The FRONTLINE Interviews
Gwenda Blair
Author, The Trumps
Gwenda Blair is a journalist and the author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on June 19, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Fred Trump, Sr.
Let’s start with the Trump family, a sense of who they are.We’ve heard the perfect story of Mom, Dad, children—even the imperfect story, that you’ve got to be a winner, and you’ve got to be a loser. ...
But also just generally, what was the wisdom from Fred Trump Sr. to his children about their role in life and how to act and what to aspire to be?
Fred Trump Sr.—that is to say, Donald’s father’s overall message to his children was, to the boys—and it was a very different message to the boys than to the girls—to the boys, was compete, win, be a killer and literally be a killer.That was what he told them in—presumably he meant it as a figure of speech, but be ruthless.Win.Do what you have to to win.
To the girls, it was that they would have—of course, get married, have children.They were not ever in line to take over the business.So they were to be support people, to be—not to take any primary role.
Trump’s Early Exposure to Race Relations
Is there any sense of how Donald would have learned about or thought about or anything about Black people?
He went to—well, to begin with, the family had a Black chauffeur, so he would have been familiar with the idea of Blacks as servants.He always went to private schools, never went to public school.The chauffeur drove the kids to that private school that he went to until high school, and then he went off to military academy....
Finding out what his childhood was like wasn’t easy.I did talk to scores of people who lived in that neighborhood, who went to school with one or another of the kids, who went to summer camp with the kids.They were very—but they were a very tight-knit bunch and kind of separate.They were rich.They had this, a chauffeur; they had a live-in maid.They had—they were kind of separate, in a way.And other kids were aware of that, that they seemed separate, that they were—lived in a somewhat different way.They were kids; other kids came over.It wasn’t like they were shut off in some kind of castle with all the windows boarded up, but they were certainly—seemed different.
Fred Trump, Jr.
The Fred Jr.-Fred Sr. relationship.Can you talk a little bit about what you know about that?
Fred Jr., by the time I started writing my book, had already died.So I obviously was never able to speak to him.He seemed to—he was the oldest of the kids.He bore his father’s name, and his father initially assumed that he would go into the business, probably assumed that he would take over.Very early on, he seemed to have been on a different path.He was laid-back, popular, funny.He had a lot of friends and was really kind of—seemed to be a get-along kid.And his friends who came over to the house, who were around the family—that is to say, Fred Jr.’s friends when he was a kid and a teenager—said that the father seemed extremely harsh, really tough, especially tough on Fred Jr.Whenever he seemed to have some kind of larger view of the world, whenever he wanted to talk about the idea of maybe not being a builder, about art, about books, his father was very discouraging, very—almost angry, sometimes, at the idea.He felt like his son was wasting his time, that Fred was wasting his time—“Why are you fooling around with that stuff?Why would anybody go to college and study art?”
So he had a very, very—seven days a week, 365 days a year, he was at work, making money, building houses; that’s what you should look at.
And Donald’s perspective on all of this?Can you imagine what it was?
Well, on this topic, I would take Donald’s word as being probably true.Not the whole truth, by no means, by at least not untrue.That he was watching.He was taking his cue.He was figuring out what went over with the old man, what didn’t, what the old man was angry at, and very much how the old man ran the business, and his ruthlessness with anybody who worked for him, any competitors.He was well-known—Fred Sr., that is—for going to a closing and at the last minute holding everything up.Everyone else is there with pens in hand, holding it up until he could get an even better deal, being like a ruthless bargainer until he could get an even better price, and that take every—as much as you can, leave as little as you can for the other person.That approach, again, I mean, you could call American capitalism, but they certainly honed it to a very sharp point.
So he watched his father’s way of business and he watched how his father responded and treated his older brother, and he took his cue.
How was Donald and Fred Jr.’s relationship?
He was—Fred was his older brother.When Donald was in boarding school—excuse me, military school, he had a photograph of his brother on his dresser, his brother standing next to an airplane, his brother who wanted to be a pilot.So there was some sense of connection.
Donald didn’t understand why his brother would want to do something other than go into the family business, why his brother wouldn’t rise to the opportunity to compete and win and be a killer, why his brother wanted to do something else.His father, Fred Sr., thought being an airline pilot was, I believe the quote is, "being a chauffeur in the sky."Why would you do that?Among other things, it was not going to make any money—or a lot of money; he was not going to become wealthy with that.And working for someone else, why would you do that?
So Donald was very unable to see why Fred would want to do that, and very critical.
Was there room for both of them, or was Donald waiting to pass Fred by when Fred dropped in his tracks in some way and Donald could take over?
I don’t think Donald was exactly patiently waiting.His—the older sister, Maryanne, a recently retired federal judge, told me that Donald was like a wind, a hot wind at Fred’s back.He didn’t quite throw him under the bus, to mix metaphors, but he was certainly right behind him.And when Fred seemed he didn’t even really want to be working in the company, didn’t really seem to have an appetite for being this kind of ultra-competitive, high-pressure, high real estate developer doing the same kind of thing that his dad did, Donald was standing right there and ready to take over.
Trump’s Relationship with His Father
Do you know how Donald treated his dad?Was it with deference?Was it obedience?Was it collaboration?Was he trying to show his dad that he had the right stuff?How did it work?
Donald portrays himself as having been sort of like standing up to his dad, and that his dad respected him for that, how much he stood up for his dad, to his dad, how much he was his dad’s apprentice—was he both of those things?Probably.He certainly seemed to have taken on board all of his dad’s business practices, and then some.And his dad had been very heavily influenced by Norman Vincent Peale, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a book that was a huge bestseller in 1952, when Donald was 6....
This notion of pressing ahead at all costs, his parents were very affected by that.They went to Norman Vincent Peale’s church.Donald and his two sisters were married in that church.The parents’ funerals were in that church.And Donald has said that he was very influenced by Norman Vincent Peale and this whole success notion.Donald, subsequent to those times, sort of weaponized it, took it to a much higher level.Norman Vincent Peale never suggested you should absolutely destroy any rivals.No, he was all about having a notion of yourself being successful.Donald brought in the corollary of “destroy your rivals.”
