Trump and Me

by Mark Singer

  TRUMP: “I always go into the center.”

  LEBED: “I hope I’m not offending by saying this, but I think you are a litmus testing paper. You are at the end of the edge. If Trump goes to Moscow, I think America will follow. So I consider these projects of yours to be very important. And I’d like to help you as best I can in putting your projects into life. I want to create a canal or riverbed for capital flow. I want to minimize the risks and get rid of situations where the entrepreneur has to try to hide his head between his shoulders. I told the New York Times I was talking to you because you are a professional—a high-level professional—and if you invest, you invest in real stuff. Serious, high-quality projects. And you deal with serious people. And I deem you to be a very serious person. That’s why I’m meeting you.”

  TRUMP: “Well, that’s very nice. Thank you very much. I have something for you. This is a little token of my respect. I hope you like it. This is a book called The Art of the Deal, which a lot of people have read. And if you read this book you’ll know the art of the deal better than I do.”

  The conversation turned to Lebed’s lunch arrangements and travel logistics—“It’s very tiring to meet so many people,” he confessed—and the dialogue began to feel stilted, as if Trump’s limitations as a Kremlinologist had exhausted the potential topics. There was, however, one more subject he wanted to cover.

  “Now, you were a boxer, right?” he said. “We have a lot of big matches at my hotels. We just had a match between Riddick Bowe and Andrew Golota, from Poland, who won the fight but was disqualified. He’s actually a great fighter if he can ever get through a match without being disqualified. And, to me, you look tougher than Andrew Golota.”

  In response, Lebed pressed an index finger to his nose, or what was left of it, and flattened it against his face.

  “You do look seriously tough,” Trump continued. “Were you an Olympic boxer?”

  “No, I had a rather modest career.”

  “Really? The newspapers said you had a great career.”

  “At a certain point, my company leader put the question straight: either you do the sports or you do the military service. And I selected the military.”

  “You made the right decision,” Trump agreed, as if putting to rest any notion he might have entertained about promoting a Lebed exhibition bout in Atlantic City.

  Norma Foerderer came in with a camera to snap a few shots for the Trump archives and to congratulate the general for his fancy footwork in Chechnya. Phone numbers were exchanged, and Lebed, before departing, offered Trump a benediction: “You leave on the earth a very good trace for centuries. We’re all mortal, but the things you build will stay forever. You’ve already proven wrong the assertion that the higher the attic, the more trash there is.”

  When Trump returned from escorting Lebed to the elevator, I asked him his impressions.

  “First of all, you wouldn’t want to play nuclear weapons with this fucker,” he said. “Does he look as tough and cold as you’ve ever seen? This is not like your average real-estate guy who’s rough and mean. This guy’s beyond that. You see it in the eyes. This guy is a killer. How about when I asked, ‘Were you a boxer?’ Whoa—that nose is a piece of rubber. But me he liked. When we went out to the elevator, he was grabbing me, holding me, he felt very good. And he liked what I do. You know what? I think I did a good job for the country today.”

  The phone rang—Jesse Jackson calling about some office space Trump had promised to help the Rainbow Coalition lease at 40 Wall Street. (“Hello, Jesse. How ya doin’? You were on Rosie’s show? She’s terrific, right? Yeah, I think she is….Okay-y-y, how are you?”) Trump hung up, sat forward, his eyebrows arched, smiling a smile that contained equal measures of surprise and self-satisfaction. “You gotta say, I cover the gamut. Does the kid cover the gamut? Boy, it never ends. I mean, people have no idea. Cool life. You know, it’s sort of a cool life.”

