neutralizes reporting, reporters, journalism, and expresses power, because he can go out and say it was sunny when it was raining; and if you have to accept that, he has made it very difficult to exercise the First Amendment.

So all of these checks and balances have become seriously, seriously eroded under Donald Trump’s presidency by his using all these tactics, which he honed as a businessman.It’s a very singular businessman; it’s not just like any businessman in government would have been this way.It is a Trumpian businessman bringing a Trumpian business model to Washington, which has completely crashed through norms and systems and institutions that many people thought were sacrosanct.

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Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

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