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October 20 - October 27, 2022
He was usually selling, saying whatever he had to in order to survive life in ten-minute increments. He was also guided by a belief in repetition; over and over he would convey to employees and friends a version of the same idea: if you say something often enough, it becomes true.
He was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.
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.
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.
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 one adviser with another adviser, creating a wedge between them. The challenge is figuring out at any given moment which trick he is using.
For all the talk of how he values loyalty, he has been most abusive to those who readily offer it, and he enjoys watching people who had previously criticized him grovel in search of his forgiveness or approval. Yet people also describe him as lonely, and often a people pleaser as much as he is a fighter, frequently allergic to direct interpersonal conflict.
He is incredibly suggestable, skimming ideas and thoughts and statements from other people and repackaging them as his own; campaign aides once called him a “sophisticated parrot.”
Over time, Trump has had both the thickest skin and the thinnest skin of any public figure I have ever covered, sloughing off a barrage of negative coverage in one moment, while zeroing in on a perceived minor slight made against him by a talking head on television in the next.
Fred always boasted about Donald publicly. But Fred’s private approach to fatherhood—described by family members and associates as undermining, pitting his children against one another, with his attention singularly focused on building an empire of financial mechanisms to maximize profits—was better suited to overseeing a business than a home.
He told one friend after another that he wore two condoms to protect himself, and he announced publicly that he would require prospective dates to take an AIDS test. “It’s one way to be careful. There are a lot of ways,” he told an interviewer. “I’m saying, take all of those ways and double them, because you will need them.”
When a Fortune magazine reporter tagged along with him on the Minnesota trip—who delivered the mocking assessment that “Trump is to business what professional wrestling is to sports: part of it, certainly, but also a cartoonish parody of it”—Trump was unhappy that the cover story focused on his presidential campaign and not his company.)
“I mean, Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually before the World Trade Center was the tallest, and then when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second tallest, and now it’s the tallest,” Trump told the interviewer, his voice passing tinnily through the telephone. It wasn’t even true—Forty Wall Street was not the neighborhood’s second-tallest building—but Trump’s mind was clearly on his own interests as New York City reeled.
Nothing rankled Trump more than O’Brien’s estimate that he was worth no more than $250 million, and possibly as little as $150 million, just a year after Trump had published his own book titled Think Like a Billionaire. Insisting O’Brien was wrong, Trump in January 2006 filed a $5-billion libel lawsuit against both the author and his publisher, Warner Books, claiming the author had knowingly made false and malicious statements about a variety of topics, including his net worth.
Most banks had stopped lending to Trump after his run of bankruptcies, in a way that effectively made it impossible for him to build on the scale he had in the 1970s and ’80s. There was one major exception: Deutsche Bank,
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.
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.
“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.”
Trump would periodically throw print paper into the toilet, which would clog the pipes and require engineers to clear them; staff sometimes found clumped-up paper themselves, with his handwriting on it, and recalled it happening on some foreign trips.
By the middle of 2019, Trump had seen more of his original cabinet depart than any of the five presidents who had immediately preceded him. He was on his third press secretary, third chief of staff, and sixth communications director.
Trump had always appeared to believe that things only existed if they were discussed openly, and he set about minimizing the virus in public, despite private warnings from his National Security Council team that it was significant and from aides such as Kellyanne Conway and Brad Parscale to treat it seriously.
Yet Trump seemed to view the virus as a different kind of threat. Over and over again he asked visitors and callers to the Oval Office and White House residence the same rhetorical question: “Can you believe this is happening to me?”
