“I BELIEVE YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION FOR US”
CANDIDATES ALWAYS SEEK SYMBOLIC BACKDROPS AT MOMENTS of political embarkation. Ted Cruz chose a Christian college in Virginia for his announcement that he was entering the 2016 race. Jeb Bush wore shirt-sleeves at a state college in Miami. Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Clinton released a two-minute video that devoted more screen time to images of everyday Americans taking on new challenges than to the prohibitive favorite to be the next president.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump had entered the presidential race on a gilded escalator. Without taking a step, he descended into a crowd of cheering supporters in the baroque lobby of Trump Tower.
A monument to excess, Trump Tower was an unlikely setting for the launch of a populist campaign. But it was inconceivable that Trump would begin anywhere else. The center of his self-created universe, with his palatial residence and his business offices on the skyscraper’s upper floors, the building is a fifty-eight-story manifestation of the image he spent his entire life cultivating: that of a dealmaker and business titan who transformed a family empire of unglamorous apartment complexes into a global brand synonymous with success and opulence.
The tower also served as a symbol of the vaunted boardroom savvy that Trump promised to bring to Washington. Certainly the breadth of his properties and the ubiquity of his brand were evidence of undeniable business talent—for seizing opportunity, sizing up people, and of course, selling himself. But like the tower’s marble and metallic veneer, the Trump aura has always masked a less regal reality. Behind the glittering name were repeated bankruptcies, racial discrimination claims, unpaid contractors, class action lawsuits, and financial entanglements with the criminal and corrupt. Beneath the tale of spun gold were opinions and a pattern of behavior that without the offsetting charms of wealth and fawning media attention would have led to ostracism. Discrepancies about the building’s true dimensions (he claims it has sixty-eight stories, ten more than actually exist) speak to a life premised on falsehood.
From childhood, Trump had been perceived as egotistical and a bully. As an adult, his views of women and minorities, as well as his vision of the American dream, seemed stuck in a bygone era, unaltered by the social movements that otherwise defined the majority of his generation and the politics of his hometown. Like anyone in high-end real estate, Trump was prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement. But he seemed to take these traits to extremes, habitually overstating—and outright lying—about the size of his fortune, the measure of his charity, even the ratings of his reality show. When he wasn’t making such claims directly, he would impersonate imaginary characters in phone calls to journalists, describing “Donald Trump” with a cascade of superlatives and fabrications.
These tendencies were on display from the outset of Trump’s campaign. As he stepped onto a stage draped with American flags, he dispensed with the clichés of announcing one’s candidacy—the faint praise of political rivals, the lofty rhetoric about hope, unity, and higher purpose. Instead, he delivered a diatribe that depicted America as a global laughingstock and presented himself as its only viable savior, a role he said he was willing to suspend his luxurious life to accept.
Many voters would be repulsed by the fact that Trump made no effort to subdue the coarse aspects of his personality or refine his message to avoid insulting entire demographic categories. But to others, it made him appealingly unscripted. In a field of candidates whose positions and even personalities were shaped by polls and focus groups, Trump stood out as strikingly authentic no matter the factual inauthenticity of many of his claims.
Trump’s opening speech was actually more honest than most to the extent that it was a remarkably accurate reflection of who he was as a person and what he would be like as president. He opened with a stream of falsehoods. He claimed a turnout of “thousands” to see his announcement, though reporters counted hundreds—some of them movie extras hired for the occasion; he said that America’s gross domestic product had plunged “below zero,” when it was well into the trillions and even its growth still registered positive; he accused the U.S. government of having spent $5 billion on the troubled website used by citizens to enroll in the subsidized health insurance program known as Obamacare, for which he offered no evidence.
His spurious depictions of the country’s finances were matched by extraordinary exaggerations of his own. He touted a personal net worth exceeding $9 billion, and brandished a supposed balance sheet verifying this total drawn up by a “big accounting firm” that he declined to name. In fact, he had overstated his net worth by at least a factor of two, according to the most reliable estimates,1 and had opened his bid for the presidency with a version of the falsehood he had probably told most frequently in his public life.
Trump had long been utterly obsessed with his standing among America’s richest people, and often had gone to extraordinary lengths to cheat his way up such rankings. In 1984, smarting over Forbes’s decision a year earlier to value his holdings at $200 million—a fifth of what he claimed in interviews with the magazine—Trump waged a campaign to influence the next round of tabulations. He courted one of the main reporters on the project, twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Greenberg, with invitations to his office and company parties. He threw fistfuls of fictitious data at Forbes, claiming the Trump family owned more than 23,000 apartments worth $40,000 apiece. (Greenberg’s scrutiny found only 8,000, perhaps worth an average of $9,000.)
At one point, Greenberg took a call from a supposed Trump subordinate named “John Barron,” who sought to persuade the journalist that he failed to fully grasp the scale of Trump’s empire. Barron told Greenberg that Trump had taken possession of the majority of his father’s assets—a falsehood revealed later by family legal filings—and that because of the consolidated holdings Trump should be considered a billionaire. Greenberg made recordings of the odd conversations with Barron, and they made clear Barron was just Trump trying to alter the cadence of his voice.2 Forbes saw through the ruse, at least in part, assigning Trump a net worth of $400 million. More rigorous scrutiny showed that even $400 million vastly overstated Trump’s wealth, so while the magazine had rejected the outrageous figures pushed by Trump and his phony alter ego, it still had moved him up. “This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real,” Greenberg later wrote. It “led to future accolades, press coverage, and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.”
The most poignant moment in Trump’s opening speech came when he spoke of his father. Fred Trump was the son of Friedrich Trump, a German immigrant who had been a barber and then a hotel manager and moved the family to a house on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and began accumulating money and properties in the burgeoning borough. Friedrich died during a flu epidemic when Fred was only twelve, leaving his family with the seeds of their future fortune. His widow, Elizabeth, managed the budding real estate business she renamed E. Trump & Son. Fred grew up to take the reins of the company, and as New York’s population and economy boomed, he turned its focus toward building sprawling apartment complexes. In the 1920s, vast tracts of Brooklyn and Queens were undeveloped. It was an auspicious and lucrative moment, and Fred Trump made the most of it.
“I started off in a small office with my father in Brooklyn and Queens,” Trump said during his announcement speech. “I learned so much just sitting at his feet playing with blocks listening to him negotiate with subcontractors.”
That father was a stern figure with streaks of his own vanity—neighbors recalled marveling at the Cadillacs in the family driveway with FCT license plates. The cars were the least of it: Donald grew up in a faux southern plantation twenty-three-room mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, surrounded by the trappings of wealth, including a chauffeur and a cook.3 Trump attended the nearby private Kew-Forest School, though poor grades and surly behavior later prompted his