The FRONTLINE Interviews
Marc Fisher
Co-author, Trump Revealed
Marc Fisher is a senior editor at The Washington Post and the co-author of Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on June 12, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Relationship with his Father
Marc, in the territory of the family—dad, brother, mom, sister—but really, the relationship of Donald and his dad, when you think about his dad and you think about what his dad taught him and where there might be lessons about these things, what dimensions do you see occurring in the relationship between the two?
Donald Trump’s whole approach to life, his whole approach to winning and losing, his approach to being a success comes from his father, comes from Fred Trump, and Fred Trump’s concept that to be a Trump, you have to be a king.You have to succeed in every possible way.You brook no criticism; you brook no defeat.And this was drilled into Donald from very early on, from going around with his father to collect rents in their middle-class buildings in Brooklyn and Queens, from visiting the Democratic clubs where they got to know the local politicians who they would need favors and permits from.In all of these interactions, Fred Trump had one goal, which was to get what he wanted and didn’t matter—he wasn’t there to make friends.He wasn’t there to win people’s hearts.He was there to get to the bottom line.And he drilled this into Donald, and he allowed no weakness, no signs of softness.
And this stuck with Donald in a way, an almost desperate way, because he didn’t have a whole lot of time with his father.The time they spent together was almost exclusively work time.And so everything that he saw of his father came through the prism of the company, the organization: How are we going to get to the bottom line we need?And that’s how he learned to be the extraordinarily work-oriented, success-oriented, image-oriented person that he became.
Was there any instance in their lives, their professional lives, where a comeback was necessary, where they hit the skids, where they hit a bump, where they were in some kind of a jam and he had to watch his dad dig their way out of it?
Fred Trump never had the giant, explosive, glorious defeats and failures and bankruptcies that Donald had.But it wasn’t all easy for Fred Trump either.He was really the first real estate magnate in New York City to use showmanship to become an enormous success.And what Donald gleaned from that was the idea that real estate was, if not a con game, at least a platform for persuasion.It was a way of selling not just apartments, but yourself—your brand, your name.The name “Trump” flew over Coney Island and Brooklyn in airplanes that were pulling messages across for beachgoers to see.And this was a kind of self-touting that was not done in the real estate industry up till that time.
And so Donald saw in his father a bit of the showman that he would become.He saw in his father someone who knew how to bounce back by putting on a show, and it didn’t matter if that alienated everyone else in the real estate business, which it often did.The Trumps, through the generations, were seen as outliers in the real estate business.They were people who were all about showmanship and sending a marketing message more than playing that behind-the-scenes role that most real estate developers in New York played.
It’s interesting.I just talked to Rudy Giuliani about Mr. Trump and Donald Trump, and he said that old Mr. Trump was a really staid, kind of quiet, powerful guy, very different than Donald, the sort of showman, the super-gentleman, kind of overacting that role.Is that what you’ve heard?
Yes.So while Fred Trump was very comfortable with a kind of showmanship in the marketing of his apartments, he was personally much more reserved than Donald.He was almost courtly in his manner.And really, the kind of celebrity entertainer aspect of Trump’s personality comes much more from his mother, who was much more enraptured with Hollywood and the British royals and all of these trappings of celebrity culture.His father, on the other hand, was a much more reserved character.He was someone who did not go on TV, who was not terribly prominent in the gossip columns; he really tried to stay behind the scenes.And his offices, his trappings of business were quite modest.They ran the Trump Organization out of a very modest office on Avenue U in Brooklyn, really not top-flight offices by any means.
It was a very middle-class environment.Even the family home, although in some ways the largest, the most opulent in the neighborhood, it wasn’t very showy from the outside.And although the Trumps, of course, had a chauffeur and they had a fancy car and all of that, nonetheless they were not seen out on the town.They went to regular restaurants when they went out at all.They were not really the kinds of people who would show up in the celebrity columns of the local tabloids.
But Donald had money….Each kid, as a young child, had a tremendous amount of money in the bank.Certainly as a grown-up had what was then a million dollars.The kids weren’t flaunting their richness, but they all must have known that they were secure financially in that sense.
I think that’s right.I think Trump always knew that they were doing well.He went to private schools.They had a driver.There was help in the home.But they did not see themselves as fabulously wealthy.They really saw themselves as people who served the middle class and were in many ways of the middle class.Certainly Fred Trump did.And he tried to inculcate that sensibility in his children.Some of the other siblings took to that lesson far more than Donald did.
