As someone who once devoted several months to studying Donald Trump’s career and habits, an endeavor alternately excruciating and pleasurable, I wouldn’t have predicted that I would find nothing amusing in his big-footing about and pretending that he had something worthwhile to offer our republic in its hour of great need. When, against my wishes, in the late nineties, I was cajoled into writing a Profile of Trump—the pre-“Apprentice” Trump—I focussed on two fundamental questions: What did he actually do as a businessman? And did he have an interior life?
As for the latter: one Saturday in the winter of 1997 I spent a morning and afternoon with Trump one-on-one, touring construction projects, in Manhattan (office building) and Westchester County (golf courses). He drove, and I sat in the death seat, taking notes. As we cruised up I-684, I asked Trump about his early-morning routines. What time was he awake? Five-thirty A.M. What time did he arrive at his desk in the Trump Tower? Seven or seven-thirty. How did he spend his time before leaving for the office? Reading the newspapers, etc.
From Trump, a look of incomprehension.
Trump remained baffled.
At the time, I deemed Trump’s reply unprintable. But that was then.
So, regarding the question of an interior life, I ended my Profile with the observation that Trump, who delineated three categories of his real estate offerings—luxury, super luxury, and super-super luxury—“had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
Trump never challenged my facts, but—surprise, surprise—he hated what I wrote and has taken opportunities across the years to verbally assault me publicly. Most memorably, in 2005 he attacked me in a wonderfully deranged letter to the Times Book Review, which I still regard as the signal accomplishment of my career. Also, framed and hanging in my bedroom is a hand-scrawled message from Trump in which he informed me, “Mark—You are a total loser—and your book (and writings) sucks! Best wishes, Donald.” (Some money exchanged hands—$37.82—as did a couple of Band-Aids, an uplifting correspondence that I described during the New Yorker Festival in 2009, a video of which is below.)
Plumbing the particulars of Trump’s business dealings turned out to be extremely labor-intensive. It was not a high point for Trump, financially, as I wrote at the time:
Still, Trump deserves credit, as it were, for rescuing himself by successfully leveraging his name. As long as others were willing to put up the money, “TRUMP” kept being slapped on buildings that certain people wanted to occupy. His greatest achievement, of course, was branding himself, and his running-for-President nonsense was conceived as an extension of the brand.
During an online chat earlier this week, the question arose whether Trump’s current antics are good or bad for his business. Hendrik Hertzberg opined that “he’s willing to lose money on running for President.” I respectfully disagree about the “willing” part, though the bottom line might nevertheless turn out that way.
A deputy mayor of New York City once sagely observed, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” A simple enough rule to live by, which raises the question of whether Trump “believes” his own non-stop prevarications. Leaving aside the tempting armchair theories about where Trump belongs on the spectrum of acute narcissistic personality disorder, I’m convinced that he’s convinced that everything he says and does is ultimately good for business. A large proportion of the tenants in Trump properties are foreigners who regard them as worthy flight-capital investments. A reassuring segment of the American electorate recognizes Trump’s execrable birtherism, aspersions upon President Obama’s academic credentials, and the slur that he needs to get “off his basketball court” for exactly what they are. Abroad, however, I doubt that a large audience is playing close enough attention.
Probably the funniest thing I ever heard Trump say was when, one day in his office, he handed me an unaudited financial statement (the provisional numbers added up to a net worth of a few billion) and declared, “I’ve never shown this to a reporter before.” If, at some point in the near future, Trump makes public an up-to-date “audited” financial statement, my guess is that a very large percentage will be assigned to the value of his name alone and a far less impressive amount to his tangible holdings.
Until a couple of days ago, I was in accord with those who maintained that Trump would never formally announce his Presidential candidacy because he couldn’t walk away from whatever his fellow cynics at NBC Universal would pay him for another season of “Celebrity Apprentice.” Now I’m not so sure. Clearly, he needs the money—he always needs the money. One potential pitfall for Trump is that his compulsive ugliness is self-propagating. As Hertzberg and David Remnick observe, whatever laughter Trump evokes is rooted in dread and disgust, which the demeaning spectacle of President Obama releasing the long form of his birth certificate deepened into revulsion. Can he and will he get even uglier? Count on it. As of yet, there are no indications that the suits at NBC will muster the scruples to deprive him of his lucrative franchise. Unless, that is, Trump winds up doing a Full Frontal Charlie Sheen. Not an outcome we should necessarily hope for, but at the rate he’s going he just might.
Photograph by Max Vadukul.
