Ares
10th September 2015, 05:42 AM
"I'm owned by the people. I'm no angel, but I'm going to do right by them."
Hey, ya made it, great to see ya!" says Donald Trump, having just stepped aboard his throne room of a plane and stopping by my seat to extend his hand. "You get the big tour yet? No? What the hell? C'mon, I'll show you myself."
I follow him into the stateroom of the 757, past three rows of sleeper seats wrapped in eggshell calfskin, with seat-belt buckles of plated gold and the family crest stitched in every headrest; past the conference center, with its mahogany table and a dozen executive high-backs snugged around it; past the in-plane theater, with its oyster-shape couches and the 57-inch flatscreen tuned to Fox; past the bumped-out bulkhead and the first of two bedrooms, this one fitted with mohair couches that convert to a full-size bed; and then the master bedroom, with its silk-spun walls and bathroom fixtures finished in rosy gold.
"Not bad, you agree?" calls Trump over his shoulder, leading me down the corridor to the cockpit. "I bought this from Paul Allen and gutted it top to bottom. It's bigger than Air Force One, which is a step down from this in every way. Rolls-Royce engines; seats 43. Didja know it was featured on the Discovery Channel as the world's most luxurious jetliner?" (Fact-check: It isn't bigger than Air Force One, and it was featured on the Smithsonian Channel. But in this, as in much of what Trump says, it's more about the broad strokes than the details.)
After takeoff, I find him in the stateroom, reading notes. "Gotta concentrate," he says. "I'm speaking in front of thousands. After the rally, we'll have plenty of time to talk."
This seems fair, though we've spent hours in his office and haven't gotten around yet to a single policy question, beyond his assurance that we'd touch on "all that stuff" later. I buckle in to watch the campaign coverage when he asks me if I know what inversions are. "Uh, no," I say, thinking I'm in for a tutorial about wind patterns at 30,000 feet. "It's when companies leave America and take thousands of good jobs with 'em. What do ya think of that, does that sound fair?" he says.
"Well, no, it doesn't. But what would you do about it in your first hundred days?"
"Yeah, I gotta remind myself to talk about that tonight. But I'm busy now! I really gotta prep!" He burrows into his notes, marking a section in ballpoint. Not 60 seconds pass before he looks at me again. "You know New Hampshire has a huge problem with heroin? Why do ya s'pose that is?"
I tell him that it probably has to do with OxyContin and school kids raiding their parents' medicine chests. They run out of pills, then find that bags of heroin are cheaper. "Yeah? Well, which is worse for you, the heroin or the pills?" I explain that they're both derivatives of opium, which is dicey however it's delivered. "Hunh!" he says. "Interesting. I didn't know that. But I gotta get back to my notes!" (At a press conference, an hour later, he'll respond to a question about heroin in New Hampshire by saying that "it starts probably with OxyContin, from what I'm hearing.") Sixty seconds pass. "Hey, you believe this ******* ISIS? Chopping people's heads off, putting people in cages and drowning 'em. We gotta waterboard 'em, don't you agree?"
I tell him I'm not in favor of chopping people's heads off, and ask if he'd sanction waterboarding as president. He begins a rambling answer, then asks the woman across from me if she believes in the practice of waterboarding. And so it goes for the 26 minutes it takes us to fly from New York to Hampton, New Hampshire, where tonight he'll go on in front of 2,500 people, a crowd to thoroughly dwarf the several hundred people who've turned out to watch Jeb Bush and Rand Paul speak in the state. In those 26 minutes, he'll devote some 90 seconds to his typewritten notes, diverted instead by the mentions of him on Fox and the crowd of whims and tangents in his head. To sit alone with Trump is to be whipsawed and head-snapped by his sentences that start and stop, his thoughts that take hard detours or suddenly become questions in midstream. But as I learn in Hampton, exactly none of this will matter once Donald Trump takes the stage. The second those klieg lights hit him, he'll find his maestro voice, that nimble and knowing schoolyard brogue that doesn't miss a trick or a chance to pounce. Besides, he'll say the exact same unscripted things he said in Michigan days earlier and will say again tomorrow at the Iowa State Fair, all of it word for word from memory. You may lament Trump's message, but you can't move him off it. It's like trying to stop a 757.
