The Making (and Sanewashing) of Donald Trump • Buttondown

Posted on by Vaseline

September 8, 2024

By David Swanson

Welcome back to Culture Club, the weekly feature where Talia and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing—for premium subscribers.

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Trump on the stump last month

Whatever his skills as a populist demagogue, Donald Trump has never been mistaken for a paragon of erudition or eloquence. Recently, however, the former president’s oratory has reached levels of incoherence the likes of which have never been seen before. This week, when asked about his position of affordable childcare, Trump put on a master class in his particular brand of communication:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down—you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it…”


There was another two minutes of this palaver, in which 78-year-old former game show host said a lot of words without them adding up to much of anything at all, a discursive, nonsensical rhetorical style he calls “the weave.”

The media has long both laundered and indulged Trump’s worst oratorical tendencies—the Times likened “the weave” to the narrative acrobatics of Shakespeare and Dickens. This week, in a must-read essay for The New Republic, Parker Molloy has coined a new term for this (mal)practice: “sanewashing.”

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality. When major news outlets consistently present a polished version of Trump’s statements, they create an alternate narrative that exists alongside the unfiltered truth available on social media and in unedited footage.

Tuesday’s debate will put Trump’s mental and verbal dexterity up against a far younger and more nimble opponent than the doddering, diminished Joe Biden he faced in June. That night taught me to temper any expectations when it comes to presidential debates, but I’m reasonably certain that whatever Trump says onstage will sound more coherent in the moment than it will read when transcribed on paper. That’s the beauty of the weave, it’s like verbal sleight-of-hand. But if the media is unequal to the task, it’s incumbent upon readers, viewers, and voters to stay as informed as possible.

“As we approach another critical election, the quality of our discourse hangs in the balance,” writes Molloy. “The health of our democracy depends on an electorate that’s truly informed, not just placated with sanitized versions of reality. It’s time for both the media and the public to recommit to the pursuit of truth, however uncomfortable that may be.”

In the spirit of staying informed, and in anticipation of this week’s debate, we’re re-publishing this exhaustive digest of archival Trump stories—over 50 articles covering 50-plus years—with a handful of new pieces added since we first ran it in 2023.

In January, 1973, Donald J. Trump made his first appearance in the New York Times, in a story which falsely claimed the 26-year-old developer had graduated first in his class at Wharton. In December, 1973, the Times reported on a lawsuit that Trump was facing over discrimination against Black tenants. This was five decades ago, and already the media was yo-yo-ing between fawning profiles packed with falsehoods, and hard-boiled investigations into dirty business dealings.

The news this week of Trump’s latest indictment came as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention. And over his career in New York real estate, no-one paid closer attention than Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice investigative reporter who made the case — article by article, year by year, decade by decade — that Donald John Trump belonged behind bars. The notion of his nemesis in the Oval Office was so noxious a reality for Barrett to abide that he passed away — literally the day before Trump’s inauguration in 2016. If no one else could have predicted how bad things would get, Barrett sure did.

It’s amazing, in reading through old coverage of this rise to infamy, how every time a writer like Barrett would expose some sort of corporate or personal malfeasance, another reporter would publish a puff piece. You can see some of that in this week’s collection of archival material, covering the would be titan’s first decade on the scene in New York. Over the next few weeks, we’ll examining the limited successes and abundant failures of Trump’s pre-White House career, and how the media’s coverage enabled his rise. Knowing where things would lead, it makes for a horrifying read.

Donald and Fred Trump, 1973

A Builder Looks Back — and Moves Forward
By Alden Whitman
New York Times, January 28, 1973

The big change in Mr. Trump’s operations in recent years is the advent of his son, Donald. Born in 1946, Donald is the second youngest of five children — three boys and two girls — and the only one of them to display an interest in real estate.

Donald, who was graduated first in his class from the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, joined his father about five years ago. He has what his father calls “drive.” He also possesses, in his father’s judgment, business acumen. “Donald is the smartest person I know,” he remarked admiringly. “Everything he touches turns to gold.”

Realty Company Asks $100‐Million ‘Bias’ Damages
By Barbara Campbell
New York Times, December 13, 1973

A $100‐million damage suit was filed yesterday against the Federal Government by the Trump Management Corporation on the ground that “irresponsible and baseless” charges had been made against the realty Company.

Last October the Government filed a suit charging the company, which owns 16,000 apartment units in the city, with discriminating against blacks.

Donald Trump, president of the corporation, said that, in addition, a move was being made in Eastern District Court for dismissal of the Government’s suit.

“I have never, nor has anyone in our organization ever, to the best of my knowledge, discriminated or shown bias in renting our apartments,” Mr. Trump said in a news conference at the New York Hilton Hotel. A number of local actions have been brought against the company, he has said, but “we’ve won them all.”

Donald Trump, 29-yr-old pres of Trump Orgn, comments on LS housing
By Alan S. Oser
New York Times, December 10, 1975

“At 29, it isn’t so much to wait a couple of years,” Donald J. Trump said the other day. He is president of the Trump Organization, owners and managers of more than 22,000 apartments, including Trump Village in Brooklyn. What he is waiting for most ardently is a revival of housing across the country under a Democratic administration in Washington after 1976.

“If the Democrats get in there will be $20‐billion in housing programs,” he said, “and there will be enough for the country. If the Republicans get in there will be a drought for years.”

Donald Trump, Real Estate Promoter, Builds Image as He Buys Buildings
By Judy Klemesrud
New York Times, November 1, 1976

He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth “more than $200 million.”

Flair. It’s one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite words, and both he, his friends and his enemies use it when describing his way of life as well as his business style as New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter of the middle 1970’s.

“If a man has flair,” the energetic, outspoken Mr. Trump said the other day, “and is smart and somewhat conservative and has a taste for what people want, he’s bound to be successful in New York.”

How a Young Donald Trump Forced His Way From Avenue Z to Manhattan
by Wayne Barrett
Village Voice, January 15, 1979

Trump’s problem is not so much what he’s done, but how he’s done it. I decided at the start that I wanted to profile him by describing his deals — not his lifestyle or his personality. After getting to know him, I realized that his deals are his life. He once told me: “I won’t make a deal just to make a profit. It has to have flair.” Another Manhattan developer said it differently: “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra — a kind of moral larceny — in it. He’s not satisfied with a profit. He has to take something more. Otherwise, there’s no thrill.”

Donald Trump Cuts the Cards: The Deals of a Young Power Broker
By Wayne Barrett
Village Voice, January 22, 1979

There is nothing terrible about Trump’s convention center site. It is, I am sure, as good as the others… My quarrel is that $400 million of state funds could salvage entire neighborhoods; that New York City already is the top convention city in America and has an exhibition hall that is turning a profit for the city; and that Trump’s site will never pass any fair environmental test, precisely because it sees midtown as the city and will concentrate thousands of people — with their cars and their sewage — right where the city can’t cope with them. Trump’s answer to this kind of pro-neighborhood argument was contained in a New York Times piece about him two years ago: “I think the city will get better,” he said. “I’m not talking about the South Bronx. I don’t know anything about the South Bronx.”

What he doesn’t understand is that the South Bronx is this city. Its problems were created by someone else’s deals. And the problems remain, at least partially because of deals that ignore them. Deals like his own.

