45 Self-Evident Truths About Donald Trump
10/29/2020 04:30 AM EDT
Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and Politico Magazine. Follow him @michaelkruse.
Ever since he rode down that escalator, Donald
Trump has been the most paid-attention-to person on Earth. Perhaps no other
political figure in American history has generated such reams of coverage
trying to decipher patterns of behavior.
It has been well-documented that the 45th president operates with
evident disregard for norms and rules. But over the past 5 ½ years of reporting
I have determined that he abides by a firm code of conduct as predictable as it
is confounding. In more than 60 stories in the Politico Magazine oeuvre that came to be known as “Trumpology,” I documented how his unswerving
allegiance to a certain set of principles, unprincipled as they might seem to
some, elevated him to the pinnacle of global power. If widespread polling holds
true on Election Day, these same traits and tics, and rock-ribbed beliefs,
might also be the reasons he’s ousted from office.
Much has
been made recently of this election as a referendum on the president not just
as a politician with a set of policies, but as a person. This list—compiled
using excerpts from my pieces and my interviews with sources who have known him
most of his life—is the distillation of his worldview, a condensed sketch of
Donald Trump as a man. And no matter what happens, and whether or not he
retains his grip on the White House or decamps in defeat to Mar-a-Lago, these
truths will continue to guide his behavior—and the way we perceive it.
1. Attention is power.
“He is of the mindset,” according to the
late Jim Dowd, who did public relations for Trump, “that the more his name is
dropped, the more a kind of hypnosis, for lack of a better word, there is to
the American public.”
“If people pay attention, that’s what matters,” Trump once said. “You can be a
horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get
ratings, you are a king.”
The central gambit of Trump’s entire life is that there’s no such
thing as bad publicity—“that,” as I once wrote, “if you’re
watching, he’s winning.”
2. Words don’t matter.
“He’s always understood it,” Roger Stone once told me. “That how
you look is more important than how you sound. How you come across is more
important than the words you use.”
3. Everything’s a show.
“Donald Trump is the host of his own show,” longtime Democratic
strategist Hank Sheinkopf once told me. “A
performance artist,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said. “He sees himself
as a Broadway character,” former “Apprentice” contestant Sam Solovey said. He’d
“stage-managed Miss Universe,” Newt Gingrich said. “He’d
stage-managed professional wrestling.”
4. People are props.
Men? “Central
casting.” Women? “Accessories to
his brand.”
5. The crowd knows.
“He’s not a book-reader so much as a room-reader,” I wrote; “an instinctual
gauger and tweaker and torquer of crowds,” I wrote. Crowds, for
him, are “rolling,
roiling, visceral focus groups.”
6. Conflict is the key.
“Trump’s energy,” a former close associate told me, “comes
from conflict.”
7. Nothing motivates like
fear.
“Trump’s
vision for the Penn Yards is really based on a very old idea, one made popular
in the 1920s—and since then universally discredited in theory and in fact,” the
architecture critic for New York magazine once wrote.
“Isolated towers from the ’50s and ’60s survive in most of the world’s major
cities as reminders to planners that this brand of angst-inducing exclusivity
is nasty to live with. Hard lessons have shown that the way to make a
residential complex work is to create some sense of intimacy, or at least
communal identity. But for all the adolescent, outdated striving for bigness,
Trump is onto something thoroughly contemporary in the life of ’80s New
Yorkers. It is fear.”
And he is a product of New York of the ’70s and ’80s:
Trump, who in the ’70s
had identified the city’s insecurity and fear and found a way to benefit from
it, now tried to do so again. He paid a reported $85,000 to put in four New
York newspapers a full-page ad that called for the death penalty. “What has
happened to our City?” he wrote in the ad. “What has happened to the respect
for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police
for those who break the law, who wantonly trespass on the rights of others?
What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” He seethed
about “roving bands of wild criminals” and “crazed misfits” and longed for a
time when he was a boy, when cops in the city roughed up “thugs” to give people
like him “the feeling of security.” …
“Mayor Koch has stated
that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump said in the ad.
