Friday, November 25, 2016 10:09:54 PM
7 Takeaways from Vanity Fair’s 1990 Profile of Donald Trump
V.F. writer-at-large Marie Brenner’s investigation of Trump reveals he hasn’t changed much in 25 years.
by Vanity Fair August 5, 2015 1:40 pm
Donald Trump has lived the entirety of his adult life in the public eye, leaving behind a trail of bombastic headlines that include accusations of sexual assault .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/ex-wife-donald-trump-made-feel-violated-during-sex.html , racist rental policies .. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E06E5DD1739E73ABC4E52DFB6678388669EDE , and more than a mogul’s fair share of other scandals.
Twenty-five years ago, this magazine’s Marie Brenner spent some time with Trump for an investigation into the dissolution of his marriage to Ivana Trump .. http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner . In retrospect, the story has all the trappings of a perfect Trump piece: discord between reality and Trump’s claims about it, accusations of disloyalty, and triumphant highs amid a string of batted-away lows. Here are seven takeaways that still matter.
1. Trump’s views on women are repugnant. Here’s how Donald explained the tabloid fascination with Ivana: “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”
And here’s a story about one incident that left Ivana distraught:
--
Trump even called a press conference to announce Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza hotel: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy!” Ivana called her friends in tears. “How can Donald humiliate me this way?”
--
2. He excels at the art of slinging “the old Trump bullshit.”
--
He was known to be making shocking deals now that he never could have made two months before. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it,” one of his rivals once said of him.
. . .
“Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “I don’t lie, Donald,” the architect replied.
Eventually Trump bought out the Equitable Life Assurance company’s share of the commercial space in Trump Tower. “He paid Equitable $60 million after an arm’s-length negotiation,” a top real-estate developer told me. “The equity for the entire commercial space was $120 million. Suddenly, Donald was saying that it was worth $500 million!”
When The Art of the Deal was published, he told The Wall Street Journal that the first printing would be 200,000. It was 50,000 fewer than that.
When Charles Feldman of CNN questioned Trump in March about the collapse of his business empire, Trump stormed off the set. Later, he told Feldman’s boss, Ted Turner, “Your reporter threatened my secretary and made her cry.”
--
3. He is convinced that “the real public” loves him, even if you find him repulsive.
Brenner’s investigation occurred when Trump’s business empire was in the dumps and the real-estate scion was personally overexposed by millions of dollars. But he didn’t think that was a problem: “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/donald-trump#intcid=dt-hot-link . The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam.”
4. When pressed on awkward topics—such as whether or not he regularly read Adolf Hitler’s speeches—he turns skittish and, perhaps, inventive.
--
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/john-and-lavinia-elkann#intcid=dt-hot-link .. give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
--
[.. just another Trump lie ..]
5. He has a long history with undocumented immigrants, whom he recently smeared as “rapists.” When Brenner was reporting the story, Trump was in the middle of a lawsuit about his alleged hiring of undocumented immigrants from Poland, who said they were paid four dollars an hour.
6. The Trump empire was built, in large part, on the largesse of reckless banks.
--
Like Michael Milken .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/michael-milken#intcid=dt-hot-link , Trump began to believe that his inordinate skills could be translated into any business. He started to expand out of the familiar world of real estate into casinos, airlines, and hotels. With Citicorp as his enabler, he bought the Plaza and the Eastern shuttle. He managed them both surprisingly well, but he had paid too much for them. He always had the ready cooperation of the starstruck banks, which would later panic. A member of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank recently demanded at a meeting, “What in God’s name were you thinking of to make these loans?” No satisfactory answer was forthcoming; the Rockefeller bank had once kept Brazil afloat, too. The bankers, like the Brooklyn-machine hacks from Trump’s childhood, were blame shufflers, frantic to keep the game going.
“You cannot believe the money the banks were throwing at us,” a former top legal associate of Trump’s told me. “For every deal we did, we would have six or eight banks who were willing to give us hundreds of millions of dollars. We used to have to pick through the financings; the banks could not sign on fast enough to anything Donald conceived.”
“He bought more and more properties and expanded so much that he guaranteed his own self-destruction. His fix was spending money. Well, his quick fix became his Achilles’ heel,” a prominent developer told me.
--
7. Loyalty has never been his strong suit. Here’s the story of how Trump dumped his partner in the Commodore Hotel, which he transformed into the Grand Hyatt.
--
Trump’s first major real-estate coup in New York was the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel, which would become the Grand Hyatt. This deal, secured with a controversial tax abatement from the city, made Trump’s reputation. His partner at the time was the well-respected Pritzker family of Chicago, who owned the Hyatt chain. Their contract was specific: Trump and Jay Pritzker agreed that if there were any sticking points they would have a ten-day period to arbitrate their differences. At one point, they had a minor disagreement. “Jay Pritzker was leaving for a trip to Nepal, where he was to be incommunicado,” a lawyer for the Pritzker family told me. “Donald waited until Jay was in the airplane before he called him. Naturally, Jay couldn’t call him back. He was on a mountain in Nepal. Later, Donald kept saying, ‘I tried to call you. I gave you the ten days. But you were in Nepal.’ It was outrageous. Pritzker was his partner, not his enemy! This is how he acted on his first important deal.” Trump later even reported the incident in his book.
