Trump Revealed Read online

  Praise for Trump Revealed

  “The most complete and nuanced life of Trump thus far.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The most definitive book about Trump to date.”

  —Booklist

  “Talented writers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher have taken the work of dozens of Post journalists and woven it into a compelling narrative. . . . The best of investigative reporting . . . Voters can’t say they weren’t warned.”

  —USA Today

  “The many revealing scenes cohere into a fascinating portrait. . . . Trump the outrageous poseur becomes sadder and more real in this fine book.”

  —Evan Thomas, The Washington Post

  “Useful, vigorously reported . . . deftly charts [Trump’s] single-minded building of his gaudy brand and his often masterful manipulation of the media.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Three hundred and forty-seven well-reported pages.”

  —VICE

  “Those willing and brave enough to dare these pages will find the authors’ approach evenhanded . . . in preference to allowing Trump plenty of rope—and suffice it to say that Trump unrolls miles of it.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Although I have fussed, fumed, and fulminated, I see that I have, frankly, not understood all there is to understand about Mr. Trump. . . . I guarantee that reading about this particular life is incredible. It has taken genuine intelligent research to realize it. Page after page, it’s all convincing. I think you’ll be startled by the cumulate facts. . . . I wish I had read it before, but I simply didn’t know the half of it.”

  —Liz Smith, New York Social Diary

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  CONTENTS

  * * *

  About This Book

  Prologue: “Presidential”

  Chapter One: Gold Rush: The New Land

  Chapter Two: Stink Bombs, Switchblades, and a Three-Piece Suit

  Chapter Three: Father and Son

  Chapter Four: Roy Cohn and the Art of the Counterattack

  Chapter Five: Crossing the Bridge

  Chapter Six: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had”

  Chapter Seven: All In

  Chapter Eight: Cold Winds

  Chapter Nine: The Chase

  Chapter Ten: A League of His Own

  Chapter Eleven: The Great Unraveling

  Chapter Twelve: Ratings Machine

  Chapter Thirteen: The Name Game

  Chapter Fourteen: Empire

  Chapter Fifteen: Showman

  Chapter Sixteen: Political Chameleon

  Chapter Seventeen: The Worth of a Man

  Chapter Eighteen: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

  Epilogue: Law and Order

  Afterword: President Trump

  Acknowledgments

  About Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher

  Notes

  Index

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  * * *

  Every four years, reporters at the Washington Post explore the lives and careers of the presidential nominees. The idea is to learn as much as possible about how the candidates think, decide, and act; to examine their past in order to glean how they might behave in the future. In late March 2016, with both parties’ nomination contests still unresolved, the Post’s editors decided they had to get started on the extensive research and reporting necessary to produce comprehensive biographical studies of each candidate in the general election. Post editors assembled large teams of reporters to look into the work and backgrounds of the likely nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Both teams had the same charge, but Trump presented a unique challenge: he would be the first major party nominee for president in more than half a century—the first since Dwight Eisenhower—to rise to that status without having held elective office.

  The Post assigned more than twenty reporters, two fact-checkers, and three editors to examine Trump’s life. In about three months, they were to produce this book and more than thirty articles for the Post, with the goal of chronicling and understanding everything from Trump’s family background through his childhood, career, and political evolution. We sent reporters to his ancestral homes in Germany and Scotland, to his childhood neighborhood in Queens and his boarding school in upstate New York, to his college campuses in the Bronx and Philadelphia, and to his business ventures in Atlantic City, Panama, Russia, and Azerbaijan. We visited and spoke with Trump’s relatives, classmates, friends, competitors, business partners, executives and employees, boosters, and critics.

  • • •

  This book is the work of an extraordinarily dedicated and talented group of reporters and editors: Jenna Johnson and Frances Sellers traveled far and wide to explore the Trump family’s roots. Michael Miller and Paul Schwartzman reached back to Trump’s childhood to find playmates, classmates, teachers, and neighbors. Robert O’Harrow and Shawn Boburg explored Trump’s complicated finances and real estate transactions in Atlantic City and New York, and Bob Woodward provided key interviews and guidance as we learned how Trump built his businesses. Drew Harwell traced the roots of the Trump Organization in Manhattan and Will Hobson delved into the evolution of Trump’s decades-long love-hate relationship with the news media as well as his ventures in the world of professional sports. Mary Jordan and Karen Heller chronicled Trump’s relationships with women, including his wives, girlfriends, and female executives. Amy Goldstein and Jerry Markon examined the ups and downs of Trump’s casinos and other ventures during a particularly difficult stretch of his career, and Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger traced how Trump reshaped his empire into a brand based on his name and popular image. Robert Samuels explored Trump’s politics through the years and Kevin Sullivan traveled around the globe to examine the international ventures. Dan Balz went deep inside the 2016 campaign to understand how and why Trump emerged from the big pack of Republican candidates. Nearly all of these reporters also worked on other aspects of this book, which also benefited greatly from work by Post reporters Dan Zak, Ben Terris, Michael Birnbaum, Ian Shapira, Steve Hendrix, David A. Fahrenthold, Karen Tumulty, Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, and Janell Ross; researcher Alice Crites; and financial columnist Allan Sloan. Researchers Julie Tate and Lucy Shackelford painstakingly fact-checked the book, and photo editor Bronwen Latimer organized the book’s picture section. Editors Scott Wilson, Steven Ginsberg, and Peter Wallsten played a critical role in shaping the reporting and reading every draft as the process unfolded. The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, and managing editor, Cameron Barr, were adamant from the start that this biography be as comprehensive and penetrating as possible, and they made an extraordinary commitment of resources to back that goal.