Donald picked up a different message, we think from his mother, and that was one that, in addition to being a king of all things, in addition to being a success at whatever you do, you must also be a personality.You must have some sort of a very public character.That was what he drew from his mother’s approach, from her passions, from her approach to life.And that was very different from the message he got from his father, which was both more reserved and more cautious, both politically and financially.
His father did not borrow money, did not like borrowing money.Drilled into Donald from a very early age that you must never go into debt, that the way you build is with the cash you’ve brought in from rent payments.And Donald always thought that that was a foolish message.He thought that his father had limited himself unnecessarily, unfairly; indeed, foolishly.And so Donald swore from early on that he would take his own career, his own life to a much higher platform, to a much bigger stage, and he would do it with other people’s money.
Fred Trump, Jr.
While we’re still on the family, help me imagine what it was like, what Fred Jr. looked like to Donald as a youngster growing up behind his big brother, watching him, the namesake, the heir apparent, whatever Fred Jr. was at the time.What was Fred Jr.’s aspect?And how did he take to the father’s goals and aspirations for his family?
Donald Trump was never going to be the guy in charge of the Trump empire.Donald Trump was not groomed for that; that’s not what Fred Trump wanted.Fred Trump knew from the start that his namesake, Fred Jr., would be the one to take over.Fred Jr. was the charismatic one.Fred Jr. was the firstborn.Fred Jr. was the leader in many ways.He was the one people liked to be around.And Fred Jr., to his father’s disappointment and dismay, didn’t really want to do that.Fred Jr. wanted to fly airplanes.He wanted to be a pilot.He wanted to have adventures.He wanted to break away from the family business.
And so there was a tension between father and son that perhaps contributed to the son’s troubles with alcohol that really bedeviled him for the remainder of his adult life and were, at least in Donald’s telling, responsible for his death.Fred Jr.’s decline began rather early on.He was not going down the path his father wanted.He went off; he became a pilot.He did live his dream to some small extent.But by that time, he was already deeply troubled.
And Donald saw this in the older brother who he idolized, the older brother who he really had tried to take after in many ways.He saw that brother declining in his capacity, in his ability to get the job done, in his connection to the family.And Donald attributed all of this decline to alcohol and to his brother’s struggles with alcohol.And so Donald resolved from a very early age that he would have nothing to do with that.He would never have a drink.He would never allow himself to be taken advantage of by something that, to this day, he believes that if he had ever had a drink, he would have gone down the road of his brother; he would have been destroyed by it.And he’s very frank about that.He talks about the road not taken, and that was the one that Fred Jr. went on and was destroyed by.
One of the things we’re looking for is empathy.We’re doing the same thing with Biden.Did he experience what was happening with Fred Jr. in an empathic way?Any sense that he related to it that way?Or was it relating to it about, “God, I don’t want to be that guy; I don’t want to get in that kind of trouble”?
In all of his most intimate relationships, Donald Trump views what goes wrong in those relationships never as a commentary on himself and never really on something that he needs to pay attention to on behalf of the other person.Rather, he sees object lessons.He draws lessons from other people’s failures and he attributes either evil intent or something gone terribly wrong in those people’s lives, and he looks at himself and says, “I don’t want to be like that; I’m not going to be like that, and here’s how I’m going to achieve that end run, that detour around that potential hazard.”
In the case of his brother, Donald Trump, I think, has a very soft spot for Fred Jr.He really sees him, still, as the older brother whom he looked up to.But he also looks down on the choices that Fred Jr. made, and he believes that he, Donald, made smarter choices, had greater discipline, and therefore succeeded, where his brother died.
No evidence that we’ve ever seen of Donald inside the family or maybe anyplace else actually saying: “How can I help you?Let me help you in any way that I can.”
No, there’s really no instance in the family history of Donald being the peacemaker.When his brother Robert ran into troubles, when his brother Fred Jr. declined and died, when his mother in her final years had many troubles, when his father began losing his memory toward the end of his life, there’s no evidence of Donald reaching out, pulling people in, closing ranks.Instead, Donald goes his own way, learns what he thinks the mistakes were that those people made, and resolves never to make those mistakes himself so that he can win.
Trump as a Bully
In following Biden, you discover the stutter, of course, and you discover that here’s a little boy who everybody made fun of, and he had a lot of shame and humiliation associated with it.Teaches himself not to stutter looking in a mirror, practice, practice, practice.Overcomes the stutter, and it also creates all kinds of other ways of his being as he matures.Did Donald Trump ever have anything like that?
Donald Trump’s crises, Donald Trump’s tests as a young man, as a boy, came largely because of his own bullying of others.
