Donald Trump: The Candidate - Softcover

Blair, Gwenda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416546545 ISBN 13: 9781416546542

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2007

Synopsis

The revealing story behind Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rise to the top.

In Donald Trump, adapted and updated from The Trumps, bestselling author Gwenda Blair recounts a true-life history with more twists and turns than any television producer could imagine. Towering skyscrapers and glittering casinos, a luxury airline and a football-field-size yacht, steamy affairs and bitter lawsuits, near bankruptcy and stormy feuds—all this and more are part of the life of Trump.

An adaptation and update of her definitive biography, The Trumps, this book provides fresh material on Trump’s brushes with bankruptcy, mammoth construction projects, and ever-expanding place in American life. Blair offers new insight into the man who seems to have it all and making a run for the highest office in the country: the presidency. For the first time, we also get a glimpse of the person who may ultimately decide the fate of the Trump brand: Donald Trump, Jr., the real-life apprentice who hopes to put his own imprint on his father's empire.

About this title

About the Author:

Gwenda Blair is the author of the bestselling Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch And The Selling of TV News, and she has written for Politico, The New York Times, New York, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, Esquire, Smart Money, The Village Voice, Chicago Magazine, and other newspapers and magazines. She lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her @GwendaLBlair.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 23: THE LEGACY

Donald Trump's unrelenting focus on his own accomplishment alienated many people; others, drawn to winners, found his self-absorption appealing. No matter the occasion, he was always competing, always concentrating on how to make whatever he was doing seem bigger and better than what anyone else had ever done. When he lost, he would say he won; when he won, he would say he won more. He called such behavior "truthful hyperbole." Broker Ed Gordon labeled it "diarrhea of the mouth." Barbara Corcoran, founder and chairman of one of the largest residential real estate companies in Manhattan, may have put it best: "He's got a gift that's good in good times and really good in bad times," she said. "It's called bullshit, and he uses it unabashedly. We've all gone to high school with someone like that - the only difference is most people have to let it go."
But as Donald Trump would be the first to say, he wasn't like most people. In The Art of the Deal, he claims that business deals are what distinguish him; by all accounts, he is indeed an artful negotiator, with his father's skill at walking into a meeting without notes or a calculator because he's got the numbers and deal points in his head. But his most original creation is the continual self-inflation that has made him a touchstone of excess. Early on, it made him his father's favorite child and treasured apprentice, a choice that sheds a certain light on the journey taken by this family - indeed, this nation - over the past century.
Despite obvious differences in lifestyle and affect, grandfather Friedrich, father Fred and Donald were similar types. All three were energetic men who would do almost anything to make a buck; all three possessed a certain ruthlessness; all three had a free and easy way about the truth and a wide range of solid, practical skills. But how these traits played out in different eras is, in its own way, a vest-pocket history of America.
During Friedrich's first two decades in the New World, he made a living by providing services that were as concrete as could be imagined. They ranged from haircuts to food to sex, and customers returned because they were satisfied with his work, not because he was the vendor. When he purchased older businesses, he did not change the sign over the door; when he started new ones, he named them after their locations. Even when he moved into real estate, near the end of his life, his intention was to create value not through his name but by buying plots of land and building homes.
Friedrich's son Fred followed in his father's footsteps but created value in his own way. By establishing a network of political contacts, he managed to obtain government housing subsidies, then released a stream of press releases designed to give a special shimmer to what were in fact conventional developments. A man of his era, he gave them innocuous generic addresses, like Shore Haven and Beach Haven. Only on the last, Trump Village, did he place his name, a precedent that his son Donald would expand on in ways that Fred never dreamed of.
Donald shared much with his father and grandfather. He, too, knew how to frame a building and retar a roof. But Friedrich's grandson would not employ this practical knowledge to build anything with his own hands; instead he would use it to hire and fire those who put up his structures and to connect with the construction crews, maintenance men and retired blue-collar workers who played his slot machines in Atlantic City. Although these skills would be helpful in negotiating contracts, the special value he would add to his projects would be his name. Seemingly the simplest of acts, it was actually quite arduous, for keeping that name going, constantly protecting and buffing it, required vigilance and intensity of the highest order.
By 2005, 14 buildings in Manhattan bore the name, although he had provided little or no financing for more than half. To all appearances, he held equity in only three or four, but rather than offering proof of more extensive ownership, he simply insisted, sometimes ferociously, that he owned practically everything labeled Trump. One perennially sore spot involved Trump Place, the vast West Side complex financed by a Hong Kong consortium. When the New York Times Magazine asked about Trump's holdings there, the consortium's lawyer delicately described him as "a major partner" who was "not merely receiving a fee" - seemingly a roundabout version of the near-unanimous belief that Trump's portion was a management fee plus a share of the profits.
Donald was less delicate. "I'm not a fucking flunky," he said. "I'm a 50/50 owner, owner, owner of the job. Okay, do you have that? I get 50 percent of the profits because I own 50 percent of the job, and it turned out to be one of the most successful jobs ever done in Manhattan." Afterward, in a Trump-style clarification, he added that he did get fees for building and managing the project. "I own that job, can I get it through your head? I own the West Side. I'm the largest owner. I own it. I'm not just a person that works, you know, for a fee. Do you understand? I'm an owner. I own a big chunk of that job, a big portion of that job. Off the record, I own 50 percent of that job. Five-Oh. You said I didn't own it, I got fees, but that's bullshit."

