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1Behind Trump's Political Fling
2by Christopher Byron
3
4In this world, everything is stage-set perfect. The attendant who parks your car is young and handsome. The receptionist who announces your arrival looks like the parking attendant's twin sister. Mr. Trump's "manservant" — Tony, by name — stands ready to welcome you; he is a dead ringer for Bruce Wayne's aging butler in Batman. The only giveaway that all is not as it seems on the day of my arrival is the animated discussion taking place between Tony and the receptionist, Tracey, as I enter. 
5
6It went like this:
7Tracey: "I don't want to call him. I'm afraid. He's in a yelling mood."
8Tony: "Go ahead. You've been working here for two years, and he hasn't killed you yet, has he?" Whereupon Tony turns to me and says, "Mr. Trump will be with you momentarily. 
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10He gestures toward the "living room," actually the astonishing Grand Salon and I enter. By and by Donald Trump presents himself before me and proceeds to hold court on topics ranging from his wealth ("huge") to his presidential ambitions ("we're considering the situation carefully"). As it happens, there is one other element to the proceedings that is not easy to overlook: the arrival, midway through the meeting, of a half-naked fashion model wrapped in a towel about the size of a dinner napkin, who approaches the two of us and joins the discussion. 
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12I'll get into what happened next in due course — and in detail — but, for the moment, it is enough to say that this is what I had waited a decade, and now had come a thousand miles, to see and hear and discover for myself: whether the official billionaire rascal of American real estate is indeed serious about running for president, or whether his campaigning is a publicity ploy to improve his bottom line.
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14When a friend recently asked Trump why he was running, Donald laughed — apparently only partly in jest — and answered, "It's a good way to raise the rents." My goal was to find out whether he was (a) as rich as he claims to be, (b) as serious about running for president as he suggests, and (c) as cynical as that "raise the rents" answer makes him sound. 
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16What I found, in the end, was what I suppose I had suspected all along — that the answer to all three questions is ultimately "no." But so what? Whether Trump is even a fraction as rich as he says (which is almost certainly not the case) or stands any chance at all of becoming president is ultimately a nitpick. When it comes to understanding Donald Trump, what's most important is to grasp what matters the most to him, and that is how well he's been performing in his lifetime starring role of living rich as the best revenge — and on that score he's basically retired the cup.
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18For nearly a quarter century now, Trump has held himself forth before the public as an enduring testament to the Cerebrus-like proposition that (a) ostentation is its own reward and (b) what you've got is less important than what people think you've got — whether you've got anything or not. And who cannot admire the finesse with which he's pulled it all off — even to the point of twice in his life transforming a fling at presidential campaigning into a profit-making opportunity.
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20At the dawn of the third millennium, Donald Trump is America — a creation of limitless possibilities, ever reinventing itself, bold, noisy, juvenile, shallow, obsessed with material gain, but with a smile to the world as wide as all outdoors. Who can't like a country like that, or admire a businessman who has invented himself in its image? If America is a Great Country, then Donald Trump is a Great Guy. It's as simple as that.
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22In a culture that exists on the come, in which debt and desire axe the interchangeable images in the pop art called the American Experience, it was Trump, after all, who in the mid-1980s bought the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach — one of the most ornate, lavish, overwrought residences in the world — for next to nothing down. (Donald says it was $1 million down.) Then, to save it from seizure by creditors as his business empire crumbled, he turned it into a kind of real-life Love Boat for status-hungry businessmen you've never heard of. Trump sells memberships to the place for $100,000 a pop, which is not a bad way to pay the bills.
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24In those cable-TV infomercials in which real estate promoter Carlton Sheets shows America's late-night insomniacs how to buy real estate for almost no money down, then turn it into income-producing property, Donald Trump is the ultimate model — the man who actually did it. He lives like a billionaire by simply borrowing the money, and betting that the endless bounty of the American economy — and his own endlessly flowing blather and blarney — will bail him out. 
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26It takes nerves of titanium to attempt that kind of a titanium to attempt that kind of a stunt even once in your life, let alone to pull it off successfully time after time until it becomes your whole career. But that is precisely what Trump has done: He's made living like the richest man in America America seem at least as good as actually being that person. To quote a line from the comic Billy Crystal's send-up of Latin film idol Fernando, "It's better to look marvelous than to feel marvelous."