Donald Trump, from a very early age, drew strength and stature from denigrating others, from insulting his peers, from presenting himself to the world as someone who was not to be fooled with, not to be insulted.And so again and again, we see him with the kids at the military academy, with the kids back home in Queens, taking people and being the disciplinarian, being the tough, being the guy who makes things happen on behalf of the beloved coach or the tough teacher.Trump would find ways to endear himself to those who had more authority than he had.And he did it by ganging up on his peers and by presenting himself as superior in every way.
This was how he managed to put himself at center stage, because that’s where he saw success.He was told by his father, and this was reinforced throughout this life by all of his mentors, that to win—he was told by all of his mentors that to succeed in life you must be a winner.But he didn’t define winning the way most people do.He defined winning more or less as not losing.It wasn’t that he needed to achieve certain things—he was never a great student; he was never a reader; he was never someone who would achieve intellectually—but he could manage to put himself in the top rank by tearing others down.
And so in that way, by not losing, by being the last man standing, by being the one who was perceived as toughest, most stubborn, that’s how he put himself at center stage.And center stage for him was more important than the big achievement.
Trump at Military School
How does he get to military school?What is Fred Sr. doing when he sends Donald up there?
Beginning in elementary school and continuing on through junior high school, Donald Trump got in trouble in classes.He was a bully.He took advantage of his classmates.He tormented some of them.In one instance after another, he got in trouble.Teachers would call him out.Teachers would punish him.Then teachers would eventually inform his parents.
Fred Trump did not take kindly to his son getting in trouble, and he repeatedly warned Donald that if Donald didn’t shape up, if Donald didn’t start listening to his father and stop violating rules, that Donald would be shipped away.Donald had a pattern of running off to Manhattan with his friends.They’d go to the magic shop.They would hang out on 42nd Street.They’d take in a movie.They would even go to a show.And they would get caught being away from school, being away from home.
And finally Fred Trump had enough of it, and he shipped Donald off to the toughest place he could imagine, New York Military Academy, not far from West Point, a place known for its discipline, a place that was a magnet for troubled kids, a place you would send a kid who was in trouble at school, perhaps in danger of being thrown out of a school.
How does he do?How does strength manifest itself in military school?
In military school, as in all of his experiences prior to that, Donald Trump got ahead by pushing people around.He persuaded and forced his classmates to do what he said, and he made himself useful to the teachers, the coaches, the people in charge at the military academy.And so he rose through the ranks, and he became a leader of the cadets.He became one of the student leaders who had a number of kids under him in the dormitories, and he ruled dormitory life with an iron fist.
Donald Trump yelled at his classmates.He pushed them around.He even used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do.He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.He wanted people to act a certain way to make himself look like he was not only their lead cadet, but also a leader of all men, a leader of the entire student body.
And so he finagled a place for himself at the head of the parade when, on St. Patrick’s Day, the New York Military Academy’s band and marching cadets led a contingent down Fifth Avenue with Donald Trump at the lead, the lead cadet, one of the proudest moments in his life, and one that he lorded over his classmates.
He was someone who could be a teammate—in other words, he was on the baseball team; he played golf; he played other sports—and he was someone who could get along fine with his teammates.But he always wanted to be in charge.
And he would do whatever it took, including using his money, to make sure that he played a leading role.So he would pay for sports equipment when they were on the road to meet another team.He would have moments of genuine generosity in which they one time pulled off to the side of the road with some of his teammates in Maryland somewhere and he hauled out of the trunk of the car a set of golf clubs and they all took turns golfing balls into a bay below the roadway.And this was a bonding moment that Trump organized for his teammates.He wasn’t close with any of them; he never had close friends.But he knew that to be a leader he had to at times show something that would bring people closer to him, make them more loyal.
Trump’s Move into Manhattan
So now let’s jump to his decision to come into the city, into New York, into Manhattan.It’s a city in deep distress at the time—drugs, racism, financial collapse, all of it.What kind of opportunity does Trump see when he goes in there to take advantage of a city on the ropes, that’s flat on its back?How does he game the system, work the system to build, I guess, the Hyatt, the Commodore into the Hyatt?
The mythology that Donald Trump has created around his move to Manhattan has him bombing up and down the avenues in a big car with one of his assistants looking for properties to buy and just snapping up distressed properties.It didn’t happen.What did happen was he took advantage of the skills and the connections that his father had given him in order to do one big deal, his premier deal.And it was a big one.It was the renovation of an utterly fallen classic hotel just across the street from Grand Central Terminal.The old Commodore Hotel was in such sorry shape that it had boarded-up windows; it had rodents all over the place.It was one of the markers of New York’s sorry decline.
