“We’d see him in the morning briefly before he went to work and we went to school,” Don Jr. told me. “It was the daily lecture: you know, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, and then ‘Don’t trust anyone.’ There were a couple of times he’d follow up with a question: ‘Do you trust me?’ ‘Of course, [I said], you’re my dad!’ He’s like, ‘Wrong! You can’t trust.’”
* * *
AS THE WORLD has turned meaner, led by the Twitter option that the president so much enjoys, Donald Trump’s view of humanity has narrowed even further. The prism now is how every person he encounters will affect him. That’s his quick study and main evaluation. Sensitive about slights, the president is always on guard, and quick to react if he senses unfairness and negativity.
As I stated, Donald Trump did not want to speak to me for this book, and he did so only because we have a long-standing relationship. I am certain he does not trust that a book of history about him will be beneficial to his life.
But even though he doesn’t fully trust me, he knows that I have always treated him and his family fairly. He also understands that when he asks me a question, I will answer it honestly, whether he likes the answer or not.
The truth is that many powerful and successful human beings are egocentric and emotionally distant. Pretty much all of them are like Trump in that they lack trust and are almost devoid of concern for those who cannot help them. But most famous people hide those dubious attributes much better than Trump does.
The president is not good at hiding stuff. His moods are often on vivid display. Everyone working in the West Wing knows quickly each morning what they are in for that day.
Donald Trump has that New York thing: “Blank you and the cab you drove in on”—especially if things are not going well or if you are annoying him.
In Washington, DC, the world’s center of political power, calculation is the coin of the realm, and rationalization is the bank you cash it in. That city has a long history of treachery and deceit. Abraham Lincoln was openly mocked as a hayseed when he arrived to run the country from Illinois. Ronald Reagan was looked upon by many in Washington society as a Hollywood moron.
Donald Trump did not understand Washington when he decided to run for president, and he does not understand it today. That’s because he achieved his initial success in New York City, which is light years away from DC in attitude and behavior.
After his schooling, the young Donald developed into an economic hustler similar to his dad, but he incorporated a much smoother presentation. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to succeed in the big, tough city, you have to out-hustle your competition. You have to beat them, sometimes brutally.
If you want to succeed in Washington, it’s a different story. There, you must out-ingratiate the competition, a much more mannered hustle. The rules of polite society are many in the nation’s capital, and you are expected to obey them. Outsiders like the Obamas will be accepted if they behave accordingly. But some people (for example, Richard Nixon, the Clintons, and Jimmy Carter) are never accepted. It is all about pedigree.
Donald Trump is in the unacceptable category.
The only rule in the power precincts of New York is to keep a strong bank account. It doesn’t matter what fork you use. In his climb to real estate royalty, Donald Trump had to accommodate corrupt politicians, Mafia killers, union thugs, ruthless lawyers, and dishonest press people. And he did, sometimes gleefully.
But Trump did not temper his New York style and swagger when he rolled into Washington. His inauguration was met with widespread loathing, and he did little to win over the DC establishment. He simply did not understand the game because he didn’t want to take the time to figure it out.
In New York, it’s in your face. In Washington, it’s in your back.
* * *
THE FASCINATING THING about President Trump is that despite all the excess he embraces, the working folks outside the coastal cities like him. The more extreme his presentation, the more applause he gets from the non-elite forces. It is hard to understand, but regular people accept him and overlook his faults when they don’t overlook Hillary Clinton’s deficits, for example. If they did, she’d be sitting in the White House right now.
Perhaps the folks see Donald Trump as genuine, which he mostly is. There is not much difference between the public and private Trump. He likes people on a casual basis. Whenever I’ve been with him, he takes time to be nice to those with whom he interacts. When he tells them they are “terrific,” they beam.
United States president Donald Trump is joined by the congressional leadership and his family as he formally signs his cabinet nominations into law, Friday, January 20, 2017, in the President’s Room of the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington. From left are Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Roy Blunt, Donald Trump Jr., Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, Karen Pence, Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, Barron Trump, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The decade of the 1970s saw Donald Trump rise and begin achieving stardom, something he wanted above all else. He consolidated his success in the 1980s, but in both decades, there were bitter defeats and questionable activities. Trump can be generous but also ruthless. He engenders both loyalty and loathing. His children love him, even though he was often not there for them while they were growing up. But today, the eldest three are his best friends.
In evaluating Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency, the practical thing to do is acknowledge that he used all available advantages to build his power. He certainly did things that most people would not do. I will chronicle some of those things, but I will always give the president the presumption of innocence in unclear situations. That, of course, will anger the Hate Trump media, which is in business to destroy him.
History will record that ongoing corrupt media campaign and how it has harmed America. The country deserves honest reporting on the president, who is capable of both good and bad.
It is an undeniable fact that Donald Trump has achieved amazing things in his life. Those accomplishments were all centered on money until he entered national politics in 2015.
So, let’s find out how he made that money.
CHAPTER NINE
MANHATTAN
SPRING 1978
Things have changed for Donald Trump. Now age thirty-two, he has been president of the Trump Organization for almost seven years. The company has moved its headquarters into Manhattan from Queens, even though company chairman Fred Trump prefers to remain in the outer boroughs, overseeing the fourteen thousand apartments the Trumps currently own in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
Donald Trump is content to let his father and younger brother, Robert, now in the family business as well, sweat the small stuff. Donald wants the big stuff—and has finally latched on to a piece of it.
New York City is in the midst of its most permissive era since the Roaring Twenties. Studio 54 and a bunch of other discos are packed most nights, fueled by cocaine and lust. Sybarites such as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and their crews smirk in photos that dominate the city’s tabloid newspapers. Life is good for the party people, and also for the street criminals.
Times Square is Sodom, a seedy marketplace where vice and petty crime go largely unchecked. But lawbreaking is a contagion that, once ignored, moves quickly into the extreme.
In 1978, there will be nearly 150,000 violent acts committed in New York City, including more than 1,800 murders and 5,200 rapes. By contrast, there were fewer than 300 murders reported in 2018 New York City, forty years later.
The city is also broke, trying to dig out from a fiscal crisis that has been going on for years. In 1975, New York City officials asked the federal government to provide funding in order to avoid the embarrassment of bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford said absolutely not, a decision that led to one of the most infamous newspaper headlines in history, the New York Daily News on October 30, 19
75: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
In the face of the chaos, Ed Koch, a flamboyant politician who will come to despise Donald Trump, has just been sworn in that January as mayor, winning 50 percent of the vote—more than nine points ahead of his liberal opponent, Mario Cuomo. Koch ran on a promise to clean up the city, making it great again, if you will.
But Mayor Koch and the other politicians who run New York well understand that little will change unless high-end developers begin investing in new businesses and buildings. The city needs to be revitalized economically, and only private-sector money can do it.
The powerful billionaire Harry Helmsley and his vicious second wife, Leona, are already acquiring properties in Midtown at bargain prices. With new construction and facilities come jobs and the increased business tourism the city desperately needs.
Still on the outside looking in, Donald Trump knows this.
* * *
THE COMMODORE HOTEL on Forty-Second Street is just a few blocks away from Times Square and abuts the heavily used Grand Central Station. The hotel is a squalid mess, with dingy, dimly lit hallways and rats infesting its foundation.
Built before 1920, the Commodore was owned by the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. Sensing a distress sale, Donald Trump convinces his father to arrange a series of city tax abatements in order to buy the Commodore and some other Penn Central property near the Hudson River. Fred Trump, still smarting over the civil rights beef in 1973, agrees and becomes the silent partner in a deal that will eventually total $80 million.
Front page of the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975.
Times had indeed changed in Jamaica Estates, Queens.
Donald Trump quickly allies with the Hyatt Hotel company to turn the Commodore into the Grand Hyatt Hotel. And grand it will be, with Trump demanding every modern convenience and design.
The rats are confused.
Now on a roll, the wheeler-dealer Trump sells his other Penn Central land acquisition to New York City. The land will be used to build the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, a project the city hopes will bring in billions in new revenue.
Donald wants the new building named after his father, but the city balks. However, the Trumps make millions on the hotel and land transactions, establishing Donald as a power player in New York.
Helping Donald with the Grand Hyatt construction is his new wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech national who had immigrated to Canada to escape communism. Tall and blond, Ivana is a model, designer, and competitive skier who has her eye on the good life in America.
She finds it, at least temporarily.
In 1976, Ivana met Donald Trump at Maxwell’s Plum, a singles bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The courtship was relatively quick, and the two were married the next year in a lavish ceremony at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church. Norman Vincent Peale officiated.
Attending the wedding was Abe Beame, then the mayor of New York City.
Beame, one of the worst mayors in the city’s history, was a longtime associate of Fred Trump. In the late 1940s and throughout the ’50s, the diminutive Abe pretty much ran the Democratic political machine in Brooklyn. Along with Fred’s friend and fixer Bunny Lindenbaum, Beame set the Trump business up with excellent real estate opportunities at heavily discounted prices. Fred, Abe, and Bunny were the Supremes behind the scenes in post–World War II Brooklyn. If there was a good deal to be had in that teeming borough, these three men knew about it.
On the hunt in Manhattan, Donald Trump tapped into the Beame machine, but then actually one-upped his father, getting close to the powerful governor of New York, Hugh Carey, who ruled the state from 1975 to 1982. Carey even posed for a picture with young Donald, standing in front of an architectural drawing of the new Grand Hyatt Hotel, immediately bestowing power on the project.
In turn, Donald donated generously to Carey, who enjoyed the many pleasures of Manhattan very much.
