Trumpologies

Trumpologies

By James Traub

·         Sept. 12, 2004

·          

One morning in July, Donald J. Trump walked across the vast, peach-colored marble lobby of Trump Tower toward his fans, who had formed into two orderly lines stretching from the skyscraper's doors to Trump's black limo, idling at the curb. "I don't think this happened to Bill Zeckendorf," he cracked. Zeckendorf, a very successful real-estate developer, was the closest thing to Donald Trump a generation ago -- which is to say, not close at all. We plunged outside, and the fans, observing a correct distance, thrust out copies of Trump's latest, mega-best-selling book, "Trump: How to Get Rich."

"Will you sign my book, Mr. Trump?" He signed.

"Hey, Donald, if I send the book to your office, will you sign and send it back?" Yeah, sure, he said. Send it in.

Trump worked the crowd in his own peculiar way. He abhors physical contact, so he raised his arms, like a heavyweight champion, and paraded around the circle left by his fans' respectful regard. "Does everybody watch 'The Apprentice'?" he shouted. That was a joke; they loved the show.

William Zeckendorf was merely a famous developer; Trump has transcended such petty categories to become the most famous businessman since . . . well, forever, as he says himself. His name has become such a byword for success that even the most humiliating reverses barely dent his reputation. Reports had it that he would be forced to place the company that holds his Atlantic City hotel and casino operation into bankruptcy, and in fact he did just that a few weeks later. He would have to come up with $55million in cash to preserve his stake in the company. Did he have $55 million? Only an idiot would even ask! Of course he did! He had huge cash flow from his real-estate operations. He was stronger than ever. He could have rescued the company with a check if he'd wanted to, but he would rather do it "institutionally," with an infusion of capital from his good friends at Credit Suisse First Boston -- his bank, by the way.

The rules that govern others just don't apply to Trump. With him, it's celebrity that breeds success rather than the other way around. And Trump has never been a bigger celebrity than he is now, thanks to the astounding success of "The Apprentice," which has been nominated for four Emmys and began its second season last week. Did I think that crowd on the sidewalk was big? That was nothing! The fans just hadn't had time to gather. Once inside the arctic cool of the limo -- we were going to the topping-off ceremony for the 6th of the projected 19 buildings in a development known as Trump Place -- Trump told me that if the car sits at the curb for 10 minutes before he arrives, he has to fight his way through a thousand people. "Half an hour," he continued, "you have to close off the street."

Like it or not, Donald Trump is now the No. 1 guy in the world's No. 1 city. With Rudy Giuliani off making money and the rather colorless Mike Bloomberg occupying City Hall, Trump has become the emblematic New Yorker. And this bears some thought, for the New York that Trump incarnates is not the same one that Giuliani did, or Reggie Jackson, or Travis Bickle. Remember the City of Unshakable Resolve that rose from the ashes of 9/11? That's history, baby, whatever the Republicans were saying two weeks ago. Trump's New York is a Darwinian, winner-take-all town -- "the real jungle," as Trump crows in his show's opening moments, as opposed to those two-bit jungles featured on shows like "Survivor." 

Actual New Yorkers may have trouble recognizing themselves in the Trumpian narrative. But the fact that millions of Americans have become besotted with both the man and his show tells us that the Donald is on to something -- as it seems he always is. One generally accurate gauge of the greatness of the great man -- or woman -- is the number of supernumeraries and factotums whose hands you must pass through before gaining admission to the Presence. With this rule in mind, early in July I telephoned Howard Rubenstein, the publicist renowned for taking special care of the great, and asked what I needed to do to gain access to Trump. Rubenstein said, "Just call Norma in his office." 

Trump probably receives more requests for interviews than any other private citizen in New York, but he doesn't employ anyone to keep reporters from his door for the simple reason that he doesn't want to keep them from his door. I called Norma Foerderer, an effervescent former diplomat who has worked for Trump for a quarter of a century and now functions as his gatekeeper and gal Friday, and within a couple of days I found myself sitting across from Trump in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.

