C
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A Civil Servant in Public Housing
There is a through line from the House to the Trump Tower triplex to the West Wing, just as there is from Trump Management to the Trump Organization to the Oval Office. The first are essentially controlled environments in which Donald’s material needs have always been taken care of; the second, a series of sinecures in which the work was done by others and Donald never needed to acquire expertise in order to attain or retain power (which partly explains his disdain for the expertise of others). All of this has protected Donald from his own failures while allowing him to believe himself a success.
Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits. Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.
There was a long line of people willing to take advantage of him. In the 1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnists discovered that Donald couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his shamelessness to sell papers. That image, and the weakness of the man it represented, were precisely what appealed to Mark Burnett. By 2004, when The Apprentice first aired, Donald’s finances were a mess (even with his $170 million cut of my grandfather’s estate when he and his siblings sold the properties), and his own “empire” consisted of increasingly desperate branding opportunities such as Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump University. That made him an easy target for Burnett. Both Donald and the viewers were the butt of the joke that was The Apprentice, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon.
For the first forty years of his real estate career, my grandfather never acquired debt. In the 1970s and ’80s, however, all of that changed as Donald’s ambitions grew larger and his missteps became more frequent. Far from expanding his father’s empire, everything Donald did after Trump Tower (which, along with his first project, the Grand Hyatt, could never have been accomplished without Fred’s money and influence) chipped away at the empire’s value. By the late 1980s, the Trump Organization seemed to be in the business of losing money, as Donald siphoned untold millions away from Trump Management in order to support the growing myth of himself as a real estate phenom and master dealmaker.
Ironically, as Donald’s failures in real estate grew, so did my grandfather’s need for him to appear successful. Fred surrounded Donald with people who knew what they were doing while giving him the credit; who propped him up and lied for him; who knew how the family business worked.
The more money my grandfather threw at Donald, the more confidence Donald had, which led him to pursue bigger and riskier projects, which led to greater failures, forcing Fred to step in with more help. By continuing to enable Donald, my grandfather kept making him worse: more needy for media attention and free money, more self-aggrandizing and delusional about his “greatness.”
Although bailing out Donald was originally Fred’s exclusive domain, it didn’t take long for the banks to become partners in the project. At first, taken in by what they believed to be Donald’s ruthless efficiency and ability to get a job done, they were operating in good faith. As the bankruptcies piled up and the bills for the reckless purchases came due, the loans continued but now as a means to maintain the illusion of success that had fooled them in the first place. It’s understandable that Donald increasingly felt he had the upper hand, even if he didn’t. He was completely unaware that other people were using him for their own ends and believed that he was in control. Fred, the banks, and the media gave him more leeway in order to get him to do their bidding.
In the very early stages of his attempts to take over the Commodore Hotel, Donald held a press conference presenting his involvement in the project as a fait accompli. He lied about transactions that hadn’t taken place, inserting himself in a way that made it difficult for him to be removed. He and Fred then used this gambit to leverage his newly inflated reputation in the New York press—and many millions of dollars of my grandfather’s money—to get enormous tax abatements for his next development, Trump Tower.
In Donald’s mind, he has accomplished everything on his own merits, cheating notwithstanding. How many interviews has he given in which he offers the obvious falsehood that his father loaned him a mere million dollars that he had to pay back but he was otherwise solely responsible for his success? It’s easy to understand why he would believe this. Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.
Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.
Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon
