TrumpNation Quotes

“However popular Candid Camera may have been, though, it represented a genre—with the exception of a few popular shows like COPS, Real World, and America’s Funniest Home Videos—that lay dormant on American prime-time television until the late 1990s. Then, stung by a loss of viewers and watercooler buzz to more innovative, more targeted, and more creatively unshackled cable operators, network television programmers revisited reality. The show that ushered in the new era in network programming debuted in the summer of 2000 on CBS, and it became a ratings powerhouse known as Survivor.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Rolling through Manhattan in his limousine, Donald confided that he was nervous about his pending marriage to Slovenian model Melania Knauss, which was just ten days away. “It’s all in the hunt and once you get it, it loses some of its energy,” he said. “I think competitive, successful men feel that way about women. Don’t you agree? Really, don’t you agree?”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“I wonder, from a remote warehouse on Long Island.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“When Donald later took out full-page ads criticizing the White House’s military spending overseas and advocating more financial aid for the homeless (yes, the homeless), Koch reminded New”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“The point is that if you are a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.… That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. I play to people’s fantasies.… People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion”).”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Donald, an avid and lifelong football fan, wanted to be part of the club. After all, football ownership is a high-profile guy-thing (potato chips and Budweiser around a TV set on Sunday afternoon is a low-profile guy-thing), and men need to be boys. They can’t help themselves. They like to run headfirst into one another. Donald and football almost had to happen.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Tan as a catcher’s mitt and as whippet-thin as Gollum, Cohn was a power broker who, until his death in 1986, prowled New York with a slippery, lethal pragmatism worthy of any Tolkien creation.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“One thing that went missing from the reporting of Donald’s percentages was some quick math. Donald was in the midst of his I-am-worth-$5-billion-to-$6-billion phase, but by valuing his casino stake at 1 or 2 percent of his net worth he gave himself a personal treasure chest worth no more than $1.7 billion. Still, such is the hypnotic power of the Trumpster that his verbal billions convince people to stop doing multiplication and division.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Shortly after the Taj opening, Forbes magazine published a cover story saying the developer was worth, at best, only $500 million, down from an earlier Forbes estimate of $1.7 billion. But Donald’s situation was worse than even Forbes imagined. Given all of the debt Donald had piled on his holdings, it was unlikely he ever was a billionaire, much less worth $500 million. In fact, Donald only had about $17 million to $23 million in cash, and in the most optimistic scenario—one adopted by New Jersey regulators—his net worth was about $206 million.64 But the debts on his properties were so massive that he owed far more than he had. In all likelihood, Donald was worth less than zero.65”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“When Donald later took out full-page ads criticizing the White House’s military spending overseas and advocating more financial aid for the homeless (yes, the homeless), Koch reminded New Yorkers of Donald’s failed attempt to buy land in Moscow for a new hotel in the Russian capital. “I mean, how bright do you have to be to know that in Moscow you can’t own property?” asked Koch. “How bright? Is this the man we want dictating foreign policy?”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“While the vision he had shown in building Trump Tower remained, the discipline he had summoned to get the skyscraper built evaporated. Emboldened by easy money and a laudatory press, Donald went on a massive and ill-considered shopping spree. Among the projects he juggled was a promising expanse on the West Side on the same turf where Zeckendorf wanted to erect Atomic City, and Donald gave the development-in-waiting an equally retro, Jetsons-like label: Television City. As Donald wheelied along, fine-tuning his performance as the business world’s answer to Evel Knievel, the media lavished whopping reams of attention on him. For the most part, reporters didn’t cover Donald’s ventures because what he did was smart. They covered Donald’s doings because what he did was fun to watch. Whether any of them recognized that what they were watching was a slow-motion car crash didn’t matter. It was the ’80s.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Other members of Manhattan’s real estate elite preferred anonymity and usually disdained slapping their names on their buildings. They didn’t buy football teams or airlines or casinos or beauty pageants. They simply built, waited patiently to get rich, and donated huge sums to philanthropies. For the most part, no one in this crowd considered Donald a peer, either in terms of his tastes or his accomplishments. The Rockefellers, assessing Donald at his peak, dismissed him.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“This little coin toss with NBC was vintage Donald. Zoom in for the jackpot. Be outrageous in your demands. Keep a straight face. See what happens. Make a buck as fast as possible. Keep a straight face. Pretend you knew exactly what would happen all along. Keep a straight face.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Of course, any workplace actually run like the operation Donald presided over in Season Two would have devolved into a dysfunctional compost pile. “You don’t solve problems by simply firing people,” said David Cadden, a management professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. “I think the notion that somebody’s got to get it from an all-knowing CEO emanates from this glorification of the CEO that we’ve all embraced over the last decade.”35”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“If you don’t win you can’t get away with it. And I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win, whether it’s in golf, whether it’s in tennis, whether it’s in life, I just always win. And I tell people I always win, because I do. “I guess to a certain extent it is all about winning when you think about it, and it’s about style. It’s probably about winning with style. “A lot of people build a brand and they study it very carefully and every move is calculated. My moves are not calculated. My moves are totally uncalculated. I’ve got a brand, sometimes despite me. And it’s a hot brand.”6”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“are no concrete workers like New York concrete workers. Love ’em, hate ’em, they do incredible things,” said Ms. Res, who also thought Donald was an unusual boss. “As much as he is with the Miss Universe thing, and with all the models, of all the men I have worked for he’s the one who has taken the most interest in a woman’s brain. He really cared about what I thought and what I had to say. People are surprised to hear that about him, but it’s true.”29”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Donald’s celebrity, rooted in his image as the republic’s reigning can-do guy, forged such a high-voltage, intercontinental bond with every mogul-in-training that he spent two decades striding the business landscape like Thor in Valhalla, like Donaldus Rex, dealmeister of all he surveyed.”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“For the most part, reporters didn’t cover Donald’s ventures because what he did was smart. They covered Donald’s doings because what he did was fun to watch. Whether”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald

“Donald is going to have trouble going back to his normal life when the show is over because starring in The Apprentice is like being on cocaine constantly,” said Solovey. “He’s going to have a hard time leaving that behind. You can just see it in him. He’s got a big ego.”53”
― Timothy L. O'Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald