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WHEN TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS campaign for the White House in 2015, questions about his net worth took center stage. Trump offered a valuation of his assets: his “real estate licensing deals, brand and branded development” were worth $3.3 billion. The campaign did not explain how the number was calculated.
In New York City, Trump owned a small collection of properties, including the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street, the commercial floors of Trump Tower, two properties on East Fifty-Seventh Street, and housing co-ops on East Sixty-First Street and East Forty-Third Street. He also held minority stakes in projects such as 1290 Avenue of the Americas, an office high-rise mostly owned by the Vornado Realty Trust. His name was associated with some other projects through licensing deals, not through ownership. Those included Trump International Hotel & Tower, Trump Palace, Trump Park Avenue, and Trump Place.
A month after announcing his net worth, Trump followed up with a ninety-two-page federal filing and a campaign statement valuing his assets at more than $10 billion. But the numbers were not independently audited, and some of the claims appeared at odds with Trump’s own estimates. The disclosure valued the Trump National Golf Club, in Westchester County, New York, at more than $50 million, but in a 2015 court case seeking lower taxes, his attorneys argued that the golf club was actually worth only $1.4 million. Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s lawyer, said the values should not be compared because one was used to contend a tax assessment and the other was an estimate of the sales price.
Trump’s personal income tax returns could have answered many questions. Every major party nominee of the last forty years had released tax returns. The returns would show how much money Trump made, how much he gave to charity, and how aggressively he used deductions, shelters, and other tactics to shrink his tax bill. Trump went on national TV after launching his presidential bid and pledged to disclose his “very big . . . very beautiful” returns. But then he declined to release them—and had not done so as of mid-2016. He said the problem was that his taxes were undergoing an IRS audit. But he also would not release prior returns on which audits had been completed. He asserted that voters were not interested and said, “There’s nothing to learn from them.”
Trump had bragged often about his ability to pay as little as possible to the government—a practice he called the “American way.” Yet Trump denounced corporate executives for “getting away with murder” by using loopholes to lower their taxes: “They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, okay?”
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JUST AS TRUMP BOASTED of his wealth, he touted his generosity. His company’s website labeled him “a deal maker without peer and an ardent philanthropist.” At the launch of his campaign, he said he had given more than $102 million to charity between 2011 and June 2015. But the Washington Post found that none of the $102 million came from Trump’s own cash. Many of his contributions took the form of free rounds of golf at his courses, given away at raffles and charity auctions, the value of which was determined by Trump. He counted as monetary contributions a host of similar donations that involved no cash. One 2015 donation involved the charity of tennis star Serena Williams. Trump gave Williams a ride from Florida to an event in Virginia and counted the trip as a $1,136.56 charitable contribution, according to records shared with the media. Included in his donation was a framed photo of Williams.
Many of the gifts came from the nonprofit charity that bore his name, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which didn’t receive any money from Trump from 2009 through 2014. Trump said he “gives mostly to a lot of different groups.” Asked in an interview to cite the beneficiaries, he declined: “No, I don’t want to. . . . Why should I give you records? I don’t have to give you records.”
Separately, Trump had promised in January 2016 to give away $1 million of his own money to veterans’ causes—along with millions of dollars raised from the public—but he did not deliver his share of the money until four months later, after a Post reporter, David Fahrenthold, pressed him on details of the gift. “You know, you’re a nasty guy,” Trump told Fahrenthold. “You’re really a nasty guy. I gave out millions of dollars that I had no obligation to do.” Soon after, Trump announced that he had given $1 million to the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation. He held a press conference at Trump Tower at which he announced he had given away the last $1.5 million that other donors had entrusted to him four months earlier, bringing the total to $5.6 million, just shy of the $6 million pledged.
“I wasn’t looking for the credit, but I had no choice but to do this because the press was saying I didn’t raise any money for them,” Trump said. He called the media “dishonest” and “unfair,” singled out one TV reporter as a “sleaze,” and noted, “I’m going to continue to attack the press.”
Self-promotion. Bluster. Litigation. Trump had been open about using all of it and more to protect his image and achieve his ultimate goal: making money. He had bluntly said of his career, “I’m representing Donald Trump.” But now, as he pursued the presidency, the self-described multibillionaire would need to convince voters that his value to the country was greater than his net worth, and that he could be a champion of more than himself.
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“Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Everything about Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination was surreal, starting with the day he announced his candidacy. As he rode down the escalator to the lobby of Trump Tower, he was known as a rich businessman, a developer of high-end properties, a reality TV star, a flamboyant ex-playboy, and a long-running character in the New York tabloids, with a brand name recognized worldwide. He was not known as a politician. He had dabbled with running for president before, only to pull back. Everyone expected the same tease this time. Late-night comics only hoped he would stay around long enough for them to milk his candidacy for a few laughs.