  • • •

  One Saturday this winter, Trump and I had an appointment at Trump Tower. After I’d waited ten minutes, the concierge directed me to the penthouse. When I emerged from the elevator, there Donald stood, wearing a black cashmere topcoat, navy suit, blue-and-white pin-striped shirt, and maroon necktie. “I thought you might like to see my apartment,” he said, and as I squinted against the glare of gilt and mirrors in the entrance corridor he added, “I don’t really do this.” That we both knew this to be a transparent fib—photo spreads of the fifty-three-room triplex and its rooftop park had appeared in several magazines, and it had been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous—in no way undermined my enjoyment of the visual and aural assault that followed: the twenty-nine-foot-high living room with its erupting fountain and vaulted ceiling decorated with neo-Romantic frescoes; the two-story dining room with its carved ivory frieze (“I admit that the ivory’s kind of a no-no”); the onyx columns with marble capitals that had come from “a castle in Italy”; the chandelier that originally hung in “a castle in Austria”; the African blue-onyx lavatory. As we admired the view of Central Park, to the north, he said, “This is the greatest apartment ever built. There’s never been anything like it. There’s no apartment like this anywhere. It was harder to build this apartment than the rest of the building. A lot of it I did just to see if it could be done. All the very wealthy people who think they know great apartments come here and they say, ‘Donald, forget it. This is the greatest.’ ” Very few touches suggested that real people actually lived there—where was it, exactly, that Trump sat around in his boxers, eating roast-beef sandwiches, channel surfing, and scratching where it itched? Where was it that Marla threw her jogging clothes?—but no matter. “Come here, I’ll show you how life works,” he said, and we turned a couple of corners and wound up in a sitting room that had a Renoir*2 on one wall and a view that extended beyond the Statue of Liberty. “My apartments that face the Park go for twice as much as the apartments that face south. But I consider this view to be more beautiful than that view, especially at night. As a cityscape, it can’t be beat.”

  We then drove down to 40 Wall Street, where members of a German television crew were waiting for Trump to show them around. (“This will be the finest office building anywhere in New York. Not just downtown—anywhere in New York.”) Along the way, we stopped for a light at Forty-second Street and First Avenue. The driver of a panel truck in the next lane began waving, then rolled down his window and burbled, “I never see you in person!” He was fortyish, wore a blue watch cap, and spoke with a Hispanic inflection. “But I see you a lot on TV.”

  “Good,” said Trump. “Thank you. I think.”

  “Where’s Marla?”

  “She’s in Louisiana, getting ready to host the Miss U.S.A. pageant. You better watch it. O.K.?”

  “O.K., I promise,” said the man in the truck. “Have a nice day, Mr. Trump. And have a profitable day.”

  “Always.”

  Later, Trump said to me, “You want to know what total recognition is? I’ll tell you how you know you’ve got it. When the Nigerians on the street corners who don’t speak a word of English, who have no clue, who’re selling watches for some guy in New Jersey—when you walk by and those guys say, ‘Trump! Trump!’ that’s total recognition.”

  Next, we headed north, to Mount Kisco, in Westchester County—specifically to Seven Springs, a fifty-five-room limestone-and-granite Georgian splendor completed in 1917 by Eugene Meyer, the father of Katharine Graham. If things proceeded according to plan, within a year and a half the house would become the centerpiece of the Trump Mansion at Seven Springs, a golf club where anyone willing to part with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars could tee up. As we approached, Trump made certain I paid attention to the walls lining the driveway. “Look at the quality of this granite. Because I’m like, you know, into quality. Look at the quality of that wall. Hand-carved granite, and the same with the house.” Entering a room where two men were replastering a ceiling, Trump exulted, “We’ve got the pros here! You d
on’t see too many plasterers anymore. I take a union plasterer from New York and bring him up here. You know why? Because he’s the best.” We canvassed the upper floors and then the basement, where Trump sized up the bowling alley as a potential spa. “This is very much Mar-a-Lago all over again,” he said. “A great building, great land, great location. Then the question is what to do with it.”

  From the rear terrace, Trump mapped out some holes of the golf course: an elevated tee above a par three, across a ravine filled with laurel and dogwood; a couple of parallel par fours above the slope that led to a reservoir. Then he turned to me and said, “I bought this whole thing for seven and a half million dollars. People ask, ‘How’d you do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Does that make sense?” Not really, nor did his next utterance: “You know, nobody’s ever seen a granite house before.”