f0Such diligence had its rewards. In the early 1990s, when Donald's empire was in trouble, the carefully tended glow attached to his name persuaded holders of the junk bonds underwriting his casinos to cut deals leaving him in place as owner. In 1995, Several years later, his renown allowed him to take the casinos public and load them with still more junk bonds. But a decade later, the casinos faced stiff competition: neighboring Pennsylvania had legalized slot machines, and right in Atlantic City there was a new kid on the block: the $1.1 billion Borgata, the first casino built since the Trump Taj Mahal. A sleek, sumptuous Las Vegas-style resort with high-end retail shops, celebrity-chef restaurants and a popular spa - the wait list for facials was eight weeks - the Borgata was blowing the doors off every casino in town, but the dilapidated Trump properties were hit especially hard.
tThe remedy was obvious: refurbishment and more hotel rooms. But staggering interest payments on high-interest bonds had left Trump's thepublic company too strapped to replace worn upholstery and repaint scuff marks on walls - a serious no-no in an industry that relies on glitz and glamour to lure customers. Worse, there was no money in the till for. - much less to finance a much-needed expansion. Because Trump was always strapped, said Jacques Cornet, a casino analyst for CIBC World Markets, the developer had never been able to "right-size" his casinos with enough hotel rooms - a critical gap given that overnight customers spend an average of $325, compared to only $100 for someone who drives down for the day. "The logic was that if Donald could double the room count, the returns would finally be adequate," Cornet said. "It makes sense, but there's a tremendous leap of faith involved."
Evidently, the Trump name continued to give the bondholders that faith. In late October 2004, just weeks before another interest payment that many predicted THCR would not be able to make, they "took a haircut." But once again, the Trump name convinced bondholders to "take a haircut." In exchange for the right to keep using that name and likeness, plus an equity stake and a modest cash payout, they accepted a prenegotiated bankruptcy that reduced their rate of return and gave Donald yet another lease on his ever more highly leveraged financial life.
This time, the man who had insisted that he owned "mostly 100 percent of everything" declared that reducing his own equity by more than half was not such a bad thing after all. "I'll own 27 percent of a great company as opposed to 56 percent of a company that had a lot of debt," Trump said. "Which would you rather own? It's a great deal, no one else has ever done such an amazing deal. The casinos have always been a great deal for me. How much have I made off the casinos? Off the record, a lot. And nobody's ever understood that. They think, oh, gee, he hasn't done that well. But I've made a lot of money with the casinos over the years and now I'm going to make it a great company. I put a lot of debt on them and I took the money out and I bought a lot of real estate in New York. So I'm very happy at how things have turned out."
It was a remarkable turnaround for a man facing seemingly inexorable death by interest payments. "He has staved off a ticking time bomb," one long-time Trump critic, casino analyst Marvin Roffman, told Newsday. "He should go home tonight and take out his cashmere Trump bathrobe and crack open some Dom Perignon and celebrate."
But there would be another reckoning, and soon. According to the terms of the agreement with bondholders, by the following spring, Trump, who would still be the largest shareholder, would have to kick in an investment of $71.4 million, including $55 million in cash. "People are talking about whether the check will appear," said one industry observer. "Will some bank lend him more on a building in New York? Or against future expected fees on his TV show, "The Apprentice"? He can get creative - and historically, he has."
* * * *