But that was kind of the family ethic and the business ethic.And Donald certainly was—took a lot from his father about not only being head of the business, but all of the financial connections and all of the political connections that his father had built up over the years.And the whole idea of kind of figuring out how to control the situation and being completely ruthless, those very much came from his father.
My final question on the family is, why don’t we know anything about his mother?Why do we not know anything really about how he feels about his mother?It’s all about the dad, all the time.All the stories, his own stories, it’s all about the powerful, strong leadership of a father.But every shrink I’ve ever known says it’s all about the mother.What is it about the mother?What happened?
The mother seems to have been the helpmate person in the family, the one certainly at home.After she married, she wasn’t working anymore and she took care of the five kids.She had been—she came from Scotland, from a part of northern Scotland, a remote, rural area where the number of eligible men for her to possibly marry was pretty small, and she seems pretty clearly to have come to the U.S. for a new life, but also hoping that she’d meet a guy.And she did.Not an unusual story.And proceeded to have these five children.
She was—Donald himself has said his mother always said that he was the greatest person, that he was terrific, he never did anything wrong.And he, in an unusual moment of insight, said maybe that wasn’t so good.But I heard that from other people, others who saw the family, that she was very much—not a helicopter parent, as we would say today, but very perhaps overly supportive of the kid.Nothing he did was wrong.If there was a problem, it was somebody else’s fault.And that’s certainly how he operates in adult life....
I wanted to say something else about Fred Trump—actually, Fred and Donald.
Yeah?
One of the things that has intrigued me about Fred and his—I mean, one of the things that has intrigued me about Donald and his father is that after Donald did take over the Trump Organization, his father pretty much stepped aside, stayed on, giving him advice, a lot of advice, letting him use all the financial connections, all the political connections, all of his savvy.He apparently was very closely involved in what happened there, but he didn’t try to step out in front of Donald.He, Donald, was—he didn’t compete with his son.He let his son take over, which is not how it always plays out in family businesses.Often, obviously, the patriarch just doesn’t step aside, period, until he drops in his tracks or does sort of ostensibly step aside, but in fact is still controlling everything, is still kind of getting in the way and not letting the next generation actually run the show.
That didn’t happen with Fred Trump.It really didn’t.He seemed to have—he was active, gave the benefit of his experience, but didn’t try to run the show.Is that because Donald was so overwhelming?Is that because he recognized that Donald was able to handle things much better than he could?He said, and more than once, that Donald was the smartest person he’d ever met.And that was his—he said that to a number of people, told me that he had said that, words to that effect or that actual quote: He’s the smartest person I ever met.So he was very impressed with his son.
And I’m not sure.His own father died when Fred was 11.And so was this somehow—he was like—there’s something about being the father that he wanted his father to be?Some kind of wish fulfillment that—there’s some, I think, complex thing that was being reenacted, that he didn’t have his own father after he was 11, and that there was some kind of fathering himself at the same time he was fathering Donald.There was, I think, a very—clearly a very, very strong tie there.
But his actually stepping aside, not just saying he was going to, seemed so unusual.
Trump’s Move to Manhattan
I’ll say.Do you know why Donald went into Manhattan?Why not stay out there and collect rents and make a lot of money and build more housing?Why would he step into New York, especially New York in those years, the sort of rotten Big Apple?
Well, sometimes when asked, when Donald’s been asked why did he go to Manhattan, he has a lot of different answers.But certainly one that comes up a lot is that he didn’t want to compete with his dad.And so he went to this—because he would have crushed him.He would have actually been the one who won.And so out of what, filial obligation, he chose another arena.
Maybe.But I think more likely, and really—I think he was something of an extension of the Trump Organization.I think Fred wanted to explore Manhattan in some ways.And it was a much bigger market.I mean, there was a much larger—there were much larger possibilities in Manhattan.Riskier, yeah, but there were much larger possibilities than there were in Brooklyn at that time.
And it was also Donald’s MO.He spent his whole life being competitive.His father raised him to be hypercompetitive.You have to win at everything, always be checking out the other person; always be looking for a weak spot; always be looking for a way that you can get some leverage, that you can get ahead, some way that you can get that person under your thumb.And New York City at that time was, indeed, in poor shape, but it was also—there was a lot of opportunity there.There was a possibility to, if you were going to do anything at all, to get attention, possibly support, possibly government support for any kind of building.At the time that Trump, that Donald Trump first started wanting to operate in New York City, the city was in poor shape and nobody was doing any construction.
So there was his idea, when he first initially approached city officials, with an idea of kind of—in a creative way, you might say—use existing programs to underwrite commercial building and get the city OK and whopper tax abatements.The city was on its back.And he—his father—had figured this out, that you might be able to pry open some kinds of support that previously hadn’t been used for that.
Trump in Military School
Let me ask you a question that I forgot to ask you, which is, why did Donald get sent to military school?
The story about why Donald went to military school that Donald relates in <i>The Art of the Deal</i> is that he had been kind of an upstart; that he had been not the obedient son that his parents wanted him to be; that he had, and very explicitly, had gotten a switchblade from when he’d gone over to Manhattan, gotten a switchblade.And his parents had already been kind of concerned that he’d been acting up in school, and they found the switchblade and said that’s it; they shipped him off to military school.
I think he—there was some concern in the family that he needed more discipline, that he needed more—that he needed to have a real hands-on kind of thing where a military atmosphere would be good for him.Whether there were—I don’t really know past that.
And the reason I’m hesitating is because I feel like everything in <i>The Art of the Deal</i> isn’t true.So I don’t like to lean on that so heavily.I mean, it’s a story that I relayed in my book because I thought it was true.But we later learned that <i>The Art of the Deal</i> is kind of made up.We can, I think, talk to the impact on him that that very disciplined situation, where there was both discipline, loyalty and a lot of rewards, had a big impact on him.
Let’s hear about it.
Donald—when Donald went to New York Military Academy, as he relates, as he tells the story in <i>Art of the Deal</i>, because he’d been acting out at school and his parents thought he needed to be shipped off to a place with more discipline, most of the kids there, or many of the kids there, anyway, would be homesick.They would—it took them a long time to get used to that kind of situation of having to make your bed, be at inspection every morning, have your—for everything, every part of the day you were being inspected, you were being graded, you were being overlooked, you were being supervised.And for a lot of the kids, this was a really—they were homesick; they wanted to go home.
