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April 20 - May 6, 2025
He was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.
He treated rules and regulations as unnecessary obstacles rather than constraints on his behavior.
In a celebrity-obsessed country that over many years treated politics as a wrestling match or a game, Trump found his moment, fueling and benefiting from the collapse of cultural and political identities into one another as the country cleaved along the lines of whom you hate, or who hates you back.
It is an examination of the world that made Trump and the personality and character traits he possessed as he emerged from it, and how they shaped and defined his presidency.
Without understanding how the federal government worked, and with little interest in learning, he recreated around him the world that had shaped him.
Other than his father, the most important influence on the future president was Roy Cohn, who taught him how to construct an entire life around proximity to power, avoiding responsibility, and creating artifice through the media.
Yet for all the intrigue that is part of the Trump mythos—the talk of his unpredictability or descriptions of him as an agent of chaos—the irony, say those who have known him for years, is that he has had only a handful of moves throughout his entire adult life. There is the counterattack, there is the quick lie, there is the shift of blame, there is the distraction or misdirection, there is the outburst of rage, there is the performative anger, there is the designed-just-for-headlines action or claim, there is the indecisiveness masked by a compensatory lunge, there is the backbiting about
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More often than not, Trump is reacting to something instead of having an active plan, but because he so disorients people, they believe there must be a grander strategy or secret scheme at play.
So true
Among his most consistent attributes are a desire to grind down his opponents; his refusal to be shamed, or to voluntarily step away from the fight; his projection that things will somehow always work out in his favor; and his refusal to accept the way life in business or politics has traditionally been conducted.
“I realized then and there that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool,” Trump told Blum. “I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
Trump’s view of the day appeared to be singular. “The sun shone, the sky was cloudless” were the first lines of Gay Talese’s next-day Times dispatch about the 1964 ceremony. There was no rainfall. Ammann was Swiss, not Swedish, and he had lived in the United States for decades before the bridge’s completion, having emigrated from Switzerland in 1904. And in fact, Ammann was among the first people Moses called on to be acknowledged with applause during the ceremony.
“I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.”
“If you’re not going to go marry me, you’re going to ruin your life,” he told her, as Ivana recalled it.
Fred Trump disparaged him in racial terms.
Called him the n word?
Trump would later adopt a phrase spoken at the time by Rizzo’s counterpart in Miami—“When the looting starts, the shooting starts”—as his own.
It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good.
“If they didn’t give it up—and I don’t mean reduce it, and I don’t mean stop, because stopping doesn’t mean anything. I mean get it out. If they didn’t, I would bring sanctions against that country that would be so strong, so unbelievable . . .”
The text laid out the developer’s policy-light but slogan-based impulses on a single theme: foreigners are ripping off the United States, making the country an international laughingstock.
“I’m tired of nice people already in Washington,” Trump said. “I want someone who is tough and knows how to negotiate. If not, our country faces disaster.”
“They used a—an expression, which I thought was fantastic,” Trump recounted. “It was the feeling of supremacy that this country had in the 1950s, it was a feeling of supremacy, it really was.
The writer Adam Davidson would later trace Trump’s ambition for raw dominance to the economics of Manhattan real estate, in which wealth comes from grabbing one’s share of scarce land and extracting income from others as its value grows. The “rentier economy,” Davidson explained, enshrined a zero-sum mentality in which the person (or country) with power gets to set the terms of exchange. Trump assumed—or wanted to assume—that the entire world worked that way.
When the director Chris Columbus was filming a sequel to Home Alone and wanted to use the Plaza’s lobby, Trump forced his way into the film. “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie,” he said. Columbus thought of cutting the cameo, but Trump’s appearance drew applause from the test audience.
Trump had attempted to get his father to sign a codicil to his will that would strengthen Donald’s position as the sole executor of the estate and protect his inheritance from creditors. “This doesn’t pass the smell test,” Fred would tell his lawyer daughter, Maryanne, according to her testimony in an affidavit. He found new lawyers who drafted a version of his will that removed Trump as sole executor.)
in practice you are either loyal or disloyal, there is no middle ground. I also learned that loyalty is not necessarily returned.”
“You know what today is?” Trump asked giddily. Marcus said he did not. “Today is ‘Liberation Day,’ ” Trump explained. To him, the term had a very specific meaning: it was the first warm spring day, when women stopped wearing coats and “liberated” their upper bodies.
Once, with a dozen people around a Trump Tower conference table, Trump came up behind a junior associate at a law firm employed by him, swooped over the young man’s shoulder, and crumpled up papers on which the lawyer had been diligently scribbling down notes.
Former company officials recalled Marla having concerns about vaccines and chemicals, while Trump, according to Marcus, favored them for his child.