This past June, Donald John Trump rode down the escalator in the five-story, pink-marble atrium of Manhattan's Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for president of the United States. Since then, he has been mocked and reviled, worshipped and courted, and, till very lately, dismissed as a fever dream of the torch-and-pitchfork segment of the Republican Party. Entering stage far-right with wing-nut invective — the people coming across our border are "rapists" and "killers" who routinely commit "great amounts of crime" — he has dominated the race since the day he got in it and posted a large and durable lead ever since. The caveat: His negatives are through the roof. About a third of registered Republicans likely to vote next year say they'd never pull the lever for him.
In all the hysteria, however, what's often missed are the qualities that brought Trump here. You don't do a fraction of what he's done in life — dominate New York real estate for decades, build the next grand Xanadus for the super-rich on the far shores of Dubai and Istanbul, run the prime-time ratings table for more than 10 years and earn a third (or sixth) fortune at it – without being immensely cunning and deft, a top-of-the-food-chain killer. Over the course of 10 days and several close-in encounters, I got to peer behind the scrim of his bluster and self-mythos and get a very good look at the man. What I saw was enough to make me take him dead serious. If you're waiting for Trump to blow himself up in a Hindenburg of gaffes or hate speech, you're in for a long, cold fall and winter. Donald Trump is here for the duration — and gaining strength and traction by the hour.
Begin with his message and mode of delivery. Standing over his shoulder, I watched Trump use the press to speak directly to his base, talking past the cameras and microphone banks to that furious demographic of working and out-of-work factory-town families who saw their wages set like Quikrete in the 1980s and watched the spoils and tax breaks swim upstream. When we landed in New Hampshire and pulled in to a Hampton high school in his motorcade of stretch SUVs, Trump was mobbed by reporters with the pushy fervor of kids seeking autographs at spring training. He batted aside their questions — Iraq, Russia, immigrants — to buttonhole the hundreds of people milling outside, unable to get in but listening on speakers, and the thousands more seated down the hall.
"I built a net worth of more than $10 billion. I've been a world-class businessman. . . . That's the thinking that our country needs. Take our jobs back from China and Japan and Mexico. . . . Take a look at China. . . . We owe them $1.4 trillion . . . because we're led by people who don't have a clue. Honestly, I think we're led by stupid people."
There, in those words, is his campaign. I am strong; politicians are weak. I speak truth and never retreat; they lie and wave the white flag to our foes. They have stripped us bare; I will build us back, make this country feared the whole world over. Everything he utters is a version of this, dressed in different raiment or reference — and he's saying it to people, his "silent majority," who have longed to hear these words since Richard Nixon. "He's delivering a message of power and courage without any proof points called policy," says Steve Schmidt, the Republican wise man and campaign warhorse who's been watching Trump with mounting fascination. "A huge chunk of conservatives are unmoored from the issues. What moves them is his tone and attack on Republicans who they hold in complete contempt."
In the airless auditorium, the faithful are packed so tight that it feels like a breeding barn with a PA system. They are the young and the old, the blue- and white-collar, the white and, well, white-haired. He has a pitch-perfect ear for their curdled resentment and a ventriloquist's gift for reading it back to them in words that they think but cannot utter at work, or anywhere else but their kitchen tables. Canvassing the crowd before he comes on, I hear the same phrases over and over. "Finally, someone's saying what we've all wanted to say — we've been pushed too far for years," says Tina, a gym-toned mom in a sleeveless top. "I like that he's not politically correct — we don't have time for that here," says Lise, a frost-tipped blonde in the row behind her, calling Trump "another Ronald Reagan." "He means what he says, and says what he means," says a converted Democrat named Dino. "The other guys, they got marbles in their mouth — you don't even know what they're saying."
Trump takes the stage to a standing ovation. His speech goes the way it always goes. "They had 24 million people [at the debate the other night]. . . . Do you think they were there for . . . Rand Paul? Rand, I've had you up to here!" He touches his armpit, zinging the vertically challenged Paul: "He didn't like it when I said you have to pass an IQ test to get up on the stage." Then he pivoted to Carly Fiorina. "Carly was a little nasty to me — be careful, Carly! Be careful! But I can't say anything to her because she's a woman. . . . I promised that I wouldn't say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground. I said I wouldn't say it! That her stock value tanked. That she laid off tens of thousands of people, and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say that. And that she then went out and ran against Barbara Boxer, and . . . lost in a landslide. And I said, 'I. Will. Not. Say. That!' "
The enormous audience leaps to its feet in eruptive, rocking laughter. And for 58 minutes, he goes on like this, playing the crowd like a Telecaster. Mexico's taking your jobs. Ford and Nabisco are fleeing there. No more Oreos for Trump! What's most striking is the ease with which Trump does it — no note cards, no teleprompter, no prep in the car. Running his first race for office at 69, an age when other men are seeking help for bladder conditions, he gives every impression of being born for this — and of having the time of his life.
A week or so earlier, I'd been summoned to Trump's office at his glitter-bomb cathedral, Trump Tower. It is hard to overstate the effect of the building on your sense of dimension and place. You walk into a lobby that is half-Vegas, half-Vatican, a vaulting altar of brass and obsidian that soars halfway to heaven, where they serve dark-roast. There's a Starbucks somewhere up in the sky-high atrium, not far from the 60-foot waterfall. You fight the urge to dunk your head in the pool where it collects, and try, instead, to regain your wits on the whooshing ride up to the 26th floor.
There, you are met by the first in a series of dazzling young female assistants. Trump also likes the theatrics of beauty. Many of his close aides are women in their twenties not very long removed from college. Hope Hicks, Trump's communications director who, several years ago, was studying at Southern Methodist University, leads me into the boss's office, which is as much Trump's trophy room as workspace. Every flat surface is adorned by his image: framed magazine glossies from Important Publications, none more so, at least per Trump, than the 1990 Playboy where "I was one of the only men to ever get on the cover."
Trump offers me a seat by his mahogany desk. Over his shoulder looms a bust of Ronald Reagan. (There is also a bald eagle, the stuffed-animal version, for any preschool patriot who wanders in.) In an earlier sit-down, Trump had fought me to a standstill when I tried to draw him out about his past. As countless writers before me have discovered to their sorrow, there's no such thing as question-and--answer with Trump. Instead, you frame a query, then stand back and watch him go, hoping that in the monologue that follows, he touches at least obliquely on your topic. This time, he did divulge about his father, going on at length and with real feeling. Fred Trump, the second in a line of self-made magnates (his father, Friedrich, had earned his fortune in the Klondike gold rush, selling lodging, food, booze and possibly women to hordes of miners), was possessed of the singular family gift: He could see the future and beat everyone else to it.
"When the car was just coming out, houses had no garages," says Trump. "Dad went all over Queens, building garages in the Thirties, and he could throw 'em up like nothing. He had great energy and vision, worked seven days a week and liked it, and was happy in his life. I watched people take vacations, and they're miserable. Him, two hours at the beach with us on Sundays, and he was back to work."
Fred was among the first of the great wartime developers to figure out the import of Federal Housing Authority programs, vast new pots of government loans to build housing for the working- and middle-class. Trump doesn't volunteer that much of the family fortune derived from taxpayer funds, or that his father was a master manipulator of the Democratic machine in Brooklyn. Fred's real money was made erecting outer-borough housing for the returning vets of World War II, brick behemoths that he delivered on schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars under budget.
Though Fred lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. "We'd go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors," he says. "You'd see 'em ring the bell and stand way over here. I'd say, 'Why're you over there?' and he'd say, ' 'Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'"
Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. "I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping," says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father's. "My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar." "I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn't an option," says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump's kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they've nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. "We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well," says Don Jr. "But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently."
It's worth noting that Trump was nearly a train wreck himself as the son of wealth in Jamaica Estates, Queens. An indifferent student who was "mouthing off to everybody" and carrying around a switchblade in his pocket, he was yanked out of prep school by his disappointed parents and sent to the New York Military Academy upstate. "He thought he was Mr. America and the world revolved around him," says Col. Ted Dobias, his former instructor and baseball coach, a barrel-chested man who's now nearing 90 but whose memory is diamond-drill sharp. "I had a lot of one-on-ones" with the 14-year-old Trump, adds Dobias, some of which got physical, both men say. Whatever it took to seize the eighth-grader's attention, Dobias seemed to turn him around. By ninth grade, Trump was a model cadet; as a senior, he made cadet captain, says Dobias, and was the star first baseman for Dobias' varsity squad. "He was good-hit and good-field: We had scouts from the Phillies to watch him, but he wanted to go to college and make real money."