Where the Donald Trumps Rent
By Patricia Lynden
New York Times, August 30, 1979

Mr. Trump and his 30-year-old wife maintain three residences — in Aspen, Colo., where they go for long skiing weekends every four or five weeks in winter; in Wainscott, L.I., where they take long weekends in summer; and in Manhattan, their home base. The last is an eight‐room aerie that they share with their baby, the baby’s nurse, and a black poodle called “Tlapka,” which is Czechoslovak for “paw” (Mrs. Trump is Czechoslovak on her mother’s side).

The couple met at a party in Montreal where Ivana, who is from Vienna, had gone to learn English and take up fashion modeling.

“My wife was the No. 1 model in Montreal for eight years,” Mr. Trump said.

Complexes, persecution and otherwise
By Ken Auletta
New York Daily News, September 23, 1979

Donald Trump, president of a $1 billion real estate corporation, feels persecuted. Last January, Trump purchased the Bonwit Teller building at 725 Fifth Ave., announced plans to save the store and to erect over it a luxury apartment complex, sprinkled with trees and pedestrian malls.

Now, almost one year later, Trump attended still another hearing, this time of the City Planning Commission, where he listened to critics complain that his proposed zoning change would do violence to the environment.

“Anyone else proposing this building would get it through in a minute,” Trump whispered from the rear of the Board of Estimate hearing room. “Because it’s me, there’s trouble.”

In Sunday’s Culture post for paid subscribers, we took a look at how the media covered Donald Trump’s rise in 1970’s New York, as the flashy real-estate nepo-baby set out to make his name. Already, fifty years ago, the clues to Trump’s true nature were there: the lying, the bullying, the ego, the flair for self-promotion. But at the same time that critics like Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice were digging into his dirty deals, other writers were laundering his reputation. It’s a pattern that would continue for decades.

While the seventies ended with Barrett’s two-part investigation into Trump’s history of shady business dealings, the eighties began with Harold Blum of the New York Times hailing him as the most important developer of his generation. And for quite a while that seemed to be the consensus of the suspiciously credulous media. When I was growing up in New York in the 1980s, Trump was ubiquitous — a shameless mascot for a new Gilded Age. Looking back on it now, he was emblematic of something rotten in the Big Apple’s core, like an infernal mash-up of Lex Luthor, P. T. Barnum and Patrick Bateman.

Throughout, the media did its part to smooth his path. In a lot of ways, eighties saw Trump at his Trumpiest, when he really was the toast of the city — before the personal scandal and professional failure made him a laughing stock to anyone who was still paying attention. If the decade started with Trump on top of the world, it ended with one of the most egregious acts of his career (a high bar, to be sure.) On May 1, 1989, Trump took out a full-page advertisement in New York’s four largest newspapers, calling for the execution of the (since-vindicated) Central Park Five. If there had ever been any doubt that this was a truly soulless individual, the ad should have put it to rest.

By the nineties, Trump was still good for a tabloid headline, but his reputation as a successful developer had been shattered. Among his fellow New Yorkers — those who knew him best — the Trump show seemed blessedly over. But for those observers who, thanks to a fawning national media, only knew about his eighties successes, Trump never lost his shine.

As a taste of what you can expect to get as a paid subscriber to this newletter, we’re making this post available for free. As a time capsule, it’s both humorous (Ada Louise Huxtable writing to the Times to complain about Trump’s lies) and horrifying (that newspaper ad.) If there’s any light at the end of the tunnel it’s the fact that, by the end of the decade, the media seemed to catch on to the shell game Trump was playing. “The man demeans anything he touches,” wrote Murray Kempton in 1989, “which is any place where he can leave his name permanently engraved.”

Playing the Trump Card
by Owen Moritz
New York Daily News, August 3, 1980

Tall and blonde, a fastidious dresser, he married Canada’s most successful model three years ago. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale performed the ceremony, and the couple has taken up residence in a large apartment off Central Park. Today, they maintain the requisite residences in Manhattan, Aspen and the Hamptons…

One of five children of Fred Trump, a successful builder of post-war middle-class homes and apartments, Trump was the only one to show any interest in real estate. And he learned all the lessons, starting out by graduating first in his class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance.

“I gave Donald free rein,” says Fred Trump with pride. “He has great vision and everything he touches seems to turn to gold.”

Trumping the Town
By Marie Brenner
New York, November 17, 1980

Little Donald showed plenty of guts. He threw cakes at birthday parties, erasers at teachers, fizzed Cokes at girls, and collected soda-pop bottles in a Red Flier wagon from Dad’s construction sites — 22,000 of them. No Viola Wolff dancing classes for Donald. No artsy-fartsy days at the Met or wearing the sweet little blazer of St. Bernard’s or growing up on Fifth. Fred Trump was determined that his kids, like himself, would “know how to make a buck.”

They had loads of bucks, but they were quiet. No dinners with Rockefellers, no Belle Simone. Abe Beame and Brooklyn political dinners was about as posh as the family got. Norman Vincent Peale was and is the Trumps’ minister. “I’d like to take credit for Donald,” Dr. Peale says, “but I’m not sure I’m responsible for his positive thinking. Maybe all my preaching about faith the size of a mustard seed helping to move mountains bolstered his character.”

Donald Trump: Demolishing Affirmative Action 
By Wayne Barrett
Village Voice, July 29, 1981

The day after the violent protest over minority hiring at Trump Towers, State Supreme Court Judge Frank Blangiardo granted developer Donald Trump a $50 million tax abatement for the project. One would think the award of so massive a 10-year tax dole to Trump’s Fifth Avenue condominium should give the city more leverage to force affirmative action con­cessions from Trump and his builder, HRH Construction Company. But Mayor Ed Koch, whose black-baiting taunts about the protests got banner headline treatment in the Daily News and Post, has seen to it that city-assisted projects like Trump’s million-dollar-a-condo-casbah for oil sheiks escape even the minimal minority-hiring requirements of the city.

The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump
By Marylin Bender
New York Times, August 7, 1983

He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70’s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock. Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes — and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way…

The essence of entrepreneurial capitalism, real estate is a business with a tradition of high-rolling megalomania, of master builders striving to erect monuments to their visions. It is also typically dynastic, with businesses being transmitted from fathers to sons and grandsons, and carried on by siblings. In New York, the names of Tishman, Lefrak, Rudin, Fisher, Zeckendorf come to mind.

And now there is Trump, a name that has in the last few years become an internationally recognized symbol of New York City as mecca for the world’s super rich.

The USFL’s Trump Card
By Robert H. Boyle
Sports Illustrated, February 13, 1984

A 37-year-old multimillionaire developer who has deftly swung from one vine to another in the political jungle of New York real estate, Trump is used to getting what he wants. He has the buildings to prove it, such as the Grand Hyatt Hotel (which features a restaurant called Trumpet’s) and the new Trump Tower, sheathed in bronze and glass, a structure combining stores, offices and condominiums, on Fifth Avenue next to Tiffany’s. Affable and boyishly handsome, Trump and his blonde wife, Ivana, a Vienna-born former competitive skier and model who gave birth to their third child on Jan. 6, have recently been the golden couple of newspaper style pages. They dine at tanned goatskin tables in their own Manhattan condo overlooking Central Park, wear designer clothes and ski in Aspen, Gstaad and St. Moritz when not weekending at their Greenwich, Conn. estate. “Donald’s brilliant,” says Ivana, an executive vice-president in charge of interior design for the family-owned Trump Organization. “As a lot of people say, whatever he touches turns to gold.”