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28The really intriguing question left about Donald Trump today is this: Will he seriously pursue the Reform party's nomination for president, or is all his talk just part of his self-promoting act, as he swells himself up, larger and larger, until the dimensions of his majesty block out even the sun?
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30As I write this, I don't know the answer for sure. Maybe Trump doesn't either. But whether he ratchets up his campaign or bows out is beside the point. One need only revisit his history to see what this — his second flirtation with the White House since the late 1980s — is all about: In a presidential election year built of bathtub rings and name-the-leader-of-Azerbaijan foreign affairs tests, Trump stands apart as the candidate who manifestly and obviously is in it for the money. Or, as Trump boasted to George, "I'm the only one who makes money when he runs." To dispel all doubts, he added, "I got a fortune for the book I came out with. Also, I'm the highest-paid speaker out there. I'm making 12 speeches this year at $100,000 each." Not to mention his other profit-making angles.
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32It is perhaps a measure of the current American temperament that few people seem to regard his obsession with money as diminishing his qualifications for the job in any way. It is as if wealth and leadership in America have become flip sides of the same coin, so that the ostentatious display of the former is now seen as a way to demonstrate competence in the latter.
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34If so, Trump is certainly a man for his time, for rarely does one encounter a person more devoted than he — through good times and bad, from triumph to failure and back again — to the narcissistic lifelong adoration of his reflection in the mirror of high finance. That is where we found him nearly 35 years ago, as a young man fresh out of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, working in his father's real estate office in Brooklyn while yearning to join the fast-track crowd of East Side socialites across the river in Manhattan.
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36Now, at the age of 54 — after two failed marriages and a humiliating $900 million prepackaged bankruptcy — that is where we find him, still seeking, Gatsby-Like, to impress the impressionable with his closets of monogrammed shirts, while holding himself forth to the worth as a possible candidate for president of the United States. As he told ABC TV's Cokie Roberts recently, "if you look at the other candidates — give me a break. Now, I made billions of dollars. Do you think that they would have made billions of dollars? I don't think so."
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38Trump is, in fact, hardly as wealthy as he claims to be — a condition that has dogged him for his entire adult life. He is the only even semiofficial candidate for president who has a private plane — a vintage Boeing 727 jet — registered in the offshore tax-haven domicile of Bermuda. "I play by the rules," Trump said to me at Mar-a-Lago, "and the rules say I can keep a plan in Bermuda, so I do."
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40Trump likes to create the impression that he owns the General Motors building in New York City, but when questioned on the matter, he agrees that he actually owns only half of it. And it is mortgaged, so, for all practical purposes, he owns very little of it. In addition, he owns only 40 percent of the Trump Tower project he is now constructing near the United Nations — and the stakes of both he and his 60 percent majority partner in the project are dwarfed by the debt on it held by a German bank. Many of his other high-profile projects of years past have disappeared in bankruptcy proceedings, or his interest around them has been sharply reduced.
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42Even the beautiful 26-year-old model, Melania Knauss, whom he paraded around as his potential first lady until their recent breakup, is something of an illusion. The press has taken to describing her as a fashion "supermodel," in much the way they uncritically fawned over his first wife, Ivana, as a top model and an "Olympic skier," two images that Trump did much to help cultivate. But just as Ivana seems to have been, at most, a barely known model prior to hooking up with him, Melania Knauss was largely unknown prior to her yearlong romance with Trump. She earned a good living, to be sure. But her status as a supermodel, whatever that means, was bestowed by the media only after Trump began incessantly introducing her that way as she hung on his arm at public functions. 
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44As with everything else about Donald, you can hear the jingle of coins in the background. In reality, Melania Knauss is represented by a modeling agency owned by Trump, T Management. Since beginning her high-profile life as Trump's love interest, Knauss has seen her day rate double, from $5,000 a day two years ago to $10,000 a day now. And because she is represented by Trump's agency, 20 percent of her modeling fees go to Trump, who also collects another 20 percent from agencies and publishing companies that hire her. That is an even richer take-off than Trump took from the labors of his second wife, Marla Maples, whose short-lived career as a Broadway actress blossomed from her association with Trump. He pocketed 30 percent of her earnings.