  Trump made himself available for more than twenty hours of interviews with many of the reporters who worked on this book. He also made his lawyer and some members of his campaign staff available. He turned down our requests to speak to his siblings or to lift the restrictions he’d imposed on his many current and former executives who signed nondisclosure agreements when they worked for Trump. He also declined to give us access to his income tax returns, something that every other presidential nominee in modern history has made available to the public. Throughout the process, Trump said he hoped and expected that this book would be accurate and fair, and we assured him that that was indeed our chief goal. To give readers every opportunity to delve into the record of Trump’s life for themselves,
and to demonstrate that every assertion in this book is backed up by documents, interviews, and other research, we put thousands of pages of our background materials for the book online for all to see. That archive is available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-revealed-book-reporting-archive/. At many points along the way, Trump also told us that if he didn’t like the book, he wouldn’t hesitate to denounce it or to take action against it. On the same day that he first agreed to be interviewed for this book, he told the New York Post that the project was “ridiculous.” Then, on the evening before this book was published, Trump tweeted, “The @WashingtonPost quickly put together a hit job book on me. . . . Don’t buy, boring!” Trump had not yet seen the book when he sent out that tweet. As best we can tell, he has lived up to his promise to us that he would not read the book.

  Donald Trump has lived by the credo that all attention, fawning or critical or somewhere in between, accrues to his benefit, that his personal image defines his brand, that he is his brand. We began this reporting on the theory that Trump, like anyone else, is far more than his reputation or brand. We conclude this work on that same note, having discovered that the man elected as the nation’s 45th president is far more complex than his simple language might indicate, that his motivations and values are informed by his parents, his upbringing, his victories and his defeats, and his lifelong quest for love and acceptance. What follows is the man we have come to know.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  “Presidential”

  He was the front-runner now, and for his next act, he would become presidential. His son and his daughter and his wife had told him he had to do this, had to show his more thoughtful, calmer side. And he had told them, “I can be very presidential.” He had laughed and said, “I can be more presidential than any president that this country has ever had, except for Abraham Lincoln, because . . . you can’t out-top Abraham Lincoln.” And now here he was, in the nation’s capital, in the belly of the beast, showing them all that he could do this. He would meet with a US senator—a senator who was supporting him, the kid from Queens, the bad boy of New York real estate—at the offices of one of the capital’s top law firms. He would talk foreign policy with a roomful of Washington wonks. He would read a speech from a teleprompter, the tool he’d long made fun of, the crutch that political losers used. He would name some of the insiders who would advise him in the White House, even though he would, of course, remain his own chief adviser, because he knew this stuff better than anyone else. On one crystalline spring day in 2016, the leader in the race for the Republican nomination for president of the United States would field whatever sharp questions the editorial board of the Washington Post might throw at him. He’d address the tough crowd at AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most influential lobbies in the most important city in the world, a group whose members were increasingly calling his campaign frightening, even demagogic. And just because he was in Washington—where he was, by the way, building what would be one of his company’s signature hotels—he’d lead the jackals of the media through the construction site, showing off the thick granite and the top-shelf marble. He would beam and jut his jaw as he announced that his hotel was coming in way ahead of schedule and under budget, “and we have almost three hundred rooms, superluxury,” and “we are going to employ substantially more than five hundred people, at least five hundred people.”

  It would be an important day in the grand campaign to Make America Great Again. He would show just how multifaceted he was, now the populist man of the moment, egging on huge crowds in ever-bigger arenas, complimenting them for bursting out of silent-majority status and becoming “a very, very aggressive, very, very noisy, loud majority,” and then, the next day, he would be the elegant, serious, principled—yes, presidential—front-runner. This is the real deal, he was saying, and there would be no denying the will of the people. Donald Trump—scion of a self-made man who built modest homes for the middle class, brash kid who crossed the bridge and took Manhattan, braggadocian developer who plated everything with gold, the man who made Atlantic City great again (until it collapsed again), the entertainer who was a self-described “ratings machine”—stood now in the biggest room in the nation’s capital, delivering an address, every word of which would be examined as if he were already the president. Trump—the fringe candidate who turned the Republican Party upside down, the billionaire who persuaded millions of Americans that he best understood their frustrations and aspirations—this political novice, this proud outsider, had outsmarted the experts and the consultants and the insiders, the whole cabal of the powerful and the self-righteous who had driven this city into an embarrassing paralysis. In weeks, the sideshow had become the main event. Now he was the star of just the kind of day that there would be hundreds of once he became President Trump, days devoted to “making this a country again,” taking it back, making it great, bringing back the jobs, keeping out the Mexicans and the Muslims, “winning, winning, winning.” “Bam!” he’d say at his raucous rallies. Bam!—and the evil terrorists of ISIS would be wiped out. Bam!—and the same companies that had exported American jobs would bring them back. Bam!—and Mexico would pay for the wall to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States. Bam!—a great country, again.