One of the remarkable things about Trump, at least from a reporter's point of view, is that he does not require an actual interview; he just starts talking. That morning, without even bothering to stand up and shake my hand -- he believes shaking hands is a reckless invitation to infectious disease -- Trump started in on the widespread misconception that he does not own most of the properties on which he has affixed his name. He treats this as a malicious slur, since it makes him out to be a wizard of self-promotion rather than the biggest developer in New York, which is how he describes himself on "The Apprentice." "I've got 50 percent of the equity on Trump Place," he said, referring to the giant Hudson River development, "and that's 10 million square feet all by itself. Nobody's got 10 million square feet." I asked Trump if he could supply some documentary evidence of his half ownership. No problem, he said, unless his highly secretive Chinese partners objected.

By the way, had I heard about his new radio show? No, I hadn't. Trump had been contacted by both Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting, the two big station-owning groups, to do radio. He had decided to go with Clear Channel, the industry monster, and they agreed to let him do a 90-second spot, the way Paul Harvey used to, and he started on June 14, his 58th birthday, and the response had been incredible, and "You want me to call Sean?" Sean Compton is the vice president for programming at Clear Channel Radio, which owns 1,200 stations. "Rhona!" he shouted. "Could you get Sean on the phone?" Trump put the phone on speaker. "Sean, I have a reporter here from The New York Times Magazine. You told me that my show was the biggest launch in radio history, is that right?"

"That's right, Donald."

"Bigger than Rush Limbaugh, right?"

"Rush rolled out with, I think, 60 stations. We rolled your show out with 320."

Trump invited me to interview Sean, while he delicately clipped his nails and swept the parings into his hand. Sean hazarded that "Trumped!" would soon be the biggest feature on radio. "Thanks, Sean," Trump said and bipped him off.

Trump loves the radio show because he gets to sound off on things like the idiotic names with which celebrities saddle their children or the repellent snobbery of the "Jag-u-ar" ad, all without leaving his desk. But radio is only one piece of a burgeoning empire. Since "The Apprentice," Trump has ascended into the Brandosphere, where an individual life becomes so immense, and so immensely desirable, that it can be marketed in the form of a purchasable lifestyle. This is the Olympus of the celebrity culture; its chief deities are Oprah, Martha (for now), Ralph Lauren and maybe P. Diddy. Now comes the Donald, with his own hit TV show, his own golf courses, his own magazine -- Trump World, whose first issue just arrived on the newsstands -- and his name-bearing collection of shirts, ties, suits and a fragrance. The suits and the fragrance are a done deal, and on the others he's just got to say the word.

In fact, when I was ushered into his office one morning a few weeks after our first meeting, Trump was surrounded by members of the Brody family, who apparently are huge in the suit business. They were showing him samples from the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection. The suits will retail for no more than $675. "The target is young men going into the business world for the first time," explained Sheldon Brody, the paterfamilias. For this demographic, thanks to "The Apprentice," the name "Trump" had apparently become synonymous with "business." Brody said that within 18 months he expected to be doing $60 million to $70 million worth of business "in stores all over America and the world." He invited Trump to admire the engraved golden blazer buttons. Trump said, "My manager at Bedminster" -- one of the golf courses -- "wants to buy every member a green blazer. What's it going to cost me if I buy, say, a thousand?" Ninety to a hundred dollars per, Sheldon figured. Trump nodded; he could have his very own version of the fabled green jacket at Augusta National for a hundred thousand bucks. Then he said, "You heard about my new radio show?" He started telling the Brody family, and me, the whole story -- Clear Channel, Paul Harvey, 90 seconds. Only when he turned to me and said, "You want me to call Sean?" did I gently remind him that Sean and I had spoken two weeks earlier. He called anyway, for the Brodys' benefit, and the family members stood frozen in respectful attention while Sean ran through the numbers. 

Trump's meteoric rise from mere superstar to brand name is a testament to the power of television. In his earlier heyday, in the late 1980's, when he was snapping up trophy properties like the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Shuttle and Adnan Khashoggi's yacht and very publicly dumping wife No. 1, Ivana, for wife No. 2, Marla, Trump became famous through the medium of publicity and autobiographical literature. ("Trump: The Art of the Deal," which was published in 1987, sold 835,000 copies in hardcover alone, thanks in no small part to Trump's brief "presidential campaign" that year.) But "The Apprentice" introduced Trump to a vastly larger audience. More than 40 million people watched the first season's last episode (well, technically, some part of the last episode), when Trump anointed the winner. The show was the top-rated new series and tied with "The West Wing" for attracting TV's most affluent prime-time demographic. "The Apprentice" almost single-handedly rescued the lagging fortunes of NBC, the network that broadcast it.