“I do not think so. I want to hate.”
8. Division works.
And politics, in the estimation of Stone, Trump’s
longest-running, off-and-on adviser, is a Machiavellian combination of showmanship
and combat—not about “uniting people” but about “dividing people.”
9. Life’s a fight.
It’s one of his most consistent
convictions:
That Trump would so
quickly in the wake of the Mueller investigation commit a brazen act some
critics say represents an egregious and impeachable abuse of power
has mystified many observers. How could he have so blithely ignored the lessons
of the nearly three-year investigation? But those who know him best say this is
merely the latest episode in a lifelong pattern of behavior for the
congenitally combative Trump. He’s always been this way. He doesn’t stop to
reflect. If he wins, he barely basks. If he loses, he doesn’t take the time to
lie low or lick wounds. … Regardless of the outcome—up, down or somewhere in
between—when one tussle is done, Trump reflexively starts to scan the horizon
in search of a new skirmish.
“The discomfort he feels in the moment of peace that follows a
victory is so intense that he will do whatever it takes to find new fights,”
biographer Michael D’Antonio told me.
10. Chaos is fuel.
“The prince of chaos,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. “Chaos
creates drama, and drama gets ink,” former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg
explained. “This is a new kind of presidency. He’s followed the tabloid model,
and it got him to where he is, and it’s the model that will be followed until
it doesn’t work. And it has worked. He’s sitting in the Oval
Office.”
11. There’s no such thing
as going too far.
Even if it’s not always helpful:
When Trump is riding
highest, he is simultaneously at his most manic and self-destructive. He
overreaches and oversells. He doubles down. In the arc of Trump’s life,
from his fevered buying spree in 1988 in
the wake of the fame-spiking sales of The Art of the Deal to
his wild couple of years in the aftermath of
the image-laundering launch of “The
Apprentice” to his rowdy and improbable political ascent, the craters of his
most marked failures follow closely on his most consequential successes. He is
this way, say people who know him well, because of his unshakable
self-assurance and nerve but also because of his insatiable appetite for attention
and conflict.
“It’s true of everything he goes into,” Trump biographer Tim
O’Brien told me. “He will
hunker down and do something well—and then he thinks he’s Zeus.” And that’s
when the trouble starts. “Because he’s not Zeus.”
12.
Bigger is always better.
In the ’80s, on the Upper West Side, he wanted to build a
“mammoth mall” and a “giant garage” and apartments “above the clouds.”
“New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” he said.
“And frankly, so do I.”
13. The
answer to any problem is always more Trump.
It’s part of how the Trump show gets old:
Even as its numbers
dipped, he insisted [“The Apprentice”] was still on top; he picked
fights with critics and blamed others; and maybe most notably, he took on an
even bigger role. Rewatching the show’s first season, he is the star—no
question about that—but it’s surprising how infrequently he appears; he
introduces the tasks, and then mostly vanishes as his teams bicker and compete
until the climactic boardroom scenes when he fires somebody. But in the second
season, things change. There’s less team, more Trump. He makes more appearances
in the middle, and the boardroom scenes are longer. And it’s not only that
he’s there more. The volume is turned up. He’s meaner. More
performative. There are more soaring shots of his plane. More over-the-top
shots of his scowl. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s hard to miss, too.
14.
Exhaust the enemy.
“He sues,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res told me.
“He uses it to wear people out, whether it’s financially or
emotionally,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me.
“Did he learn from the Television City debacle that he shouldn’t
get too big, too fast, too loud? No,” Brendan Sexton, a former president of New
York’s Municipal Art Society, told me. “Maybe
what he learned is … think big, talk big, make a big splash. And let the other
guys fight to keep up with him.”
15. It’s
good to be selfish.
“He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration
of the government,” Michael D’Antonio said days before
his inauguration. “It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in
public esteem.”
“More than any person I’ve ever met, he’s focused on how things
impact him,” former Trump Shuttle president Bruce Nobles told me.
