The Making of Donald Trump, David Cay Johnston, 2016 PDF
By:Melville House Press
Published on 2016-06-16 by Bukupedia
INTRODUCTION hen Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower lobby escalator live on national television in June 2015 to announce his campaign for president, nearly every journalist treated his candidacy as a vanity project. Not me. I have been an investigative reporter since I was eighteen years old. I’ve been digging up facts, getting laws changed, and generally making a lot of trouble reporting for the San Jose Mercury, the Detroit Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and finally for The New York Times. From the start, I acted on my own authority in deciding what to report. I was a newsroom rogue who got away with it because my stories engaged readers and got big results: a broadcast chain forced o the air for news manipulations; an innocent man saved from life in prison after I confronted the real killer; Jack Welch giving up his retirement perks; political spying and crimes by the Los Angeles Police Department revealed, along with foreign agents secretly interfering in American politics. While at my last paper, I won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing so many tax dodges and loopholes that a prominent tax law professor called me the “de facto chief tax enforcement ocer of the United States.” In 1987, I got interested in casinos after the Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans had a right to own them. I was sure it would lead to the spread of casinos across the country—casinos run mostly by corporate America. For the only time in my life, I applied for a job. The Philadelphia Inquirer liked my idea: in June 1988, I moved to Atlantic City. A few days later, I met Donald Trump. I sized him up as a modern P. T. Barnum selling tickets to a modern variation of the Feejee Mermaid, one of the panoply of Barnum’s famous fakes that people decided were worth a bit of their money. Trump was full of himself. I quickly learned from others in town that he knew next to nothing about the casino industry, including the rules of the games. That would turn out to be important, as explained in two chapters near the end of this book. In the nearly thirty years since then, I have followed Trump intensely; I’ve paid close attention to his business dealings and I’ve interviewed him multiple times. In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he’d claimed, Trump actually had a negative net worth and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the bank’s, as you will read. Before technology allowed me to digitize les, I built up a vast trove of Trump documents, as investigative reporters often do with subjects that interest them. I had so many Bankers Boxes of les on Trump and other prominent Americans—Barron Hilton, Jack Welch, and Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates among them—that for years I rented two storage lockers just to hold them all. So when Trump announced his bid for the Republican nomination for the 2016 election, I knew it was for real. I’d spent decades reporting on him and I had kept my files. In addition, reporter Wayne Barrett had generously shared his. First, I knew that Trump has been talking about the presidency since 1985. In 1988, he proposed himself as the running mate of the rst President George Bush, a job that went to Senator Dan Quayle. In July of the same year, I watched him arrive in Atlantic City on his yacht, the Trump Princess, where cheering crowds greeted him. A phalanx of teenage girls, jumping up and down, squealed with delight as if they had just seen their favorite rock star. As Trump and his then wife, Ivana, took an escalator up into his Trump’s Castle Casino, a crowd cheered him on. One man shouted loudly, “Be our president, Donald!” I also watched Trump run in 2000 on the ticket for the Reform Party, a fringe group with members in the tens of thousands (as opposed to the millions who call themselves Democrats or Republicans). It was during that brief campaign that Trump declared he would become the rst person to run for president and make a prot. He said he had a million-dollar deal to give ten speeches at motivational speaking events hosted by Tony Robbins. He coordinated his campaign appearances around them so the campaign would pay for the use of his Boeing 727 jet. It was classic Trump, seeing prot in everything, even politics. Few people knew about it. For the 2016 run as well, a large share of Trump’s campaign money has been spent paying himself for the use of his Boeing 757, his smaller jet, his helicopter, his Trump Tower oce space, and other services supplied by Trump businesses. By law, Trump must pay charter rates for his aircraft and market prices for services from his other businesses. This anticorruption law was designed to prevent vendors from underpricing services to win political favors—a legacy of a time when no one imagined that a man of Trump’s presumed immense wealth would buy campaign services from himself. In 2016, the law ensures that Trump makes a profit from his campaign. Trump again declared his candidacy in 2012. He was treated as a serious contender by just about everyone except Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC and me. Separately, O’Donnell and I both came to the conclusion that Trump’s campaign then had a purpose other than moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. His real