He was never—his mother told me that he was never homesick.He loved it.He loved all that stuff because it was also really competitive.There were a lot of—his mother didn’t say that; I’m saying that.But his mother said that he was never homesick.
There were all kinds of—there was competition from shiniest shoes to cleanest uniform to best-made bed to marching in formation to all kinds of sports.It was a very competitive atmosphere, and he thrived in that.The kids that were in school with him there said he was so competitive that other kids didn’t really like him all that much.He wasn’t that popular because he was so competitive.He was always looking for the edge.
But it was an environment that he thrived in.His sports coach told me that he was the most coachable kid he’d ever seen.Probably some hyperbole there, but that—and he said the reason that he was saying that was that he, unlike all the other kids who the coach would say something and the kid might listen and might not, and might remember and might not, that Donald really wanted to win and he really listened, and he really followed up.And he was quite a good athlete as a result.
... One of the qualities we’ve witnessed in him that he talks about and he likes about himself is strength, law and order.I would assume the military academy’s a very good place to pick those qualities up.
The military academy certainly instilled in him, or perhaps enhanced in him, a notion of law and order and rules and regulations and things that had to be followed and chain of command, a lot of apparent respect for the military.He later said, decades later, said that he really knew as much as or maybe more than generals because, after all, he went to a military school.And another time he said something about having—he more or less had been in the service because he went to military school.So he felt that this had given him a real leg up in understanding sort of a military way of life, a military perspective, a military way of doing things.
I think what’s really interesting is that however much he may have a military perspective, however much he may have picked up, he also picked up—he also has a very highly developed notion of going outside of the rules, of figuring out where the weakness is, figuring out where the give is and then exploiting it.So he’s got kind of—maybe we can say he has both sides of that.
... When you look through the school yearbooks, do you see a lot of Black faces?
A lot?How about any?There may be a handful or a small handful.But certainly it was a white institution.Among other things, it was a private school.Parents had to be able to pay for it.
So when you think about Donald Trump now, he walked away from military school with what?With what attributes?
He was a good athlete.He had very finely honed competitive instincts and, I would say, skills.I mean, he was very close—knew [how to] watch other people, look for where their weaknesses might be, that the way that you end up, in his notion of the world, the way that you end up succeeding is finding some kind of leverage in whatever situation you’re in and figuring out the key moment to deploy it.That’s what he saw with his dad.He worked—in summers, he worked for his dad in high school and in college.He saw the real estate business close up.And he saw how it is—real estate is a particularly clear example of a business where looking for leverage, looking for ways to shave prices, ways to figure out your way around regulations.He saw all that up close.So he had all that in hand.
And he also saw that to get places, you use whatever connections you can find.So after two years at Fordham—and why did he go to Fordham for two years?According to his sister, it was because that’s where he got in.That’s how she put it to me.So after two years at Fordham when he was—would be—he could apply elsewhere as a transfer student, he went to see an admissions officer at Wharton who happened to be a friend of his older brother, Freddy, a guy named James Nolan, and James Nolan gave him a big check mark, and he got in to Wharton.
So use every advantage you have.And that happened—that was the advantage at hand, and he used it.
Trump and Roy Cohn
He forms a relationship when he gets to New York and he’s walking along those mean streets in the very beginning of the ’70s.He meets Roy Cohn at the club.And I guess he’s got some legal trouble and he wants Roy’s help.Help us with who Roy Cohn is, and why would he be attracted to young Donald Trump.
Donald Trump met Roy Cohn in the beginning of the ’70s in New York City and when Donald was just beginning to find his way there.And he, the Trump Organization, had just been hit with, or served with legal notice by the Justice Department that it was not in compliance with fair housing laws; it was charged—the Trump Organization was accused of not renting to minorities, to African Americans.
And the same thing had happened to the Trump Organization in the ’60s in Cincinnati with an apartment complex that Fred Trump owned.And he had—the Justice Department had charged that the Trump Organization in Cincinnati was not renting to Blacks, and the Trump Organization signed a decree and agreed to post notice and to rent to Blacks, and kind of handled it quietly.
So when this happened in the ’70s, Donald Trump—it was the second time—Donald Trump had met Roy Cohn and, according to Trump, had said to Cohn, “I’m faced with this; what do I do?”And Cohn said, “Come back fighting.”And within a few days, Donald Trump lodged a—or his lawyer, his then-lawyer, Roy Cohn, lodged a complaint, lodged a lawsuit, suing the Department of Justice for $100 million in libel.One hundred million dollars is a fair piece of change now, and at that time was an astronomical piece of change.
So it was a real headline-grabbing, punch back, fight back, deny, accuse, throw back any charges that are against you against who’s ever charging you.And it was the first real public version of what we would come to see as the MO of Donald Trump in the four decades since then.
And that MO is?
The five decades since then.The MO is, deny again and again.Again and again, insist on your version of events.Throw back any way—any insult, any charge, anything that’s leveled at you, throw back and say it’s the other person who’s doing it.And just keep doing that.Refuse to budge.Dig in.Keep pushing back.Keep yelling and screaming.And by then Donald also had grasped that he needed to yell louder, louder, more places.So he was already launched on trying to get his name into print and getting—making himself into a public figure in what we maybe at that time wouldn’t have recognized as branding, but have subsequently recognized that notion of making your name so large—and he did that—into a juggernaut so you can just roll over any charges that are leveled at you.This was the beginning of that.
So this is a Roy Cohn playbook, almost chapter and verse.
The three influences on Donald Trump, as I sometimes describe them, are School of Dad/School of Fred Trump; School of Roy Cohn; and School of Norman Vincent Peale.I guess in chronological order it would be School of Dad, School of Norman Vincent Peale, School of Roy Cohn, School of Roy.