After graduating from Wharton, where his academic laurels have been grossly overstated through the years (he didn't finish first in his class or anywhere near it, and went altogether missing from the list of honors for the class of 1968), Trump began working for his old man in Brooklyn, but had little sustaining interest in low-rent units. What he wanted was to have his name writ large on the next iconic towers of Manhattan. It was the mid-1970s, when the city was swirling the drain of insolvency and structural collapse, but even from the boroughs, Trump could look ahead a decade to the gilded age of the 1980s. Seizing upon the collapse of the Penn Central railroad, the largest corporate bankruptcy in history at the time, he scooped up an option to redo the Commodore Hotel, a Beaux Arts colossus gone badly to seed as one of the troubled railroad's minor holdings.
"The area was dying, people were leaving the city, but I went to Bowery Bank across the street and said, 'If you lend me the money, 42nd Street is gonna be great again,' " Trump says. Bowery and a second firm, Equitable Life, staked tens of millions of dollars on the reconstruction. Trump strong-armed City Hall to give him an unheard-of break – full tax abatement for 40 years — and stripped the old girl of her limestone vestments, dressing her in dazzling skirts of glass. Reborn as the Grand Hyatt in 1980, the building — a great mirrored beacon to investors eager to pounce on midtown projects — came along just as the stock market soared, minting a brash generation of new millionaires.
Those young-money turks burned to tweak their stodgy fathers by flashing their sudden wealth on shiny objects. Trump built them the gold-dust condos of their dreams, converting the dowdy Gulf and Western in Columbus Circle into a brass-and-glass playpen for Wall Street flyboys, after setting his style template with Trump Tower. That building helped revive Fifth Avenue, which, like many of New York's former talismans, had fallen into sad decline. It was also a benchmark moment for Trump: the accomplishment with which he officially eclipsed Fred as the signature builder of his age.
"So here's a story I've never told," he says, warming to the memory of that triumph. "When I was building Trump Tower, my father stood across the street and said, 'Don't use glass and bronze, use brick. It's better, less expensive, and no one cares about the outside. All they care about is the size of the closets!' " Trump laughs and shakes his head in mordant wonder, as if to say, Oh, the humanity. By the way, Trump has told this story many times, according to Gwenda Blair, the author of Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, which will be reissued as an e-book this fall. "It's all part of what he does," she says, "the bragging and the repetition: It's called branding, and he's relentless at it."
Trump springs from his desk chair and summons me over to the floor-to-ceiling windows facing north. Below us, beyond the Tiffany Building and the Plaza Hotel, spreads the splendid sine qua non of Central Park, lush in its summer coat of greens and golds. "I mean, who has this location? I own this," says Trump, marveling at his great good fortune. "I'm at the point in my life — tremendous cash flow, very little debt — where I could do anything I want. I said, 'Now, I'm gonna take the risk of running for president. We need that kinda mind to make great deals.' "
As we stand there, hundreds of feet above New York, gazing on the Lilliputian tourists, it occurs to me to wonder: How on Earth, from this vantage, did Trump see into the hearts of underemployed white folk? How did he know that they stewed and simmered over free trade, immigrants and fat-cat Republicans who'd sold them down the river for decades? How did he guess that they'd conflated those things to explain the flight of factory jobs, and that all they really cared about, besides the return of those jobs, was that someone beat the hell out of the party hacks — the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers and Karl Roves?
"What you've tapped into," I say, "is that people see those guys and say, 'This one's owned by David Koch, that one's owned by Sheldon Adelson, and so on, and then they look at you . . ."
"I'm owned by the people!" Trump says. "I mean, I'm telling you, I'm no angel, but I'm gonna do right by them!"
But the answer to my question is ringing in the air — specifically, in the echo of Trump's accent. He was raised around lunch-pail guys in Queens and learned to talk like them trailing his father to building sites. He shares the syntax and sympathies of meat-and-potatoes types, and has crafted his message for their ears expressly, calling out the enemies on their list. In New Hampshire, I watched that huge crowd come to a boil as he took dead aim at corporate greed. "When the head of Ford calls me up and he says, 'Mr. President, we really want to build this plant in Mexico,' I'll say, 'Congratulations . . . we're gonna charge you a 35 percent tax on every car and truck and part that comes in!' 'But you can't dooo that, Mr. President!' Trust me, I can do it — and what happens is, they probably fold by 5 p.m."
