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November 24 - November 25, 2023
He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse, but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well.
Over time, as Trump became a patriarchal figure to me and I fell under the trance-like spell of the real estate tycoon, I would come to understand that questions of right and wrong didn’t matter to Trump in the slightest—all that counted to him, and then to me, was winning and displaying blind loyalty.
Let me stop for a moment to point out that I’m not making up Trump’s nearly constant use of the word “great” to make myself look good. That was how he talked. Hyperbole was his instinctual method of communication, exaggerating his own talents and wealth and physical characteristics and achievements, as if by enlarging things he could make them real.
One thing I had learned from my limited interactions with Trump was that he is not a forgiving person. Once he sours on you, you are done.
Bullying people to do things was not attractive to her at all. She wasn’t impressed by things like that. When I started doing work for Donald Trump, I wanted her approval, but she wasn’t going to give me praise for pushing someone else around. We didn’t talk a lot about business and my work, and she let me go my own way, but I wasn’t going to be admired at home for the things I was doing for Donald Trump, and I knew it. As our children grew older, they came to feel the same way. They would beg me to quit working for Trump, but I didn’t listen. It seemed to them that I wouldn’t listen to
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I became Trump’s spokesman, thug, pit bull, and lawless lawyer.
I was exactly like Rudolph Giuliani would become: the crazed advocate mocking others and proving my unquestioning loyalty, even as it led to ruin.
Just one example was Trump’s call in 1989 for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of black kids convicted of the rape of a white female jogger in Manhattan’s famous park. The fact that the kids were exonerated years later, when it was proven beyond doubt that they were not guilty, didn’t prompt Trump to back down or admit a mistake; he’d understood instinctively that the racial anxiety and resentments then gripping New York City would provide a potent symbol that he hoped to ride to power.
The real real truth about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world. I know it sounds crazy, but look at what Trump is doing now:
running the world, into the ground, but still, he literally rules.
knew Trump would do whatever was necessary to win. I just lacked the imagination and moral purpose to actually think about what that would mean for America, the world, for me, and for my family.
Because here’s the thing: When you sell your soul, you do exactly that: sell your soul.
The election of 2008 was a cataclysm for Trump, as he watched a young African American senator from Illinois defeat first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain. Barack Obama’s victory in many ways was the defining event of Donald Trump’s rise. There were really no words to describe Trump’s hatred and contempt for Barack Hussein Obama—always all three names and always with a disdainful emphasis on the middle.
“Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole,” he would challenge me as he cursed out the stupidity of Obama. “They are all complete fucking toilets.”
He abandoned the truth in favor of falsehoods—which he knew perfectly well were false—in exchange for news-cycle soundbites, and the media has fallen for it over and over and over, to this day and beyond.
“Can you believe that bullshit?” Trump said, with incredulity, referring to the ritual and the evangelicals. “Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”
All of the staff at the Trump Organization routinely joked about how any given day could be your last, pressure that you might think would drive us away but in fact made us all the more determined to defend Trump and do what he wanted, no matter how morally or legally dubious.
whistled and pointed in the direction of the tennis courts. “Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said. “I would love some of that.” I looked over and stopped cold. My fifteen-year-old daughter had just finished a tennis lesson with the club pro and she was walking off the court. She was wearing a white tennis skirt and a tank top, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I turned to Trump, incredulous. “That’s my daughter,” I said. Trump turned to me, now surprised. “That’s your daughter? When did she get so hot?” I said nothing, thinking to myself, or I should say allowing myself to think: What
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I’m sorry to report that Samantha was used to creepy rich men behaving in sketchy ways around her, but this was going too far. When we were alone, she told me with disgust that if you’re an attractive female the first thing Trump commented on was your appearance, as if he had the right to offer an opinion in your presence. Samantha said she was sick and tired of the way Trump demeaned and degraded me, as if he needed to keep me in my place. She wanted me to quit working for Trump because he was constantly doing things like
threatening to cut my pay in half, as he actually did, or withhold my bonus or fire me. Our family had money independent of Trump, which he didn’t like, Samantha believed, because the Boss wanted me to be subservient to him in all ways, so when I bought a nice car or had a fun vacation Trump would use it as an excuse to ridicule me and make me feel small—again, as if an insignificant speck like me had no right to enjoy the good life he led. This was part of his cult-leader persona—his slow, incremental, relentless way of saying nasty things to me about my abilities and intelligence, things
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“That’s disgusting,” my wife Laura said to me as I said he’d asked Samantha for a kiss. “He’s disgusting.”
The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.
Trump was a great story. He was chaos all the time. By five a.m. every day, he’d created the news cycle with his stubby fingers sending out bile-flecked tweets attacking anyone or everyone. In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.
identified it, and this remained a central fact of the campaign. If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank the chain of the media with an insult or racist slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN and the Times and Fox News dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t tragic, you’d laugh—or cry. In the frantic days after I’d first floated the coming Trump candidacy, I started to feel myself change. The transformation wasn’t obvious to me, at first, as I just seemed like a harder and more determined version of my prior self—ready,
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A better way to understand what I was doing was to liken it to acting. Method acting, to be specific. I was inhabiting the character I was playing for the press, repeating lines from a script. Lying for Trump became nothing to me. In my mind, I was an actor speaking lines written for me by someone else—in this case, Donald Trump. I was reciting the agreed-upon line of nonsense, in the most realistic and convincing way I could, with complete and total commitment to the role, like Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, and what I was merchandizing was indeed raging bullshit. Trump had mocked Obama’s
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Before long, I started to believe my own lies, just like Trump, a measure of how deeply I was invested in creating the narrative. Trump was a self-made man, I told the press, a statement so ridiculous I can’t believe I kept a straight face.
When I got home, Samantha was furious. She knew I was friends with people from all walks of life, including different ethnicities and religions. She knew I knew better. She said that I was friends with lots of Muslims and Hispanics and there I was, cheering on a racist pig. How could I support Trump when he said such terrible things about Mexicans? “This is going to be really bad,” she said. “Your grandmother was born in Buenos Aires, for God’s sake,” my son Jake said.
“It was taken out of context,” I told them, as always, making excuses for Trump, excusing the inexcusable. “He’s not qualified to be president,” Samantha said. “I’m a political science student and I know more about how the world works than he does. What does he know about the United Nations or NATO or nuclear weapons? Nothing is what he knows. I’m literally more qualified than him and I’m twenty-one-years old.” “I’m not going to discuss this again,” I said, as our dispute escalated into a screaming argument that left us unable to talk to each other for two months. That was my mantra with
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Globalization, climate change, gay marriage, the loss of American jobs to Third World countries, immigration, the central role of God—all of those with resentments and grievances had found their advocate. Dangerous forces were let loose on the land that day, and I was there, not just complicit, but an active and cynical participant in the game of Russian roulette the United States of America was about to play.
“Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump said. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”
I was like the millions of Americans who now line up for hours in the driving snow in some town in Wisconsin to hear Trump’s hour-long stream-of-consciousness comedy act—because that’s what he is, a stand-up comic, with a grotesque sense of humor.
He had long accused others of doing the very things he did; that was a central element of his modus operandi. If Trump claimed you cheated or lied or stole, you could be sure that he’d done those things himself; it was almost as if he had a compulsion to confess to his terrible actions by way of accusation.
After the raid, I had no choice but to continue to stay the course as we entered into a joint defense agreement. Trump, Jared, Ivanka, and I all collaborated using my attorney, Stephen Ryan, as the lead attorney. I never expected that Trump was going to do to me what I’d done to so many others over the years on his behalf: stiff me on the legal fees I owed to lawyers.