Trump professes to be amazed by his blockbuster success. One afternoon, as we were standing on the steps of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle, he said, apropos of I don't know what: "Harvey Weinstein calls -- he's a friend of mine; you know, he's the head of Miramax -- and he says, 'Donald, you know you're the biggest star in Hollywood.' I say, 'What are you talking about?' He says, 'You're the No. 1 star; you're a superstar on the No. 1 show in television [No. 4, actually]. You saved NBC.' I never thought of it, because the rest of the time I'm negotiating with contractors. So I said: 'You know what? It's true."'

Maybe it's only true in the poetic sense -- the sense in which Trump is the biggest developer in New York or in which Trump National at Briarcliff Manor is the best golf course in New York State. But why cavil? "The Apprentice" is huge, to use one of Trump's favorite words. It's also dopey, but it's dopey in a very powerful way. Most of the weekly "business" tasks designed to winnow out the contestants -- selling lemonade, charming bargains out of shopkeepers -- could be won by hiking up your skirt, which is why the girls beat the boys every week. But what made the show powerful was that these labors were understood to constitute a billionaire's boot camp. The contestants were all the kind of junior-beaver business aspirants who might be customers for the Trump Signature Collection. For them, business was the ultimate thrill ride, and Mr. Trump the ultimate businessman.

In the first episode, Sam, a slightly unhinged co-founder of an Internet media company, ardently declared, "I want access to Trump" -- and not on a game show but "in the back of a limo." The show brilliantly exploited the premise that access to Trump was an unsurpassably precious good. "As the master," Trump himself solemnly announced, "I want to pass along my knowledge to someone else."

Trump is god of "The Apprentice," its fate, its hero. And yet he often presides over this battle to the death with the leering malevolence of a Bond villain. He goes about either by black limo or black chopper, and he usually emerges from these war chariots with an ominous cuing of the strings. He materializes at the beginning of each episode to issue his entrepreneurial labor of Hercules. Then he often disappears until the very end, when he receives the contestants in a dark boardroom crossed with menacing shadows. And at the end of each episode, he administers the famous Blofeldian order of execution: "You're fired!" The only thing missing is the trap door into the shark pool (though one contestant did shout, "Don't say it, Mr. Trump!").

And yet Trump is, without question, the show's hero. Perhaps he suits the truculent national mood. As Mark Burnett, the show's creator and (with Trump) co-owner, says, "Americans want to puff out their chests right now. It's like a forget-about-you moment" -- Burnett actually used a more potent expression -- "and he's one of us." That's really the great revelation of "The Apprentice." Donald Trump is an egomaniacal, germophobic multi-multi-millionaire, and yet television viewers, and the folks who gather outside Trump Tower hoping for a glimpse, can't get enough of him. When Trump took me to the topping-off ceremony at Trump Place, he demonstrated his peculiar populism. When his limo glided up to the construction site, he said to me, "These are the people who love me, and I love them." And it was true. As soon as Trump got out of the car, a huge roar went up, and the construction workers who had gathered to hear him began to laugh and shout: "You're fired! You're fired!" Trump looked around and yelled: "Where's Miss Universe? [He is also a co-owner of the Miss Universe contest.] Did you ever see Miss Universe of Australia?" He jerked his thumb back to me. "Hey, fellas, this guy's writing for The New York Times Magazine. If he writes badly about me, will you kick the [expletive] out of him?" He glad-handed everyone in sight, gave a speech in which he made fun of the sissy construction workers in Florida, dickered with a structural engineer over a bid for work on a projected skyscraper in Chicago, posed for pictures and climbed back into the limo to shouts of "Take it easy, Donald!" And then he took out a stingingly alcoholic hand towel and rubbed away the traces of promiscuous human contact. 