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46Nonetheless, once every decade or so Trump begins reminding folks that millions upon millions of them would like nothing better than to have him as their president, and up rockets his public image — and his income. Up go the sales of whatever ghosted autobiography he happens to have in the stores at the moment, up go the rental values of his apartments, in come more day-tripping gamblers lured to his Atlantic City casinos — in short, up goes the market price of the most valuable, and promotable, possession Trump has: his name.
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48Then, like the Kenny Rogers character who "knows when to hold 'em, and knows when to fold 'em," he simply places his cards facedown on the table, sweeps his winnings into his lap, and exits the quadrennial poker game without ever showing his hand — namely, the obligatory audited personal financial statement, required of serious candidates, that would reveal how modestly wealthy, relatively speaking, he really is. Forbes magazine currently pegs his net worth at $1.6 billion, but the magazine's editors say the total could be far lower. They do know, however, that much of his wealth is not from his own wheeling and dealing, but simply represents the Queens, New York, apartment buildings he inherited from his father, Fred. 
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50Be that as it may, Trump's many critics have already dismissed his political ambitions as being half-hearted, self-indulgent, and (roll the drums for this one, please) Not Serious — the ravings of a confused rich man in the grips of a midlife crisis. But that misses the point because, when it comes to Donald Trump, the name of the game isn't delivering the goods; it's the Art of the Process. 
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52Trump has already come so far ahead financially that actually becoming president would be a setback. Sure, he'd get to live in the White House and fly around on Air Force One. But he's already got the run of Mar-a-Lago (which may be more garish but is certainly bigger than Casa Blanca), and he's got his own plushed-out Boeing 727.  Worse, if he did, by some miracle, become president of the United States, he wouldn't be able to run his businesses anymore, and would have to scrape by on a rotten $400,000 a year, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  No one who knows Donald Trump can imagine him allowing others to take over the management of his business and financial affairs for a single minute.
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54We could therefore say, with only slight poetic license, that in his second flirtation with the presidency, Donald Trump is in a race he's already won. Says Michael Bruneau, senior vice president of the Lund Group, a boutique New York public relations firm, "In almost no time at all, Trump has graduated from the gossip pages to Meet the Press. I tuned in Don Imus on the radio the other day and heard Dan Rather describe Trump as a 'really smart guy.' This kind of is so huge that its value is incalculable. If I were Donald's flack, I'd send him a bill that even he would choke on."
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56New York advertising personality Jerry Della Femina agrees.  "What's it worth for a casino operator to get himself transformed into presidential material?" asks Della Femina.  "I dunno, $500 million maybe?"
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58But Jack O'Dwyer, the dean of New York public relations men, says he thinks Trump is playing a dangerous game by toying with the presidency. "Publicity is like a football," says O'Dwyer. "You never know which way it's going to bounce next. One false move and he could have the whole country laughing at him." In the short-attention-span theater of American politics, what O'Dwyer and others forget, of course, is that Trump has been down this road before, and the more he travels it, the better he gets at avoiding the potholes. In his recitation of events, the genesis of his current presidential sort-of campaign was when a real estate trade publication carried an article last fall that described him as presidential timber. Almost instantly, says Trump, his office was besieged with calls — from Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, everyone — all wanting to know if he was planning to run. So Trump just tossed the ball to his good friend and "great guy," Republican party campaign adviser Roger Stone, who decided to test the waters by setting up an exploratory committee.
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60A plausible scenario? Sure, except that it bears an eerie resemblance to certain events that unfolded 13 years ago. That's when Trump invented his "Trump for President" stunt. Back then, in the autumn of 1987, his goal was to gain national recognition to stimulate sales of his first book, Trump: The Art of the Deal. And he recruited many of the same characters who are involved this time, too, most notably Stone, the Republican campaign apparatchik who's been his Washington, D.C. lobbyist for the past 18 years. The campaign even featured a softball segment on 20/20, hosted by Barbara Walters, and a Stone-concocted "open letter" on U.S. defense policy, which ran in The New York Times. Then, when Trump's book leaped onto the best-seller list for the next 48 weeks, Dona'd campaign for the presidency faded away until nothing remained but the smile of a Chesire cat.