goal, we surmised, was a more lucrative contract with the NBC television network for his aging Celebrity Apprentice show, where his trademark line was “You’re fired.” Indeed, when Trump dropped out, he said, in eect, that as much as the country needed him in the White House, his show needed him more. Based on that, journalists concluded his campaign had been a strange joke. As such, they gave little regard to his announcement for the 2016 election. But this time things were dierent. Trump’s ratings were in decline. His show was at risk of being canceled. To Trump, a man who reads the New York tabloids religiously, I knew that just about the worst fate he could imagine for himself, short of death, would be waking up to these Daily News and Post covers: “NBC to Trump: You’re Fired.” As soon as Trump announced in 2015, I immediately set out to report what the mainstream news media were not. I wrote an early piece that posed twenty-one questions I thought reporters should ask on the campaign trail. Not one of them did. Late in the primaries, Senator Marco Rubio brought up my question about Trump University and Senator Ted Cruz posed my question about Trump’s dealings with the Genovese and Gambino crime families, matters explored in this book. I will always wonder what might have happened had journalists and some of the sixteen candidates vying with Trump for the Republican nomination started asking my questions months earlier. This book is my eort to make sure Americans know a fuller story about Trump than the one he has polished and promoted with such exceptional skill and determination. Trump, who presents himself as a modern Midas even when much of what he touches turns to dross, has studied the conventions of journalists and displays more genius at exploiting them to his advantage than anyone else I have ever known. More important, Trump has worked just as hard to make sure few people know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine tracker, with mobsters and many mob associates, with con artists and swindlers. He has been sued thousands of times for refusing to pay employees, vendors, and others. Investors have sued him for fraud in a number of dierent cities. But among Trump’s most highly rened skills is his ability to deect or shut down law enforcement investigations. He also uses threats of litigation to deter news organizations from looking behind the curtain of the seemingly all-wise and all-powerful man they often refer to as The Donald. At one of my rst meetings with Trump, I did something I hope many journalists will do before the November 2016 elections. I brought up a casino issue that Trump did not know much about, intentionally saying something that was false, a technique that has many uses in investigative reporting. Trump immediately embraced my faux fact and shaped his answer to it, much the way television psychics listen for clues in what people say to shape their soothsaying. Trump’s habit of picking up on what others say was on full display when Lester Holt, the NBC Nightly News anchor, asked Trump in late June 2016 about his claim that Hillary Clinton had slept through the Benghazi attack. After Holt noted it had been midafternoon where Clinton was, Trump tried to incorporate that into his answer, then tried to bluff his way out of not knowing the facts. For those who doubt that Trump lacks basic knowledge about important issues, I will provide many examples. Here is one to set the stage: During the Republican presidential debate hosted by CNN in December 2015, the conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump, “What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?” “Well, rst of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing,” Trump responded. “That is so powerful and so important. And one of the things that I’m frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you’re going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important. But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out—if we didn’t have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can’t just leave areas that fty years ago or seventy-ve years ago we wouldn’t care [about]. It was hand-to-hand combat …” Hewitt then followed up, asking, “Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority?” Trump responded: “I think—I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Hewitt then turned to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whom Trump often derided as an empty suit. “Do you have a response?” “First, let’s explain to people at home what the triad is,” Rubio said. “The triad is our ability in the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos or from the ground, or from our nuclear subs.” This was not the rst time Trump had been asked about how he would allocate money among the three dierent methods by which the United States military can deliver nuclear bombs. Four months earlier, Hewitt had asked Trump the same question on his radio show. Trump gave an answer indicating he had no idea what Hewitt was asking about. He had clearly made no effort in the intervening months to learn. “I think one of the most important things that we have to worry about is nuclear generally speaking,” Trump said on Hewitt’s radio show. “The power of nuclear, the power of the weapons that we have today—and that is, by the way, the deal with Iran— the concept of it is so important that you have to make a good deal and what