Maybe it's an example of what Marxists call "false consciousness," but Trump really is a populist plutocrat -- and not because he's philanthropic or even liberal-minded. It's the opposite: people seem to like him because he loves his money and spends it just the way they would if they had it -- as if he had just won a reality show himself in which the prize is absolutely everything. He lives, or at least perches, in the rococo majesty of a Trump Tower triplex, and he has every toy a boy could ever want: a plane and a helicopter, golf courses and, above all, babes. Maybe his hair is as ridiculously concocted as some nouvelle-cuisine dessert, but what does he care? He's engaged to Melania Knauss, a Slovenian supermodel. (O.K., model.)

But what makes Trump Trump is not just what he has but what he doesn't care about having: status. Trump is not a patron of the arts; he does not sit on the boards of museums or universities or think tanks. His self-love simply will not brook the idea of a superior station to which you gain access by virtue of taste or values or behavior or whatever it is you might be supposed not already to have. Trump does not even recognize that some people look down on him; he assumes they must be looking up. And he knows why, too. "The people that don't like me," he explained on our way back from the topping-off, "are certain rich people that are jealous of the show, because they walk down the street and nobody knows who they are, and nobody gives a damn." Everybody wants what Donald has.

When I asked Michael Jacobson, the editor and publisher of Trump World, what the message of the new magazine would be, he replied, "It's O.K. to be arrogant when you're that rich; it's hip to be a little arrogant and confident and sure of yourself." Yes, that certainly would be a message for our time, but it's easy to miss how very reassuring Trump's peculiar species of arrogance can be. Both the Martha and the Ralph brands betray the class aspirations (or perhaps insecurities) of their founders, the classically American wish to jettison your somewhat humble origins in order to find a place in the upper reaches of WASP society. Trump represents the opposite end of this Henry James spectrum: the American who swears by the democracy of money. Like George W. Bush, Trump manages to seem plebeian even as he consumes at a level made possible only by great wealth.

In 1995, Trump purchased the magnificent mansion in Bedford, N.Y., where Katharine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, grew up. After he insisted that it was the finest house on the best land in the richest community, etc., I broke down and paid a visit. And it was true: here was the Ralph Lauren dream incarnate, with brilliantly polished limestone walls, a flagged inner courtyard, vast rooms, a marble indoor pool and splendid grounds with a fine pergola and orangery. The next time I saw Trump, I asked why he hadn't moved in there himself. "It's sort of not me," Trump said. "If I had my choice, I'd rather live in a golf villa at Trump National, roll out of bed to the driving range, hit balls." In fact, Trump was much prouder of the deal than of the house. He says that he bought the 55,000-square-foot house as well as another smaller mansion and 250 lovely acres for $8 million. Originally he planned to build a golf course, with the mansion as clubhouse. Now that he already has Trump National nearby, he has decided to subdivide the property into 17 lots, each with its very own mansion, and sell them for an average of $35 million. That would be $600 million or so coming out of an $8 million investment -- if you don't count the tens of millions Trump would have to spend on infrastructure and construction. And if he can actually sell the lots at that price. And if he can actually do what he says he wants to do. 

Is Trump for real? Is he what he says he is on "The Apprentice," the supreme artist of the deal and the biggest developer in the toughest town? Is he really worth billions? Or is he some sort of master illusionist who earns a very nice fortune by blowing gorgeous bubbles? This has been the great question of the voluminous Trump literature, and it has been motivated both by Trump's own obfuscations and by the intense dislike he sometimes inspires. It has always seemed unjust, at a cosmic level, that a man could live as if he alone could defy the laws of gravity, brag about doing so and then get away with it. Surely fate would melt his wings. A spate of such accounts appeared when Trump was facing bankruptcy more than a decade ago. In "Lost Tycoon," for example, Harry Hurt III wrote that the combination of the wreckage of Trump's marriage (to Ivana) and the impending annihilation of his fortune would reduce him to a "public laughingstock" and indeed signal "the end of the so-called greed decade of the 1980's."