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62Thirteen years later, memories as well have faded, and a whole new set of media acolytes have emerged to play his foil. There's Stone Phillips and Tim Russert, both of NBC, nodding dutifully to Trump's pronunciamentos on tax policy in set-piece interviews. There's Chris Matthews and Geraldo Rivera sounding awestruck when each in turn asks him how rich he—and he answers that, frankly, he really doesn't know how many billions he's got.
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64I asked Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz to explain the press's groveling approach to the Trump candidacy, and he said, "Donald Trump is a master at finding the media's G spot. He knows journalists go gaga over the idea of a gold-plated developer running for president with a superbabe on his arm. And reporters are all too happy to suspend disbelief — about his finances and his campaign — so they can ride on the Trump jet and chronicle the Trump lifestyle, which is a lot more interesting than writing about Steve Forbes." 
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66Meanwhile, lurking just offstage, we once again find the indefatigable Stone, cobbling together talking-point papers on everything from taxing the rich to negotiating trade deals with Japan. In January, Stone told the Associated Press that "if" Trump decides to run, he'll conduct a "fireside chat" with the American people on all the major networks in the spring. The idea is for Trump to spend part of the $10 million of his money that he's earmarked for his race for the Reform party nomination on a five-minute block of the same time slot on all five major networks: CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and Fox.
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68Whatever happens on the TV front, Renaissance Books is shipping book four of the FrankenTrump saga, his campaign manifesto, The America We Deserve, to stores, and Trump is hawking it hard.
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70When Donald Trump and I first came face-to-face a decade ago, it was a rather oddly orchestrated get-together. Word reached him, via a mutual acquaintance in the media, that I was preparing to write a column vouchsafing the opinion that, his blustering, blowhard self-absorption notwithstanding, he was probably a net positive for New York — at least, insofar as the local economy was concerned. Scarcely had this pearl of medium-priced wisdom dropped form my lips than he was on the phone with me, telling me what a "great guy" I was and how much he had admired my writing over the years. Then he invited me to his office on Fifth Avenue to hear those very sentiments expressed directly from his lips.
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72I recall two things in particular about that meeting. His entire office wall, large enough for at least a half-court game of jai alai, was covered end-to-end and top to bottom with framed magazine photographs of himself. Also, he spent most of the meeting explaining to me how wealthy he was, as evidenced by the nightly gambling take at the Taj Mahal in New Jersey ("the greatest casino resort in the world!") and his ownership of a 282-foot yacht that had previously belonged to Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
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74I also remember that no sooner had I returned to my office, a 15-minute walk from his headquarters on Fifty Avenue, when a messenger arrived with a note. Inscribed on paper so heavy it could have been parchment, the note told me how much he, Donald, enjoyed a book I'd recently written and how he'd already recommended it to two of his "top friends." Not long afterward, I wrote a column that nonetheless suggested that Mr. Trump had a lower net worth than many believed. A decade went by without another peep or glance in my direction from the man.
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76During that time, Trump's businesses and two marriages collapsed, various properties slid into bankruptcy, and he was forced to sell his yacht as well as his airline (he had once owned the old Eastern Airlines shuttle service from New York to Washington, D.C.). His ownership of the Plaza Hotel was stripped from him, he lost his mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he even wound up having to turn his treasured Mar-a-Lago into a spa open to the paying public.
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78From having had the run of Mar-a-Lago's 118 rooms as his own palatial romper room, Trump was reduced to living quarters in a single wing, managing the rest in the manner of a threadbare British duke who is forced to raise funds by turning the ancestral barony into a drive-through zoo where weekenders from London come to pay a few quid and gaze at the rhinos and giraffes. From a man with a claimed net worth of more than $1.5 billion, he had emerged as America's most preposterously enormous deadbeat. In the midst of all this, he and Marla Maples were walking down Fifth Avenue one day and passed a panhandler on the street. Trump looked at her and said, "That guy's better off than I am. At least he's got nothing. I'm $900 million in the hole."