  • • •

  HE’D BEEN IN THE spotlight nearly all of his adult life. He was still in his thirties when he became a single-name celebrity, like Madonna or Beyoncé, like a rock star or a president, his name, in ALL CAPS, gold plated, on buildings and airplanes and shirts and wine bottles (even though he says he’s never had a drink in his life). He was the rare billionaire who shunned privacy, who invited cameras to focus on the ego wall in his office. He flaunted his wealth, spent ostentatiously, worked the media to keep himself on the gossip pages and the business pages and the sports pages and the front pages. He would, his detractors said, attend the opening of an envelope.

  He was, almost from the start, his own brand. He got there in good part by making a close study of everything said about him. He began his days with a sheaf of press clippings, his daily mentions. Even now, running for the most powerful position on the planet, a job that relies almost entirely on the power to persuade those around you, a job heavy on running a team and winning loyalty, even now Donald J. Trump said he made most of his decisions by himself, consulting no one: “I understand life,” he said. “And I understand how life works. I’m the Lone Ranger.”

  He knew how to be famous, he knew how to win numbers, get ratings, make people take notice. More than three decades before he decided he wanted to be president, he showed up on Gallup’s list of the ten men Americans most admired, running behind only the pope and some presidents. He’d made a lifelong study of how to create buzz. He had a hierarchy of attention in his mind. Glitz was one level up from flash, he said. Good PR was better than bad PR, but both were good. He was a curious, perhaps unique, blend of savvy showman and petulant, thin-skinned street brawler. He promoted himself with abandon, generating both fawning and ridicule. He was as likely to sue his critics as he was to tout his achievements. He was a proud, boastful winner who had also failed at more businesses than many moguls start in a lifetime. He took pride in demanding respect. He was rarely seen without jacket and tie. Even people who had worked closely with him for decades addressed him as “Mr. Trump.”

  Yet his language could shock people and he consistently laced his perceived enemies—and especially women—with slashing, coarse insults. His language sometimes seemed a string of slogans and simple, declarative sentences delivering simplistic ideas. This led some people to conclude that he was boorish, unthinking. He kind of liked that; it was the sort of thing he expected from the elitists who had sneered at him all his life. He boasted about a great deal, but he mostly kept quiet about what was going on deep inside. That came out only rarely, such as when he talked about the movies he loved. When he was asked about Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles clas
sic about an idealistic newspaper owner who acquires great wealth and loses his soul, Trump said, “Citizen Kane was really about accumulation, and at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens, and it’s not necessarily all positive. Not positive . . . In real life, I believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people. It’s a protective mechanism. You have your guard up, much more so than you would if you didn’t have wealth.”

  He fancied himself a man of the people, more interested in the praise of cabdrivers and construction workers than in accolades from the rich and the powerful. The people knew him and admired him, he said, and so he had always thought maybe the ultimate move might be to the White House. “Because I’ve had great success,” he said. “I’ve been very successful for a long period of time. I’ve always maybe had it in the back of my mind . . . always toward making the country better, or, as we say, making the country great again, right? . . . A very good slogan, which I came up with.”

  • • •

  ONE YEAR EARLIER, TO the day, this was all a dream, a fantasy. Trump was doing what he’d done just about every election cycle for decades, toying with the reporters, making the rounds of the radio talk shows and TV newscasts, hinting, teasing, smirking at the incompetent politicians, tantalizing audiences with the idea that he might bring his talent to bear on the woes of the world. On that March day in 2015, exactly one year before he would make his first “presidential” rounds in Washington, DC, the first wave of Republican wannabes had started to declare their intentions, and Trump was mentioned eighty-six times in the press. The Chicago Sun-Times asked him to weigh in on a local controversy about the possible landmarking of a skyscraper; Trump hated the idea of hemming in his fellow developers—if they, like Trump, wanted to make changes in historic buildings, they should be allowed to. In Palm Beach, Trump was lining up with homeowners to oppose an airport runway extension that would result in noisy jets roaring above his Mar-a-Lago estate. In Scotland, Trump reversed course and announced he was going ahead with a hotel and golf course development. At home in New York, an entertainment company staging a music, dance, and fashion show at Radio City Music Hall put out word that the performances would include a “celebrity video cameo” by Donald Trump.