they should have done is that they should have doubled up and tripled up the sanctions …” This book is a presentation of the facts as I have witnessed them and as the public record shows. They are facts reported with the same int-eyed diligence as everything else I have written about in the past half century. Many have asked why I’m not writing a book about Hillary Clinton instead of, or as well as, writing a book about Donald Trump. The answer is that in 1988 I wound up in Atlantic City instead of Arkansas. I know Trump; I have never spoken to Clinton or her husband. However, as rst lady she was furious over my New York Times articles revealing that she and her husband paid more than twice as much income tax as the law required because, despite paying almost $10,000 a year to have their tax returns prepared, they got bad tax advice. One last thing to keep in mind as you read this book: those applauding crowds of young people who lled the Trump Tower auditorium in June 2015 when Trump announced his campaign with vicious denunciations of Mexicans, Muslims, and the media. At the time, I thought that was incongruous for midtown Manhattan, a place not exactly known for xenophobia or applause for racist tirades. Indeed, that crowd was not the voluntary outpouring that television viewers would reasonably have believed they were seeing. Many of those clapping were actors paid fifty bucks apiece. T 1 FAMILY HISTORY he Trump family’s deep roots in Germany stretch back to the war-ravaged seventeenth century, when the family name was Drumpf. In 1648, they simplied the name to one that would prove to be a powerful brand for their latter-day descendants. Looking back from the twenty-rst century, it turns out to have been an interesting choice. Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s denition of trump: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other denitions include “a thing of small value, a trie” and “to deceive or cheat” as well as “to blow or sound a trumpet.” As a verb, trump means “to devise in an unscrupulous way” and “to forge, fabricate or invent,” as in “trumped-up” charges. Donald Trump never knew his grandfather, Friedrich, who died when Donald’s father, Fred, was only twelve years old. As a rogue entrepreneur, however, Friedrich cast a century-long shadow over the Trump family with his passion for money and the outing of legal niceties—such as erecting buildings on land he did not own. Friedrich Trump grew up in the winemaking region of southwest Germany, in the town of Kallstadt, where hard work meant a roof over one’s head, not riches. His father had died when Friedrich was only eight years old. In 1885, at the age of sixteen and facing mandatory military service, Friedrich left his mother a note and did what millions of other Europeans with few prospects at home were doing: ed Germany for the United States. Enduring a surely dicult North Atlantic crossing in a packed steamship, Friedrich eventually landed in New York, where he moved in with an older sister, Katherine, and her husband, both of whom had immigrated earlier. Before long, the young man decided to go west, eventually settling in Seattle, where he opened The Dairy Restaurant. It also had a curtained-o area that most likely served as a low-rent whorehouse, according to Gwenda Blair, who had the family’s cooperation in her history of the Trumps. In 1892, Friedrich became a citizen, lying about his age in the process by saying he’d landed in New York two years before he actually had. Two friends accompanied him to the proceedings to attest to his good character. One was a laborer, the other a man whose occupations included providing accommodations for what Blair politely called “female boarding.” Friedrich was the genesis of many Trump family traditions in America, but voting was not among them. In fact, his grandson Donald would run for president after failing to vote in the 2002 general election and, as records indicate, in any Republican primary from 1989 until he voted for himself in 2016. Friedrich’s great-grandchildren were even less diligent in their civic duties. When Donald Trump’s name appeared on the New York State primary ballot in 2016, his daughter Ivanka and son Eric, both in their thirties, could not cast ballots because they had neglected to register as Republicans. They blamed the government, saying they should have been allowed to change from independent to Republican at the last minute. But the primary voting rules, however outmoded, had been law in the Empire State for many years. The siblings had months in which to change their registration so they could vote for their father. A family tradition Friedrich Trump did start in America, however, was the art of prospering but wanting more. Friedrich sold his restaurant/bordello and set up a new business about thirty miles north. Rumor had it that the oil-rich Rockefellers planned a big mining operation in the area. On a piece of land he didn’t own, right across from the train station, Friedrich built a hotel of sorts—one intended mostly for, shall we say, active short stays, not overnight visits. Building on land he did not own foreshadowed the terms under which his grandson Donald would acquire the Florida mansion Mar-a- Lago: with a mortgage that Chase Bank agreed in writing not to record at the courthouse. In the end, the mining project zzled and only a few got out better o than they were when they arrived. Among them was Friedrich Trump, who had, by that point, Americanized his name to Frederick. He went by Fred. Hearing about the Klondike gold rush, Frederick headed for Canada’s Yukon Territory. He had no interest in the hard physical labor of panning for gold in frigid streams; Frederick mined the miners. He built a sort of bar and grill, calling the joint The Arctic. It oered hard liquor and “sporting ladies,” as the prostitutes were called. Again his timing was impeccable. He arrived when the gold rush was at its height. By the time the gold was running out and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were riding in, Fred Trump had made a small fortune to take with him as he skedaddled back to America. In 1901, at age thirty-two, Frederick Trump returned to Germany, where his mother introduced her now-rich son to eligible young ladies. Frederick, however, took a liking to a woman his mother did not care for, a twenty-year-old blonde named Elizabeth Christ. Just six years old when her husband-to-be had slipped away to America to avoid the German draft, Elizabeth had grown into a well-endowed adulthood. Trump men favoring busty blondes would become a family pattern. Frederick took his new bride to America and scouted for opportunities to increase his fortune, by then worth a half million dollars or so in today’s money. But Elizabeth had no love for bustling New York and its stark contrasts between wealth and want. She desperately wanted to go home. In 1904, Frederick, with his young wife and their infant daughter, sailed back to Germany. Once there, however, he had to convince the authorities to overlook his draft dodging. Hoping the fortune he brought into the country would impress the authorities, in September 1904 he explained his absence to the government in writing: “I did not immigrate to America in order to avoid military service, but to establish for myself a protable livelihood and to enable myself to support my mother” in Kallstadt. German authorities didn’t buy it; they ordered him to leave. Donald Trump has not yet been asked whether this episode of family history plays any role in his unconstitutional proposals to deport an estimated eleven million immigrants who entered the country illegally, including those whose children are American citizens, or if he thinks of it when suggesting that the United States block soldiers and sailors who are Muslim from returning to America. Back in New York City, Frederick continued to prosper. In her richly detailed biography, Gwenda Blair suggests Frederick worked as a barber, a low-paid occupation that seems odd for a man so focused on making money. She notes that barbershops also sold tobacco in those days, but that was still a low-paying opportunity. However, they were often fronts for illegal businesses and—because men of dubious means could come in for a daily shave or just to hang out—they could also have been opportune places to gather business intelligence and engage in sub rosa transactions with the many ethnic criminal elements in the big city. Whatever he was up to, Frederick’s fortune couldn’t buy him more time: he became one of the more than twenty million people around the world who died during the 1918 inuenza pandemic. He was followed by another industrious Trump: Donald’s father, Fred. T 2 FAMILY VALUES hough only twelve years old when his father died in 1918, a mere two years later Frederick Christ Trump took after his father by starting a residential garage– building company with his mother: Elizabeth Trump & Son. Elizabeth had to sign all the checks and documents because her ambitious boy was still a teenager not legally allowed to enter into contracts. Fred Trump entered his majority by getting himself arrested at age twenty-one for his involvement in a battle between about a hundred New York City police ocers and a thousand Ku Klux Klan members and supporters, many of them in white robes. The riot took place in Jamaica, the Queens neighborhood where Fred Trump lived. Police booked him for failure to disperse, but prosecutors later declined to try him and many of the others arrested that day. It was the rst of many indications of Fred Trump’s racial enmity. Almost nine decades later, his son Donald, running for president, tried to deny the whole thing, claiming his father never lived at the address the newspapers had obtained from police records. Other public records verify that it was indeed his father’s address. They also show only one Fred Trump living in Queens during that period. Cornered in a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Donald Trump bobbed, weaved, and tried to persuade the paper to ignore the arrest, which the website boingboing. net had written about after uncovering a 1927 New York Times article about it. Trump’s comments went like this: It never happened. And they said there were no charges, no nothing. It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges. They said there were charges against other people, but there were absolutely no charges, totally false … Somebody showed me that website—it was a little website and somebody did that. By the way, did you notice that there were no charges? Well, if there are no charges that means it shouldn’t be mentioned … Because my father, there were no charges against him, I don’t know about the other people involved. But there were zero charges against him. So assuming it was him—I don’t even think it was him, I never even heard about