So much for cosmic justice. Just as the greed decade of the 80's gave way to the greed decade of the 90's, so the Golf Club Donald of today rose from the ashes of the Atlantic City Donald of yesterday. By 1990, Trump had run up such enormous debts that ruin seemed all but inevitable. His annual interest payments on $2 billion in bank loans and more than $1 billion in bonds sold to finance the purchase of the casinos exceeded his cash flow. Forced to throw himself on the mercy of his banks, Trump bluffed and bargained his way out of the hole with a sang-froid that even his worst critics have acknowledged. In the end, he received a short-term infusion of capital and restructured the bank debt on more favorable terms; in exchange, he agreed to sell off his most egregiously nonperforming assets and to accept a monthly "allowance" of $450,000, which he proceeded to ignore. And then he started buying up property in the depressed market of the mid-90's, beginning with the Briarcliff Manor golf course. "Other guys were going bankrupt, and I wasn't necessarily supposed to be bidding on things," Trump crowed to me. "But the banks said . . . I don't know, I just bought it." Trump had Tom Bennison, senior vice president of the ClubCorp, which owns major golf clubs, call me to offer testimony on this account. Bennison said that Trump "took what in my view was a fairly mediocre golf course and made it a great golf course." Bennison added that Trump has been able to charge vastly greater initiation fees -- upward of $300,000 -- than the old-line clubs whose hegemony he hopes to challenge.

Trump now owns, among other things, four golf courses, the Bedford estate, two large tracts for subdivision in a less rarefied precinct of Westchester County and Mar-a-Lago, his private playground in Palm Beach, Fla. He is planning to build a luxury condominium on a choice plot on the Strip in Las Vegas, as well as another in Chicago for which, according to newspaper accounts, he has already sold $500 million worth of apartments. Both buildings will, of course, bear his name. In Manhattan, he owns Trump Tower and the mighty triplex, with all the solid-gold accouterments therein; Trump World Tower, a 72-story luxury residence near the United Nations; and 40 Wall Street, an office building. He owns half of "The Apprentice" and half of the Miss Universe contest. He controls a significant portion of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, which owns and operates three casinos in Atlantic City. And he's got that half ownership in the gigantic Trump Place. So why cavil?

Well, first there's what you might gently call an epistemological problem. In conversation, Trump does not bother to distinguish between the promotional and the actual, so that words like "own" or "bought" or even "stories" -- as in a building's height -- take on whatever meaning he deems useful. He told me, for example, that two years ago the Japanese owners of the land under the Empire State Building "gave me half the deal to be their partner" and that "I sold it to Peter Malkin" for $57.5 million. When I ran this story past an official at Malkin's real-estate development company, he laughed and told me what Trump had told him: that the Donald had proposed to the Japanese owners that he go to court to invalidate the long-term net lease on the building and thus vastly increase the value of the ground and that the Japanese in turn had promised to pay him part of the profit from an ensuing sale. But Trump's lawsuit was dismissed, and the Japanese were forced to sell at a negligible profit of $15 million after holding the land for more than a decade. Subtracting the litigation costs, the official estimated that Trump "got a couple of million dollars, I think." Trump confirms that narrative, but says that he was fully reimbursed for the litigation costs, and he adds that he made a pretty nice piece of change for "about two minutes' worth of work a month."

Trump is only the biggest developer in New York if you count this Trump Place as "his," thanks to his supposed 50 percent ownership. But it is almost universally believed in the real-estate industry that Trump's deal with his Chinese backers is similar to what he worked out on the Empire State Building and other projects: a sizable management fee and participation in profits, in this case amounting to 30 percent. Trump angrily swore to me that this was wrong. And several days after I had put in my request for documentary evidence, I received a letter from one Barry C. Ross, attorney for Hudson Waterfront Associates, the Hong Kong-based financiers of Trump Place. The letter asserted that "Donald Trump is a major partner in the aforesaid companies . . . and not merely someone receiving a fee for the development of the project." This phrasing was, of course, completely consistent with the view that Trump gets a fee and major profit participation, and I said as much to him. Trump gave me the first really stern look I'd seen since we had met. He said, "'Major partner' -- what do you think that means?" I pointed out that the term was scarcely synonymous with "50 percent ownership." The all-knowing Norma was standing nearby, and Trump shot her a look that seemed to mean, "What can you do with these people?" It occurred to me that he may use "I own half" as a term of art, though I very much doubt that Hudson Waterfront understood it that way. Does he also use "billion" as a term of art? Trump told me that Forbes magazine had calculated his net worth at $2.5 billion, though the real number, he said, was $6 billion. In fact, in its most recent profile of Trump, Fortune noted that "weeks of digging" into Trump's finances "yielded only murk." Trump's real-estate holdings are private and thus ultimately no more penetrable than he wishes them to be. 

