‘Loser’: How a Lifelong Fear Bookended Trump’s Presidency
The
president’s inability to concede the election is the latest reality-denying
moment in a career preoccupied with an epithet.
By Dan Barry
- Nov. 26, 2020Updated 3:47 p.m. ET
In the now-distant Republican
presidential primaries of 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas handily won the Iowa
caucuses. This was determined by a method that has lately come under attack but
at the time was considered standard: elementary math.
One of the losers in Iowa, the
developer and television personality Donald J. Trump, soon accused Mr. Cruz of
electoral theft. He fired off several inflammatory tweets, including this
foreshadowing of our current democracy-testing moment: “Based on the fraud
committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election
should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
The episode vanished in the tsunami of
political vitriol to come during the Trump presidency. Still, it reflects what
those who have worked with Mr. Trump say is his modus operandi when trying to
slip the humiliating epithet he has so readily applied to others.
Loser.
“The first thing he
calls someone who has wronged him is a loser,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran an
Atlantic City casino for Mr. Trump in the 1980s. “That’s his main attack word.
The worst thing in his world would be to be a loser. To avoid being called a
loser, he will do or say anything.”
Across his long career, he has spun,
cajoled and attacked — in the press, in lawsuits and lately, of course, on
Twitter — whenever faced with appearing as anything less than the superlative
of the moment: the greatest, the smartest, the healthiest, the best. This has
at times required audacious attempts to twist a negative into a positive, often
by saying something over and over until it either displaces the truth or
exhausts the audience into surrender.
It is a matter of record that Mr. Trump
has been a loser in many business ventures (Trump Steaks,
anyone?). In fact, his greatest success flowed not from real estate but from
the creation of a popular alternate-reality television persona — Donald
Trump, master of the boardroom — that he ultimately rode to the White House.
But his famous aversion to the label of
loser has now reached its apotheosis.
Since Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared
the winner of the Nov. 3 election — and Mr. Trump therefore declared the loser
— the president has repeatedly trafficked in baseless allegations of a
fraudulent and corrupt electoral process. What was once considered the quirky
trait of a self-involved New York developer has become an international
embarrassment, nearly upending the sacred transition of power and leaving the
world’s foremost democracy — grappling with a deadly pandemic and a teetering
economy — with a leader who refuses to concede despite the basic math.
“AND I WON THE ELECTION,” Mr. Trump
tweeted last week. “VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.”
On Monday, the Trump administration
finally authorized a weeks-delayed transition process after Michigan certified
Mr. Biden as its winner. Still, Mr. Trump continued to press quixotic lawsuits
and tweet of fraud and defiant resolve.
“Our case STRONGLY continues, we will
keep up the good fight.”
“This was a LANDSLIDE!”
And for Thanksgiving:
“Just saw the vote tabulations. There is NO WAY Biden got 80,000,000 votes!!!
This was a 100% RIGGED ELECTION.”
The president’s tweets have succeeded
in sowing doubt about the foundational underpinnings of the republic among his
many millions of followers. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about half the
Republicans questioned believed that Mr. Trump had “rightfully won”
re-election, and 68 percent expressed concern that the election was “rigged.”
Such behavior by the president reflects
a binary-code approach to life that spares no room for nuance or complication.
If a person isn’t a one, then that person is a zero.
“You are either a
winner or a loser,” Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said
in an interview last week. “Reality is secondary. It is all about perception.”
Mr. Cohen, who was convicted in 2018 of
tax evasion and campaign finance violations and who has since become a vocal
critic of the president, provided several examples in his recent book,
“Disloyal: A Memoir.”
Mr. Cohen recounted how, in 2014, CNBC
was preparing a poll of the 25 most influential people in the world. Mr. Trump,
who initially ranked 187th out of 200, ordered Mr. Cohen to improve his
standing.
“Just make sure I make it to the top
10,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Cohen hired
someone to assess the options. After that person determined that the poll could
be manipulated, $15,000 was spent to buy discreet I.P. addresses through which
votes for Mr. Trump could be cast. The scheme worked, with Mr. Trump elevated
to ninth place when all the votes were counted.
“Before long, Trump believed he really
was rated in the top 10 and was regarded as a profoundly important business
figure,” Mr. Cohen wrote.
But CNBC removed Mr. Trump from the
list without offering an explanation. The infuriated future president ordered
Mr. Cohen to get the network to change course. This failed. He then ordered him
to plant a story in the media about “the terrible treatment Trump had received
at the hands of CNBC.” This also failed.