“You know, being Donald Trump is a double-edged sword,” he said. “People love me because I bring quality to everything. But people hate me because I love to fuck supermodels.” The group was silent. Peper glanced at his son. What could you even say to that, Peper thought.
Now, they don’t look like Indians to me, sir.” When a reporter asked him to explain exactly what an Indian looked like, Trump replied, “You know. You know.”
“I certainly have nothing against luxury apartments nor do I have anything against very successful project developers, including Mr. Trump,” McCain said on the Senate floor in 1996. “I do object, however, to asking the taxpayer to bear the risk of a development for one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the country, to help finance a project that will predominantly benefit upper-income Americans.”
(Weeks after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side.” He laughed as he said it; Young told him that wasn’t something to joke about.)
He also had instincts about the types of proposals he thought would appeal broadly: a government-run universal health-care system and increased taxes on the wealthy.
One middle-aged man gave me a strange look when I asked and assured me he would be casting a ballot for Trump at the caucuses. I asked him why he planned to do that. Without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, his voice earnest, “I watched him run his business.”
Years later, Trump described the goal of the suit—one of many he filed or threatened to file over decades—as inflicting pain on the author and the publisher. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he reflected on his motivations.
When Costanzo took out his laptop to show how the site worked he found that there was already a Twitter user impersonating Trump under the handle @donaldtrump. Costanzo created a new account, @realDonaldTrump.
The two men met at Trump Tower and had an open-ended conversation about politics. Trump talked extensively about China and said that the country—which was on a trajectory to soon have the world’s largest economy—was ripping off the United States through its trade practices. Bannon talked positively about populism, and suddenly Trump piped up. “That’s exactly what I am—a popularist,” Trump said. Bannon corrected him. “No, it’s populist,” he said. “Yeah, popularist,” Trump responded.
While Stone never described himself as Trump’s brain—and always said the opposite in interviews and in his own writing—Trump was, I would learn, particularly sensitive to the notion that he was anyone’s puppet.
Then Obama’s sarcasm grew even more scathing. “All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience.” More laughs. “For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well
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Putin never met with Trump, but that did not dampen Trump’s ambitions. “I had a great weekend with you and your family,” he tweeted afterward at Aras Agalarov. “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”
In 2010, Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, opened a civil investigation into “possibly deceptive trade practices,” but after Trump University abruptly pulled out of the state, Abbott dropped the matter.
Trump’s foundation donated twenty-five thousand dollars to one of Florida attorney general Pam Bondi’s campaign committees. She had considered joining Schneiderman’s suit, but ultimately declined to. (During the same period, Trump also sent four-figure donations to California attorney general Kamala Harris, a Democrat. Her office ultimately took no action against Trump University even as it went after other for-profit educational entities.)
A few months later, Trump—who didn’t like to use email and was not particularly tech savvy—sent out the first tweet he had typed out for himself on an Android smartphone, thanking an actress for her warm words about him. McConney later compared the moment to the scene in the movie Jurassic Park, when dinosaurs realize they can open doors themselves.
When the two men spoke that May, Clinton—ever the pleaser himself and needing to see his own inherent abilities reflected in others—told Trump that he had tapped into a real current of dissatisfaction among a segment of Republicans.
Perhaps most important, Stone and Nunberg had attempted to draw Trump’s attention to immigration, a point of friction between grassroots activists and the party’s pro-business establishment since McCain had promoted a 2005 bipartisan bill pairing increased border enforcement with a path to citizenship that conservative media called “amnesty.” But Trump had little organic interest in the topic; he was far more interested in the concept of other nations’ “ripping us off” through trade practices and international institutions. In 2014, Stone and Nunberg came to a new way of approaching the issue:
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Republican leaders responded to Trump’s candidacy with instant alarm. Shortly after the kickoff speech, a colleague got word of a private meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel where several prominent Washington-based Republicans commiserated about the predicament in which he was putting their party. What struck me about this conversation, and others like it, was how powerless some of the most powerful people in American politics felt when up against Trump.
In a conversation with his friend Christie, who got into the race two weeks after Trump did, Trump was blunt, confiding that he wasn’t sure he would make it past October.
At another South Carolina rally that week, Trump mocked the two Post journalists for walking away from their original reporting, which they hadn’t in fact done. At one point, he turned to impersonation, standing ramrod straight behind the lectern, then waved his arms around while dangling his hands. “Uhhh, I don’t remember!” he hammed to laughs from the crowd.
“I’ve never seen a situation before where someone fucks up and their numbers go up,” a Trump political adviser told me at the time.
He ultimately spent much of the week before the New Hampshire primary complaining to the state’s voters that “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.”
(A third contender, Marco Rubio, was represented by the local congressman, Mike Pompeo, who said Trump would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.”)