--
Brenner’s entire piece, from the September 1990 issue, is available online.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/donald-trump-marie-brenner-ivana-divorce
V.F. writer-at-large Marie Brenner’s investigation of Trump reveals he hasn’t changed much in 25 years.
by Vanity Fair August 5, 2015 1:40 pm
Donald Trump has lived the entirety of his adult life in the public eye, leaving behind a trail of bombastic headlines that include accusations of sexual assault .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/ex-wife-donald-trump-made-feel-violated-during-sex.html , racist rental policies .. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E06E5DD1739E73ABC4E52DFB6678388669EDE , and more than a mogul’s fair share of other scandals.
Twenty-five years ago, this magazine’s Marie Brenner spent some time with Trump for an investigation into the dissolution of his marriage to Ivana Trump .. http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner . In retrospect, the story has all the trappings of a perfect Trump piece: discord between reality and Trump’s claims about it, accusations of disloyalty, and triumphant highs amid a string of batted-away lows. Here are seven takeaways that still matter.
1. Trump’s views on women are repugnant. Here’s how Donald explained the tabloid fascination with Ivana: “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”
And here’s a story about one incident that left Ivana distraught:
--
Trump even called a press conference to announce Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza hotel: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy!” Ivana called her friends in tears. “How can Donald humiliate me this way?”
--
2. He excels at the art of slinging “the old Trump bullshit.”
--
He was known to be making shocking deals now that he never could have made two months before. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it,” one of his rivals once said of him.
. . .
“Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “I don’t lie, Donald,” the architect replied.
Eventually Trump bought out the Equitable Life Assurance company’s share of the commercial space in Trump Tower. “He paid Equitable $60 million after an arm’s-length negotiation,” a top real-estate developer told me. “The equity for the entire commercial space was $120 million. Suddenly, Donald was saying that it was worth $500 million!”
When The Art of the Deal was published, he told The Wall Street Journal that the first printing would be 200,000. It was 50,000 fewer than that.
When Charles Feldman of CNN questioned Trump in March about the collapse of his business empire, Trump stormed off the set. Later, he told Feldman’s boss, Ted Turner, “Your reporter threatened my secretary and made her cry.”
--
3. He is convinced that “the real public” loves him, even if you find him repulsive.
Brenner’s investigation occurred when Trump’s business empire was in the dumps and the real-estate scion was personally overexposed by millions of dollars. But he didn’t think that was a problem: “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/donald-trump#intcid=dt-hot-link . The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam.”
4. When pressed on awkward topics—such as whether or not he regularly read Adolf Hitler’s speeches—he turns skittish and, perhaps, inventive.
--
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/john-and-lavinia-elkann#intcid=dt-hot-link .. give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
--
[.. just another Trump lie ..]
5. He has a long history with undocumented immigrants, whom he recently smeared as “rapists.” When Brenner was reporting the story, Trump was in the middle of a lawsuit about his alleged hiring of undocumented immigrants from Poland, who said they were paid four dollars an hour.
6. The Trump empire was built, in large part, on the largesse of reckless banks.
--
Like Michael Milken .. http://www.vanityfair.com/people/michael-milken#intcid=dt-hot-link , Trump began to believe that his inordinate skills could be translated into any business. He started to expand out of the familiar world of real estate into casinos, airlines, and hotels. With Citicorp as his enabler, he bought the Plaza and the Eastern shuttle. He managed them both surprisingly well, but he had paid too much for them. He always had the ready cooperation of the starstruck banks, which would later panic. A member of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank recently demanded at a meeting, “What in God’s name were you thinking of to make these loans?” No satisfactory answer was forthcoming; the Rockefeller bank had once kept Brazil afloat, too. The bankers, like the Brooklyn-machine hacks from Trump’s childhood, were blame shufflers, frantic to keep the game going.
“You cannot believe the money the banks were throwing at us,” a former top legal associate of Trump’s told me. “For every deal we did, we would have six or eight banks who were willing to give us hundreds of millions of dollars. We used to have to pick through the financings; the banks could not sign on fast enough to anything Donald conceived.”
“He bought more and more properties and expanded so much that he guaranteed his own self-destruction. His fix was spending money. Well, his quick fix became his Achilles’ heel,” a prominent developer told me.
--
7. Loyalty has never been his strong suit. Here’s the story of how Trump dumped his partner in the Commodore Hotel, which he transformed into the Grand Hyatt.
--
Trump’s first major real-estate coup in New York was the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel, which would become the Grand Hyatt. This deal, secured with a controversial tax abatement from the city, made Trump’s reputation. His partner at the time was the well-respected Pritzker family of Chicago, who owned the Hyatt chain. Their contract was specific: Trump and Jay Pritzker agreed that if there were any sticking points they would have a ten-day period to arbitrate their differences. At one point, they had a minor disagreement. “Jay Pritzker was leaving for a trip to Nepal, where he was to be incommunicado,” a lawyer for the Pritzker family told me. “Donald waited until Jay was in the airplane before he called him. Naturally, Jay couldn’t call him back. He was on a mountain in Nepal. Later, Donald kept saying, ‘I tried to call you. I gave you the ten days. But you were in Nepal.’ It was outrageous. Pritzker was his partner, not his enemy! This is how he acted on his first important deal.” Trump later even reported the incident in his book.
--
Brenner’s entire piece, from the September 1990 issue, is available online.
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/donald-trump-marie-brenner-ivana-divorce
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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