So yeah, this is School of Roy.And that begins it.And Roy gave him advice over the next 15 years until he died that was just about always out of the same idea—push back, deny, demand more, accuse the other person.And I think it could all be condensed into “You can get away with almost everything.”And Donald took that to heart.That’s the only metric that counts—can you get away with it?And you can get away with an enormous amount.You can get away with being—having four or more corporate bankruptcies, and people still think you’re incredibly wealthy and are willing to buy bonds that you issue and are willing to invest in you.You can get away with not showing your tax returns.You can get away with almost anything.You can get away with, in Manhattan, when he built Trump Tower, he got a whopper tax abatement that was intended for poor areas of town.His building was built a block away from Tiffany’s at the corner of 5th Avenue and 56th Street.That was a deteriorating area of town?I don’t think so.He got away with renumbering the floors in that building.In any adjacent building, the same level floor would be one number; the floor numbers in Trump Tower were a higher number, because people wanted to live on a higher floor.You can get away with almost anything.
And I guess the corollary is, tell people what they want to hear.It works.
Cohn must have taught him—in order to do what he did with the Commodore, and of course what he did with Trump Tower was, he needed the grease, somehow, to get through city government, and even state government, in a lot of ways.That’s Cohn, I guess.Or maybe it’s School of Dad because of the Democratic Social Club, and School of Roy in the city about how to deal with politicians.This is really Donald’s first interaction with the world of politics.What is he learning about that?What happens as a result of what they’ve taught him to do in New York?And how does he do it?
I think one of the things that Donald learned from School of Dad and School of Roy was that almost everybody has their price.Whatever—it might not necessarily be dollars, although it often is, but it’s some kind of influence; it’s some kind of horse-trading.It might be some vulnerability that won’t be revealed.But there’s almost everyone—there’s a point, a pressure point.And his father had been very wired into political circles in Brooklyn, which was mostly Democratic.And at the time that Donald Trump was just launching himself in New York, that old Brooklyn clubhouse gang happened to be in very, very strategic positions in New York City and state government.The mayor, Abe Beame, was from the Brooklyn Democratic crowd, and the governor, Hugh Carey, was also from that crowd.
And so there were very strategic positions, and that Donald Trump could call in the chits that had been built up over the years with those guys, that you use every little bit of leverage.His father had also had financial dealings with various banks in New York, specifically Chase.And so he was able to call in his chits with financial officers there, loan officers.And that you don’t leave anything to chance.You use every bit of pressure that you possibly can exert.And you make it seem worth their while; I mean, that they’re going to be on a winning ticket, that they’re going to get something out of this.
When Roy Cohn dies, or is dying, Donald Trump, who’s been so close to him for 12, 15 years, doesn’t have anything to do with Roy Cohn.He has HIV; he’s dying.He’s now publicly, maybe always publicly gay.What does that tell us about Donald Trump?
Well, Roy apparently summed it up best.He said, “Donald pisses ice water.”He’s a really calculating guy.He’s completely transactional.So the only thing that matters is what he can get out of it.If it’s a person, if it’s a deal, whatever it is, what can he get out of it?And he couldn’t get anything out of Roy anymore.Roy had nothing to offer, and he was dying, and he was a wasting asset.And so he didn’t visit him.He, Roy, was gone from his playbook.
Not exactly empathetic.
That’s not his—empathy has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit.You might think that currently, during the period of COVID-19, when his own grandfather died during the pandemic epidemic in 1918, probably of influenza, that that could be a point of empathy.It could be something he personally might refer to, and certainly a note he could strike in speaking to the public.But that’s not his playbook.Anything that identifies him with a loser, that would identify him with a loser—Roy Cohn, who was dying of AIDS—or would identify him with a loser who has COVID-19, no interest.He can only—he only wants to be a winner.And that seems like a very crude, unbelievably crude notion that if you’re sick and dying you’re a loser.I think that’s exactly how he sees it.
Trump’s Marriage to Ivana
Now let’s bring Ivana into his life.The way we read it and see it and reconstruct it, he almost picks a female Donald Trump.He’s got a partner.He actually lets her run things.And she actually is as good at it as he is.Certainly one casino in Atlantic City, the Plaza.Is that the way you read the story about Ivana and Donald?
The Ivana chapter, or I think we should call it volume, in the Donald Trump story, because it was long, is fascinating.She’s—I think initially he was drawn to her, at least in part, because she was a model.All three of his wives have been models.All three of them had been stunningly beautiful women.He’s a guy who wants to come into a room, have every eye turn to him, seem like a winner.And in a very, very male-oriented, traditional way of looking at the world, one of the attributes of a guy being a winner is a beautiful dame on his arm.
All three of these women were that, and they were trained to be that.They were women who were trained to have heads turn.I mean, models are, to have that walk, that look, that way of coming across.So that’s been—so women as attributes of his power, of his strength, a throughline all the way through.
And Ivana was the first.He had dated models before that and had been—I mean, that had been principally who he had dated, or tried to date, were models, to show that he had the cojones to have such a beautiful woman.So there’s that.
And I think Ivana was also—she was very competitive.And she grew up in—behind the Iron Curtain.She grew up in a world with a lot of constraints.She was very eager to leave.And she was a competitive skier—not an Olympic skier, as he suggests, but she was a competitive skier, and managed to get herself out of Czechoslovakia, managed to get herself to Canada, actually, as a model, and had—she was very—this kind of hypercapitalist, I think, perspective on the world.
So she was very keen to be—to jump on this train and to be very much a part of this family business, to be—make it a success, to make as much money as possible, to make a big mark.And the way that she was involved with his first project, the Grand Hyatt, she was involved with Trump Tower, as well.And everyone who worked there said that she saw herself as very much the kind of co-captain of what was going on, that she was going to be—make executive decisions, that people should be loyal to her, that they should jump to her commands.And she played a significant role in all of that, as Donald was his first—Grand Hyatt was his first big project.And he was keeping a lot of things going.And he seemed to have welcomed her input.He welcomed having another person who was looking out for what was going, and would spy on everyone there, and would tell him everything that was going on.So he welcomed that, it seems, on that first project, very much.
And they really were doing it together.But after a while, the idea that she would be permanently a co-captain seemed to wear thin.He grew tired.He found another model who wasn’t interested in being a co-captain, and was very willing to be arm candy.And the rest is history.Ivana did actually prove her executive acumen.She was very aggressive, very belligerent as a manager, and did very well as a manager of one of the Trump casinos, and even at the Plaza Hotel.But that’s not what he wanted.
