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February 21 - April 28, 2021
I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as
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Apart from his wife and children, I
knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.
He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them. I was the one who most
encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy.
I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path
to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch-and-kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.
To Trump, life was a game, and all that mattered was winning. In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the Constitution—which is in far greater peril than is commonly
understood—and following one of the worst impulses of humankind: the desire for power at all costs.
life. Cummings was the lone politician I encountered in all my travails who took an interest in me as a human being. When I reported to serve my sentence, he even took steps to ensure my security in prison. It was a selfless act of kindness for which I will
always be grateful.
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. Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about—and Trump never actually jokes—will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.
As an undergraduate at American University, in Washington, DC, I’d read The Art of the Deal when it was published in the 1980s not once but twice, and I considered the book a masterpiece. Ruthless, relentless, insatiable, brilliant, innovative, hard-edged, hard-driving, above all always a winner—the
the self-portrait of Trump contained in those pages, however fictional and far from the truth, had enthralled me.
Some of the residents were prominent, like the lawyer George Conway, the husband of President Trump’s future spokesperson Kellyanne, but the effort was covert in the beginning, in order to blindside the board in the forthcoming condo board meeting.
Don Jr., who oversaw development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, sat quietly as his father demeaned him. Over time, I would come to learn that his father held him in extremely low esteem.
“Don has the worst fucking judgment of anyone I have ever met,” Trump would often tell me, adding that he’d been reluctant to bestow his first name on his first-born son. He didn’t want to share his name with a “loser,” if that was what his son turned out to be.
In fact, Trump didn’t actually own Trump Mortgage. Like many of “his” businesses, there was a licensing
agreement, paying Trump royalties for the use of his name, a structure which shielded him from liability, but also meant he had no equity in the business.
“Invoice?” he said. “You want to get fired on your first day?”
My father Maurice was a Holocaust survivor from Poland. As a kid, aged six, he’d had to hide
in the woods with his family during the German occupation of the Second World War, which had a formative impact on him. My Dad wasn’t hugely religiously into Judaism when I was a kid, but he was very proud of his heritage as a Jew, and that formed a big part of my identity growing up and hanging around with other Jewish kids, many of them the children of refugees from the former Soviet Union.
I called Melania, as instructed, and we performed a game of kabuki theater, each of us aware of the deception but following an unspoken rule that we wouldn’t acknowledge that reality.
She knew everything, but she didn’t do what most wives would do and insist on the whole story.
It was like water off a duck’s back to me, but it fed his need to demean people around him who had the temerity to get ahead in life; success was always a zero-sum game for him, and he and he alone had to be the winner.
I really felt for him in that moment, as his father fixed his tie and adopted his scowling stage presence to enter what amounted to the twenty-first century version of the Roman Forum, the roar of the crowd above now echoing in the hallways.
I’d never seen the Boss look so happy.
He loved trafficking in violence, or the threat of violence, as could be seen during the election campaign, when he implored his followers to beat up a protestor at a rally in Las Vegas in 2016. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” candidate Trump said as the protestor was roughed up.
There was also the fact that I took on the slimiest assignments without complaint. One of the worst was cleaning up the mess in the aftermath of a clusterfuck known as the Trump Network. This brilliant idea started soon after I began to work for Trump, and essentially involved a couple of operators who sold vitamins and supposed health pills and supplements who approached the Boss about a multi-level marketing scheme. The structure was like Amway, with each commission-based salesperson paying the person above them in the pyramid, thus the pejorative term “pyramid scheme” to describe what was
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to continually increase the payments being kicked up the ladder. But the problem was the most basic of any business: the products didn’t sell. I’m not sure if it was quality, or whether or not the vitamins actually did anything, or bad marketing, or bad design, or the Trump brand having no earthly relevance to a health-based product, but the company was a total failure and I was tasked with exiting the Boss in a cost-effective and timely fashion.
In 2000, Trump again flirted with the idea of aiming for the presidency, this time as a candidate for the small and fractious Reform Party. Trump’s candidacy was touted by his old friend, David Pecker, a connection I would come to
increasingly lean on.
The Reform Party had been founded by billionaire and failed presidential candidate Ross Perot, and it lacked a coherent philosophy, which actually suited Trump well, but it was constantly besieged...
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out.
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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. This was when I started to witness the increasingly reactionary and unhinged Archie Bunker racism that defined Trump and his views on modern America. He was friendly with many African American people, pretty much exclusively of the celebrity variety—of course, Trump really had no friends, only interests and desires and ambitions—and he wasn’t so stupid as to use the N-word, at least not in my presence. Mike Tyson, Don King, Oprah—those were the black folks he admired and embraced.
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“Tell me one country run ...
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person that isn’t a shithole,” he would challenge me as he cursed out the stupidity of Obama. “They are ...
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We even hired a Faux-Bama, or fake Obama, to record a video where Trump ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him, a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out—until he did the functional equivalent in the real world.
Trump didn’t despise Obama. It was much, much stronger than that. I figured that Obama was the only person on the planet whom Trump actually envied—truly, madly, deeply. Air Force One, walking the carpet to deliver the State of the Union, the way Angela Merkel and other world leaders obviously admired and listened to Obama—it drove Trump out
of his mind. Then came The Speech: Obama was invited to address the German nation in front of the Brandenburg Gate, in the same place as John F. Kennedy in the early ’60s, one of the indelible images of American history in the twentieth century. Trump went from incandescent to sputtering, spittle-flecked fury as he watched Obama talk about freedom and ridding the world of nuclear weapons and turning back the rising seas by fighting global warming. “You’ve got to admit he’s a great orator,” I said.
How did Donald Trump come to command twenty-six percent of Republican voters in the spring of 2011? The short answer—the only honest response to that question—was one word: Birtherism. I know because I witnessed it unfold from the inside.
By sitting on a stage while he was being ridiculed, Trump would prove that he could take a joke, even if he very rarely laughed—in fact, he almost never laughed, unless it was
at a crude sexual comment, or at someone else’s misfortune.
This is a little-appreciated fact about his path to power. He screams about fake news and reporters being the enemies of the people, like a tin-pot dictator, but the truth was that the media’s psychotic fascination with Trump was one of the biggest—maybe the biggest—cause for his rise to power.
The question of whether I would knowingly participate in a lie and a fraud had long ago been asked and answered; this was what Trump meant by loyalty, and what is still playing out nightly on the news as the Vice President and cabinet members repeat things that they know not to be true.
The room exploded with laughter as the celebrities turned to catch a glimpse of the reddening face of Trump. Many in the media have speculated that his animus for Obama came from that night—the humiliation in front of a room of power players—and was what made Trump want to run for the presidency. I can tell you with absolute certainty that wasn’t true. Not even in the slightest.
There was a $100-a-head lunch fundraiser, which was packed, and I offered the keynote address—relishing the chance to speak in public. I raved about Trump’s love for the wide-open spaces of Middle America and the prairie states of Red America. But nothing could have been further from the truth: Trump couldn’t locate Iowa on a map any more than he could tell the
difference between the locations of Kansas and Kansas City.
The vibe between Stone and me was instantly not good. Stone was a sycophant to Trump, but he and I had an instant dislike for each other.