16. Altruism is for losers.
It’s on the long list of lessons he learned from his
two most important mentors:
What Fred Trump
and Roy Cohn had in common
was their deep immersion in patronage politics—old-school, clubhouse-style
favor-trading, used to grasp private gain under the guise of public good. “You
take care of the boss and the boss takes care of you,” as veteran New York
political operative Hank Sheinkopf described it to me. Operating within the
Democratic machines of Brooklyn and Queens, Fred Trump for decades made shrewd
connections and large, dutiful donations in exchange for preference in
properties, pricing and zoning. And Cohn? Cohn was a virtuoso in “the trade of
human calculus,” his biographer wrote, “of deal making, swapping, maneuver, and
manipulation.” Watching and emulating these two, the canny younger Trump reportedly looked,
too, to fabled Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito as a
model. Esposito once was caught by an FBI wiretap saying there should have been
an 11th Commandment: “Think of Thyself.”
17.
Trusting is for losers.
“There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former
associate told me. Trump has
a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and
“cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t
friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath
they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007
book, Think Big. “They want your job, they want your house, they
want your money, they want your wife.”
18.
Loyalty is for losers.
“Despite Trump’s protestations about the utmost importance of loyalty,
biographers and others have said his
notion of the concept evokes a cross between the Mafia and the urban political
machines of the past,” I once wrote. “You take care of
the boss, and the boss takes care of you,” as Sheinkopf put it. Trump’s
definition of loyalty is, and always has been, the opposite of complicated,
according to those who know him the best. “Support Donald Trump in anything he
says and does,” in Stone’s words. “I never particularly thought,” Nobles told me, “that he
was loyal to … anybody.”
19.
Taking blame? For losers.
“He won’t say anything that happened was his fault,” longtime New York public
relations expert Paul Holmes told me. “Every
failure he’s ever had,” O’Brien said, “he has blamed it
on outside forces.”
20.
Losing is for losers.
It’s how he succeeds without succeeding:
He flopped as the
owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own
franchise but the league as a whole. He blew up his first
marriage, married his mistress, and then divorced her, too. He bankrupted his
casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed
for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in
debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of
duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University—for
which he settled a
class-action fraud lawsuit [in 2017] for $25 million). Other risk-taking
businessmen might periodically cop to falling short while pivoting to what’s
next. Not Trump. He has dealt with his roster of losses largely by refusing to
acknowledge them as anything other than wins.
“If you knock Donald on his ass, he will tell you the best
position to be in is on your ass,” a former Trump Organization executive told me.
“He knows of no other way,” former New York Daily News writer
George Rush told me, “and that is to spin until he’s woven some gossamer fabric
out of”—he searched for the right word—“garbage.”
“My main purpose in life is to keep winning,” Trump once said. “And the reason
for that is simple: If I don’t win, I don’t get to fight the next battle.”
21. Sometimes winning means
not losing now.
It’s how he (with the
help of Roy Cohn) “won” the federal government’s suit in the 1970s against him
and his father for racist rental practices at the apartments they owned:
The accepted narrative
of this case is that Trump and his father lost. The Justice Department did
indeed notch what it considered a victory—a consent decree mandated that the
company rent to more tenants who weren’t white. But looked at slightly
differently, it was every bit a triumph for Trump, too. Typically seen as a
not-quite-two-year episode more or less confined to the mid-’70s, the saga
actually lasted for almost a decade. The government ascertained quickly that
the Trumps had failed to adhere to the terms of the decree and apparently had
little intention of ever complying. A revolving-door roster of exasperated
prosecutors, stymied by Cohn’s shameless, time-buying tactics, found it
practically impossible to enforce the specifics of their “win.” And Trump
simply waited them out. He emerged in Manhattan, his reputation virtually
unscathed, to wrest unparalleled public subsidies to convert the
collapsing Commodore Hotel into the glossy Grand Hyatt and then pry additional
tax cuts to erect Trump Tower—the one-two punch of projects that constituted
rocket propellant for Trump’s entire adult existence. His monetary wealth. His
life-force celebrity. His extraordinary presidency.