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80One way or another, Trump's problems can all be traced to his involvement in the gambling business of Atlantic City — the source of most of the cash and calamity in his life over the past 20 years. Atlantic City had been the arena in which he found the glamour and the cash flow to concoct his image as a kind of early Howard Hughes. But the siren song of the slot machines and craps tables was also the reason for his collapse into a prepackaged bankruptcy reorganization — from which he emerged as only a minority owner in a business he once owned outright. The fiasco in Atlantic City also led to the bank-directed reorganization of his real estate holdings, reducing him to little more than a manager of buildings he once owned. 
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82Yet, by 1997, Trump was back, more boastful than ever, recalled to life in one of the shrewdest maneuvers in the history of high finance. Convinced by his top adviser and chief financial officer, Stephen Bollenbach — who had been hired away from Holiday Corp. at the behest of Trump's creditors — that the banks to which he owed billions needed him even more than he needed them. Trump negotiated what turned out to be a highly beneficial bankruptcy deal. In it, he agreed to shed various real estate holdings and lifestyle accoutrements in return for being permitted to keep the wildly indebted Atlantic City casino and hotel properties that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.
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84Trump's reasoning? Although the gambling industry was then in recession, as was most of the economy, both he and Bollenbach figured the Atlantic City market was destined to recover in a big way, if for no other reason than its close proximity to the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., markets.
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86Then, having maneuvered the banks out of any role in his casino operations, Trump began issuing more debt while siphoning off the resulting cash and rebuilding his real estate empire all over again.
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88In June 1995, he tapped into the Wall Street equity market, bundling one of his Atlantic City properties — the Trump Plaza Hotel — together with some blue-sky plans for a riverboat gambling operation outside Chicago, and taking the thing public in a complex IPO transaction. In the deal, Trump sold 60 percent of the resulting company to the public for $140 million, an offering price of $14 per share — a transaction that boosted the market value of his take in the company to $93 million.
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90This offering, plus a 15.5 percent junk bond issue, raised nearly $300 million for Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, and as the company's largest single — and controlling — shareholder, Trump was suddenly back in the game.
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92Soon deals were flying in all directions. First came Trump's move to climb out from under his money-losing 50 percent stake in Atlantic City's Taj Mahal. The Taj, a minaret-domed complex spread over 17 acres that is visible from far out at sea, had cost Trump $675 million in junk bond financing, but wound up cannibalizing business from his other gaming properties from the moment it opened. So he sold the business to Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts for $40.5 million in company stock. Then, several weeks later, he did the same thing with the third — and weakest — of his Atlantic City properties, the Trump Castle. He dumped that one on the public company for $133 million more in stock and cash.
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94Along the way, there were more junk bond financings and more debt reshuffling — and with each one, more millions seemed to tumble into Trump's personal pocket. As Trump himself confessed in book three of the FrankenTrump saga: "If truth be known, without Atlantic City it is highly unlikely that Random House would have asked me to write this book, because it was the tremendous cash flow from Atlantic City that enabled me to escape the tough times of the early 1990s."
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96But what was good for him as not so good for his shareholders. By siphoning off cash, Trump weakened the very casino operations that had saved him from ruin. In the process, the public's stock in Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts crashed from a high of $35 per share three years ago to around $3 per share now, as nearly $2 billion of debt was piled back onto the balance sheet.
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98Look, I'm telling you, I've let that situation slide, okay?" Trump said to me at Mar-a-Lago. "But I'm going to be getting involved in it big-time right after the first of the year." Then, as if to reassure me that things were okay with him personally, even if his investors had gotten soaked, he added, "Anyway, it's only a small portion of my wealth. You want to be looking at the real estate, really." 
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100That, unfortunately, is easier said than done, since Trump, who seems obsessed with sticking his name on anything he comes within 20 feet of, has hidden his real estate interests — especially especially the debt on them — behind blanket after blanket of anonymous corporate filings and then goes to almost comical lengths to reassure the curious that he's got nothing to hide. 
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102Author Harry Hurt III, whose definitive biography — Lost Tycoon, The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (WW Norton, 1993) — infuriated Trump for its page after page of unflattering revelations, quotes one Trump executive as saying regarding the company's real estate finances: "It was all a shell game. We never had any unencumbered cash. We were already creating new partnerships and corporate entities to shift the money around. We were always robbing Peter to pay Paul."