With all that firepower behind him, Donald Trump decided to launch a blitzkrieg. Tooling around Manhattan in a silver Cadillac with the vanity license plate “DJT,” he bought a number of expensive properties, including the Bonwit Teller site on Fifth Avenue, which would become ground zero for Trump Tower.
Trump was making deals constantly, aided by his own fixer, the much-feared and much-loathed Roy Cohn, the lawyer who had represented the Trumps in the 1973 federal civil rights case. Cohn had put together a vast network of informers, including police commanders, and knew much about the powerful men who ran the city. Donald Trump once told a reporter that Cohn was a bad lawyer but a “genius” in getting things done. How he got things done was usually shrouded in secrecy, but one thing was widely known: it would not be wise to cross Roy Cohn.
The short, crude Cohn became a mentor to Donald, second in influence only to his father. Cohn once told legendary reporter Cindy Adams that the young Trump would someday rule the city.
By 1980, the Trump Organization was acquiring and building real estate, and raking in tens of millions of dollars. The Trumps had secured protection and were wired into the Manhattan power structure. Even organized crime, which controlled some of the labor unions in the city, did not interfere with Donald and his dad.
Attorney Roy Cohn at home, posing with stuffed toy frogs and holding a photo of him and Donald Trump, 1984.
Deals and offers came quickly across Donald Trump’s desk. He rarely missed an opportunity. He was smart, driven, and tough—tougher, even, than his father.
At age thirty-three, Donald Trump began construction on the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, helped by a $140 million tax abatement. If you’re going to build a skyscraper on one of the most expensive pieces of land on the planet, it helps to have friends in high places before the concrete is poured.
And Trump did.
So it is that Donald Trump finds himself a multimillionaire with a wife, a baby (Donald Jr., born in 1977), and a growing financial empire. He lives lavishly, wanting for nothing in the material world. His skills as a negotiator bring him satisfaction and staggering success.
But there is one thing that Donald Trump does not have. He is not yet Broadway Joe.
National fame still eludes him.
And he wants it.
CHAPTER TEN
TRUMP TOWER
MANHATTAN
SUMMER 1985
Life is good for Donald Trump, who has just turned thirty-nine. He sits in his office knowing that he owns one-third of perhaps the most valuable building in the world. In addition, he has now acquired a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and will soon preside over the dramatic Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, once the home of the famously wealthy Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Donald now has three children, who live with him and Ivana on the top three floors of this sixty-eight-story high-rise. The Trump Organization is housed with other businesses throughout the first nineteen floors.
In 1985, the average cost of a home in the United States is $96,500. But to buy even the most inexpensive apartment in Trump Tower, you would need millions. Celebrities such as Bruce Willis, Liberace, and Johnny Carson have all been buyers. The volatile Carson, however, did not stay long. As the story goes, he misplaced a coat and accused some Trump employees of stealing it. Two people were fired. Shortly after that, Carson found the coat. Shortly after that, he sold his place.
Steven Spielberg also has a residence in Trump Tower, even as he is marketing his hit film The Color Purple, starring Oprah Winfrey. Donald Trump is well aware of the glamour and status that are now attached to his building, where a waterfall cascades in the atrium. The Trump name has become a selling point.
As he strategizes in his office, Donald Trump may or may not be aware that a Panamanian holding company will soon purchase an apartment at Trump Tower in secret for the notorious Jean-Claude Duvalier, the deposed and despised dictator of Haiti. A man who looted hundreds of millions from the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, Baby Doc, as he is known, w
ants the elaborate security in place at Trump Tower to protect him from avengers. While running Haiti, he used his secret police, the Tonton Macoute, to terrorize thousands. Duvalier has legions of enemies who would kill him if they could.
* * *
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to ascertain exactly how much Donald Trump knows about what goes on inside his growing empire. He is not a leasing agent. But he is surely aware that on all major building projects in New York City, including Trump Tower, organized crime is involved.
The mayor, governor, and perhaps even President Ronald Reagan also know about mob activity inside the city’s vast construction industry because it is common knowledge within the Justice Department. The FBI has been tasked with stopping the corruption.
In 1980, Donald Trump chose to have Trump Tower constructed using primarily concrete, not steel girder, the other option. Structures built with concrete go up faster. However, concrete is more expensive than steel.
In New York City, the organized crime families controlled the concrete industry through the Teamsters Union Local 282. If a developer wanted concrete poured, that union supplied the labor, and Mob-run concrete companies like Scara-Mix, in Staten Island, provided the material.
If a builder defied the union, the Hudson River beckoned.
In 1985, a mobster named Constantino “Big Paul” Castellano oversaw the concrete situation. As head of the Gambino crime family, Big Paul put his son Philip in charge of Scara-Mix, and the construction money rolled in.
Again, New York and federal authorities were aware for years that this was how the business of building was done in the city because the FBI had wiretapped Castellano’s Staten Island mansion and, in early 1985, indicted him and a number of other alleged mobsters in the so-called Mafia Commission Trial.
One of Big Paul’s lawyers was Roy Cohn.
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