“He’s used litigation historically,” O’Brien told me, “to keep
hostile forces at bay and to delay reckonings.”
22. Sometimes winning is
just winning that hasn’t happened yet.
It’s how he’s used the word
“comeback” over the years. “If there’s a moment that you’re not quite a winner,
you’re almost a winner. You’re practically a
winner,” Blair explained. “It’s a cloak that contains winning as a part of
it.”
23. And sometimes winning
is whining.
“By claiming victory over and over again, it starts to become a
self-fulfilling prophecy,” Trump biographer Harry Hurt III told me.
He believes, because of Norman Vincent Peale,
that simple assertion can lead to actual achievement.
“I win, I win, I always win,” he said in 2005. And
when he doesn’t? “I keep whining and whining until I win.”
“He’s the most successful failer of all time,” I once wrote.
24. Reality doesn’t matter.
He just rewrites (and prewrites) his own
history:
He is who he is, is
where he is, is seen the way he’s seen by so many, because of it.
He’s self-made! (He’s not.) He’s a businessman
with a Midas touch. (He’s not.) He’s an outsider!
(He was an insider—thanks to his father’s political connections—the day he was
born.)
“He’s been able to create his own reality,” late Trump
biographer Wayne Barrett once told me.
“He can build 200 yards of wall and say he built the wall,”
old Upper West Side Trump foe Steve Robinson told me. “And the
press, which has been so diligent in fact-checking, will say, ‘No, no, no, wait
a second, Mr. President. You didn’t build the wall that you said you
were going to build. You only built 200 yards of it.’ And it won’t matter.”
25. The past doesn’t
matter.
Never has. Not to him:
Trump, according to
those who know him best, is not a man given to backward looks—“the most present
human being I ever met,” in the words of an intimate. Traditionally, Trump has
seen the past as something to be either razed or twisted for expediency.
“Trump has about as much interest in history as he does in
literature and philosophy,” O’Brien told me. “Which is
to say almost nonexistent.”
26. The future doesn’t
matter.
He is the “episodic man.”
27. Nothing, actually,
matters.
Whatever happens, happens,” he says.
“I’m very much a fatalist,” he says.
“He’s empowered to be a fatalist,” O’Brien told me, “because he’s
been insulated from his failures by wealth, privilege and celebrity—so the
impact of catastrophes is more muted in his world than it is in the world of an
average person.”
28. Create your own world.
It helps explain his complicated relationship with
New York:
For Trump, as
inhospitable as he found the city on the street, the parlors of high society
were equally problematic—and he created a refuge. It was some 600 feet in the
sky, where the faucets were gold, the baseboards were onyx and the paintings on
the ceiling, he would claim, were comparable to the work of Michelangelo in the
Sistine Chapel. At the top of Trump Tower, biographer Tim O’Brien told me, he
could live “at a remove from the city and its amazing bloodstream of ideas and
people and culture”—“encased,” added fellow biographer Gwenda Blair, “within
this bubble of serenity and privilege.”
“I am the creator of my own comic book,” he once said, “and I love living
in it.”
29. Tell your own story.
He started telling his
early on:
Trump was, and still is, they say, a confident,
competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional,
unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven,
want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator. His self-burnished image as a tip-top
deal-maker long has obscured an actual record that is far more mixed, pocked
with moves and acquisitions that scratched a passing itch but created massive
financial problems later. His best work, too, was his earliest work. Trump was
at his most patient, his most diligent, his most attentive and his most
creative—his most effective—some 35 to 45 years ago, when he was intent on
pile-driving into the cultural bedrock powerful storylines on which he would
build his career as a celebrity business tycoon.
“Americans are suckers for a good story,” Sheinkopf told me. “Donald
Trump is going to give ’em a good story.”