To his grandfather and his father, Trump had been a name, a signifier of family and history. But to Donald, it meant something more. When he'd hoisted it on one undertaking after another, it wasn't simply a matter of advertising; he was turning himself into a brand. In turn, when investors backed his ventures and the public patronized them, they weren't merely making financial choices; they were buying into "Donald Trump," the personality brand created by consistently making the same extravagant claims and having the same look - including, apparently, the dark suit, the smirk, and the ever-more-improbable hairdo. "He was an early mover in this kind of personal branding," said brand guru Bernd Schmitt, a professor at Columbia Business School. "Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in computers, he became the most well-known brand in real estate - in public awareness and notoriety, no one else even comes close."
It was a strategy that paid off handsomely. In the early 1990s, when he was in his late forties, Donald was nearly $1 billion in the red; by the fall of 2004, when he was approaching his sixties, the Forbes 400 pegged his wealth at $2.6 billion. Along with film director Steven Spielberg and Yahoo cofounder David Filo, Trump was in a five-way tie for being the 74th richest American. Such a spot would have been more than enough for others on this exclusive list, who tended to be reticent about their means. But modesty was not Donald's way, and he continued to insist that the real number was actually $6 billion. Whether anyone believed him was unimportant; what mattered was that he sparked still more press attention.
For years, Donald had looked to such coverage to keep his name in the public eye. But in 2004, there would be, literally, a dramatic change. The hit reality television show "Survivor" had rented Wollman Rink, the skating arena in Central Park that Trump had renovated nearly twenty years earlier, for the live broadcast of its season finale. When Donald dropped by to watch, a sandy-haired man with a hybrid British-Australian-American accent introduced himself as Mark Burnett, the show's producer. Back when he'd been hawking t-shirts on Venice Beach, he said, he'd been inspired by The Art of the Deal, and now he wanted to talk about a new idea.
Although Trump courted attention every waking moment, he'd already turned down other pitches for day-in-the-life-style reality shows. "Can you imagine 15 cameras in the middle of an important meeting?" he said later. "I don't want to do that, and neither do the people I do business with. It would freak them out." But Burnett, a famously persuasive sort - CBS chairman Leslie Moonves called Burnett's pitch for "Survivor" the best he'd ever heard - proposed a elimination-style format in which the contestants, divided into teams, would compete on a demanding business task and each week Donald would fire someone. Intrigued at the prospect of a show set not in a jungle hideaway, a la "Survivor," but in New York's real-life business world, Trump said yes. Later he explained his decision: "The combination of Mark Burnett, who did Survivor, which was the number one show, and Trump, the number one developer in New York, was a great combination. It would be terrific, amazing, totally amazing."
It was a rare understatement. In Jacques Cornet's phrase, real estate jargon, television "right-sized" Donald, translating his over-the-top mannerisms and exaggerations into entertainment and turning his sometimes grating behavior into something engagingly camp. "He's a pull-me-in, push-me-back personality," said Michele Greppi, national editor of TelevisionWeek. "Seeing the show is like going to the zoo, where there are some things you watch between the fingers of your hand. I wouldn't want to be his employee, but I've got to know who he's going to fire or praise."
Television also seemed to exert a humanizing effect on the developer. As the would-be apprentices schemed and backstabbed their way to the grand prize of a one-year, $250,000 job with the Trump Organization, he consoled one contestant whose mother had cancer, winced while addressing another competitor named Ivana and made fun of his own much-ridiculed hair. In this medium, even his own brush with financial disaster was an asset, for it showed that he, too, was mortal, and his comeback fit perfectly into the ever-popular genre, tales of redemption.
But perhaps dearest to Trump's heart, the show presented him as he had always seen himself: the most stupefyingly successful man in the world. Contestants gaped with wonder at a Trump helicopter, golf course and casino, and they turned ashen when he pointed his index finger at 20one of them and uttered the show's catchphrase, "You're fired." Spending 10 minutes alone with The Donald (and, of course, a camera crew) seemed tantamount to a papal audience. "I show this apartment to very few people," he said grandly when one week's winning team visited his residence in Trump Tower. "Presidents, kings - let me give you a little tour." In fact, his opulent penthouse has appeared multiple times in print, television and film, but there was nary a snicker from the awestruck contestants.
From the start, the show held an enviable position on the schedule: directly after the hugely popular sitcom "Friends," then in its last season. But almost immediately it was clear that "The Apprentice" was a hit. Each week it attracted an average of 20 million viewers, had an audience of 40 million people for the final episode and scored particularly well with the affluent viewers that advertisers crave. Although the show did not consistently top the charts, such niggling details did not prevent Donald from making the usual claims: "You see the ratings are through the roof, bigger than ever," he chortled. "The show is now number one in demographics and I think in two weeks it's number one overall. It's a big monster. I'm in Los Angeles, I get out of my limo to be on Jay Leno and both Jay and [NBC Entertainment president] Jeff Zucker greet me at the door, and you know they only do that if you're number one in the ratings."
He was equally jubilant about press coverage: "I was on the cover of TV Guide last week, and it was their most successful magazine in three years. I was on the cover this week of Newsweek and they say you cannot buy Newsweek on the stands. So something's happening, right? I don't know what it is, but I just got a call from Rick Smith of Newswee...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1416546545
• ISBN 13: 9781416546542
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320