On the other hand, the public company that holds his casino properties lost money for years thanks to the massive debt that Trump assumed, and now the company itself has been forced to reorganize through bankruptcy. If all goes according to plan, the bondholders will refinance the debt at more advantageous terms in exchange for cash and a stake in the company; Credit Suisse First Boston will inject $345 million in fresh capital; Trump's ownership position will be reduced from 56 percent to about 25 percent; and he will relinquish the title of chief executive (though he will remain chairman). But Trump still must invest $55 million of his own to revitalize the increasingly shopworn properties. If he can't come up with the money, not only would he lose all control of the casinos, but he would also find it hard to keep repeating the $6 billion figure with a straight face.

Why should all this matter? Shouldn't we just say that Trump is really rich and that he's a really big developer? But it's Trump himself who won't let the issue lie. He keeps threatening to sue reporters who question his numbers. It is, in the end, a matter of brand protection. The Trump brand would probably survive a bit of legal trouble, as the Martha brand, for example, may not. On the other hand, his brand might be severely compromised if Trump were, say, knocked off the Forbes 500, the rich-man list that he has always tirelessly lobbied.

So much of Trump's success -- the premium he earns on his apartments and his golf courses, the millions he gets for the use of his name by developers in South Korea, the Trump Signature Collection-to-be -- depends on the aura of stupendous success he projects. The genius of "The Apprentice" from a marketing perspective is that it treats Trump's supremacy as unarguable fact, thus ensuring that the viewer will do so as well. Trump may not be the living incarnation of business, or even of real estate, but he has made a fortune by behaving as if he is. If there's one person who fully accepts the premise of "The Apprentice," it's Donald Trump. At one point he said to me: "I feel strongly about the fact -- and I don't think you've heard this before -- that I consider myself to be a great builder. I don't consider myself to be a great promoter." Actually, I had heard this before, since he had repeated the same sentiment in virtually the same words to another interviewer. Trump hates the idea that he is some kind of postmodern "virtual" mogul; he insists that he has made a fortune by seeing great opportunities, negotiating regulatory mazes, building the best buildings. He bought 40 Wall Street, a derelict property that had passed through the hands of half the developers in New York, for a pittance, held on to it through bad times and then spent a fortune refurbishing it; now the building is fully leased. "They say it's the single best per-capita real-estate deal made in 25 years," Trump said. "Who says?" I asked. "Everybody," Trump said.

It turns out that it was a great deal. Percy Pyne III, a developer who represents the firm that owns the land under the building, told me that Trump "took a hell of a risk with his own money" and "did a marvelous job" finding major tenants. Pyne then mentioned another deal of Trump's, involving the Nike megastore on East 57th Street, that he considers even more impressive. "Donald," he said, "is very creative." And you hear the same thing even from people who consider Trump preposterous, or devious, or both. Trump's peers, most of them painfully respectable, wish that he weren't the public face of their industry, but they generally acknowledge that he is very good at what he does.

Of course, being very good only gets you to the Bill Zeckendorf level. You don't get a board game named after you, you don't have your effigy in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, unless you also crave the adulation of millions of strangers. And Donald Trump, who does not believe in much, is a zealot in the cult of fame. It is, for him, the bottom line of all bottom lines. One day he was telling me about the major figures -- "the biggest people, the most white-shoe people, people that you see at the art galleries" -- who had called "begging" to appear on "The Apprentice," even if they would deny ever watching the show. The whole thing filled him with gleeful scorn. "Does everybody want to be famous?" I asked. Trump looked at me as if I had given him cause to question my sanity. "Everybody wants to be famous," he shot back, "but no one wants to admit it." He loved this hard-boiled aperçu so much that he repeated it: "Everybody wants to be famous, but no one wants to admit it."

James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.