Everyone was wrong. Trump defied virtually every prediction about his campaign. He redrew the rules of presidential politics while upending and dividing the Republican Party. He may have been a novice politician, but he possessed unerring instincts about what was angering so many Americans. His communication skills were ideally suited to the age of round-the-clock cable, the instantaneous reach of Twitter, and the coarseness of the digital media’s raucous, often anonymous conversation. He made provocative, often inaccurate comments that no ordinary candidate would dare utter, and aside from providing full-time work to fact-checkers, he mostly got away with it. Along the way, he rendered many of the older, accepted tactics of politics impotent or obsolete. The long battle for the Republican nomination would have many twists and turns, but no day was more significant than June 16, 2015, when everything about the Republican race changed, even if no one—not even Trump—knew it at the time.
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THE DAY BEFORE, IN Miami, Jeb Bush had announced his candidacy. The former governor of Florida was the real threat, or so everyone thought. In the previous six months, he had amassed more than $100 million in campaign funds, most of it stockpiled in a super PAC called Right to Rise USA. He hoped to use that super PAC to intimidate and crush his rivals. As the son and brother of presidents, he carried the second most revered name in modern Republican politics after Ronald Reagan. Though he had gone through a season of missteps, and voters were showing signs of Bush fatigue, he was still seen as the favorite.
From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, the standard campaign script was out the window. The crowd gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower turned out to include some people who had been lured with the promise of free T-shirts and other inducements. Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, with help, had spent the previous weekend writing the announcement speech. He had reviewed it with Trump, emphasizing the main points of the message. The prepared text ran about seven minutes. Lewandowski knew it by heart, and so as Trump’s remarks passed the ten-minute mark and then the twenty-minute mark and continued on for a full forty-five min
utes, Lewandowski thought to himself, This was going to be a little different.
The previous December, Lewandowski, a Republican political operative from New Hampshire with no experience in presidential campaigns, had met with Trump for thirty minutes. At the end of the meeting, he was hired to manage a campaign that few knew existed, on behalf of a candidate whose positions were very much in flux. Trump would soon disassociate himself from many of the views he had espoused for years. He would oppose abortion rights and gun control. He would advocate the deportation of immigrants, even though he had ridiculed Mitt Romney’s “crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was,” Trump said in 2012, “and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
Now, as he began speaking at rallies across the country, Trump dismissed the idea of reading from a script. He regarded prepared texts as little more than outlines. His extemporaneous remarks were replete with memorable lines and narcissistic bravado. He insisted that he would fund his own campaign. He called the country’s leaders stupid, disparaged decades of international trade deals as job killers, and warned against threats from ISIS. He said the United States had become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He declared the American Dream dead and promised to “make America great again.” He called for decisive action against illegal immigration: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The entire event was treated as a moment of comic relief in the long slog of a presidential campaign. Yet it was a remarkably revealing window onto what was to come. Trump would not and could not be handled. He intended to be unpredictable. He was the ultimate improviser, supremely confident of his own gut instincts. He would be politically incorrect, hurling insults at people and groups in defiance of the conventions of politics. His entry into the race brought mostly scorn and dismissal. He was called a political clown. But Trump sensed what ailed and angered many Americans and knew how to speak their language.
Hours after the announcement, Trump flew to Iowa and entered the Hoyt Sherman auditorium in Des Moines to loud cheers and waves of applause. “He’s not afraid,” said Kathy Watson, who had driven up from Ottumwa with her husband, Don. “He’s not a politician.” Whatever the party establishment thought of Trump, many voters found him appealing and took him seriously. Steve Scheffler, Iowa’s Republican national committeeman and a leader in the social conservative movement, watched Trump and decided he was no joke: “I wouldn’t underestimate him at all.”
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THE NEXT DAY, A twenty-one-year-old white man opened fire at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black people. Hillary Clinton told an interviewer after the shootings that racial violence is often triggered by public discourse. She warned against overheated rhetoric: “For example, a recent entry into the Republican presidential campaign said some very inflammatory things about Mexicans. Everybody should stand up and say that’s not acceptable.” Trump’s aides saw Clinton’s comments as the catalyst that generated a wave of anti-Trump protests. Under pressure from their customers, corporations took swift action: Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language media company, backed out of plans to air Trump’s Miss USA pageant in July. NBCUniversal, which had partnered with Trump on The Apprentice, ended its relationship with him. The PGA Tour and NASCAR took steps to distance themselves. Chef José Andrés pulled out of plans to open a restaurant in the hotel Trump was building along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Alarmed, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus called Trump and asked him to tone things down.