  Granite? Nobody? Never? In the history of humankind? Impressive.

  A few months ago, Marla Maples Trump, with a straight face, told an interviewer about life with hubby: “He really has the desire to have me be more of the traditional wife. He definitely wants his dinner promptly served at seven. And if he’s home at six-thirty it should be ready by six-thirty.” Oh well, so much for that.

  In Trump’s office the other morning, I asked whether, in light of his domestic shuffle, he planned to change his living arrangements. He smiled for the first time that day and said, “Where am I going to live? That might be the most difficult question you’ve asked so far. I want to finish the work on my apartment at Trump International. That should take a few months, maybe two, maybe six. And then I think I’ll live there for maybe six months. Let’s just say, for a period of time. The buildings always work better when I’m living there.”

  What about the Trump Tower apartment? Would that sit empty?

  “Well, I wouldn’t sell that. And, of course, there’s no one who would ever build an apartment like that. The penthouse at Trump International isn’t nearly as big. It’s maybe seven thousand square feet. But it’s got a living room that is the most spectacular residential room in New York. A twenty-five-foot ceiling. I’m telling you, the best room anywhere. Do you understand?”

  I think I did: the only apartment with a better view than the best apartment in the world was the same apartment. Except for the one across the Park, which had the most spectacular living room in the world. No one had ever seen a granite house before. And, most important, every square inch belonged to Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. “Trump”—a fellow with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience, a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone.

  * * *

  *1 Recent events have shown conclusively that my characterization of Trump’s behavioral age was overly generous by at least ten years. Mea culpa.

  *2 Years later, I became aware that the picture, La Loge, was a Renoir only if a reproduction of a Renoir qualifies as a Renoir. The original hangs in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

  I used to think the funniest thing I’d ever heard Donald Trump say was when, one day in his office, he handed me a two-page unaudited personal financial statement and said, “I’ve never shown this to a reporter before.” I knew this could not possibly be true, just as I knew that his alleged net worth ($2.25 billion) was fictitious. He could have equally credibly assured me that he’d negotiated an option to buy Canada. The only thing that might have amused me more would have been if he’d offered me the certified scorecards from when he played golf alone.

  Then, as now, I never cared how much Trump said he was “worth.” I remain confident that a true appraisal would be a fraction of whatever figure he claims on a given day. His main selling point as a presidential candidate, of course, is that he’s a super-genius incredibly successful dealmaker who will make fabulous fantastic deals that will have every citizen’s head spinning—a refreshing contrast to the serially “disastrous” deals of his Oval Office predecessors. “I’m really rich,” Trump likes to say. Or the long form: “Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.” (As ever, in the eye of the beholder.)

  In the early nineties, Trump stiffed his creditors for eight-hundred million dollars, give or take. Later, whenever this fact was mentioned, he reflexively insisted that it had never happened. Except that it had, and subsequently no one with a lick of sense was willing to lend him fresh money. Gail Collins, of The New York Times, once referred to him as a “financially embattled thousandaire.” Trump sent her a copy of one of her columns with, across her photograph, the chivalrous scrawl “The Face of a Dog!” In 2005, Timothy O’Brien, then a Times colleague of Collins, published a book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, in which he estimated Trump’s net worth at $150 million to $250 million. Not unpredictably, Trump sued for $5 billion, alleging that this lowball calculation constituted libel and defamation. The case was dismissed four years later, after Trump acknowledged during a deposition: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings…and that can change rapidly from day to day.”