I guess what he didn’t want was strength in somebody else.Is that what it feels like?
Yeah.He wanted—the job of his wife was, by then—by the time he’d finished with those first two projects, he had his—the ground under his feet was solid.He knew what he was doing.He was launched into this big spending spree of the 1980s where he buys a yacht and a football team and an airline and all courts—all sorts of ways to the Plaza Hotel, all sorts of—he’s on a business magnate kind of—icons, things that were building the brand, making him, bigger, bigger, bigger, richer, richer, richer, much more and more and more of kind of public figures, this astonishingly successful businessman.Of course, he ran up a billion dollars in debt, but he did build that brand.
So he was launched into that, and he didn’t need her anymore.He didn’t need somebody who wanted to be his co-pilot.
He does this, doesn’t he?As we look at him from the lens of now, he likes strong, celebritylike people, even in his own government.He doesn’t want them there anymore; when they start to get big, they get gone.
Yeah.He doesn’t—his—one of the things that he—his people that worked with him at Trump Tower when he was, back in several centuries ago when he was only a real estate developer—said that he, his way, his management style was himself at the center of a very small staff, let us say, relative to—even at that time, it was a surprisingly small staff.When I went to his offices, I was kind of surprised that, that’s it?That’s all there is?So, not very many people.And they all reported directly to him.And he would also assign them kind of overlapping tasks to kind of set them at each other.His idea was what sometimes in business school might be called creative conflict, but the idea was that you would really have everybody a little fearful of holding on to their jobs, have everyone competing against each other, and so that would bring out the best in them, supposedly, make them work even harder because they’d be a little anxious, a little insecure.
Eliminate any kind of horizontal loyalties or alliances.Instead, people are all reporting to you.He’d ask them to report on each other to him.So it was that kind of—kind of like a wheel with all these spokes, and he’s at the hub.
That way of doing business he’s continued throughout his career, even in the White House.It’s somewhat like that, that there are people with overlapping responsibilities.He asks them what they think of each other.He’ll say, “So-and-So said this about you to me.”So this way of making everybody kind of insecure, making everybody fearful of their jobs, and an intense focus on loyalty to him, that’s been his MO throughout his career.
When he decides to get rid of her, he crushes her; it’s not pretty.Describe what he does.
When Donald and Ivana eventually split, he’d already been having an affair for several years with the woman who would eventually be his second wife, Marla Maples, another model, but not one who wanted to be—have any kind of executive role at all.She would be the head-turning, glamorous accessory to him as a powerful, dominating male, but she wouldn’t compete with him; she wouldn’t be a rival.So that was a much more—by that time, that’s what he was looking for.
And so he, during—a couple of years before they split up, Donald had sent Ivana sort of in exile to Atlantic City to run one of his casinos, in large part to get her out of the way.And she did a very good job.She actually did better than the other managers he’d had there.But at a certain point, that was becoming uncomfortable, and he really wanted to just get rid of her.So he yanks her back to New York and says she’s going to be the manager of the Plaza Hotel and in a press conference said that her salary would be a dollar a year and all the dresses she wanted, which was an astonishingly demeaning thing to say about—well, about anybody, but certainly about his wife and certainly about someone who had actually done very well as the manager of the casino.
So she set about being manager of the Plaza, and again did well.But by then, she had found out about Marla, and he—she, to a degree, paid him back.When he was out of the country and unavailable for any kind of press query, she announced that she was divorcing him.And he was unable—she sort of got her licks in first.And then ensued some weeks of dueling headlines on tabloids in New York that were vicious, very public, and that, as best one can tell, he loved.He loved being—even more headlines.He was still in that brand-building thing; he still wanted to be—every headline was a good headline....
And he—in the course of all this, there was a bloody battle about how much money Ivana would get out of this in the end, and eventually she got relatively little.And not too long after that we learned that he had very little, in fact, in cash, because he was so—he had—he was about a billion dollars in the hole.
Trump’s Treatment of Women
You were talking about all the women who had filed various forms of accusations against him.And of course, this is the “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” question.What’s up with him and women in that sense?And what do they allege?And where is this behavior coming from?
He’s been accused by, by now, I think, two dozen, more or less, women of some sort of sexual harassment.Some of it possibly might be considered sort of mild; others, other incidents quite violent.And according to court documents, including at the time of his—when he was—during his divorce from Ivana, he was accused by her in court documents of marital rape.That accusation was subsequently withdrawn, so we don’t know what to make of that.And these other accusations that have come out over the years, varying degrees of severity, some still in litigation, I think, I don’t know.But there’s been nothing absolutely dispositive.He’s denied all of it.
The one piece that we all heard, we all saw, was—we didn’t see it, sorry; we all heard—was the tape of an interview that he did with an entertainment reporter—
Billy Bush.
Yeah, with Billy Bush in the 1990s, in which he was—spoke of women in a remarkably vulgar way and said—and boasted about how being a celebrity meant that he was able to do whatever he wanted with women, that he could grab them, push them around, do whatever he wanted, they loved it.That’s what happens when you’re famous.And I’m paraphrasing because the actual tape is much more explicit and a lot more crude, and was really quite stunning.
So that certainly suggested a frame of mind which his third wife, Melania, attempted to gloss over as “how boys talk” and many Republicans have dismissed as, “oh, locker room talk.”But how that in way diminishes it is up to the listener.How would—so what if it’s locker room talk?I mean, it shouldn’t be.It’s not—that doesn’t make it OK.And it seemed far beyond locker room talk.
But his attitude has been—we’ve seen more recently, I think, another—how he’s treated women reporters during, at the—since he’s been in the White House, how he has responded to questions from women journalists during news conferences.He’s been dismissive.And he’s also been very dismissive at any number of women politicians, perhaps most notably Hillary Clinton, certainly Nancy Pelosi, anyone who crosses him.And if they’re women, they get an extra dose of hostility, dismissal and misogyny.
It’s a pattern?
I think it’s a very well-established pattern in the public eye.And going a little further than that, it turns out, what do you know, it’s actually been—he sees that as advantageous with enough of the electorate that he has no apparently incentive to change it, that way of talking about women, of acting towards women, of—seems to be part of a whole notion of social relations that enough people find, if not attractive, at least acceptable and palatable.