it. So it’s really not fair to mention. It never happened… if there are no charges that means it shouldn’t be mentioned. That last line is important to understanding the gap between what is widely reported about Trump and what the public record indisputably shows: that events not resulting in criminal charges should not be mentioned in the news has been a major theme in Donald Trump’s careful and consistent eorts to limit inquiries into his conduct. His wealth and public prominence are closely tied to his success in focusing the attention of journalists where he wants it and his skill in deecting inquiries by law enforcement and people suing him for alleged civil fraud or failure to make payments, as we shall see. In any event, as the Roaring Twenties came to an end, Fred Trump was building single-family houses in Queens. When the Great Depression began in 1929, he switched to opening a self-service grocery. It was a precursor to the modern supermarket, cutting costs because people picked their own goods o the shelf, eliminating the need for most clerks. The business was a smashing success, and Trump sold it for a substantial prot after a year. During World War II, Fred Trump landed government contracts for apartments and barracks to be built near Navy shipyards in Pennsylvania and Virginia. From this he learned the ins and outs of government procurement, a skill he would put to protable use after the war ended. When the federal government started nancing postwar housing for returning GIs, Fred Trump was said to have been the rst builder to show up with his papers at the Federal Housing Administration loan counter in Washington. In the years that followed, he would build many thousands of apartments in Brooklyn and Queens and would buy other apartments as far away as Ohio. Fred Trump was known neither for quality buildings nor for being a good landlord. He bought the cheapest materials to build more than 27,000 subsidized apartments and row houses, on many of which his family continues to collect rent decades later. He was also something of a showman, displaying the panache his son would later take to dazzling extremes. Fred the Brooklyn Builder knew just how to spin the kind of simple, telling tale that newspapers often embrace without deep fact-checking. For example, in 1946 he told the Brooklyn Eagle that because building supplies were so hard to come by after the war, he’d had his men visit hardware stores across the city and beyond to buy all the nails they could nd, even if they could only procure a handful. Later, he became known for a frugal habit: when he showed up at his construction sites (always dressed in a tailored suit and tie), he would bend down to pickup loose nails and hand them to carpenters. Years later came a stunt that would appear to be a direct inspiration to his son: While under intense criticism for plans to destroy a popular Coney Island attraction, the Steeplechase amusement ride, where he wanted to build the rst apartment project bearing the family name, Fred Trump shifted the focus of news coverage by hiring a bevy of beauties in hard hats and polka-dot bikinis to hand out bricks to locals and city dignitaries. Then he summoned news photographers to watch them all throw the bricks at the symbol of the ride, a stained-glass icon called the Funny Face. Decades later, of course, Donald Trump would surround himself with models to attract television cameras and would have his third wife pose nearly nude aboard his Boeing 757 jet for a men’s magazine while he looked on during the photo shoot. Long before he learned to manufacture news, Fred Trump had become a main target of federal investigators looking into proteering with the tax dollars intended to help World War II veterans. The subsequent Senate hearings about those investigations were not about diversionary tactics like young women in bikinis with bricks, but the fortunes Trump and other builders made by gaming Federal Housing Administration rules on mortgage guarantees. Once the FHA understood the scheme, it was explained to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reportedly ew into a rage in the Oval Oce. Soon the FHA had more than a hundred investigators combing through bureaucratic records, comparing costs to profits and discovering huge gaps between the numbers. On July 13, 1954, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a banner headline, “Denies $4 Million Prot,” and above it a kicker: “But Trump has that much surplus in bank.” Trump was already a household name, at least in Brooklyn. Testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, Fred Trump insisted that he had not made an excess prot of nearly $4 million, as the investigative report said. Trump said it was all a misunderstanding, but his explanation employed a view of nance that does not exist in any textbook or accounting manual: Trump said the money was there, for sure, sitting in the bank account for his FHA-subsidized projects, but it was wrong to describe this as proteering—indeed, it was not even profit, he said, because he had not taken any of that money out of the bank. This description was, to anyone who understood nance, absurd. His son Donald would also use creative approaches in fostering the impression that he had earned billions of dollars through his deal-making artistry. Fred Trump testied before Congress that the reasons he had nearly $4 million in the bank were lower costs for materials than