The Expanding Empire of Donald Trump
By William E. Geist
New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1984

All that is Donald Trump would seem to be embodied in this building. It is showy, even pretentious. Above the door are bronze letters two feet high that spell “Trump Tower.” Just inside, past the palace guards, are two three-foot bronze T’s. Then comes the piano player and violinist, dressed in tuxedos. That’s entertainment.

“I told Donald I hate all that stuff,” says Philip Johnson, “but people like the show. It is undeniably one of the most popular buildings in New York.” And these adornments would seem to be just the fuzzy pair of dice on the rear-view mirror of the Rolls-Royce. Architecture critics have hailed Trump Tower, Ada Louise Huxtable calling it “a dramatically handsome structure” and Paul Goldberger describing its interior as “warm, luxurious and even exhilarating.”

Donald Trump’s Tower
Ada Louise Huxtable, New York City
New York Times, May 6, 1984

I do not suppose that I can stop Mr. Trump from quoting me out of context — I think critics lost that battle a long time ago. I would be much happier, however, if he would remove the inappropriate quote from the Trump Tower atrium wall, and have, in fact, been meaning to ask him to do so. But I’ll make a deal, since he likes them. He can keep it if he’ll spare us the dungeons and dragons in his future projects. Leave Madison Avenue alone.

A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story 
By Tony Schwartz
New York, February, 11, 1985 

After his first column about Trump’s rejected offer for the homeless, Schamberg got a letter from Charles Sternberg, head of the International Rescue Committee, asking if Schanberg thought Trump might make his vacant apartments available to Polish refugees who needed temporary housing. Schanberg suggested that Sternberg write Trump. Sternberg’s two letters were not answered. Schanberg argued that Trump’s silence proved he hadn’t been sincere about his offer in the first place. Trump says he doesn’t remember getting Sternberg’s letters. 

On Being a Billionare at 40
By William E. Geist
New York Times, June 14, 1986

At 40, Mr. Trump is trim with no gray hair and is one of the richest men in New York. People ask for his autograph on the street and try to touch him for good luck. His business empire, once estimated to be worth $2 billion, includes Trump Tower, with shops that pay as much as a million dollars a year in rent and condominiums that sell for as much as $10 million. Mr. Trump lives in one of the latter but also has a mansion in Greenwich, Conn…

A surprise birthday party — ”something along the lines of New York’s Fourth of July celebration,” in the words of one — was planned for Mr. Trump, who scuttled it. Although Mr. Trump loves nothing more than seeing one of his buildings or his football players in the spotlight, he always seems uncomfortable when he is center stage.

Trump Keeps Reputation, Buildings Rising
By Christopher Boyd
The Miami Herald, December 2, 1986

In person, Trump is soft-spoken and even-tempered. He seldom raises his voice, even when deriding his critics. Though he is quick to defend a controversial decision, Trump prefers to discuss the upbeat aspects of his life, his business and his past.

Trump doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol and has a reputation as an honest and straightforward businessman. Success, one of his favorite words, comes directly from the lexicon of his minister and close friend, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

Although Trump hates posing for photographs, one wall of his office is peppered with framed magazine covers of his face. Trump favors dark blue, impeccably tailored business suits. His wife, Ivana, is responsible for the conservative apparel. Before meeting her, Trump preferred plum-colored suits with matching shoes.

Donald Trump: All Talk, No Votes 
By William Bastone 
Village Voice, June 23, 1987

Since he registered to vote, Trump has had more than 40 separate opportunities to vote on Election Day. These elections involved more than 150 offices and hun­dreds of candidates.

Trump, 41, registers to vote out of his father’s home on Midland Parkway, Jamaica, but he has not lived there for years. His drivers license also carries the Queens address, but the developer actually splits his time between his pied-a-terre in Trump Tower and his mansion Greenwich, Connecticut.

Trump Hints of Dreams Beyond Building
By Fox Butterfield,
New York Times, October 5, 1987

“I’m not running for anything,” he said.

“I love what I do,” he continued. “I’ve built the best private company in the world at a very early age. And we’ve got the biggest construction project in the history of New York coming up,” his bitterly disputed plan for Television City, a $5 billion complex along the Hudson River that would feature a 150-story tower, the tallest in the world, a new home for NBC, 8,000 cooperative apartments, a hotel and a shopping mall.

But, adds Mr. Trump with disarming immodesty, “I believe that if I did run for President, I’d win.”

Trump on Trump
New York, Nov 16, 1987

In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began, “It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.” It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.

On July 4, I flew with Ivana, her assistant Lisa Calandra, and Norma to Moscow. It was an extraordinary experience. We toured a half-dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square. We stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, and I was impressed with the ambition of the Soviet officials to make a deal.

Ace of Trump
By Michael Kilian
Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1987

A mutual friend — a woman who’s known Trump some 10 years — advised that an interviewer would come away surprised, which is to say, liking him. She was right. Trump is not a man with whom to sit around discussing the philosophy of Albert Camus or watch a Bears game in a corner tavern. Either one he would doubtless consider a waste of his billion-dollar time. But he is interested in telling people what he knows about subjects he’s interested in, and he’s keenly interested in learning what others know about subjects that interest him.

And he is a good guy. The late Nelson Rockefeller and presidential candidate Pierre Du Pont IV are remembered as back-slapping pols who strove for the common touch but nevertheless relied upon scurrying aides to put on their suit jackets for them. Trump puts on his own coat.

Democrats come courting Trump
By Phil Gailey
Tampa Bay Times, November 19, 1987

Donald Trump is tired of seeing the United States being treated like Rodney Dangerfield, getting no respect and “being kicked around” by allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia. He said these countries have become “the world’s greatest money machines” because the United States has to pick up the tab for their defense…

Donald Trump is tired of seeing the United States being used as a “whipping post” by Iran, which he described as “a horrible, horrible country.” He suggested that the United States should attack Iran “and take over some of their oil.”

Donald Trump, whose personal fortune is estimated at $3-billion, said he is tired of hearing politicians say higher taxes are the answer to federal budget deficit. His solution is to tax “these countries that are ripping us off left and right” and use the money to pay off the deficit.

Stalking the Plaza
By William H. Meyers
New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1988

Donald Trump charges up a staircase, kicks open a fire door and greets the blinding summer sun. Surrounded by heavyset bodyguards wearing gold-plated “T’s” in their lapels, he stands 18 stories above Fifth Avenue on the roof of the Plaza Hotel.

Trump is on a flying inspection tour of his latest acquisition, searching for ways to squeeze more profit out of the hotel. He spies a painters’ workshop, and his eyes light up as he envisions the dusty rooms transformed into a set of deluxe duplexes: “Move a few walls, clean the skylights, install new elevators. What a freak-out!” There he stands in his blue pin-stripe suit and pink silk tie, the 42-year-old builder from Queens who became, in the space of a dozen years, the impresario of Manhattan real estate.

Nation to Trump: We Need You
Spy, January-February, 1988

One in 25 Americans wishes Donald Trump were running for president; not too many of those, we like to think, said that just so they could pull up chairs to hoot and hiss. Look at these impressive figures Trump can build on (and how he can build!):

  • 7% of the 25-to-34-year-olds polled felt acutely the lack of a Trump candidacy;

  • in terms of level of education, the voters who most favored a Trump candidacy — with a 9% rating — were those whose minds remain uncluttered by any learning beyond junior high school;

  • 10% of blacks polled were sorry he isn’t a candidate; even in the South, fully 5% of those polled wished he were running.