Facing threats of pickets by anti-Trump protesters, Terry Lundgren, the chief executive officer at Macy’s, which carried Trump’s branded clothing line, called the candidate—whom he considered a friend—and said he was going to drop the Trump clothing. Trump, who took the call as he prepared to speak to New Hampshire voters, argued that the protests wouldn’t last long or have any serious impact. Lundgren disagreed. As Trump was being called onstage, he told Lundgren, “Do whatever you want to do. I don’t care.” The next day, Macy’s announced it would phase out its relationship with Trump because his statements were “inconsistent with Macy’s values.” The two men did not speak again. “That was blowback like I’ve never had before,” Trump said in 2016. “We had a year and a half before the general [election], and I said, ‘Is every day going to be like this?’ ”
In early July, Trump’s staff prepared for its first major rally, booking a ballroom at a luxury resort in Phoenix. When thousands registered for tickets, the staff upgraded to the nearby convention center. On July 11, thousands were lined up outside the center. Inside, more than four thousand screaming fans greeted the candidate. (He would later claim the crowd was fifteen thousand strong.) As he slowly walked along a catwalk cutting through the crowd, he flashed two thumbs up and turned slowly around, looking like an aging rock star on a reunion tour that had unexpectedly sold out. “Wow!” he shouted over the cheers. “This is absolutely unbelievable.” That crowd was all the proof Trump needed that he understood Americans’ fears and desires better than others in the party. The crowd cheered as Trump declared that illegal immigrants “flow in like water” over the border and that, if he became president, “we’ll take our country back.” At one point, a man in the crowd shouted, “Build a wall!” Trump’s comments that day alarmed Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had pushed for comprehensive immigration reform. “He fired up the crazies,” McCain said.
One week later, Trump settled into an easy chair on a stage in rural Iowa before a crowd of evangelical Christians. Moderator Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, challenged him to defend his past statements, particularly calling illegal immigrants rapists and criminals or labeling McCain a “dummy.” “Is that appropriate in running for president?” Luntz asked.
“Crazies!” Trump responded. “He called them all crazy. . . . These people are great Americans.” Trump called McCain, the GOP’s 2008 nominee, a “loser.”
As the crowd laughed, Luntz shot back, “He’s a war hero! He’s a war hero! He’s a war hero!”
Trump scoffed, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?”
As Trump came off the stage, Lewandowski met him and asked for a private word: “I closed the door and I said, ‘Holy smokes!’ ” He repeated back what Trump had said onstage and candidly told him just how offensive it was. Trump decided he needed to do a press conference to explain himself. The barrage of questions lasted nearly thirty minutes and was, in Lewandowski’s word, “brutal.” Trump refused to apologize and accused McCain of not doing enough to protect veterans or strengthen the Veterans Administration.
Most of his rivals had hesitated to attack Trump for his announcement-day comments about illegal immigrants. Now they pounced, sensing that their renegade rival might have made a fatal mistake. Strategist Chip Saltsman was at the event that day with his candidate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “I was convinced—like ninety-eight percent of the people—that this was going to be a short campaign [for Trump],” Saltsman said. “The governor said, ‘Not so fast.’ He said his numbers actually may go up. I said, ‘No way.’ ” Huckabee was correct. By late July, Trump led the field of seventeen GOP candidates. Michael Glassner, newly hired on Trump’s team, said the fallout from the McCain controversy forced him to reassess instincts honed during three decades in politics: “That incident is really when I started to understand that a lot of what I thought I knew about political campaigns didn’t apply to this one.”
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THE SUMMER OF TRUMP was now in full bloom. The next test came in early August, when Fox News hosted the first Republican candidate debat
e. The conservative network put three of its stars on the panel—Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and Megyn Kelly. For Trump, this was uncertain territory. He was a reality TV star, but politicians were experienced debaters. The heavily hyped event posed a central question: Would Trump get his comeuppance when the campaign turned to issues and the thrust-and-parry of live debates?
As the leader in the polls, Trump won the center position onstage and got to be the target of the first question, from Baier: “Is there anyone onstage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person?” Trump, who had changed parties seven times in fourteen years, knew right away that this was a test of his loyalty to his adopted party. He was the only candidate who raised his hand, clearly a risky move in front of a Republican audience. “The honest answer is what I gave,” he said later.
The toughest question of the night came from Kelly. She asked Trump to explain why he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Trump tried to deflect the question. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” he deadpanned, to the delight of many in the audience. Pressed for a serious answer, he said, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” Trump was furious at Kelly but mostly held his tongue. After the debate, he accused her of trying to sabotage his candidacy: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” The crude remark was widely interpreted as a reference to her menstrual cycle. Trump insisted he had meant her nose or ears. It was another major unforced error. Once again, it seemed not to matter.
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