Hey, ya made it, great to see ya!" says Donald Trump, having just stepped aboard his throne room of a plane and stopping by my seat to extend his hand. "You get the big tour yet? No? What the hell? C'mon, I'll show you myself."
I follow him into the stateroom of the 757, past three rows of sleeper seats wrapped in eggshell calfskin, with seat-belt buckles of plated gold and the family crest stitched in every headrest; past the conference center, with its mahogany table and a dozen executive high-backs snugged around it; past the in-plane theater, with its oyster-shape couches and the 57-inch flatscreen tuned to Fox; past the bumped-out bulkhead and the first of two bedrooms, this one fitted with mohair couches that convert to a full-size bed; and then the master bedroom, with its silk-spun walls and bathroom fixtures finished in rosy gold.
"Not bad, you agree?" calls Trump over his shoulder, leading me down the corridor to the cockpit. "I bought this from Paul Allen and gutted it top to bottom. It's bigger than Air Force One, which is a step down from this in every way. Rolls-Royce engines; seats 43. Didja know it was featured on the Discovery Channel as the world's most luxurious jetliner?" (Fact-check: It isn't bigger than Air Force One, and it was featured on the Smithsonian Channel. But in this, as in much of what Trump says, it's more about the broad strokes than the details.)
After takeoff, I find him in the stateroom, reading notes. "Gotta concentrate," he says. "I'm speaking in front of thousands. After the rally, we'll have plenty of time to talk."
This seems fair, though we've spent hours in his office and haven't gotten around yet to a single policy question, beyond his assurance that we'd touch on "all that stuff" later. I buckle in to watch the campaign coverage when he asks me if I know what inversions are. "Uh, no," I say, thinking I'm in for a tutorial about wind patterns at 30,000 feet. "It's when companies leave America and take thousands of good jobs with 'em. What do ya think of that, does that sound fair?" he says.
"Well, no, it doesn't. But what would you do about it in your first hundred days?"
"Yeah, I gotta remind myself to talk about that tonight. But I'm busy now! I really gotta prep!" He burrows into his notes, marking a section in ballpoint. Not 60 seconds pass before he looks at me again. "You know New Hampshire has a huge problem with heroin? Why do ya s'pose that is?"
I tell him that it probably has to do with OxyContin and school kids raiding their parents' medicine chests. They run out of pills, then find that bags of heroin are cheaper. "Yeah? Well, which is worse for you, the heroin or the pills?" I explain that they're both derivatives of opium, which is dicey however it's delivered. "Hunh!" he says. "Interesting. I didn't know that. But I gotta get back to my notes!" (At a press conference, an hour later, he'll respond to a question about heroin in New Hampshire by saying that "it starts probably with OxyContin, from what I'm hearing.") Sixty seconds pass. "Hey, you believe this ******* ISIS? Chopping people's heads off, putting people in cages and drowning 'em. We gotta waterboard 'em, don't you agree?"
I tell him I'm not in favor of chopping people's heads off, and ask if he'd sanction waterboarding as president. He begins a rambling answer, then asks the woman across from me if she believes in the practice of waterboarding. And so it goes for the 26 minutes it takes us to fly from New York to Hampton, New Hampshire, where tonight he'll go on in front of 2,500 people, a crowd to thoroughly dwarf the several hundred people who've turned out to watch Jeb Bush and Rand Paul speak in the state. In those 26 minutes, he'll devote some 90 seconds to his typewritten notes, diverted instead by the mentions of him on Fox and the crowd of whims and tangents in his head. To sit alone with Trump is to be whipsawed and head-snapped by his sentences that start and stop, his thoughts that take hard detours or suddenly become questions in midstream. But as I learn in Hampton, exactly none of this will matter once Donald Trump takes the stage. The second those klieg lights hit him, he'll find his maestro voice, that nimble and knowing schoolyard brogue that doesn't miss a trick or a chance to pounce. Besides, he'll say the exact same unscripted things he said in Michigan days earlier and will say again tomorrow at the Iowa State Fair, all of it word for word from memory. You may lament Trump's message, but you can't move him off it. It's like trying to stop a 757.