These are the kinds of figures that foretell November landslides — especially when they’re cited after the fact. And with Trump’s equivalent of a campaign autobiography littering the country’s book supermarkets, who can deny the probability of a growing snowball of support crisscrossing the nation? One last thing: this is one candidate who will not let you down. After all, we already have Donald Trump’s personal guarantee that if he did run for president, he would win.

The Top 20  Most Important New Yorkers  
By Liz Smith
New York, April 25, 1988

Trump has been described as the high-rolling entrepreneur of all time, half matinee idol, half riverboat gambler. He is young, energetic, egocentric, good-looking, successful, arrogant, vain, and rich. The have-nots envy but admire him; the brainy ones who criticize everything look down on him and hope to revel in what they consider his inevitable clash with fate. The elitists of business, power, and society observe him with caution and mild alarm. He is too big, too important, too potentially powerful for them to offend, yet he is forever shocking them by calling a spade a spade, using the M word, or the S word with slashes — $Moneys!

Jealousy and spite play another part in making Trump this city’s biggest target. He’ll go on being that bull’s-eye for quite some time, because he hasn’t “gotten it” yet — the “it” being a necessity for artful dodging, for pretending that one is charitable in the extreme, generous to a fault, and always developing one’s gold-plated sense of “social consciousness,” forever yammering about “giving something back to the community.”

Flashy Symbol of an Acquisitive Age
By Otto Friedrich  
Time, January 16, 1989

“I have an absolute strategy, but it’s an innate strategy and not definable,” he says. “When you start studying yourself too deeply, you start seeing things that maybe you don’t want to see. And if there’s a rhyme and reason, people can figure you out, and once they can figure you out, you’re in big trouble.”

One man who knows Trump well does see a rhyme and reason. Trump is a brilliant dealmaker with almost no sense of his own emotions or his own (identity, this man says. He is a kind of black hole in space, which cannot be filled no matter what Trump does. Looking toward the future, this associate foresees Trump building bigger and bigger projects in his attempts to fill the hole but finally ending, like Howard Hughes, a multibillionaire living all alone in one room.

His Many Detractors Are Selling Trump Short
By Jerry Schwartz
Associated Press, February 19, 1989

Donald Trump can buy hotels, he can buy football teams, he can buy casinos and airlines. But he can’t buy respect.

Spy magazine calls him a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Cartoonist Berke Breathed takes Trump’s brain and installs it in the skull of Bill the Cat, the foul feline of “Bloom County.” A Daily News columnist writes that when she needs cheering up, she watches “Donald Trump do something silly.”

The Stand Up New York comedy club devoted a night to ridiculing Trump. For two hours, comics drew laughter with readings from “Trump: The Art of the Deal” and took their own potshots — suggesting, for example, that he bought a Parisian Landmark and renamed it the #Arc de Trump.

The 43-year-old billionaire does not believe he deserves this tidal wave of derision, which rises along with his success and prominence.

Trump: ‘The People’s Billionaire’
By Glenn Paskin
Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1989

By 8 each morning, Donald Trump is behind his Brazilian rosewood desk on the 26th floor of the bronze-coated jewel of his empire, Trump Tower, his 6-foot-2 frame decked out in his daily uniform: a navy blue $1,950 Brioni suit, $350 red-striped shirt and $95 tie, all from Napoleon, the Trump Tower clothier 23 floors below.

Up for four hours already, now trailed by a corps of five secretaries and protected by two armed security men posted outside the door, he navigates through dizzying whirlwind of work: advising brokers to hold at this or that price; screening party invitations hold at this or that price; screening party invitations (“37 since Monday,” he sighs); finalizing figures for some envisioned high-rise; reviewing artist renderings of his latest toys, the Eastern Shuttle fleet; chatting with George Bush about the national debt; counseling an ever-troubled Mike Tyson, firming up weekend plans with Don Johnson; arranging to lend a helicopter to Fergie…

BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
Ad by Donald J. Trump
New York Times, Daily News. New York Post, Newsday, May 1, 1989

Many New York families — White, Black, Hispanic and Asian — have had to give up the pleasure of a leisurely stroll in the Park at dusk, the Saturday visit to the playground with their families, the bike ride at dawn, or just sitting on their stoops — given them up as hostages to a world ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter. At what point did we cross the line from the fine and noble pursuit of genuine civil liberties to the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh at her family’s anguish? And why do they laugh? They laugh because they know that soon, very soon, they will be returned to the streets to rape and maim and kill once again — and yet face no great personal risk to themselves.

Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.

They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.

Hate-Mongering Isn’t ‘Honest Debate’
By Sydney H. Schanberg
Newsday, May 9, 1989

It used to be, in communities that considered themselves civilized, that when somebody scrawled hate messages on buildings or took out hate ads in the local newspapers, they either got arrested or ostracized. People would be offended, ashamed, outraged.

Not in New York. In New York — where the ruling class considers itself urbane, cosmopolitan and large-minded — hate peddlers are apparently good company. Donald Trump has proved that.

A week ago, on Monday, May 1, Trump took out full-page ads in New York City’s newspapers calling upon all of us “to hate.” Oh yes, he was careful to say in the ads that the people he wanted us “to hate” were the “roving bands of wild criminals (who) roam our neighborhoods.” His ads were in response to the terrible group rape and beating of a young woman in Central Park on the night of April 19, and Trump was counting on the feelings of shock and even vengeance in the community to give his message a friendly reception. He also knew that all the young men accused of the crime were black or Hispanic.

The Proof That Trump Is a Self-Made Man
By Murray Kempton
Newsday, June 4, 1989

To boast of hating used to be an embarrassment for the worst of people. I knew the Birmingham police commissioner who jailed Fred Shuttlesworth again and again. He was always a mean man and now and then a vicious one, but he went to his grave denying that he had ever hated anyone. Time was when people who sent hate letters had the shame to keep themselves anonymous.

But Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock’s feathers. In any polity entitled to think itself civilized, persons with due regard for their breeding would rise up and leave the room politely but definitely whenever the Donald Trumps entered it. Instead, this perfectly matched pair of the vulgar is fawned upon wherever it condescends to lower the company. We are assured that God does not make trash, which thought disposes of the impression that Donald Trump is not altogether a self-made man.

There are few faces I hate quite as much as Donald Trump’s, and this week it was everywhere. Even before “the most famous photograph in the world” was officially released on Thursday night, twitter was rife with speculation, predictions, and fake versions of presidential mugshot. It’s hardly surprising thatbetting sites were giving odds on Trump’s weight, skin tone, and whether he would face the camera with a grimace or a grin. Given everything we know about him, it wouldn’t surprise me if he put money on a scowl before heading to central booking. He was always going to cash in.

“There were only a few ways the Donald Trump mugshot could go,” wrote Hunter Harris. “Would he go with a demure grin, the taunting smize of 2000s celebutantes? Or would he strike his familiar pose, his presidential headshot, squinting and threatening? Or would he try to pull off a grin?” As we now know, he went with “squinting and threatening,” an expression that’s been likened to a twerp kid’s passport photo, Mama Fratelli, and “The Grinch Who Stole Georgia.”

I’m so sick of that face. As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’ve spent way too much time this summer mucking about the reeking dungheap of Donald Trump’s career. Having already covered his rise in the seventies and fall in the eighties, this week I’ve assembled a collection of magazine and newspaper stories documenting his scandal-wracked nineties. There are tales of bankruptcy, divorce, sketchy business deals with the Russians and Chinese, private plane trips with Ghislaine Maxwell, and a potential presidential bid. And photo after photo of that yam face with its ludicrous hair, smirking, squinting, smiling, scowling. I hate it even more when I think that behind those beady little eyes resides a tyrant whose stated goal is to dissolve American democracy, and he may succeed. He’s probably betting on it.

The Playboy Interview with Donald Trump
By Glen Plaskin
Playboy, March 1990

A favorite word of yours, tough. How do you define it?
Tough is being mentally capable of winning battles against an opponent and doing it with a smile. Tough is winning systematically.

Sometimes you sound like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.
I don’t want the Presidency. I’m going to help a lot of people with my foundation—and for me, the grass isn’t always greener.

But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?
Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican—and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.

Another game: What’s the first thing President Trump would do upon entering the Oval Office?
Many things. A toughness of attitude would prevail. I’d throw a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country and on all Japanese products, and we’d have wonderful allies again.

Trump the Soap: Stay Tuned…
By John Taylor
New York, March 5, 1990

“Can you believe it?” Donald Trump asked me.

We were talking on the telephone. It was the morning of February 14, the day the true dimensions of the hysteria over the Trumps’ split became apparent, the day the Post ran its DON JUAN headline and accompanying story about Marla’s St. Moritz hideaway, the day the News featured Mike McAlary on Donald and Liz Smith on Ivana, and Newsday, though its front-page photo of Nelson Mandela showed an astonishing lapse in editorial judgment, tried to answer the question “Does Ivana Trump have a case?” Though Trump himself had said in a recent interview with Playboy that “the show is Trump and it is sold-out performances everywhere,” even he had underestimated the fascination with him.

Pages from the Donald J. Trump Scrapbook, 1990-96
By Jamie Malanowski
Spy, August 1990

In the previous installment of the Donald J. Trump Scrapbook the following events transpired: Trump attempted to slough off his glamorous, reconditioned wife, Ivana, in favor of young, pliable nineties edition Marla Maples; he opened the horrifically kitschy and monumentally leveraged Taj Mahal casino; he saw his net worth devalued by 70 percent in Forbes magazine; he floated the idea of selling his airline and other assets in what he claimed was an effort to become a “king of cash”; and he became the subject of speculation about his ability to service the $3.2 billion debt that is the basis of his empire. Now the saga continues…

After the Gold Rush
By Marie Brenner,
Vanity Fair, September 1990

This past April, when his empire was in danger of collapse, Trump isolated himself in a small apartment on a lower floor of Trump Tower. He would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, talking into the night on the telephone. The Trumps had separated. Ivana remained upstairs in the family triplex with its beige onyx floors and low-ceilinged living room painted with murals in the style of Michelangelo. The murals had occasioned one of their frequent fights: Ivana wanted cherubs, Donald preferred warriors. The warriors won. “If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it would be very much in place in terms of quality,” Trump once said of the work. That April, Ivana began to tell her friends that she was worried about Donald’s state of mind.

She had been completely humiliated by Donald through his public association with Marla Maples. “How can you say you love us? You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money,” twelve-year-old Donald junior told his father, according to friends of Ivana’s. “What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother, Mary, is said to have asked Ivana.

All of the People All of the Time
By John Connelly
Spy, April 1991

With his bluster and his extravagance and his tabloid love life, Donald Trump has always been a source of considerable entertainment. If we’re honest, we all have to admit that after his every achievement in greed or vanity we’ve said to ourselves, Heck, you’ve gotta love that guy! Like some funny, impossibly venal puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show, Trump has always given us a good laugh. In fact, Trump’s image as a buffoon is just another example of how the press has protected him from real scrutiny for so long. While one would prefer not to be considered a joke, that is not so bad if it distracts people from seeing what one really is: a charlatan, a liar, a cheat.

Donald Trump Gets Small
By Harry Hurt III
Esquire, May 1991

Given the kind of year he has had, Donald J. Trump might be forgiven a little ego candy. His net worth, once extravagantly overestimated at $1.7 billion, may be as low as negative $295 million. The Taj Mahal and some of his biggest real estate ventures are in various stages of bankruptcy negotiation. His other two casinos, Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, are fighting to stay afloat. In fact, the Castle only made its last bond payment in December because Trump’s father bought $3 million worth of chips there and left them in the casino cage. He may still have to part with at least one of his three Atlantic City casinos before the year is out…

“You know,” he muses philosophically as we return to our ringside seats after the grandstand tour, “it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

“But,” he adds after a pause that suggests this is a distinction with a difference, “she’s got to be young and beautiful.”

Donald Trump’s Tower of Trouble 
By Wayne Barrett
Village Voice,  December 17, 1991

When Trump Tower opened in 1983, its golden entrance, 80-foot waterfall, and rose-peach-and-orange-colored marble atrium quickly established themselves as the most photogenic symbols of Trump glamour. Donald launched a $2 million promotional campaign, complete with a lavish brochure promising the ultimate in luxury — hairdressers, masseuses, limou­sines, helicopters … all at your service with a phone call to your concierge — mak­ing the tower the place to buy. In a mas­terstroke of media deception, he even floated the rumor that Prince Charles was thinking of moving in at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. But the clientele never did get that exclusive…

Actually, your Trump Tower neigh­bors are as likely to be Medicaid cheats, coke dealers, mobsters, or those who may have gotten a touch too friendly with mobsters.

Fighting Back: Trump Scrambles off the Canvas
By Julie Baumgold
New York, November 9, 1992

Trump is one of those icons of a decade who didn’t burn up in a Porsche or drop dead of an overdose or get himself jailed at exactly the right time in his cycle of monster fame, but one who fell and lingered publicly into the next decade, a morally sullied, toppled man who would have to build again. A man who, at his lowest point, was owned by his bankers, a man whose toys had been taken away and sold, a man without a yacht or plane or airline, down to majority ownership in two of his three restructured casinos and the Plaza, a man with his name removed from his $3-billion pending mini-city at the West Side train yards (on which he has had to make concessions and which may not get built for years), a man who lost, made mistakes and left behind a lot of wounded people his unsecured creditors a man who signed the personals, who had to be bailed out by his father, had a disgraceful front-page divorce, a man who, until a year ago, was on a personal budget of $450,000 a month.

Trump Family Values
By Edward Klein
Vanity Fair, March 1994

What was there left to say about Donald Trump? Hadn’t he lost control of everything — his yacht, his plane, his airline, his casinos, his hotels, his apartment buildings, his credit with the banks, his credibility with the press? Wasn’t he, like those tarnished icons of the garish 1980s Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, history? Had he learned anything from his collapse and catastrophe? Or was he still essentially an alienated figure, a man at war against himself?

“As nasty as the press can be,” he told me on the way over the bridge to Brooklyn, “they know that once they’ve cut you down the best story is to build you back up again. Piece by piece, deal by deal, a beautiful story is starting to emerge about me.”

Trump Gets Lucky
Craig Horowitz
New York, August 15, 1994

“The attraction for us was not just the market and the land, but the fact that we can work with someone like Donald,” says Dr. Paul Tong, the general manager of New World Development, the largest Polylinks partner. “We will market these properties in the Far East, and while our name is important in Asia, Donald Trump is also known in our part of the world. It will help sell the apartments.”

