I hadn’t read either of Donald’s other two books, but I knew a bit about them. The Art of the Deal, as far as I understood it, had been meant to present Donald as a serious real estate developer. The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, had done a good job—which he has long since regretted—of making his subject sound coherent, as if Donald had actually espoused a fully realized business philosophy that he understood and lived by.
After the embarrassment of the poorly timed publication of Surviving at the Top, I assumed that Donald wanted a return to the relative seriousness of its predecessor. I set about trying to explain how, under the most adverse circumstances, he had emerged from the depths, victorious and more successful than he had ever been. There wasn’t much evidence to support that narrative—he was about to experience his fourth bankruptcy filing with the Plaza Hotel—but I had to try.
Every morning on the way to my desk, I stopped by to see Donald in the hope that he’d have time to sit down with me for an interview. I figured that would be the best way to find out what he had done and how he had done it. His perspective was everything, and I needed the stories in his own words. He was usually on a call, which he’d put on speaker as soon as I sat down. The calls, as far as I could tell, were almost never about business. The person on the other end, who had no idea he or she was on speaker, was looking for gossip or for Donald’s opinion about women or a new club that had opened. Sometimes he was being asked for a favor. Often the conversation was about golf. Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot.”
When he wasn’t on a call, I’d find him going through the newspaper clippings that were collected for him daily. Every article was about him or at least mentioned him. He showed them to me, something he did with most visitors. Depending on the content of the article, he sometimes wrote on it with a blue Flair felt-tip marker, just like the one my grandfather used, and sent it back to the reporter. After he finished writing, he’d hold up the clipping and ask for my opinion of what he considered his witty remarks. That did not help me with my research.
A few weeks after Donald hired me, I still hadn’t gotten paid. When I brought it up to him, he pretended at first not to understand what I was talking about. I pointed out that I needed an advance so I could at least buy a computer and a printer—I was still writing on the same electric typewriter I’d bought with Gam’s help in grad school. He said he thought that was the publisher’s problem. “Can you talk to Random House?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Donald’s editor had no idea he’d hired me.
One night, as I sat at home trying to figure out how to piece together something vaguely interesting out of the uninteresting documents I’d been poring over, Donald called. “When you come to the office tomorrow, Rhona’s going to have some pages for you. I’ve been working on material for the book. It’s really good.” He sounded excited.
Finally I might have something to work with, some idea about how to organize this thing. I still didn’t know what he thought about his “comeback,” how he ran his business, or even what role he played in the deals he was currently developing.
The next day, Rhona handed me a manila envelope containing about ten typewritten pages, as promised. I took it to my desk and began to read. When I finished, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was clearly a transcript of a recording Donald had made, which explained its stream-of-consciousness quality. It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met. The biggest takeaways were that Madonna chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive and that Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater who had won two gold medals and four world championships, had big calves.
I stopped asking him for an interview.
From time to time, Donald asked about my mother. He hadn’t seen her in four years, ever since Ivana and Blaine had given Gam an ultimatum just before Thanksgiving: either Linda came to the House for the holidays, or they did. They found their not-exactly sister-in-law too quiet and depressed, and they just couldn’t have a good time with her there. My mother had been in the Trump family since 1961, and though I never understood why my grandfather required her presence at holidays after my parents divorced, she always went. More than twenty-five years later, my grandmother chose Ivana and Blaine, without factoring in how the decision might affect me and my brother.
Now Donald said, “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother. It might have been better if we’d cut her off after a couple of years and she had to stand on her own two feet.”
The idea that anyone else was entitled to money or support he or she wasn’t obviously earning was impossible for Donald and my grandfather to fathom. Nothing my mother had received as the former wife of the oldest son of a very wealthy family, who had raised two of Fred and Mary Trump’s grandchildren almost single-handedly, had come from my grandfather, and it certainly hadn’t come from Donald, yet they both acted as if it did.
Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him. He did