In the 1970s, New York was at its absolute bottom, and Trump saw this as a grand opportunity.And so he decided that, unlike his father, he would use other people’s money to do what his father never had the guts to do, which was to go into Manhattan and make a huge splash.Fred Trump has always held back and felt: “Let’s stay in the outer boroughs.There’s less examination of our business.There’s less danger of grand failure.”And Donald Trump said: “No, I want to be where the action is.I want to be where the stars are.I want to be where the big payoff could be.”
And so he took the skills he got from his father, political connections, connections to the mayors and borough presidents and the people who might have the money to help fund such a renovation, and the people who would—whose permission he needed.He combined that with his own sense of daring and created a plan to take this decrepit old hotel and turn it into something glitzy and new and send a message that New York was on the rise again.It was a message that a lot of the power players in New York wanted to hear—a brash, young developer, an attractive guy who was telegenic, coming along and saying, “I’m going to remake 42nd Street; I’m going to remake one of the most depressed areas of the city, near Grand Central Station,” which had become a mecca for the homeless.
Trump went about this the only way he knew how—by cutting deals and forcing people to take the risks that he did not want to take himself.And so he began a campaign to go after some of the officials who ran state and local agencies that could help fund such a project.He wanted tax exemptions.He wanted zoning changes.He wanted grants that would allow for this renovation to be paid for in good part by public dollars.
And with some setbacks, he got it done.He got it done by bulling his way through, by pretending to have more backers than he really had, by pretending that he was actually putting large sums of money into it when he really wasn’t.And the con worked.He was able to get meetings with top people, and he was able to persuade them that the other guy he’d just spoken to was already on board, even though the other guy didn’t even know about the project yet.
And so, by triangulating all of these sources and using them against each other and making them think that other impressive people were behind this project, he got the money; he got the permits; he got it done.
Sounds like a killer to me, Marc.
Yeah.There are two projects in Trump’s life that almost live up to the mythology, and one of them is the Commodore, and the other one is Trump Tower.I guess you could say the third is winning the presidency.They’re surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds of failures and bankruptcies and embarrassments and humiliations, and none of that mattered because he was able to latch onto those few great successes and build his image and build his reputation, and ride that to a level of celebrity so that the failures never mattered.
Trump’s Marriage to Ivana
When you talk about celebrity, I think about Ivana and who she actually was, a kind of female Donald Trump herself.He picks her up; he gives her partnerships.She’s the only person—you would know better than me—but I think she’s the only person in his life or his world that he actually let in and was an actual partner with him, at least for a while.Tell me the Ivana and Donald love story.
Ivana Trump was a Czech model, skier, someone who came to America to make it big.She wanted stardom.She wanted a wealthy husband.She wanted success.When she and Donald met, no one says it was love at first sight, but it was a deal, perhaps, at first sight.They saw in each other the ability to connect and get things done, the ability to use their personality, use their charisma, use their ability to persuade people to come together and make big things happen.They wanted to be seen as a power couple in New York.They wanted to be seen as a couple that got big, impossible projects done—take over the Plaza Hotel, which had been failing, and revive it and renovate it and turn it into a jewel once more; build the glitziest, fanciest office and apartment building on Fifth Avenue; change the face of Fifth Avenue, one of the storied boulevards in the world.All of these grand projects—remaking Atlantic City, one of the most depressed seacoast towns in America, and turning it into a glitzy vacation spot once more that people would actually want to go to, which no one had said that about Atlantic City in decades.
All of these seemed impossible dreams.And yet they came together, and through sheer force of personality and through a kind of dynamism between them that allowed these things to happen.
How much of their celebrity was designed, manipulating the news media, getting favorable coverage on Page Six and Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, all of them lining up at the fire hose of information from Ivana and Donald?
Fred Trump had built the Trump Organization in good part through marketing.He took real estate to a level of aggressive marketing that business had not seen in New York before.He turned his company’s name into a brand.Donald Trump looked at that and said, “Hmm, good start, but nowhere near big enough, nowhere near bold enough.”
And so when Donald Trump crossed the bridge into Manhattan, he was playing on a bigger stage, and he wanted his approach to publicity, to marketing, to branding to be so much bigger, so much bolder than anything his father had done.And he began to cultivate sources, connections, people in the news business, people in the gossip pages, people in the television stations who he could rely on to push his image, to push his message.