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104In Lost Tycoon, Hurt tells of a 1988 Trump scheme to inflate himself from the status of a borrowed-to-the-hilt, low-millions real estate developer into the ranks of an actual, out-and-out billionaire. Why? All the easier to borrow more money from gullible bankers to keep his deal machine spinning. To that end, Trump had his organization prepare a bogus net worth statement that pegged his worth at $3.7 billion by wildly inflating the value of his assets, and then circulated it to the press. The ploy helped convince Fortune to proclaim him an authentic billionaire that autumn, and that publicity in turn helped him secure the financing to buy the Eastern Airlines Shuttle and, thereafter, the Taj Mahal. 
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106A decade later and Trump was up to the same tricks. Having been dropped from Forbes magazine's list of America's 400 richest people in 1990, not to reappear again until the turnaround in Atlantic City and his IPO for Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts in 1996, Trump wasted no time trying to boost his net worth as calculated by Forbes' editors. "he spent close to an hour with me trying to get our estimates up," says Laurence Minard, the former editor of the "Forbes 400" issue. "It was astonishing. He haggled over everything."
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108Minard's colleague Peter Newcomb, who directs research for the list, now adds, "We're currently putting his net worth at $1.6 billion, but it is very difficult to know. Much of his money seems to be coming from nothing more than the real estate he inherited from his father."
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110The Trump Tower Project, now under way on Manhattan's East Side, near the United Nations, is an example of how little he stands to profit from even the largest of his undertakings. Trump has repeatedly described the project — the world's largest residential high-rise — as "my 90-story" building. Actually, he owns only 40 percent of the 70-story project, with a Korean real estate company holding the majority stake. Furthermore, deed records on file at the New York City registrar's office show that the majority partner, Daewoo 845 UN LLC, put up part of the $65 million in what amount to earnest money after which a German bank, Hypo Vereinsbank, agreed to put up $295 million. Bottom line: If all units are sold at the asking price specified in the loan documents, Daewoo stands to make at least $89 million and Trump will get upwards of $60 million.
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112Now, $60 million may not sound like much for the "world's largest residential building," but it is hardly chump change, to be sure. Moreover, there is a way for Trump to do far better. He might convince would-be apartment buyers to pay more — a lot more — for the units than the loan committee at Hypo Vereinsbank figured they're worth. In other words, he could talk up their prices with endless references to how valuable they must be because Trump himself is the builder.
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114And what better way to boost the cachet of the Trump name than to infuse it with the marbled permanence of the Republic itself? Will anyone pay $39 million for an apartment overlooking the factories of Long Island City in Queens, which is what Trump maintains a buyer has agreed to pay for a duplex apartment, as yet unbuilt, atop the Tower? It certainly doesn't hurt for the would-be buyers to know that the "owner" of the project may bet the next president of the United States. That alone can help justify what amounts to raising the rents, as Trump joked to his pal.
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116There's another secret to Trump's supersalesmanship: his limited vocabulary. Although Trump has yet to deliver a single stump speech on any topic, his appearances in one-on-one television interviews have already positioned him as a new-millennium "man of the people" — which is to say, an affable fellow whose enthusiasms come out, New York-fashion as effective grade school grunts. His three favorite adjectives, which he attaches impulsively to almost anyone he has ever met, or any issue, institution, building, or other thing about which he holds an opinion are: "great," "tremendous," and "incredible." Whether it's idiotic to think of such a man representing American interests in the capitals of the world or not, it's undeniable entertaining to listen to him.
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118To Trump, the Seminole Indians are "great guys, you should meet them." Rudolph Giuliani is "a great mayor.” New York governor George Pataki and his wife, Libby, are “two great people." Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford are "two great people” also. Any banker who has ever lent Trump money is “tremendously talented." Marriage is "an incredible institution." So is the New York City Police Department. Mike Tyson is a “great fighter." The Empire State Building is both "great" and "tremendous." So are the Taj Mahal, the Plaza Hotel, and several other buildings. New York Stock Exchange chairman and CEO Richard Grasso is “a great guy"; so is singer Tony Bennett. Trump's ex-wife Ivana is “a great woman." Estée Lauder is "a great lady." Liberace was a “great man.” And Ted Turner and Ron Perelman are, like the Seminoles, both “great guys."