he had expected, a faster completion of the construction, and the fact that he acted as his own general contractor. That t with his reputation as a builder who got things done and ahead of schedule, though the schedules often had lots of slack built in, making an early nish easy. Fred then did his best to turn the tables, attacking the investigators for, he said, doing “untold damage to my standing and reputation.” There was talk of perjury indictments, but nothing ever came of the FHA investigation. A month after Fred Trump’s testimony in Washington, merchants in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn complained that Trump, backed by federal slum-clearance money to take over their neighborhood, had gouged them on rent. Storekeepers told the Brooklyn Eagle that he was doubling rents, which was “immoral.” Adopting the same stance he had on Capitol Hill, Fred Trump said it was all just a misunderstanding. The merchants had been paying vastly dierent rents for similar properties—$40 a month for one storefront, $200 for another—which Fred Trump said made no sense. He also said that he expected the merchants to be out within a couple of years so he could build a new apartment project using the slum-clearance powers the government had enacted … and from which he would soon profit. Taxpayers were not the only source of capital for Fred Trump’s construction projects. A few years after the war ended, he took on a partner known as Willie Tomasello. When cash was short, Tomasello was able to provide Trump with operating capital on short notice. Tomasello also saw to it that there was no trouble from the unions, from the bricklayers and carpenters to the teamsters. The New York State Organized Crime Task Force identied Tomasello as an associate of the Genovese and Gambino Maa families in New York. In other words, just as Friedrich Trump had engaged in illicit businesses to build his fortune in the late nineteeth century, his son Fred Trump turned to an organized crime associate as his longtime partner to build his own. Decades later, Donald Trump would also do business with the heads of the same families, though at a remove, developing numerous business connections with an assortment of criminals, from con artists and a major drug tracker to the heads of the two largest Maa families in New York City, as we shall see. It should be no surprise that Donald Trump took after his father. Fred Christ Trump was a stern father who expected his sons to learn the family business. He had his oldest son, Fred Jr., and the younger boys, Donald and then Robert, learn the business from the ground up, actually driving them regularly to his properties in his blue Cadillac. (He bought a new one every two years. It had what at the time was a novelty, a customized license plate reading “FCT”.) The boys were assigned to sweep out storage rooms, empty coins from the basement washers and dryers, make minor repairs under the supervision of maintenance crews, and, as they got a little older, collect rents. It was not that the boys needed the little bit of money Dad gave them for their labors. When Donald was still in diapers, he and his siblings had a trust fund. His share was about $12,000 a year, which in the late nineteen forties was roughly four times the typical income for a married couple with children if the husband held a full-time job. Fred worked out of an austere Avenue Z oce in Brooklyn, assisted by a secretary who stayed with him for more than a half century. (He told others it was best to hire an overweight and unattractive secretary because she would stay on the job.) I’ve talked with people who sat across from Fred’s plain desk, proposing to do plumbing, window, and electrical work. They describe a ritual that was certainly not unique to that oce. First, a plain envelope would be presented. Fred would take a second to test its weight in his hand before putting it into a drawer. Then he would listen to the pitch about contract terms for work on his buildings. The cost of these secretive extras was built into the contract cost when it could be passed on to Uncle Sam or tenants. Otherwise it reduced the prot the contractor made. This was, and remains today, a widespread but illegal practice unless the cash payments are reported on income tax returns—which of course would defeat the purpose of the inducements. It’s a low-risk crime: Unless the party handing over the envelope is a government agent and the bills are marked, who’s to know? The practice also meant there was little need to withdraw cash from bank accounts, thereby leaving no records for tax authorities to discover during an audit. As rst-born, Fred Jr. was rst in line to rise in dad’s business. Neither the work nor his father’s methods appealed, apparently. Fred Sr. was a no-nonsense businessman who watched every penny, kept regular hours, and, after dinner at home each night, resumed doing business on the telephone. Fred Jr. was more of a free, albeit troubled, spirit. He went o in a Corvette to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and learned to y airplanes. Although he was not Jewish, he said he was in order to join the Jewish fraternity. When Fred Jr. tried working for his namesake early on, the father and son did not see the landlord business the same way. For example, when Fred Jr. bought new windows for one of the Trump apartment houses instead of having the old ones repaired, his father upbraided him