He did this by being a fabulous source.He would call people and tell them, if they were a gossip columnist, “Hey, this celebrity is going to be at such-and-such club at this time; you want to get your cameras there.”Or, you know, “Madonna’s going to be at Studio 54, and Roy Cohn and all these folks are going to be there.You want to be there.”And so he began acting as his own press agent—sometimes in his own name, sometimes as a made-up character named John Barron.Or he used other names, too.He didn’t even bother to disguise his voice.He just called up reporters and said: “Hey, it’s John Barron.I have a great piece of news for you about Donald Trump.He’s going to be out with a hot new model at this club at 9:00, and you really want to be there, and we’ll give you an exclusive.”
So he would dish out these morsels of gossip, these morsels of news, and win over reporters so that they would take his calls and do his bidding when he had stories about himself that he wanted to sell—stories about development, stories about properties that he had his eye on.And so he would exaggerate where he was on a project and say, “I’ve made a deal to get such-and-such a property, and we’re charging ahead with this development,” when often that wasn’t true.But it got the word out, and it made him appear to be bigger than he seemed otherwise to be.
Ivana was an important part of this mythmaking.Ivana was part of the marketing machinery.She was attractive; she was vivacious.And Donald Trump used her, and she used him, so that they could be seen as this power couple who were essential to the business renaissance of New York, who were political players, and who were generally people about town who folks will want to know about because they’re so successful, so wealthy, and so connected with other celebrities.They became running characters in the tabloid wars between <I>The New York Post</I> and <I>The Daily News</I>.They became running characters on the evening TV news shows.
And in that way, anything they did became news.And so when they came up with projects, building projects that could perhaps expand the Trump business, everyone wanted the story.
So when it finally dawns on Donald that he has not only a partner but a competitor—she’s good at the other casino business; people love her; even wealthy New Yorkers who have always eschewed him seem to embrace her in some way; she’s suddenly on boards and other things—and Donald then, faced with that, at least what it looks like to us, just basically begins to crush her.It’s a real show of strength by Donald Trump.
Whatever love, whatever romance there once was between Donald and Ivana began to crumble fairly quickly as she became an important part of the Trump Organization.Donald gave her projects.He gave her projects in Atlantic City.He gave her the Plaza Hotel to run.And when things went well, he became enormously jealous of the attention she got.And when things went poorly, he became extremely angry and insulting and vindictive toward her.
In both cases, what he saw was that she was making incursions onto his territory.His territory was publicity.His territory was the marketing of the Trump name.Having Ivana stealing some of the credit, or making some of the projects look bad, in his mind, that was not acceptable.And so the more she moved on to center stage, the more he pushed back and pushed her out.
And so he, in both his love life, as he began once again connecting with other women, having other relationships, being more public and overt about that, in a financial sense he began pushing her out of positions of authority within the organization.And overall, he began to realize that he didn’t want her around.
She, on the other hand, was not going to give up her power and her stature easily.She knew how to play the—she knew how to play the marketing game every bit as well as Donald did.And so you had the ingredients for a war of attrition, a war of personalities, a war of tabloid entities that was unlike anything New York had seen.It was Page One, day after day, <I>the Post</I> against the <I>Daily News</I>, Ivana against Donald, with both characters feeding exclusives, feeding bits of gossip, feeding bits of dirt about the other, a marriage gone bad in the most public, the most humiliating way imaginable.
It’s like a thing we’ll see happen with <I>The Apprentice</I> and we see in the White House continuously, which is every day’s a new crisis.Keep the crisis going.You go back and look at those headlines, he’s not waiting…And by the way, his businesses are starting to unravel.His business is overextended.He’s got an airline he can’t deal with, the Plaza he paid too much money for, the casinos are starting to go south on him.And meanwhile, there’s this diversion almost on the newsstands of New York tabloids.
Throughout his business career and throughout his presidency, people have thought of Donald Trump as someone who creates distractions, diversions, ways of stealing the public’s attention away from whatever failure is happening in his life, in his romantic life, in his business, in his presidency.But these weren’t really distractions or diversions.The distraction is the show.It’s the main act.
When Donald Trump goes tabloid in the destruction of his own marriage, that’s not to divert attention away from the failure of his businesses, his hotel, his helicopter service, his airline, his casinos.It’s of a piece with that.It’s all about showing that no matter what happens to these businesses, no matter what failures or debts or bankruptcies may come along, the eternal show is the Donald Trump Show.And so he is proving with each of these distractions over and over again that no matter how bad things go, no matter how many times he has what for anyone else would be a career-ending mistake, he can still dominate the headlines.He can still hold center stage.He can hold people’s attention, and he can get them to like him and to want to be like him.