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120On the other hand, when Trump wants to criticize someone, the put-downs that seem to leap most effortlessly from his lips have to do with that person's physical appearance. Reporters who criticize him aren't simply "aggressive" or "obnoxious" or "pushy," but downright “unattractive” physically: New Yorker writer Mark Singer, author Harry Hurt III, Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner. 
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122The language says it all. In Trump's world, there are no shades of gray — just huge or not huge, vast or not vast, supemodel-beautiful or ugly and unattractive.
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124Yet no one seems to care, and why should they, for how is this any different from the movies, or fame, or America itself? To Donald Trump, America is the perfection of material possibilities of utter neatness, utter lavishness, utter cleanliness, utter wealth. He is Madonna stuck in a 19806 time warp, the Material Boy who never grew up.
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126Such was the baggage I brought with me when I stepped into the Grand Salon (a.k.a. the living room) of the Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach and waited for Trump to present himself.
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128The room itself is so vast that inviting someone to sit down and be comfy, as Trump's butler did to me, seems rather like being encouraged to pull up a chair and chill out in the main entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The soaring, 20-plus-foot ceilings are covered in handworked copper reliefs of angels and cherubs, the walls are paneled in oak and mahogany wainscoting, with intricately worked enamel tiles. There are gold leaf and brass inlays on everything. This isn't a living room; it's like walking inside some kind of colossal Faberge egg — the Romanoflis brought to life by P. T. Barnum.
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130Off to one side, behind a grand piano so dwarfed by the scale of everything that it seems almost a toy, is the entrance to the "library." lt is a library with no books, just a wet bar against one wall, and, nearby, a framed oil portrait of Merriweather Post. She looks old, pinch-lipped, and mean — not the kind of person to whom a tyke would come running, shouting, "Granny, Granny, can you tell me about the olden days?" And, gazing back opposite her on a far wall is — what else? — a portrait of Trump ("the Trumpster," as Tony the manservant refers to him when Trump is not around). In the painting, the Trumpster is tricked out in a white tennis sweater, with his mop of sandy hair tousled as if he'd just come in from a love game, set, match with Rudy Valle.
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132Tony approaches and says, "Mr. Trump will be with you in five minutes." He gestures toward a sofa the size of a yacht and says, "He will sit there, at the right end. You can sit on the chair next to him."
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134Why that particular arrangement? Because the seat on the sofa presents Trump to all who enter the club, as if he were on some kind of overstuffed throne — a throne by which it is impossible to pass without acknowledging the man ensconced upon it. Adding the ornamental touch of a person in a chair to the side (that would be me) simply adds to the effect: The duke of Mammon is holding count.
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136And then, suddenly, there he is: the Trumpster, or the Donald, or whatever you want to call him, resplendent in a blue Brioni suit and an open-collar white shirt.
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138"Chris," he says, extending a hand that belies his Howard Hughes — like phobia of shaking hands. "It's been a long time, no? And you haven't changed a bit." (Two sentences into the interview and he's winning already. I haven't changed in I 3 years? Okay, Donald, where do I sign?) 
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140We are there to talk about politics, business, and his presidential ambitions, but somehow the topic keeps coming back to money and how well his real estate ventures are doing. There's his 72-story art deco office high-rise (a kind of knocked-down version of the Empire State Building) at 40 Wall Street. Trump bought it for $1 million down a few years back and now says it's fully rented and worth $400 million. (On the other hand, a spokesman for the City of New York's Buildings Department says 40 Wall Street has a market value of $5 5 million. Trump says the department’s numbers are absurd. But why dwell on any of that?)
141
142There's his project over by the UN. Trump says it's more than 50 percent rented already and will wind up generating a profit of $500 million, implying that it will all be his. (In fact, it seems that 60 percent of whatever remains after all the bills are paid will go to Trump’s partners in the project, not to him.) Trump says that if the project performs well enough, he'll get the 60 percent, not his partners. So why dwell on that either?