Still, Mr. Trump managed to exploit the
fake ranking before he was dropped from the list. “He had hundreds of copies
made, and he added the poll to the pile of newspaper clippings and magazine
profiles of himself that he would give to visitors,” Mr. Cohen wrote.
This fear of being seen as somehow less
than the very best is a recurring theme in the mountains of books and articles
written about Mr. Trump. Many observers of Trump family history have reflected
on the influence of the patriarch, the developer Fred C. Trump, who had his own version of
the binary taxonomy of humanity: the strong and the weak.
Mr. Trump flicked at this in his book
“Trump: The Art of the Deal,” in which he recalled gluing together the blocks
of his younger brother, Robert, effectively ensuring that he would not be
outdone in any competition involving — blocks.
“That was the end of Robert’s blocks,” he wrote.
A grown-up iteration
of that episode came at a seminal moment in the man’s career: the opening of
his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 1990.
According to Mr. O’Donnell, who was
deeply involved in the venture, Mr. Trump pushed to have the casino open prematurely
because he feared the shame a delay would bring after promising the world a
glitzy, celebrity-packed opening.
The casino wasn’t ready; among other
issues, only a quarter of the slot machines were open, leaving the cavernous
space quiet and empty. “It was just horrible,” recalled Mr. O’Donnell, who
wrote a book about his experiences with the future president. “It didn’t look
like a normal casino.”
Privately, Mr. Trump was furious, and
blamed his brother Robert for some of the problems. (The younger Trump quit and
did not speak to his brother for years.) Publicly, though, Mr. Trump boasted of
the wonder that was the Taj Mahal.
Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in
April 1990, Mr. Trump said the only problem with the Taj Mahal’s opening day
was too much success. Gamblers were playing the slots with such ferocity that
the machines almost burst into flames.
“We had machines that — they were
virtually on fire,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
The Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy the
following year, which left Mr. Trump’s many lenders and bondholders in the
lurch.
Mr. Trump expounded
on his worldview in a 2014 interview with the author Michael D’Antonio. “You
can be tough and ruthless and all that stuff, and if you lose a lot, nobody’s
going to follow you, because you’re looked at as a loser,” he said. “Winning is
a very important thing. The most important aspect of leadership is winning. If
you have a record of winning, people are going to follow you.”
Mr. Trump has often used the courts to
try to crush anyone who might cast doubt on his Olympian standing in wealth and
success. A standout in this category is the $5 billion lawsuit he filed against
the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, whose 2005 book, “TrumpNation: The Art of
Being the Donald,” argued that Mr. Trump’s net worth was no more than $250
million — that he was not, in other words, a billionaire.
Mr. O’Brien reported that Mr. Trump
attributed the chasmic discrepancy to envy. “You can go ahead and speak to guys
who have 400 pound wives at home,” Mr. Trump said, “but the guys who really
know me know I’m a great builder.”
The lawsuit was dismissed.
Of course, Mr. Trump’s need to be seen
as a winner has informed his presidency. The self-declared superlatives cover
all bases, from being the “best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico” to doing
the most for Black Americans (with the “possible exception” of Abraham
Lincoln). In anticipation of his eventual impeachment, Mr. Trump referred to
himself as “our greatest of all presidents.”
Perhaps the most
famous moment in which this desire bled into public policy came in late 2018,
when Mr. Trump used an approaching government shutdown to demand funding for
one of his central fixations: a wall along the Mexican border.
After Mr. Trump encouraged his fellow
Republicans in Congress to reach a compromise, Senator Mitch McConnell, the
majority leader, worked out a deal to avoid a shutdown and temporarily set
aside negotiations over security measures, including a border wall.
It appeared that Mr.
Trump would sign the deal — that is, until conservative pundits accused the
president of caving to Democrats, of breaking his “Build the Wall” promise, of
effectively being a loser.
The president reversed course, and so
began the longest federal government shutdown in the country’s history — at an
estimated cost to the economy of $11 billion, according to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office.
After Mr. Trump was sworn in as the
45th president of the United States in January 2017, his administration
asserted that the inauguration’s audience was the largest ever, despite all
evidence to the contrary. But any suggestion otherwise would have rendered Mr.
Trump a loser in some imagined contest about inaugural crowd sizes.
Now, nearly four years later, the
citizens have cast their ballots, baseless lawsuits alleging electoral fraud
have been dismissed and states have certified the vote. Still, the loser of the
2020 presidential election continues to see crowds that the rest of the country
does not.
It ends as it began.
Russ Buettner, Susanne
Craig and Mike McIntire contributed reporting.