That sense of being able to manipulate people’s aspirations, that’s the core of Trump.Whether the individual businesses rise or fall or collapse or humiliate does not matter to him.What matters is staying in the spotlight, and he will do what it takes to stay there.
Trump and the Central Park Five
Let’s move now to the Central Park Five.We haven’t really talked about race and racial things, but it will certainly come up here.When he takes out that ad, what’s he doing?
The main purpose of any public statement by Donald Trump, even decades before he could have realistically thought about running for high office, was to win attention, to be in the public spotlight.He had staked out a place from very early on as someone who was going to opine on matters of public interest, not in a policy sense, not in any sort of notion about what was good for the nation or the city, but rather as someone who was going to react viscerally to the emotionally troubling moments of the day.
Donald Trump was also a voracious consumer of talk radio in its early years and of the very early talk TV.And as such, he was someone who was steeped in the kind of proto-populist sloganeering of what would eventually become right-wing talk radio.So he listened to Bob Grant, and he listened to some of the other rabble-rousers on New York radio, and he had an affinity for what they were saying.They were unbridled racists.They were people who were railing against New York’s liberal mayors, John Lindsay and Abe Beame, and seeing them as people who were weak and lily-livered.And he loved the way they were derided as limousine liberals.
And so he adopted this kind of proto-blue-collar persona.And it’s not really a bit of fakery on Trump’s part.Trump had always, from his youth, felt more comfortable with some of the blue-collar people in his organization than with some of the executives.From the very beginning when he had his own office, he liked to hang out in front of the building with the security guards and with some of the janitorial staff, not with his fellow executives.He liked to stand on Fifth Avenue; they had a game they used to play where they would stand during a lunch break out on Fifth Avenue, and as women went by, they played what they called the Invitation Game.They’d look at one woman, “I’d invite her.”Look at another, “Not invited.”And so, based on their looks, they would trade judgments with each other about who would get invited to this mythical party.
That’s where he was comfortable.And that crowd tended to have a kind of reflexive racism.It was partly culture wars between the city and the suburbs.It was partly a class thing.But it was a very important part of the way parts of white New York identified themselves, and Trump bought in to it entirely.
And when he saw the Central Park Five, a classic tabloid story that was treated as such by the newspapers, by the TV stations, he saw his role and his position instinctively.He knew in his heart that those guys were bad and that there was a—that this was a wilding incident, in the parlance of the day.He knew that these guys had to be guilty.
And so, just like Bob Grant on the radio, he said, “They’re guilty, they’re wilding, they need to be punished, and we need to stop pussyfooting around and being lily-livered liberals.”And so he would trot out these phrases that he’d heard on talk radio, just as we see in tweets all these years later.And he realized from the start that this would win him over to that same middle class that he had grown up catering to, selling apartments to, renting apartments to with his father.He knew that crowd.He knew what their frustrations were; he knew what their anxieties were; he knew what their hostilities were.
He played on it, and he felt it himself.He believed, despite his wealth, that he was one of them; that he, too, was put upon; that he, too, was having the rug stolen out from under him; that society was changing in ways that were unfair, and though he had much more money than those middle-class people who felt frustrated and forced out of their own city, he still felt a bond with them, and he wanted to cement that bond by taking these positions.
The Trump Brand and Base
But is he aware that he’s building a base?Or is he just connecting out of the ether?Or is it time to build a base?He’s done the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, thing with Stoney up there where they pretend to be running for president and all of that.Is this early kindling to a fire that will be a bonfire one day?
It’s—he’s not strictly building a political base.He’s building the brand.The brand and the base eventually become almost indistinguishable, but at that stage, he’s building the brand Trump.And part of the brand Trump, an essential part, is the idea that he is someone who people will want to be like because he’s straight-talking, because there’s no bulls---.
He’s the guy who people will look up to because of his wealth.They’ll want to have what he has.But they’ll also admire him because he has the freedom to say what they think.He learned that early on.And he used it in all theaters of his life—in business, in politics, in finance, that idea that he could be perceived as the truth-teller, as the guy who has nothing to lose; he has so much money, so much stature, so much celebrity that he can say what you only say to your spouse in bed with the lights off.He can say it out and say it proud and not bear any consequences.That was how he thought he would build his base of people who would come to Atlantic City and lose money at his casinos and build his base of people who might want to aspire to have one of his glorious apartments in Trump Tower.And as he began thinking more and more about politics and how terrible the local politicians were and how he could do better than that, he began seeing that the brand applied to politics just as easily as it applied to casinos.