It got good ratings on Howard Stern all those years.
He’s gotten good ratings in conservative media, and it’s been, however one would want to characterize it, part of a notion of how the world used to be, and wasn’t it great, and let’s go back there again.Or it’s not that bad, and if you have him in the White House, there’s certain advantages that override that.And it’s a little facile to say the right-to-life movement has endorsed this, because I think that’s too reductive.But certainly, that general profile of suggesting women should take a subordinate position, they should know their place, they shouldn’t be too aggressive, they shouldn’t try to take men’s place, they shouldn’t, certainly not be elected president, but shouldn’t try to compete with men too hard, that they really should be next to or behind but not in front of men, that’s been a posture that he’s used to his—it turns out he’s been able to use that to his advantage.So the misogynistic track record seems to have an appeal to a certain portion of the electorate.
Trump and the Central Park Five
Let’s move now to an overt race moment.It’s 1989.This was the Central Park Five case.Donald is successfully on top of the world.The story breaks on that event, and Donald is affected by it in some way and takes out a full-page ad in the newspaper.What’s going on there?
In 1989, when Donald was—had written <i>The Art of the Deal</i>, was at the height of the spending spree that he was during the 1980s, building up that brand, as we later learned, also putting himself about a billion dollars in the hole, but nonetheless, building the brand, becoming larger, larger, larger, in 1989, a woman jogger in Central Park was brutally assaulted, almost died, and five Black teenagers were eventually charged with that crime and went to prison.[Editor’s note: Four of the teens known as the Central Park Five were Black; one was Latino.]
Donald Trump early on, within a few days of that initial—their initially being charged, took out a full-page ad in <i>The New York Times</i>, saying, “Bring back the death penalty; these animals should be put to death”; that this was a horrendous, horrifying incident and that we should stop coddling criminals and they should die.It was a very, very strong-minded, strong-worded, full-page ad. It was an extremely strong stand.And at the time, the city was absolutely in turmoil at what had happened.This had been such a horrifying incident.
And eventually, these five teenagers were—did go to jail.And then, some years later, it turned out another man entirely had done this rape and these kids were innocent …of the charge of raping and brutally assaulting her.And they had been exonerated.They had been not only publicly exonerated, but officially exonerated.And Donald Trump still insists that they were guilty.He has not backed down.He has not apologized for that full-page ad.He has not in any way backed down from that, even though most but not all public officials have.
Is race at the center of this, from Trump’s perspective?
Was he looking for a race—an inflammatory racial opportunity and then he would have jumped on it, or was he looking for an opportunity, and it happened to be an inflammatory racial one?Of course, we can’t ever know, but he did jump on that one.
And it was a very, very brutal and horrible thing that happened.And it was also very much fit—could be fit into a historical notion of innocent white virtue being attacked by, you know, rapacious Black males.That is a storyline as old as this country, and one that has been reinforced countless times in—Birth of a Nation springs to mind, but any number of times, that in any number—the Scottsboro Boys—any number of cases where a charge was made—Emmett Till—where a charge was made that somehow innocent white woman, somehow evil, incorrigible, animalistic Black men, that that’s a terrible, inevitable and terrible conflict, and that it’s the role and duty of these—of civilized society to rein it in and mete out punishment, and that it’s something that’s every patriot’s duty to do.
I think that’s a very, very crude way of putting it, but I think that’s precisely the stereotype that he was drawing on in that ad, and that certainly much of the official response when this happened was drawing on that stereotype.These kids had been in the park, maybe—and they’d perhaps been involved with petty crimes during that evening in the park.The leap from that to brutally assaulting and raping a white woman, that’s a pretty big leap....
And to this day, Trump has not apologized for having jumped on that stereotype and ridden it.He was looking for a national platform.Around the same time, he took out another full-page ad talking about foreign policy and saying that he, again, that he knew more than all the experts.He knew more than any kind of foreign policy experts.He had really good ideas about trade policy and that he could take charge and he could advise the government.He was offering his advice.So he’s setting himself up as this major expert.
So this idea, this public platform, first on this brutal rape and then on this public—on foreign trade, he was brand building.
Trump’s Bankruptcies and Rebounds
You’ve mentioned the bankruptcies or the billion-dollar hole he built by buying the yacht and the Plaza and the airline and everything else.By the time the Atlantic City empire is collapsing, if ever there was a time for the School of Norman Vincent Peale to come into effect, it would have been around then.And in a way, he walks away from all of that almost clean.He doesn’t get taken down and killed; he’s sort of too big to fail, according to the banks, and he gets out from under it, in a public sense, anyway.And it does feel a little bit like maybe the Norman Vincent Peale playbook has been brought into play here.
He does manage to get out from under the bank—the bankruptcy, the corporate bankruptcy.The first one is in 19—in the beginning of the ’90s.There are many more to come.And he does manage to walk away pretty lightly—I don’t even want to say scarred.He has what we might call a boo-boo on his knee.That’s about it.And he—it was a remarkable performance.
That brand building that he did throughout the ’80s when he goes on the big spending spree and he buys the airline and the yacht and the football team and the Plaza Hotel, all of that is part of—he got it: just get as big as you can, big, big, big.It’s worth it.It doesn’t matter what it costs.Big, big, big.His attorneys later told me he doesn’t care if he doesn’t make money on some of those things; it doesn’t matter.Just get big.Get these—all these little kind of like cartoon accoutrements of being a superwealthy guy—the blond model wife, the big limousine, always be in a tux, and the yacht, the airlines, the airplanes, the football team—all of these things just, one after the other, piling up this, or building this almost impossibly large juggernaut figure of this tycoon so wealthy that if he—something goes south, it doesn’t matter.It wasn’t true, but that’s the picture that he built up.
So this commission met to decide whether or not to let him keep having his casino license after this really rather jaw-dropping debt had built up.And so anyway, I went to the meeting of this commission, and he was just really unbelievable, except that it was completely typical that during the breaks he would walk around outside the meeting room talking to the press and saying that this was a great day, that things were just terrific.It was a great time to be buying things and that he had—he was going to be investing in some stocks and that he really had his finger on the pulse of the market, and that this was just all terrific and it was all going to really work out, and no problems.