This past June, Donald John Trump rode down the escalator in the five-story, pink-marble atrium of Manhattan's Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for president of the United States. Since then, he has been mocked and reviled, worshipped and courted, and, till very lately, dismissed as a fever dream of the torch-and-pitchfork segment of the Republican Party. Entering stage far-right with wing-nut invective — the people coming across our border are "rapists" and "killers" who routinely commit "great amounts of crime" — he has dominated the race since the day he got in it and posted a large and durable lead ever since. The caveat: His negatives are through the roof. About a third of registered Republicans likely to vote next year say they'd never pull the lever for him.
In all the hysteria, however, what's often missed are the qualities that brought Trump here. You don't do a fraction of what he's done in life — dominate New York real estate for decades, build the next grand Xanadus for the super-rich on the far shores of Dubai and Istanbul, run the prime-time ratings table for more than 10 years and earn a third (or sixth) fortune at it – without being immensely cunning and deft, a top-of-the-food-chain killer. Over the course of 10 days and several close-in encounters, I got to peer behind the scrim of his bluster and self-mythos and get a very good look at the man. What I saw was enough to make me take him dead serious. If you're waiting for Trump to blow himself up in a Hindenburg of gaffes or hate speech, you're in for a long, cold fall and winter. Donald Trump is here for the duration — and gaining strength and traction by the hour.
Begin with his message and mode of delivery. Standing over his shoulder, I watched Trump use the press to speak directly to his base, talking past the cameras and microphone banks to that furious demographic of working and out-of-work factory-town families who saw their wages set like Quikrete in the 1980s and watched the spoils and tax breaks swim upstream. When we landed in New Hampshire and pulled in to a Hampton high school in his motorcade of stretch SUVs, Trump was mobbed by reporters with the pushy fervor of kids seeking autographs at spring training. He batted aside their questions — Iraq, Russia, immigrants — to buttonhole the hundreds of people milling outside, unable to get in but listening on speakers, and the thousands more seated down the hall.
"I built a net worth of more than $10 billion. I've been a world-class businessman. . . . That's the thinking that our country needs. Take our jobs back from China and Japan and Mexico. . . . Take a look at China. . . . We owe them $1.4 trillion . . . because we're led by people who don't have a clue. Honestly, I think we're led by stupid people."
There, in those words, is his campaign. I am strong; politicians are weak. I speak truth and never retreat; they lie and wave the white flag to our foes. They have stripped us bare; I will build us back, make this country feared the whole world over. Everything he utters is a version of this, dressed in different raiment or reference — and he's saying it to people, his "silent majority," who have longed to hear these words since Richard Nixon. "He's delivering a message of power and courage without any proof points called policy," says Steve Schmidt, the Republican wise man and campaign warhorse who's been watching Trump with mounting fascination. "A huge chunk of conservatives are unmoored from the issues. What moves them is his tone and attack on Republicans who they hold in complete contempt."
In the airless auditorium, the faithful are packed so tight that it feels like a breeding barn with a PA system. They are the young and the old, the blue- and white-collar, the white and, well, white-haired. He has a pitch-perfect ear for their curdled resentment and a ventriloquist's gift for reading it back to them in words that they think but cannot utter at work, or anywhere else but their kitchen tables. Canvassing the crowd before he comes on, I hear the same phrases over and over. "Finally, someone's saying what we've all wanted to say — we've been pushed too far for years," says Tina, a gym-toned mom in a sleeveless top. "I like that he's not politically correct — we don't have time for that here," says Lise, a frost-tipped blonde in the row behind her, calling Trump "another Ronald Reagan." "He means what he says, and says what he means," says a converted Democrat named Dino. "The other guys, they got marbles in their mouth — you don't even know what they're saying."
Trump takes the stage to a standing ovation. His speech goes the way it always goes. "They had 24 million people [at the debate the other night]. . . . Do you think they were there for . . . Rand Paul? Rand, I've had you up to here!" He touches his armpit, zinging the vertically challenged Paul: "He didn't like it when I said you have to pass an IQ test to get up on the stage." Then he pivoted to Carly Fiorina. "Carly was a little nasty to me — be careful, Carly! Be careful! But I can't say anything to her because she's a woman. . . . I promised that I wouldn't say that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground. I said I wouldn't say it! That her stock value tanked. That she laid off tens of thousands of people, and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say that. And that she then went out and ran against Barbara Boxer, and . . . lost in a landslide. And I said, 'I. Will. Not. Say. That!' "
The enormous audience leaps to its feet in eruptive, rocking laughter. And for 58 minutes, he goes on like this, playing the crowd like a Telecaster. Mexico's taking your jobs. Ford and Nabisco are fleeing there. No more Oreos for Trump! What's most striking is the ease with which Trump does it — no note cards, no teleprompter, no prep in the car. Running his first race for office at 69, an age when other men are seeking help for bladder conditions, he gives every impression of being born for this — and of having the time of his life.
A week or so earlier, I'd been summoned to Trump's office at his glitter-bomb cathedral, Trump Tower. It is hard to overstate the effect of the building on your sense of dimension and place. You walk into a lobby that is half-Vegas, half-Vatican, a vaulting altar of brass and obsidian that soars halfway to heaven, where they serve dark-roast. There's a Starbucks somewhere up in the sky-high atrium, not far from the 60-foot waterfall. You fight the urge to dunk your head in the pool where it collects, and try, instead, to regain your wits on the whooshing ride up to the 26th floor.
There, you are met by the first in a series of dazzling young female assistants. Trump also likes the theatrics of beauty. Many of his close aides are women in their twenties not very long removed from college. Hope Hicks, Trump's communications director who, several years ago, was studying at Southern Methodist University, leads me into the boss's office, which is as much Trump's trophy room as workspace. Every flat surface is adorned by his image: framed magazine glossies from Important Publications, none more so, at least per Trump, than the 1990 Playboy where "I was one of the only men to ever get on the cover."
Trump offers me a seat by his mahogany desk. Over his shoulder looms a bust of Ronald Reagan. (There is also a bald eagle, the stuffed-animal version, for any preschool patriot who wanders in.) In an earlier sit-down, Trump had fought me to a standstill when I tried to draw him out about his past. As countless writers before me have discovered to their sorrow, there's no such thing as question-and--answer with Trump. Instead, you frame a query, then stand back and watch him go, hoping that in the monologue that follows, he touches at least obliquely on your topic. This time, he did divulge about his father, going on at length and with real feeling. Fred Trump, the second in a line of self-made magnates (his father, Friedrich, had earned his fortune in the Klondike gold rush, selling lodging, food, booze and possibly women to hordes of miners), was possessed of the singular family gift: He could see the future and beat everyone else to it.
"When the car was just coming out, houses had no garages," says Trump. "Dad went all over Queens, building garages in the Thirties, and he could throw 'em up like nothing. He had great energy and vision, worked seven days a week and liked it, and was happy in his life. I watched people take vacations, and they're miserable. Him, two hours at the beach with us on Sundays, and he was back to work."
Fred was among the first of the great wartime developers to figure out the import of Federal Housing Authority programs, vast new pots of government loans to build housing for the working- and middle-class. Trump doesn't volunteer that much of the family fortune derived from taxpayer funds, or that his father was a master manipulator of the Democratic machine in Brooklyn. Fred's real money was made erecting outer-borough housing for the returning vets of World War II, brick behemoths that he delivered on schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars under budget.
Though Fred lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. "We'd go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors," he says. "You'd see 'em ring the bell and stand way over here. I'd say, 'Why're you over there?' and he'd say, ' 'Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'"
Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. "I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping," says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father's. "My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar." "I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn't an option," says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump's kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they've nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. "We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well," says Don Jr. "But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently."
It's worth noting that Trump was nearly a train wreck himself as the son of wealth in Jamaica Estates, Queens. An indifferent student who was "mouthing off to everybody" and carrying around a switchblade in his pocket, he was yanked out of prep school by his disappointed parents and sent to the New York Military Academy upstate. "He thought he was Mr. America and the world revolved around him," says Col. Ted Dobias, his former instructor and baseball coach, a barrel-chested man who's now nearing 90 but whose memory is diamond-drill sharp. "I had a lot of one-on-ones" with the 14-year-old Trump, adds Dobias, some of which got physical, both men say. Whatever it took to seize the eighth-grader's attention, Dobias seemed to turn him around. By ninth grade, Trump was a model cadet; as a senior, he made cadet captain, says Dobias, and was the star first baseman for Dobias' varsity squad. "He was good-hit and good-field: We had scouts from the Phillies to watch him, but he wanted to go to college and make real money."