Trump’s Business Failings
… His businesses are going down; his divorce is happening; his life is a mess; he’s losing the casino business; the banks are foreclosing on him left and right.Is this the crisis, the big crisis for Donald Trump, the big existential “It’s almost all over, pal” moment?
Seen from outside, this time, when the walls are closing in on Donald Trump, the banks are coming after him, there are no more loans to be had, there are no more bailouts, all of the businesses are collapsing, his marriage is collapsing, the tabloids are turning on him, in every forum, he seems to be losing it.
And yet Trump sails through.People who knew him at the time say he didn’t seem to lose a moment’s sleep.He didn’t seem terribly bothered that the buildings that had his very name on them, that those names would be stripped off.He wanted above all to keep the business going, but he didn’t do that by resurrecting these failing businesses or turning them around in some sort of creative fashion.Rather, he doubled down on the thing that would always bail him out—the name, the brand, who he is.
And so he became not less public, but more so.He didn’t retreat into a shell; he insisted that when he cut deals with the banks that he keep the things that had his name emblazoned on them—the airplane, the yacht.He wanted to keep the trappings of wealth so that he could still present himself to the world as a winner, even as people read all the facts.And the facts were terrible.The facts said, “You’re a loser”; the facts said, “You’re bankrupt.”But he wasn’t interested in the facts; he was interested in image.And the image said, “Your name is still there in gold letters on big, fancy stuff, on the building, on the airplane.”And as long as he could keep those trappings going, he knew the brand would be OK.
The Comeback Kid
And astonishingly, if you ever needed proof that he’s, I guess, a Norman Vincent Peale optimist, he writes a book called [<I>The Art of the Comeback</I>].And he starts to sell himself as a comeback kid.
Right.So <I>The Art of the Deal</I> is his first big bestseller.But then shortly after that, the deals all seemed to collapse.The businesses go kablooey.And so Donald Trump rebrands himself as the comeback kid.And the astonishing and amazing, beautiful thing about that book is, it never really admits that things had gone terribly wrong.Other people made mistakes.The banks did come after him.Other people dragged down his businesses.But the book’s theme is, he was fine all along.And it really is much in the way he was brought up, in Norman Vincent Peale’s church, to believe in the science of success, in the idea that the ultimate message really is mind over matter.It doesn’t really matter if your business goes bust if you maintain your sensibility, your brand, your determination to win and to succeed.And if you get other people to believe that, then you’ve won the whole game, and it doesn’t matter that you’ve left a trail of destruction, of vendors who have lost money, of contractors who are not being paid, of customers who are—who have lost their dollars.
Really, a field of carnage trails behind Trump at every turn at that period of his life, and he never looked back.
The Power of The Apprentice
And then along comes this thing called <I>The Apprentice</I>.If ever there was a place to build a base, work on your rhetoric, riff, do a crisis a day, appear to be strong, sit in a boardroom.What do you think?
Part of being the real estate success that Donald Trump took pride in being was building a customer base, building a base of potential customers who thought, you know, that Trump, he’s something special; wouldn’t it be cool to live as he does?Well, that helped sell some condos, and that helped sell some of the other brands that he came along with through the years.Probably sold some seats on the Trump airline.But Trump was still primarily a New York phenomenon.And as he was building this brand, he did so in a lot of local media.He was on Howard Stern’s show when Howard Stern was just a local New York DJ.He was—he joined the WWF to be a kind of character actor in some of those pro-wrestling dramas on TV in the wee hours of the night.
But he wanted to take his brand and his message national because he was taking his real estate empire national.And whether you think he was already plotting to run for president or not, he certainly entertained the idea.But I think foremost in his mind was the idea of ”Let’s take this brand national.”And so he took the media act that he’d refined on <I>The Howard Stern Show</I>, of the brash rogue, the renegade who’s willing to say anything, who will say what the people really think, he took that character, who got even coarser on the WWF shows, and he brought that in a more refined way to <I>The Apprentice</I>.Here was a guy who would say what was on his mind, who would talk straight to people, would tell them where they really belonged, but now he wasn’t so much the broad racist and womanizer and kind of misbehaving kid who he played on <I>The Howard Stern Show</I>.Now he was more the magnate who was tough-talking and had a kind of blue-collar sensibility to him, but was also a wealthy guy who knew what power he had.
And so he was refining his personality, refining his character for this larger audience.And it did take him some years to get to a point where he had a large national following, but he became very much on TV that same kind of personality that he had been in New York for many years—the brash-talking, hugely successful rich kid who voiced the frustrations of the people.