And at that point, that particular day, he blamed things—he didn’t bring in the casino executives, the dead casino executives, but he did bring in Saddam Hussein, and he said that it was Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, that that had really been a major factor in all of this.
So he was—that distraction, displacement, blame somebody else, School of Roy, that was in full swing.
Another time I saw him in Florida when he—there was two condo buildings, two towers in West Palm Beach that he had bought.He didn’t build them, but he had bought, renamed, put, I don’t know, probably some mirrors and some chandeliers in the lobby, and then was—thought he would make a killing because they would be called—the name Trump would be on them.And he—they hadn’t sold; it hadn’t gone well.And now there was a bankruptcy sale because the bank that held the mortgage was calling it in, and he didn’t have the money to pay.
So they were being sold at public auction, which you might imagine as being a somewhat embarrassing moment.Not for him.He, striding about the auction, telling people this is the best day in their lives.They were going to get a great bargain.These things were going to be worth a fortune, that this was a terrific situation.He looked like he was on top of the world.
He had that—that is sort of Norman Vincent Peale, hold on tenaciously; hold on to this image of yourself as successful.Never let go of it.Never let the idea of failure enter your mind.And in doing—and when he was doing negotiations with banks in New York over this billion dollars in debt, he was cool as could be.Really, it wasn’t his fault.I mean, he had been over—they had overlent to him; that was the problem.They had overlent.It was overlending; that was it.
And so they would all have to work together to correct the problem the banks had created by overlending.And so they—and the banks had, in fact, not done due diligence, shouldn’t have lent him.They lent—the loans were on shaky collateral.But they ended up giving him a haircut, and he sailed out of there.
The Apprentice
Somebody who’s been bending reality in his own favor all of his life suddenly gets an offer to be on a reality TV show.What could be better than that, right?And everything that he ever wants seems to come together.If he’s got a political future in mind, he’s going to be, for 14 years, in the living rooms of millions of Americans.He’s perfectly lit, perfectly coiffed, perfectly everything.And he’s learning how to do a kind of reality-television reality: a crisis every week, lots of action, change the subject when it’s not going well.It seems like Donald Trump really goes to the college or the school of reality television and graduates summa cum laude.
Yes.<i>The Apprentice</i> was a gift.It was an astonishing gift.And the giver was a guy named Mark Burnett who had already produced <i>Survivor</i>, which was a hugely successful early so-called reality-show program that had been enormously successful.And he went on with <i>The Apprentice</i> with Mark Burnett as the producer.And Trump was—he spotted him as this perfect figure, this kind of already larger-than-life cartoon figure who was completely agreeable to this show that would be all about him, and it would be showing him to be a business genius.
And so it was a marriage made in heaven or hell.Anyway, it was enormously successful.And I think that what’s happened since—oh, and it did indeed, it got him onto TV.When he bought a football team back in the ’80s, that got him on the sports pages, which, for anybody who wasn’t reading Page Six, wasn’t reading the gossip columns, which he’d already colonized, this gave him the other part of the newspaper, which was the sports page.And it was the most-read part of the paper.So he’s very clever about positioning himself within the media at the given time.
So that was the ’80s; get on the sports pages.2000s, it’s get on TV.As we all know, now it’s Twitter; he’s positioned himself there.And also cable TV.But let’s go back to the early 2000s when cable TV is not quite the force it became and Twitter had yet to be invented.
By the early 2000s, for Donald Trump, getting himself into—onto network TV in <i>The Apprentice</i>, next step up in this brand building.And I think that what’s happening now might be seen as kind of like, he doesn’t quite take on board that it’s not still some version of reality TV.He had—prior to <i>The Apprentice</i>, he had already spent his career figuring out how to bend public perceptions of himself.He’d already been hard at work bending public perceptions, building this brand, turning himself into the definition of business success and magnate.So then on <i>The Apprentice</i>, he does this on television, and he has—before that, he didn’t have Mark Burnett.He did it—I mean, he had his father, he had many employees.But with <i>The Apprentice</i>, suddenly he has a producer, and the producer is filming or taping hundreds of hours every week.And then it all gets edited down into a one-hour product, which shows Donald Trump and his decision to fire whoever he fired that week as being incredibly insightful and quite commanding.And it shows him to be an enormously successful, shrewd, genius guy.
So I think since then, his producers, so to speak, have been the Republican Party, the White House staff.All sorts of others have served as producers.And so he’s—it’s kind of kept going, this effort to massage and bend reality and make him look like he knows what he’s doing and that he’s in charge.But in recent—very recently, those producers have kind of fallen away, and he doesn’t—and they’re not—that massage, that bending of things is not working so well.But he still—he thinks that reality TV was real.The role of Mark Burnett, I’m not sure that he quite ever took on board how much he was—how large that role was, that he was being produced.He thought that that was more or less what happened.
And I think since then, in the White House, he’s thought what he’s doing, the way that he’s come across, he doesn’t get that there have been producers there, too, but that they’re falling away.
The Access Hollywood Tape
When you saw the <i>Access Hollywood</i> moment—you talked about it earlier—and you saw Trump’s response over that weekend from initial silence to the recording, what they called the hostage video—even his own group calls it the hostage video—and then the events at the debate, did you see the Donald Trump you knew, characteristics from that Donald Trump on display in the initial stages and throughout that weekend that you knew and understood and could pinpoint?Did you know what he would do and how he would react to that event when everybody else in America was saying, “That’s it; this guy is cooked”?
He would find the leverage in it.He would find the way to turn it around.I mean, the obvious thing to do was certainly to point to Bill Clinton and say, “Who’s accusing who?”But also, the—there was a kind of covert appeal that he’s this stud muffin, this powerful guy…and that these women were lying about it, that they—that he had not harassed them; if anything, they’d thrown themselves at him, and/or nothing had happened.Some combination of the two.And that he had—nothing that he had done had been in any way something he should be held to account for, and he would, that he would be able to turn it around. ...
So you knew he’d survive it, he’d weather through it, he’d go through it because you knew who he was.