The Riverside South deal was especially critical for Trump because he had already defaulted on a $310-million mortgage on the land (backed by a $45-million personal guarantee) held by Chase Manhattan and several other banks. Sources say that Chase Manhattan was already talking privately to other buyers. “This deal was the best of the worst for him,” says broker Carrie Chiang. “He had to make the fewest concessions, and the Chinese allowed him to save face. If he didn’t come to terms with the Chinese, he’s gone. This is the one that could have bankrupted him.”

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I’m Back
By Donald J. Trump
New York Times Magazine, November 19, 1995

There is a statement commonly used, that “everyone loves a winner.” But this is really not true. The jealousies, inadequacies and weaknesses of other people more often would lead to the statement “everyone loves to see a winner fail.”

The real-estate market crashed at the beginning of the 90’s. It was then that I realized there were certain people who were no longer responding to me as they had in the past. Many of their lives had been profoundly changed by me, in an extraordinarily positive way. Some had become rich, some powerful, but in all cases they would never have ended up in their high social or economic positions without the influence and help of Donald Trump. When crunch time came, however, some — by no means all — were not around when I most needed their help. Needless to say, I no longer associate with these individuals in that, being a total loyalist (perhaps to a fault), I view these people as being born with garbage in their genes.

Trump’s Empire: Back From Bankruptcy 
By Eric R. Quinones
AP,  November 9, 1996

Hardly a week seems to pass these days without some notice of Donald Trump and his deals — the Miss Universe pageant, the world’s tallest building and a stream of other Biggest, Best and Most Beautiful projects.

If this sounds a lot like the 1980s, when Trump was a storied example of the decade’s unbridled wealth, it is. After facing a near-crippling recession early this decade, Trump has fought back by using the lessons he learned from making big deals and some big mistakes.

Donald Trump in Moscow? 
By Jennifer Gould
Village Voice,  April 22, 1997

If Donald Trump has his way, the Kremlin towers will soon have a new neighbor. Trump Towers, just beside Red Square.

The Donald’s mouth has often been bigger than his bank account. But if Russian news re­ports are on the money, Trump’s first foreign real estate ventures includes plans to renovate the Hotel Moskva, a landmark-turned-to-seed Stalinist structure off one of the most famous squares in the world. A Trump team was in Moscow months ago to assess the venture. A top Moscow city gov­ernment official told Moscow News that the hotel deal was just about complete.

Donald Trump at MaraLago.
Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Photograph by Max Vadukul

Searching for Trump’s Soul
By Mark Singer
New Yorker, May 12, 1997

The most direct but not exactly most serene way to travel to Mar-a-Lago, I discovered one weekend not long ago, is aboard Trump’s 727, the same aircraft he gave up during the blip and, after an almost decent interval, bought back. My fellow-passengers included Eric Javits, a lawyer and nephew of the late Senator Jacob Javits, bumming a ride; Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late publishing tycoon and inadequate swimmer Robert Maxwell, also bumming a ride; Matthew Calamari, a telephone-booth-size bodyguard who is the head of security for the entire Trump Organization; and Eric Trump, Donald’s thirteen-year-old son.

Take My Party, Please
By Michael Duffy and Matthew Cooper
Time, September 27, 1999

Trump’s odds of being President are akin to hitting the jackpot on two of his slots simultaneously. His finances make the Clintons’ look simple; his women outnumber the President’s. But third parties aren’t really about winning. They’re about changing the electoral debate — and influencing who wins in the end. That’s why even Bush backers who joke privately about Trump (“He doesn’t want to live in the White House; he wants to develop it”) are relishing his possible appearance in politics. “We love this. We just love it.”

The Donald Erases Line Between Politics, Comedy
By Geraldine Baum
Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1999

If every presidential campaign needs a good narrative with plenty of comic relief, then the White House quest of Trump, the real estate-casino developer, may just be it. His Donald J. Trump Presidential Exploratory Committee is Political Science 101 on how far politics is devolving into pure entertainment.

Currently, he’s musing about going for the Reform Party nomination. He spouts tax-the-rich ideas and sounds like your very own rich uncle talking at Thanksgiving dinner about how politics is broken and America needs a businessman like him to make things right.

Still, nobody seems to know what this 53-year-old wheeler-dealer with the orange-fizz hair is really up to. And it’s hard to get a straight answer out of him.

The media can’t get enough of him and clearly he’s addicted to the attention.

Photograph by Richard Burbridge

“Most people, when they write about me, write about me like I’m a machine, like I’m some kind of motherfucker,” Donald Trump told Esquire’s Tom Junod in 2000. “I couldn’t be as successful as I am if I was just a machine and a motherfucker. One of these days, I’d like for someone to try to find another side of me.”

It’s time to return to one of the scariest stories in recent American history — the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald J. Trump as he rose from fledgling real-estate mogul to tabloid laughingstock to president of the United States. Time and time again over the last fifty years, Trump has alternately courted and jousted with the media — just when one outlet would expose some bit of his legal or ethical malfeasance, another would redeem him as an urban swashbuckler out to make his mark on the Manhattan skyline. As we’ve seen in previous excursions down the archival rabbit hole, Trump was a disaster as a developer, squandering the empire his father had left him to manage. But he was a hell of a showman. And so, following failures both personal and professional, he rebranded himself — as a brand.

At the turn of the 21st century, as demonstrated by this week’s collection of articles, Trump was back from the wilderness of bankruptcy, but far from the center of the action. He cashed in on his celebrity, licensing his name, and slapping his likeness on beverages, buildings, and board games. Then, with the January, 2004, launch of “The Apprentice,” he was back, riding the reality-TV wave right into living rooms across America.

If “The Apprentice” was the first step in Trump’s transformation from hokey New York curiosity to household name, it was his embrace of racist conspiracy theories that made him a political force. “Donald Trump has appointed himself spokesman for some of the nastiest impulses in American politics,” the editors of The New Republic wrote in 2011. “The sooner the Republican mainstream rejects him, the better. And we liberals should be cheering them along as they do.” Five years later, he was on the cover of Rolling Stone. As Trump mounts yet another bid, and as his legal woes mount in courtrooms throughout the country, it’s worth revisiting how he got to this point, and who helped smooth his path.

Lessons in the Simple Humanity of Donald J. Trump, America’s Host
By Tom Junod
Esquire, March 1, 2000

He could be the first man ever to run for president as a function of his wanting, of his covetousness, of, yes, his greed; the first man to ever posit the presidency as the pinnacle not merely of male ambition but of male desire; the first man who could come right out and say he was running for president for power and prestige and publicity and pussy without hiding his might behind the pieties of public service. He could be the first presidential candidate allowed to say “fuck” in an interview, as well as the first to relish openly the prospect of fucking a supermodel in the Oval Office, as well as the first to drive a fucking Lamborghini. “You see, I don’t give a shit,” he once said to me during a discussion of his “negatives,” which included, in his words, “the fact that I date extraordinarily beautiful women.” “That is one of the things about me,” he said. “I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck.”

Unreal Estate
By Charles V Bagli
New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2002

Last month, Donald J. Trump put a $58 million price tag on the 20,000-square-foot penthouse apartment of Trump World Tower. A week earlier, Trump and his Japanese partners signed a contract to sell the Empire State Building for $57.5 million. Sure, the vast duplex — about 10 times the size of the average American home — has wraparound windows and 18-foot ceilings atop Manhattan’s tallest residential tower. But is an apartment on First Avenue across from the United Nations worth more than the city’s tallest and most famous skyscraper? It boggles the mind. But let’s do the math.

Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery
By Landon Thomas Jr.
New York, October 28, 2002

Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Photograph by Michael Edwards

What I’ve Learned: Donald Trump, 57, Builder, New York
By Cal Fussman
Esquire, January 1, 2004 

I was walking down Fifth Avenue with Marla Maples in 1991. This was at the peak of the bad market. Across the street I saw a man in front of Tiffany with a tin cup. I looked at Marla and said, “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”

When I told Marla this, she didn’t run away. Of course, I would have saved a little money if she had.

I had a lot of friends who went bankrupt and you never hear from them again. I worked harder than I’d ever worked getting myself out of it. Now my company is much bigger than it was in the eighties — many times. The Guinness Book of Records gave me first place for the greatest financial comeback of all time.

Due Diligence on the Donald
By Charles V. Bagli
New York Times, January 24, 2004

The first episode of Donald Trump’s new hit reality show “The Apprentice” began with an introduction. As usual, Mr. Trump did the honors. Over aerial views of Manhattan’s glittering skyline, he intoned, “My name is Donald Trump and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York.” The camera panned across Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle, and he continued: “I own buildings all over the place, modeling agencies, the Miss Universe contest, jet liners, golf courses, casinos and private resorts like Mar-a-Lago.”

For millions of viewers, the show is an opportunity to watch 16 remarkably ambitious people compete for a $250,000-a-year job with Mr. Trump. But for those who follow the New York real estate market, the show provides something else: a hilarious look at Mr. Trump’s blend of fact, image and sheer nerve. Even when the show plays a bit with the truth, it’s an excellent primer — sometimes unintentionally so — on Mr. Trump’s peculiar brand of success.

He’s Firing As Fast As He Can
By Frank Rich
New York Times, March 13, 2004

At a time when even the most admired C.E.O. of the 1990’s, Jack Welch, has been tarnished by revelations of expense account greed, there’s an opening for king of the corporate hill. Surely it’s an unexpected development that that role would be filled in the popular culture by Donald Trump. In 2004, a man who was the often mocked hood ornament of the “greed is good” boom of the late 1980’s has been rehabilitated both as a show biz phenomenon (NBC sees “The Apprentice” as its Thursday night successor to “Friends”) and, more intriguingly, as a moral paragon. It’s not an indication of how much he has changed, which is not at all (with the possible exception of that hair), but how much the country around him has.

Is Trump Headed for a Fall?
By Timothy L. O’Brien and Eric Dash
New York Times, March 27, 2004

Mr. Trump’s young television apprentices spent last Thursday evening in what he described then as “the No.1 hotel” in Atlantic City, the Trump Taj Mahal, vying to lure gamblers into the casino.

In reality, the Taj Mahal needs all the help it can get — as does the rest of Mr. Trump’s increasingly troubled gambling empire. His casino holdings are mired in nearly $2 billion of bond debt that they are struggling to repay. They are aging and overshadowed by flashier competitors, and their revenue and profits have been slumping over the last year.

While the winner of “The Apprentice” will get the “dream job of a lifetime” — a year at Mr. Trump’s feet, absorbing even more of his business expertise — the master himself now faces an unwieldy group of investors who are muttering a word that has repeatedly hounded him during his career as a real estate developer and casino mogul: bankruptcy.

Proust Questionnaire: Donald Trump
Vanity Fair, September 2004

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Considering his work and love for New York City, I would say Robert Moses.

The Donald Show — Bankruptcy!
David Bianculli
Daily News, August 11, 2004

Maybe Donald Trump’s next reality TV series should be called “Atlantic City.” This time he’d be a contestant, not the king holding court- and this time, the show would end with the government telling him, “You’re bankrupt!”

The irony of Donald Trump king of all he surveys on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” is seeing his gambling empire headed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing is pretty rich even if Trump’s casino operation is not.

Reluctant Apprentices
By Dave Itzkoff
New York Times, December 30, 2006

On an afternoon when work had been halted on his SoHo hotel and condominium project by the discovery of human bones, the 2006 winner of his Miss USA pageant was embroiled in a series of personal scandals and the town council of Palm Beach, Fla., was battling his efforts to fly an oversize American flag at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Donald Trump had news to smile about: His daughter Ivanka had just earned another mention in Page Six.

Having summoned an assistant into his 26th-floor office at Trump Tower to bring him the morning’s copy of The New York Post, Mr. Trump flipped to the tabloid’s gossip pages to point out a curious juxtaposition: a photograph of another noted heiress, Paris Hilton, kicking up her heels at a dimly lighted nightspot, side by side with a picture of Ms. Trump, immaculately styled and apparently behaving herself.

“Isn’t that something?” Mr. Trump said, beaming with pride. “That’s just terrific.”

Trump for president? Billionaire may run
By Beth Fouhy
Associated Press, March 20, 2011

Famously brash, Trump minces few words when talking about his beliefs:

— China “has taken all of our jobs.”

— Japan, recovering from an earthquake and tsunami and trying to avert a nuclear disaster, has “ripped us off for years” as a trading partner.

— Obama should be pressed to disclose his original birth certificate. The “birther” movement has legitimate concerns, Trump said.

“The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him.”

Birth of a Birther: Why Donald Doubts
Steve Kornacki
Daily News, April 1, 2011

The fact that he’s suddenly taken up birtherism — that is, the belief that President Obama may not have been born in the United States — might seem like a sign that Donald Trump is serious about running for President.

After all, a narrow majority of likely Republican primary voters expressed this view in a startling recent poll, despite the fact that an official copy of Obama’s birth certificate — the very same thing you or I would use to prove our own birth — has been available and online for roughly three years.

It must be the votes of the stubborn disbelievers that Trump has in mind when he questions the circumstances of Obama’s birth and declares, as he did on Wednesday, that birthers are “really great American people,” right?

Well, probably not. Trump is many things, but dumb isn’t one of them. And dumb is what he’d have to be to follow through on his threats to seek the White House.

Trump, Birtherism, and Race-Baiting
By David Remnick
New Yorker, April 27, 2011

Not long after the White House released the President’s birth certificate this morning, Donald Trump stepped off a helicopter, ambled up to a bank of microphones, and declared, “Today, I’m very proud of myself.” (One assumes this is a daily ritual for Trump, but today there were more cameras than usual.) Trump also declared himself relieved that “the press can stop asking me questions” about the birther issue and we can now move on to more important ones, such as “China ripping off this country.” What is there to say anymore about Donald Trump? That he is an irrepressible jackass who thinks of himself as a sly fox? That he is a buffoon with bathroom fixtures of gold? Why bother, after so many decades? There is no insulting someone who lives in a self-reinforcing fantasy world.

Liberals: Don’t Even Consider Gloating About Donald Trump
The Editors
The New Republic, April 29, 2011

This is a catastrophe for America.

Now that Donald Trump appears on the verge of launching a presidential campaign, it is worth reflecting on the meaning of this low moment in American political history. Trump is a clown and a buffoon, and the odds of him winning even one Republican caucus or primary appear slim. But there is no denying that Trump has managed to tap into something genuinely worrisome in American politics. Democrats may be tempted to take pleasure in the fact that Trump will likely push the GOP presidential field to the right, and thereby help Obama in 2012. But this would be sheer myopia, and any delight over Trump’s arrival on the political scene is entirely misplaced. The Trump ascendancy calls not for glee, but for serious concern about the state of our country.