The Access Hollywood Tape
We’ve been chronicling crises all the way along here: Is this the biggest one?Is this the biggest one?What about <I>Access Hollywood</I> as the biggest one?Help me understand what came into play when that news broke about the <I>Access Hollywood</I> tape.
There are moments in Trump’s biography when all hell breaks loose.It happens a lot more than most for people.But it happens in a way that causes an immediate, overwhelming panic in public.People around him say: “This is it; we can’t possibly survive this.How are we going to fix this?How are we going to get out of this?”The public, at a remove, says, “Oh, goodness, what is he up to now?”People who like him say, “Well, I don’t know if I believe that,” and people who don’t like him say, “Look, he’s done it again; this is even worse than anything that’s ever happened before!”
And while all of this craziness is going on and the news is exploding, somewhere Donald Trump is shockingly, serenely sitting around not bothered really much at all, because he doesn’t really care what he did before.He’s always mystified when you ask him about some misdeed from earlier in his life.“Why are you even talking about that?” is his attitude.He’s not really that concerned about what it’s going to do to him.He’s concerned about that moment.And he knows that baked into the public perception of who Trump is is the idea that Trump does all kinds of things that everybody else would love to do, but they could never get away with.
And so when <I>Access Hollywood</I> rolls around, well, maybe not most people would want to have done what he did, but some.I had a call that night at my office at <I>The Washington Post</I> from a woman in Syracuse, New York, a reader.Saw a story that I’d written about Trump.And she called and started screaming at me, saying: “You people are going after Donald Trump for what he did in this <I>Access Hollywood thing</I>, and you think it’s going to destroy him?You couldn’t be more wrong.I was going to vote for him anyway, but now I’m going to vote for him even more certainly than ever.”This was a middle-aged woman.She had children.She had a husband.And I said, “Why does this make you like Donald Trump more?”And she said, “Because every man in my life—my husband, my brother, my father—would do the same thing.And this proves to me that he’s a real man.”
Does Donald Trump instinctively know that he can get away with all kinds of things that no one else gets away because people have that attitude toward him?They see in him the rule breaker they would love to be?I don’t know if he can spell it out exactly like that, but I think instinctively he gets that.
The Crisis Presidency
He’s the crisis president, Marc.That’s what everybody says.He comes in, and the way the thinking goes is one of the outgrowths of the experience on <I>The Apprentice</I> is that you have to have a crisis every day, every week.You leave a cliffhanger, create some things.That’s why people watch it; that’s what reality TV is.And you might as well run your presidency that way, too.But you can control all the crises that you’ve had.But along comes coronavirus, the crisis you can’t control.
Donald Trump’s playbook doesn’t change.When the coronavirus came along, he did what he always does.He says: “It’s going to be fine.It’s not just going to be fine; it’s going to be great.The economy’s going to come roaring back.The cases will vanish.”He is the pitchman.He is the real estate salesman he’s always been.That’s his instinct, and it’s done pretty well for him.
So you could look at that and say, boy, that doesn’t work for coronavirus.The virus has its own path, and it cannot be stopped, and you can’t market your way out of that kind of a crisis.But for Donald Trump, you sort of can.He is able to maintain his support, which varied hardly at all throughout the early months of the coronavirus crisis, because he’s able to do what he always did.He’s able to talk things up and say: “This is going to be all right.This is going to be great.America will be great again.”He’ll even redo the timeline in the third quarter, in the fourth quarter, whatever it is.
So he only has the one playbook.He uses it no matter what the crisis.It doesn’t really matter when it doesn’t work.It didn’t matter when the casinos went bust.It didn’t matter when his whole financial empire seemed to collapse.He was able to maintain the brand.And so he ratchets up the anger; he ratchets up the insults.He raises other topics and crises and issues to distract, purportedly, but really to keep the focus on him.
One of the great surprises, one of the few surprises of the Trump administration to a lot of people was the idea that he never tried to build.Here he is, a builder.That’s what he did; that’s what brought him here.But he never tried to build coalitions.He never tried to build beyond his base.He never tried to build infrastructure, which seemed to be one of the few things he was passionate about doing as president.Why did he not try to build?
Well, the answer is, he was never much of a builder.He was a brand creator.He was someone who, if he built anything, it was his own image, reputation, that aspirational sensibility that people want to be like Donald Trump.He’ll say what we think.He maintained that through coronavirus.He maintained that through impeachment.He maintained that through all of the crises of his presidency, the ones he could control and the ones he couldn’t.And he maintained his base at every turn.
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