143
144There's his project on the West Side, a project on Park Avenue...there's this project, then that project. Just when it seems as if he's determined to run through them all, as if on cue, who should emerge in the grand living room before us, wrapped in a Turkish towel in drop-dead defiance of the club’s dress code, than supermodel Melania — all dewy fresh and wet from the spa. I'm an ordinary sort of guy, to be sure...just a working-stiff reporter, and Donald had figured me to a tee. For here was this vision, emerging from nowhere, wrapped in a towel you could have fit into a Taj Mahal tote bag, trying to clasp it to her nakedness with one hand while shaking my hand with the other, and saying, “I'm so flattered to meet you. Donald has told me so much." And I'm thinking, Oh sure, I’ll bet he has — and while we're on the topic, can I just see what's under that towel?
145
146Unfortunately, a moment more and she is gone, gliding out the double-hung doors onto the veranda and the rear lawns, disappearing into the enveloping embrace of Palm Beach's morning mist. And thereI am, watching her leave, thinking, I want to be that mist. No, actually, I want to be the Turkish towel. No, the hell with all that: I want to be Donald Trump!  Soon, more characters make their appearance. Through the door waltzes Patricia Duff — not in a Turkish towel — on her way to the spa. (I'm thinking, Why don’t we just move this interview into the spa?) Donald smiles wanly, and as soon as she's out of earshot he turns to me and says, “That bitch had some nerve, the way she treated Ron Perelman."
147
148By and by, more members enter and acknowledge the great one, but mostly they turn out to be people even Donald doesn't know. There's a little, fat fellow named Jerry who's in the carpet business. He approaches with a funny story about how come Sears couldn’t make a go of it in the catalog business and what that foretells for Internet outfits like Amazon.com. Says Jerry, "I'm telling you, people would buy stuff and then send it back. Sears had a billion dollars' worth of shit that got sent back." After he leaves, Donald turns to me and says, "Jerry's a great guy, I'm telling ya, one of the best." But when I ask his last name, the Trumpster goes blank. He says, "I dunno..." 
149
150That's how it turns out for a lot of Mar-a-Lago's allegedly swanky, gilded, jeweled, and gowned clientele: They're people you've never heard of, faces you've never seen before, names you forget as soon as you hear them. There's somebody named Seymour (or was it Sid?) Cohen, who, Donald wants me to understand is big in New York real estate (not as big as Donald, mind you, but big enough), "a real mother...," as Donald puts it. The trouble is, being a medium-big mother... — real or otherwise — in New York real estate won't get you a sofa spot on Jay Leno's show or anywhere else: Let's hear it for Sid Cohen, the toughest son of a bitch in the Kew Gardens rent-stabilization game? I don't think so. This, then, is Mar-a-Lago, filled with members like Jerry and Sid (or was it Sy?) who think that a $100,000 membership fee is a quick and painless passport to the Palm Beach glamour they read about in the Shiny Sheet but never get access to in their lives. Amortized over 20 years, it's not even all that expensive to catch a glimpse of Melania flashing her towel act for a reporter, or listen to wax museum "stars" like Michael Bolton and Paul Anka sing on the weekends? Hey, life is short, so what the hell, live a little!
151
152And that, in the end, is Donald Trump himself: Life is short, live a little. No one needs to remind the Trumpster what fate awaits him if interest rates rise and the economy turns south: It could be curtains all over again for the Trump magic act. Even in America, there's more to life than fast talk and extravagant dreams — you need people who are willing to hand over cold cash (or, at least, able to borrow it from somewhere) in order to buy into your dream of minaret-domed gambling palaces that reach to the sky, of Faberge eggs with soaring ceilings, of women with legs as smooth and flawless as polished marble... none of which is possible when interest on the long bond rises. money grows tight in all the wrong places, and, suddenly. life becomes payback time.
153
154But Donald Trump didn't want to think about that a decade ago, and he doesn't want to think about it now. Why should he? When Mario Cuomo proclaimed Bill Clinton America's Comeback Kid at the 1992 Democratic convention, he didn't know the meaning of the words. In the world of Comeback Kids. you‘ve got Arkansas pols and their bimbos, and then there's Donald Trump. the Comeback Guy of all time, who by the art form of his personal life has managed to turn every failure he has ever endured into spectacular, gilt-edged success. Why should tomorrow be any different? It's morning in America, the dawn of a new millennium. and life is good — especially when it's lived on the cutting edge of airbrushed perfection, where all the women are flawless and beautiful, and all the grandest buildings hear your name...and by simply pretending to run for president. you can raise the rents and never have to awaken from your dream at all.