Well, I think that’s a stretch.I’m no crystal ball.But the fact that he did survive it was not surprising.I’d put it that way.I mean, that was pretty—a pretty remarkable moment, but that he would—he was already on top of the ticket.It would be a huge mess to get rid of him, and that he would get that—the Republican Party to circle the wagons around him; that if he could just get everybody to move past that, then very quickly it would be rearview mirror.
Trump and the ‘Crisis Presidency’
So the guy we’ve discussed, sitting in the White House, in all the crises that he faces—Russiagate, coronavirus, all of them, all the others, the leaks, the back-and-forth, the impeachment, coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter protests—who is that man responding in there?Who is he?Is he listening to his dad?Is he listening to Peale?What’s driving his responses in these moments, from what you know about him?
School of Dad, School of Norman Vincent Peale, School of Roy, certainly those voices are still operating.He was a very apt pupil.He was, as his coach in military school would say, he was very coachable because he wanted to win.He wanted to dominate.He wanted to be the guy on top.He trained himself to walk into every room, looked for the biggest, strongest other guy in the room and go right up to that person and punch him in the nose—not that I know of ever literally, but certainly figuratively—immediately challenge that person and get whatever was happening onto Donald Trump’s terms and to put everybody else on the defensive.That’s his MO.Make it his turf.Put everybody on the defensive.They’re always behind.
And Twitter, of course, has allowed him to do that for years now, for his entire presidency.He puts everyone on the defensive so that they’re responding to him.He sets the agenda.He set the agenda at the beginning of his campaign; he sets the agenda whenever he can.He’s not setting the agenda now, and that’s a really dicey world for him.
Will he be able to reset it?He’s trying.He’s doing everything he can.He’s insisting that coronavirus is only a flu.The whole thing with the masks made that—in 2016, it was MAGA hats; this year it’s the mask.That’s the immediately telegraphing signal of whether you’re, in his terms, patriotic, a real man, a real American standing up for your rights, all the rest.If you have a mask on, you’re a wimp, a loser, cosmopolitan, internationalist, antifa, whatever.If you have a mask on, you’re saying one thing, which is that you’re not voting for him, which is really what it boils down to.And if you don’t have a mask on, you’re on his team.
So in—those golf hats, I thought were brilliant, actually.They’re so relatable, so identifiable and a signature that didn’t need any explanation.And the masks are the same way.Is that going to be enough?I think it’s a little shaky to say the golf hats elected him the first time around, but they were a big factor.His no-masks?Probably not.But it’s not small, this idea that you can just—that you’re a winner, and it’s really jujitsu: that you’re a winner if you don’t wear a mask.Really?Only losers wear these stupid masks.They’re wimps and fraidy-cats.
So who’s talking?Who’s in his head now?What’s the voice in his head?How is he assessing the situation?He’s not a deep figure, as we know.He’s not an insightful guy.But he is very resourceful.He’s a quick study.He’s very adaptive.He can turn it around.He’s never going to turn it around to anything except what works for him.I mean, not turn it around as in generous.No, no, no.But he is adaptive.So he’s just night and day thinking about how do you turn this around.
Yeah, and he’s got millions of Americans walking the streets in protests around Black Lives Matter.Black Lives Matter.
He’s watching the protests, he’s watching the numbers of deaths from COVID-19, which you might think would be—it captured everyone’s attention for a long time, but I don’t know if Americans have a shorter attention span than anybody else in the world?I doubt it.But it—the ability to focus on having to give something up, give up being in public, give up being outside, being in groups, having to focus on that for that long has proved to be a big challenge, but—and maybe even conveniently for him.The protests that have arisen has taken the focus off of COVID, which we thought might have been fatal to him, how poorly he handled it.So the fact that he—how absolutely disastrous the White House has been at handling that has been kind of eclipsed by the protests.And the protests are much more incendiary, much more incendiary.
And if he can rally enough support for a law-and-order response, things—we’ll see.He’s doing his best.I mean, he’s going to Tulsa.He’s doing—he tried to do it on Juneteenth and then, grudgingly, shifted it to one day later, which is more or less like not doing anything.More or less like standing fast.Very Roy Cohn.Very School of Dad.Very Norman Vincent Peale.Just insist that you’re successful.Insist that what you’re doing is right.
Trump and Sharing the Spotlight
I did want to ask one question, though, about, just to go back to Ivana, because it’s so unusual in his life that he is with somebody who is also a celebrity, who is also powerful, who is known in her own right.Do you think that the breaking up of that relationship was a turning point for Donald Trump, not just in his relationship with women, but with having powerful people close to him?Is that the one example?Did he change after that marriage?
When Donald and Ivana got together in the early ’70s, and in the course of the earlier parts of their marriage, in a sense they were both starting out.He, of course, had his father’s very significant real estate empire, his father’s political connections, his father’s financial connections.So he had—he wasn’t starting out from nothing, not even close.But still, he was just beginning in Manhattan, and she, an immigrant, was just beginning in the United States.And they were both out for the main chance, extremely competitive, and, as she said, and I think it was true, that they kind of spurred each other on for sometime.
But after a while, having somebody else in that spotlight, he wasn’t interested.Not only not interested, he despised it.He wanted her out of the way.He wanted a helpmate.He did not want somebody else next to him, second-guessing him, making—maybe even pointing out mistakes.No interest in that.And I think he saw her as added on, as value-added, and then he didn’t.
And that is, since then he’s had any number of advisers, since he’s more recently, of course, in the White House, any number of people who seem to be next to him 24/7—Steve Bannon—and then suddenly were gone, any number of people who he would tout and seem to confer with and then they’re gone.And I think that that’s—so that role Ivana played was unique, and he’s never let anybody else be in that role since then.
Now, in the White House, who does he have close to him?More close than anybody?Family.Family are the people that he hangs on to.Family are the people he feels he can trust.Family are the people whose—to whom any benefit, any profit will go to.And so it’s very closely held.
There’s another—there are other famous families who have had perhaps something like that.But with family, he feels that—he seems to feel that he can rely on them.And with family, you don’t have a paper trail; you don’t have any record; you don’t have to give commands.You can do it—it’s all up close.You can’t be tracked.I think he’s found that to be his comfort zone.
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