Trump Roasted and Skewered at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
By Mike Vilensky
New York, May 1, 2011

Barack Obama: “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately but no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? All kidding aside, we all know about your credentials, and your breadth of experience. For example, on a recent episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the men from Omaha Steaks. There was lots of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. Ultimately, you didn’t blame (rapper) Lil Jon or (singer) Meatloaf, you fired Gary Busey. These are the kinds of decisions that keep me up at night. Well handled, sir! Well handled.”

After Roasting, Trump Reacts In Character
By Michael Barbaro
New York Times, May 1, 2011

He was savagely mocked by President Obama and the comedian Seth Meyers at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — belittled as a political charlatan with an unchecked ego and a dead fox plastered on his head. 

But the next morning, Donald J. Trump was not laughing. He was doing what seems to come more naturally: lashing out. 

“Seth Meyers has no talent,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on Sunday. “He fell totally flat. In fact, I thought Seth’s delivery was so bad that he hurt himself.”

Mr. Trump, who appeared unsmiling throughout most of the annual dinner on Saturday night, acknowledged his occasional discomfort (“I am not looking to laugh along with my enemies”) but said he viewed the rough treatment as a measure of the fear he had struck in the Washington establishment. “It was like a roast of Donald Trump,” he said, clearly reveling in the attention, if not the content.

Donald Trump and the White Nationalists
By Evan Osnos
New Yorker, August 24, 2015

Trump’s candidacy has already left a durable mark, expanding the discourse of hate such that, in the midst of his feuds and provocations, we barely even registered that Senator Ted Cruz had called the sitting President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” or that Senator Marco Rubio had redoubled his opposition to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or a mortal threat to the mother. Trump has bequeathed a concoction of celebrity, wealth, and alienation that is more potent than any we’ve seen before. If, as the Republican establishment hopes, the stargazers eventually defect, Trump will be left with the hardest core — the portion of the electorate that is drifting deeper into unreality, with no reconciliation in sight.

Trump Seriously: On the Trail With the GOP’s Tough Guy
By Paul Solotaroff
Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015

This past June, Donald John Trump rode down the escalator in the five-story, pink-marble atrium of Manhattan’s Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for president of the United States. Since then, he has been mocked and reviled, worshipped and courted, and, till very lately, dismissed as a fever dream of the torch-and-pitchfork segment of the Republican Party. Entering stage far-right with wing-nut invective — the people coming across our border are “rapists” and “killers” who routinely commit “great amounts of crime” — he has dominated the race since the day he got in it and posted a large and durable lead ever since. The caveat: His negatives are through the roof. About a third of registered Republicans likely to vote next year say they’d never pull the lever for him. 

This Donald Trump Interview Is the Best. You’re Gonna Love It.
By Chris Heath
GQ, November 23, 2015

Some aspects of the Donald Trump experience are almost — but not quite — immune to parody. Throughout a year in which he has had some strange and deep effect on American politics, he has done a number of interviews here at his desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, Central Park stretching out in the distance behind him. Many of these encounters relay the same Trumpian idiosyncrasies — the way he always has impressive hot-off-the-press poll data to share, for instance, or the pleasure he takes in showing off the packed wall of Donald Trump magazine covers going back over 30 years (“cheaper than wallpaper,” he told 60 Minutes), or the hyperbolic descriptions of his lifetime achievements.

And no matter how many articles make note of these habits, or try to lampoon them, he’s not giving them up. As I enter his office and take a seat at the opposite side of his desk — I don’t offer a handshake, nor does he — he immediately hands me a sheet of paper. “Okay, that’s for you,” he says warmly. “Nice poll. Just came out.” Between us, lined up along the front of his desk, are stacks of all of the recent magazines with his face on the cover — Rolling Stone, Time, People, Newsweek, New York,multiple copies of each, as though as an additional sideline he has opened the world’s most narrowly focused newsstand.

Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private
By Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey
New York Times,  May 14, 2016

Donald Trump and women: The words evoke a familiar cascade of casual insults, hurled from the safe distance of a Twitter account, a radio show or a campaign podium. This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president: degrading, impersonal, performed. “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” he told a female contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Rosie O’Donnell, he said, had a “fat, ugly face.” A lawyer who needed to pump milk for a newborn? “Disgusting,” he said…

The New York Times interviewed dozens of women who had worked with or for Mr. Trump over the past four decades, in the worlds of real estate, modeling and pageants; women who had dated him or interacted with him socially; and women and men who had closely observed his conduct since his adolescence. In all, more than 50 interviews were conducted over the course of six weeks.

Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity
By Ronan Farrow 
New Yorker, February 16, 2018

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me—telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you—I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

Hideous Men
By E. Jean Carroll 
New York, June 24, 2019

Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.

His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.

Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire
New York Times, September 27, 2020 

While Mr. Trump crisscrossed the country in 2015 describing himself as uniquely qualified to be president because he was “really rich” and had “built a great company,” his accountants back in New York were busy putting the finishing touches on his 2014 tax return.

After tabulating all the profits and losses from Mr. Trump’s various endeavors on Form 1040, the accountants came to Line 56, where they had to enter the total income tax the candidate was required to pay. They needed space for only a single figure.

Zero.

For Mr. Trump, that bottom line must have looked familiar. It was the fourth year in a row that he had not paid a penny of federal income taxes.

Can America Restore the Rule of Law Without Prosecuting Trump?
By Jonathan Mahler
New York Times, November 22, 2020

How does the country move on from a president whose disregard for the law has been so constant and pervasive? Every president seeks to exploit the immense power of the office, but Trump’s exploitation of this power represented a difference in both degree and kind. Never before had a president leveraged so much of the “energy” of the executive branch — Alexander Hamilton’s word — to advance his personal interests. Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush stretched the limits of their authority in the name of national security. Trump stretched the limits of his authority not just to enrich himself and his family but to block investigations into his personal and official conduct and to maintain his grip on power.

Donald Trump’s Final Campaign
By Olivia Nuzzi
New York, December 23, 2022

The plan in 2016 was to prove the haters wrong by running, to poll well enough to be able to say he could have won, and to return to the fifth floor of his building where he filmed The Apprentice, his NBC reality show. But NBC killed his contract over his comments about Mexico sending rapists across the border. He no longer had a vehicle for the attention he required. He had to keep going. The fifth floor became campaign headquarters. Trump was always his most Trump when he was in a bind. “That’s the Trump you want: You want him defensive, you want him belligerent,” a member of the current campaign staff told me. But that’s not how Trump sounded now. He sounded old all of a sudden. Tired. There was a heaviness to him. A hollowness, too. He will turn 77 in June.

Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This
By Charles Homans
New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2024

Trump’s critics were right in 2016 to observe the grim novelty of his politics: their ideology of national pessimism, their open demagoguery and clear affinities with the far right, their blunt division of the country into us and them in a way that no major party’s presidential nominee had dared for decades. But Trump’s great accomplishment, one that was less visible from a distance but immediately apparent at his rallies, was the us that he conjured there: the way his supporters saw not only him but one another, and saw in themselves a movement.

That us is still there in Trump’s 2024 speeches. But it is not really the main character anymore. These speeches, and the events that surround them, are about them—what they have done to Trump, and what Trump intends to do in return.

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