“Donald Trump is an excellent storyteller. It’s like we’re all
amazed by his ability to cast himself in the best light possible. And that’s
kind of what campaigning is,” Amanda Carpenter, a former speechwriter for
Ted Cruz and the author of Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When
Trump Lies to Us, told me. “He just
does it with staggering audacity.”
30. Shame is for losers.
“He’s not feeling ashamed,” Res once told me. “He’s
feeling aggrieved.”
31. There is no subtext.
And there is no filter.
He thinks it, he says it.
He thinks it, he tweets it.
32. Everything’s a
transaction.
“Donald Trump,” Barrett wrote, in January of
1979, “is a user of other users.”
“As a contributor,” Trump told POLITICO in a
statement in the summer 2015, referring to checks he’s written to [Hillary
Clinton’s] campaigns as well as the Clintons’ foundation and Bill and Hillary
Clinton’s attendance at his third wedding, “I demanded that they be there—they
had no choice and that’s what’s wrong with our country. Our country is run by
and for donors, special interests and lobbyists, and that is not a good formula
for our country’s success. With me, there are no lobbyists and special
interests. My only special interest is the United States of America.”
33. Nothing’s on the level.
Trump was “schooled and
shaped by some of the most committed, effective and objectionable practitioners
of quid pro quo.”
34. The ends justify the
means.
“He stands for what he can get away with,” D’Antonio, the
biographer, told me. “Looking
for the loophole, pushing it as wide as possible, going through it,”
Blair added. “There’s a
certain American romance to getting away with it,” said Jim
Zirin, a former federal prosecutor and the author of
the book Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of
Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits.
“What he does, he has been successful at,” said Sexton. “It’s
important to recognize that, or you go into the next discussion overconfident,
thinking that he couldn’t possibly pull this crap off. And you wake up six
months later, look around, and wonder, ‘How the hell did he pull that crap
off?’ And that’s a real danger. And it keeps happening.”
“Imagine if Roy Cohn were president,” Marty London, one of the
lawyers who worked on Cohn’s disbarment, told me. “That’s
basically what we have now. We have a Roy Cohn as president. He has no morals.
There are no boundaries. He does what he wants.”
35. You can’t be stopped if
nobody stops you.
Over and over it’s been true for
Trump:
Whether Trump could remain not only financially
solvent but reputationally intact was an open question for the entirety of the
first half of the 1990s. So many times, he could have been snuffed, stopped,
rendered a relative footnote, his place in the history of this country limited
to status as a gauche totem of a regrettable epoch of greed. That, needless to
say, is not how the tale played out. Trump is many things. A developer. A
promoter. A master media manipulator. A grown-old rich kid. The president of
the United States. Above all else, though, he is a survivor.
“The ultimate survivor,”
former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me recently.
But it’s not just that
Trump has survived that’s important to consider at this moment—it’s how he has
done it. Armed with extraordinary audacity,
constitutional sangfroid, a stomach for tumult, an acumen for recasting obvious losses into strange
sorts of wins, and the prodigious safety net bequeathed by his wealthy, wily
father, he has plowed past myriad hazards. And he did it by tying himself
tightly to his bankers and lenders in New York and to gaming industry
regulators in New Jersey—who let him live large until they couldn’t let him die
without fatally wounding themselves. He effectively inhabited hosts, using them
to get bigger and bigger in the ’80s until he was practically perversely
invincible.
“He’s a magician that way,” said Jennifer
Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University and the author of a book
about Trump’s rhetoric, Demagogue for President. “Other people
would stop and recognize that they were defeated. Or that they should be
shamed. He refuses.”
“He thinks he’s immune to everything,” O’Brien said. “Always
did,” said Res.
36. People aren’t
inherently good.
“Man is the most vicious of all animals,” Trump told People in
1981.
“Never make people your heroes,” Nunberg told me when I
asked what he’d learned from Trump.
37. People look out for
themselves.
“He figures it out,” Blair told me, “so that
for people to go against him, it’s going to make them look
bad.”