  Given that O’Brien later stated, “My lawyers stripped the bark off of him,” I admit it’s awfully Trumpish of me to claim credit for his salutary outcome. Nevertheless I must mention that, early in the proceedings, I wrote a short piece in The New Yorker advising O’Brien to string Trump along rather than immediately cutting him a ten-figure check. I confessed my envy and, in an open letter of sorts to Trump, begged him to try to make my life miserable, too: “Please, Donald…Once and for all, sue me. I need the aggravation. Not to mention the royalties.” For a change, I didn’t hear back. I’m guessing his subscription had expired.

  The sage observation that “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized”—courtesy of Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor of New York City—offered a simple enough rule to live by, and it’s never gone out of fashion. A healthy democracy depends, I suppose, upon the vigilance of a free press whose members feel personally affronted by the brazen mendacity of the powerful. I’m just not that touchy. With Trump, I always knew that it wasn’t my intelligence per se that was being insulted by the transparent distortions that burbled from his lips; that was just the way the man talked. I feel confident that Trump never budged from his initial estimation of me as a hapless schmuck. Still, given his campaign-trail pronouncements about the press—“scum…terrible…lying disgusting people…I hate some of these people, I hate ’em”—I’d say we got along swell. As long as he kept talking, what could go wrong? Unless Trump was having an off day megalomania-wise, he was never not good copy. Before he lifted his eyes to the horizon and decided the moment was ripe to take over the entire world, the hometown press dreaded the prospect that he might freeze us out. How would we feed our families?

  • • •

  The ascendant Trump familiar to New Yorkers during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s was hardly harmless. He possessed a talent for inducing targeted outrage—the hair-trigger litigiousness helped—among public officials, real-estate competitors, business partners, casino shareholders and bondholders, and tenants in buildings that bore his name. He called Ed Koch, a three-term mayor, a “moron.” He said, “The city under Ed Koch is a disaster.” (Sound familiar?) Koch returned the favor with “greedy, greedy, greedy”—if Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right.” Still, the damage in those days was relatively localized. Whatever games Trump was playing, the spoils in retrospect seem quaintly small-potatoes.

  In 1975, when Trump was pursuing his first major Manhattan real-estate venture, the Grand Hyatt New York, on the site of the old Commodore Hotel, the then-mayor, Abe Beame, was a Brooklyn Democratic-machine-bred career civil servant—i.e., a malleable hack—susceptible to the blandishments of Trump’s Brooklyn-clubhouse-wired father and loan guarantor. Donald the dauphin
presumed the license to write his own rules, and it worked. He squeezed unprecedented tax abatements from a functionally bankrupt municipal government. The monster rose from the laboratory table and walked.

  During the demolition to clear the Fifth Avenue site for Trump Tower, five years later, he approved the destruction of a pair of massive limestone art-deco bas-relief panels above the entrance to the erstwhile Bonwit Teller department store. Trump had promised to donate the panels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but later decided that properly removing them was too expensive and time-consuming. He wanted his building built. Shrewdly, he had covered his ass with a made-to-order fall guy—an in-over-his-head demolition contractor who, as it happened, employed a wrecking crew of grossly underpaid, mistreated, distinctly undocumented Polish laborers. (So much for securing the borders.)

  Wollman Rink, a public ice rink in Central Park, had closed for repairs that same year. Six years and more than twelve million dollars later, it still hadn’t reopened. Trump Tower’s first tenants had long since settled in. Thus was launched Trump’s first great public-relations coup: completing the rink renovation in three and a half months, for two million two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The following year, at the invitation of a Republican activist in southern New Hampshire, he emerged from a sporty black helicopter to deliver a Rotary Club speech. Among the locals who greeted him, some held signs that said TRUMP IN ’88 and VOTE FOR AN EN-TRUMP-ENEUR. A few months later, after a television appearance, he received a Dear Donald note from Richard Nixon: “I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great…As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”

  Thanks, Dick.

  Next came a Kabuki theater press tour of the underbelly of the temporarily out-of-commission Williamsburg Bridge. Trump had enlisted a senior transportation official in the Reagan administration as a prop, under the pretext that Trump was just the fellow to overhaul the entire city’s crumbling infrastructure.