for wasting money. In recounting this episode years later, Donald said his father freely dispensed criticism, but rarely praise. Donald said that was just fine with him, but not his older brother. Donald was what school counselors might call “maladjusted.” In his rst book, The Art of the Deal, he boasts about slugging his music teacher in second grade because he didn’t think the teacher knew the subject, although the story might be apocryphal. Neighbors have told stories over the years, including to me, of a child Donald throwing rocks at little children in playpens and provoking disputes with other kids. By his own account, Donald got into lots of trouble—so much that his father shipped him o to the New York Military Academy in upstate New York to develop discipline when he was a teenager. Donald turned eighteen in 1964, when the death toll in Vietnam was rising fast. He got four student deferments and one medical deferment after his doctor wrote that he had a bone spur in his foot. Which foot? a journalist asked years later. Trump said he could not recall. He was accepted into a Catholic school in New York City, Fordham College, but in his junior year transferred to an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Penn has a famous and highly regarded graduate business school that Trump often invokes. He did not in fact study there. He was enrolled as an undergraduate and received a bachelor of science in economics. While in college, Donald also started doing real estate deals, including one with his father in Cincinnati. He later wrote that his net worth upon graduating from college was $200,000, a gure that seems modest given the amount of money that had been flowing into his trust fund since before he learned how to walk. Meanwhile, Fred Jr. had become a pilot for TWA. He married a ight attendant whom family members describe simultaneously as being a knockout in the looks department and yet someone whom Fred Sr. couldn’t stand—just as his paternal grandmother couldn’t stand Elizabeth Christ Trump, the woman his father, Friedrich, had married. Fred Jr. and his wife, Linda, subsequently had two children and divorced. Afterward, Fred Jr. gave up flying when he couldn’t manage his alcoholism. With the way now open to becoming next in line in the family business, Donald, even before graduating from college, started modeling himself more directly after his father. He drove a Cadillac with the license plate “DJT.” He took a ashy Penn student, the actress Candice Bergen, on a dinner date that ended early. The only thing she remembered years later was that Trump wore a three-piece burgundy suit with matching leather boots. Others have said they don’t recall seeing Trump a lot around campus, an interesting observation in view of Trump’s claims years later that “nobody remembers seeing” future President Barack Obama in elementary school in Hawaii or anywhere else. In fact, many of Obama’s fellow students have spoken and written about him, as have several of his professors, notably constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. While Obama was still a rst-year law student, Tribe wrote a law review article citing Obama in the rst footnote. Tribe has since written about how Obama sat in the front row in every session, oering nuanced legal analyses that Tribe remembered because of his student’s ability to examine a subtle legal issue from the perspective of each relevant party with equal weight. Nonetheless, Trump touts his 1968 bachelor’s degree in economics and says he learned “super genius stu” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “I was a really good student at the best school,” Trump told Barbara Walters on her show, The View. “I’m like a smart guy.” Wharton, like all business schools, teaches fundamental tools for evaluating whether investments are likely to be protable. One such concept is Net Present Value, or NPV. That is the value of cash expected from an investment minus the value spent to support that investment and then reduced to a lump sum payable today. Business and nance graduates of Ivy League schools know this concept the way primary school students know that 2+2=4. In a lawsuit Trump led against journalist Timothy L. O’Brien for writing that Trump’s net worth may be far less than a billion dollars, a lawyer asked Trump questions about his knowledge of finance and how he determined his net worth. “Are you familiar with the concept of net present value?” lawyer Andrew Ceresney asked. “The concept of net present value to me,” Trump replied, “would be the value of the land currently after debt. Well, to me, the word ‘net’ is an interesting word. It’s really— the word ‘value’ is the important word. If you have an asset that you can do other things with but you don’t choose to do them—I haven’t chosen to do that.” After hearing that gibberish, the lawyer asked Trump to explain another basic business concept taught to nance students: generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. Did he understand GAAP? “No,” Trump said. “I’m not an accountant.” Once out of college, Donald Trump set his sights not just on nding young women in need of a man with a fortune, but also on establishing his name across the East River in Manhattan, where the bright lights beckoned. Less than sixteen years later, he would erect on Fifth Avenue the first building bearing his name in big, bronze letters.
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