38. People don’t change.
“Can the leopard change its spots?” Blair asked. “The tiger its
stripes?”
Trump has managed in the
Oval Office in Washington pretty much exactly the way he managed on Fifth
Avenue in New York, say people who worked for him at different points over the
past 45 years as well as writers of the
best, most thoroughly reported Trump biographies. In recent interviews, they
recounted a shrewd, slipshod, charming, vengeful, thin-skinned, belligerent,
hard-charging manager who was an impulsive hirer and
a reluctant firer and
surrounded himself with a small cadre of ardent loyalists; who solicited their
advice but almost always ultimately went with his gut and did what he wanted; who
kept his door open and
expected others to do the same not because of a desire for transparency but due
to his own insecurities and distrusting disposition; and who fostered a
frenetic, internally competitive, around-the-clock, stressful, wearying work
environment in which he was a demanding, disorienting mixture of hands-on and
hands-off—a hesitant delegator and an intermittent micromanager who favored
fast-twitch wins over long-term follow-through, promotion over process and
intuition over deliberation.
39. You are who you are.
“He’s the same Donald Trump as the Donald Trump I knew when I was
working with him,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Louise
Sunshine, who worked for Trump for 15 years starting in the early ’70s, told me.
“Same guy we’ve known for the last 20 years,” O’Brien said. “Donald being
Donald,” said former Trump
publicist Alan Marcus. “He’s never going to evolve in how he does things and
runs things,” a former employee said. “Because that’s
what got him to the Oval Office.”
“People,” Nunberg told me, “knew who
they were electing, right?”
40. No slight is too small.
“As long as I’ve known him, he has never been able to take
criticism of any kind,” said Nobles, the
former Trump Shuttle president. “You’d think at this point you’d be able to
roll with the punches. But he never has.”
41. Never turn the other
cheek.
“Get even!”
“… as viciously and violently as you can.”
42. Nothing worse than
weakness.
“Weakness,” Tony Schwartz, the
co-writer of The Art of the Deal, told me, “is Trump’s
greatest fear.” He can’t show it.
43. The loneliness is
bottomless.
The middle son of a
stony, workaholic father with whom he had an “almost businesslike”
relationship, Trump is a double divorcee, a boss with a professed distaste for
having partners or shareholders, a television-tethered, hamburger-eating
homebody and a germaphobe who has described shaking hands as “terrible,” “barbaric” and “one of the curses of American
society.” He’s been a loner most of his life. At New York Military
Academy, everybody knew him but few of his fellow cadets knew him well. In
college, he made no friends he kept. After he moved to Manhattan, he lived in a
sealed-off triplex penthouse, relied on a small, family-first cadre of
loyalists and mainly made more enemies than allies (the
mayor was a “moron,” elite “so-called
social scene” types were “extremely
unattractive people,” and on and on). At his casinos in Atlantic City, he was adamant about
not mingling with the gambling masses. Now, in Washington, he’s a two-scoops cable-watcher inside
the White House when he’s not weekending at his clutch of protective, name-branded
bubbles. Trump, forever, has collected an array of acquaintances, fellow
celebrities and photo op props, while friendships mostly have been
interchangeable, temporary and transactional.
“He was and is a lonely man,” O’Donnell told me.
“One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” O’Brien told me.
44. Everybody needs to be
seen.
It’s something I wrote in 2016:
Trump has tried his whole
life to address the lack of love he felt as a boy by attracting as much
attention as he could as a man. … Trump is an addict. Not of substances. He’s a
teetotaler. And he has said he’s never done drugs. “But his drug is himself,”
one of his former campaign advisers told me this past weekend. He has put
himself on display his entire adult life. He was never some mysterious titan of
industry pulling hidden levers of power inside secluded mansions. He has always
wanted to be seen, and seen and seen and seen …
It’s something I wrote in 2020:
“Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic
father.”
“A black hole of need,” in the words of Mary Trump.
45. Nothing’s ever over.
“He’s
always going to have something,” Blair said, “to make you tune
in again.”