After graduating from Wharton, where his academic laurels have been grossly overstated through the years (he didn't finish first in his class or anywhere near it, and went altogether missing from the list of honors for the class of 1968), Trump began working for his old man in Brooklyn, but had little sustaining interest in low-rent units. What he wanted was to have his name writ large on the next iconic towers of Manhattan. It was the mid-1970s, when the city was swirling the drain of insolvency and structural collapse, but even from the boroughs, Trump could look ahead a decade to the gilded age of the 1980s. Seizing upon the collapse of the Penn Central railroad, the largest corporate bankruptcy in history at the time, he scooped up an option to redo the Commodore Hotel, a Beaux Arts colossus gone badly to seed as one of the troubled railroad's minor holdings.
"The area was dying, people were leaving the city, but I went to Bowery Bank across the street and said, 'If you lend me the money, 42nd Street is gonna be great again,' " Trump says. Bowery and a second firm, Equitable Life, staked tens of millions of dollars on the reconstruction. Trump strong-armed City Hall to give him an unheard-of break – full tax abatement for 40 years — and stripped the old girl of her limestone vestments, dressing her in dazzling skirts of glass. Reborn as the Grand Hyatt in 1980, the building — a great mirrored beacon to investors eager to pounce on midtown projects — came along just as the stock market soared, minting a brash generation of new millionaires.
Those young-money turks burned to tweak their stodgy fathers by flashing their sudden wealth on shiny objects. Trump built them the gold-dust condos of their dreams, converting the dowdy Gulf and Western in Columbus Circle into a brass-and-glass playpen for Wall Street flyboys, after setting his style template with Trump Tower. That building helped revive Fifth Avenue, which, like many of New York's former talismans, had fallen into sad decline. It was also a benchmark moment for Trump: the accomplishment with which he officially eclipsed Fred as the signature builder of his age.
"So here's a story I've never told," he says, warming to the memory of that triumph. "When I was building Trump Tower, my father stood across the street and said, 'Don't use glass and bronze, use brick. It's better, less expensive, and no one cares about the outside. All they care about is the size of the closets!' " Trump laughs and shakes his head in mordant wonder, as if to say, Oh, the humanity. By the way, Trump has told this story many times, according to Gwenda Blair, the author of Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, which will be reissued as an e-book this fall. "It's all part of what he does," she says, "the bragging and the repetition: It's called branding, and he's relentless at it."
Trump springs from his desk chair and summons me over to the floor-to-ceiling windows facing north. Below us, beyond the Tiffany Building and the Plaza Hotel, spreads the splendid sine qua non of Central Park, lush in its summer coat of greens and golds. "I mean, who has this location? I own this," says Trump, marveling at his great good fortune. "I'm at the point in my life — tremendous cash flow, very little debt — where I could do anything I want. I said, 'Now, I'm gonna take the risk of running for president. We need that kinda mind to make great deals.' "
As we stand there, hundreds of feet above New York, gazing on the Lilliputian tourists, it occurs to me to wonder: How on Earth, from this vantage, did Trump see into the hearts of underemployed white folk? How did he know that they stewed and simmered over free trade, immigrants and fat-cat Republicans who'd sold them down the river for decades? How did he guess that they'd conflated those things to explain the flight of factory jobs, and that all they really cared about, besides the return of those jobs, was that someone beat the hell out of the party hacks — the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers and Karl Roves?
"What you've tapped into," I say, "is that people see those guys and say, 'This one's owned by David Koch, that one's owned by Sheldon Adelson, and so on, and then they look at you . . ."
"I'm owned by the people!" Trump says. "I mean, I'm telling you, I'm no angel, but I'm gonna do right by them!"
But the answer to my question is ringing in the air — specifically, in the echo of Trump's accent. He was raised around lunch-pail guys in Queens and learned to talk like them trailing his father to building sites. He shares the syntax and sympathies of meat-and-potatoes types, and has crafted his message for their ears expressly, calling out the enemies on their list. In New Hampshire, I watched that huge crowd come to a boil as he took dead aim at corporate greed. "When the head of Ford calls me up and he says, 'Mr. President, we really want to build this plant in Mexico,' I'll say, 'Congratulations . . . we're gonna charge you a 35 percent tax on every car and truck and part that comes in!' 'But you can't dooo that, Mr. President!' Trust me, I can do it — and what happens is, they probably fold by 5 p.m."