Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

by Maggie Haberman

In an interview during the 2016 campaign, New York Times reporter Jason Horowitz asked Donald Trump how his father would have felt about him running for president. The seventy-year-old replied, with no sense of irony: “He would have absolutely allowed me to have done it.”

It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good.

Collins spotted a tic in Trump’s style of argumentation, one that became a hallmark of his public commentary on controversial topics: walking right up to the line of saying something transgressive but stopping just short of articulating it directly, so as to make it hard for anyone to pin him down.

Still, in an era when Trump was seen as synonymous with wealth and bankers were crashing, he kept his place at the head of his company. Trump seemed to have learned a lesson from his travails: his personal brand mattered more than what was on his balance sheet, the projection of strength and success was more significant than any actual fact set underneath. It was important to tell the world that he was on his way back.

“During my three-year crisis period, there were those whose loyalty and devotion I would literally have ‘bet the ranch’ on. Some let me down. But in practice you are either loyal or disloyal, there is no middle ground. I also learned that loyalty is not necessarily returned.”

“Donald never really saw the difference between the tightly regulated casino company and his real estate interests, where his ability to exaggerate was a key component of the marketing strategy,” he told me.

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.”

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.

In 2014, Stone and Nunberg came to a new way of approaching the issue: he should propose a physical barrier along the border. They initially imagined the pitch as a mnemonic device that would remind the often unfocused potential candidate to remember to touch on immigration in speeches and interviews. But for a lifelong builder, the concept of a “wall” clicked in a way that visa-overstay enforcement never could. It became a political cause unto itself. And when he delivered that promise in Iowa in January—“We have to build a fence,” he said, “and it’s got to be a beauty”—the audience took to it immediately.

(“I love the Hispanics,” Trump insisted in response to questions about the activists. “I have thousands of Hispanics right now working for me.”)

Within a Republican Party that was divided on matters of foreign and domestic policy, Trump had located a strain of thought uniting different factions of conservatives: anti-Muslim sentiment.

It was a common Trump rhetorical device, a vague pronouncement loaded with ambiguous language and logical stretches, offering just enough to leave the impression he was agreeing with the idea in question, either to get out of the situation without revealing his actual knowledge about it or to please the interviewer. “Many people are saying” or “and other things” were Trump’s often-used filler descriptors.

The entire chain of events that had started with the Paris attack would prove to be a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s candidacy. It began with provocative but deliberately imprecise language that drew people in, then the refusal to claim ownership of his own words while never quite clarifying his views, and then the taking advantage of a relatively small media error—in this case, my imprecise choice of words—to portray himself as the victim of the feeding frenzy he had unleashed. Much as he had during his divorces, bankruptcies, and public feuds, Trump drove days of news based only on his reactions to people reacting to him, with one controversy rolling frictionlessly into the next, so that the controversies clouded the media’s line of sight.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump said. “It’s, like, incredible.”

At a rally there on the day of the caucuses, he primed his audience for violence against imaginary agitators. “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”

And yet Trump aides pointed to his “I disavow,” a statement in which he did not in any way acknowledge Duke, as if it was a clear and forceful denunciation. It was similar to what had happened with Trump’s answer about a possible database of Muslims a few months earlier: he gave a weak answer, waited until he was described as taking a position he appeared to be taking without actually definitely doing so, and then claimed outrage that the media was taking him out of context.

“Well, you know, my taxes are under audit, I always get audited,” Trump said. Christie looked puzzled. “So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit,’ ” Trump said. “ ’Cause I’ll never not be under audit.”

Instead, Trump replied, “I have a question.” The rest of the room, filled with people, waited and glanced at one another. Then he went ahead with it. “Cocked or decocked?” he asked. The group looked back blankly. Decocked? Trump started making a chopping gesture with his right hand. “With cock or without cock?” he said. Slowly it dawned on his coaches that he was asking if the student had gone through a surgical procedure. What difference does that make? someone asked. Trump looked around the room. “Well, I think it matters a lot,” he said. He wasn’t done. What if a girl was in the bathroom and someone came in, lifted up a skirt, and “a schlong” was hanging out, he said.

On Trump’s first day in office, his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, went to the briefing room and delivered falsehoods about the unprecedented size of the inaugural crowd. Spicer told people that it was not at Trump’s direction; nonetheless, his colleagues said, being validated was indisputably what the president wanted.

When the coverage did not turn out the way he wanted it to, Trump labeled the press “the enemy of the American people.” (It went well beyond Bannon’s habit of calling journalists “the opposition party.”) It was a refrain often used by despots around the globe, and Trump would repeat it dozens of times over the years.

Trump knew that he was being told something he did not fully comprehend, and instead of acknowledging that, he shouted down the teachers.

Yet the report offered something for everyone to claim that it validated their preexisting suspicions.

The Orlando rally and others he would hold around the country were envisioned as moments when Trump would recapture some of his favorite parts of running in 2016: appearing before crowds constantly, flying on a plane surrounded by people to chat with, dominating media coverage nearly every time he appeared. And they provided an emotional balm to all that pained him in Washington; instead of being told “no” or seeing a raft of investigations, he got to speak to a crowd that told him all he did was right.

Trump’s response helped me to answer something I had planned to ask him, which he raised before I got the chance to. “The question I get asked more than any other question: If you had it to do again, would you have done it?” Trump said of running for president. “The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.” He then went on to talk about how much easier life would have been had he not run. Yet there it was: reflecting on the meaning of having been president of the United States, his first impulse was not to mention public service, or what he felt he’d accomplished, only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame, and that many experiences were only worth having if someone else envied them. (When I asked him in a later interview about what he’d liked about the job, he replied, “Getting things done,” and listed a few accomplishments.)