PART THREE. CHAPTER NINE

PART THREE

Smoke and Mirrors

CHAPTER NINE

The Art of the Bailout

“MARY TRUMP MUGGED” the New York tabloids, subtle as ever, blared in 100-point font the day after Halloween 1991. Even though I already knew what had happened, it was jarring to see the headlines as I passed news kiosks on my way to the subway.

My grandmother hadn’t just been mugged, though. The kid who’d grabbed her purse in the grocery store parking lot as she loaded shopping bags into her Rolls-Royce had slammed her head against the car with such force that her brain had hemorrhaged, and she had lost some sight and hearing. When she hit the pavement, her pelvis fractured in several places and ribs broke, injuries that were no doubt more dangerous than they might have been if she hadn’t had severe osteoporosis. By the time she arrived at Booth Memorial Hospital, her condition was grave, and we weren’t sure if she was going to make it.

It wasn’t until she was moved out of the intensive care unit and into a private room that her progress became visible, and it was weeks more before her pain became bearable. When her appetite started to come back, I took her whatever she wanted. One day she was drinking the butterscotch milkshake I’d picked up on the way when Donald showed up.

He said hello to us both and kissed her quickly. “Mom, you look great. ”

“She’s doing much better, ” I said. He sat in a chair next to the bed and put a foot up on the edge of the bed frame.

“Mary’s been visiting me every day, ” Gam said, smiling at me.

He turned to me. “Must be nice to have so much free time. ”

I looked at Gam. She rolled her eyes, and I tried not to laugh.

“How are you, sweetheart? ” Gam asked him.

“Don’t ask. ” He seemed annoyed.

Gam asked him about his kids, if anything was new with him and Ivana. He didn’t have much to say; clearly bored, he left after ten minutes or so. Gam glanced at the door to make sure he was gone. “Somebody’s cranky. ”

Now I did laugh. “To be fair, he’s having a tough time, ” I said. In the last twelve months, the Taj Mahal, his favorite Atlantic City casino, had declared bankruptcy just a little over a year after it had opened; his marriage was a disaster, thanks in part to his very public affair with Marla Maples; the banks had put him on an allowance; and the paperback version of his second book, Surviving at the Top, had been published under the title The Art of Survival. Despite the fact that he’d brought it all on himself, he seemed put upon rather than humbled or humiliated.

“Poor Donald, ” Gam mocked. She seemed almost giddy, and I thought the hospital staff might need to cut back on her pain meds. “He was always like this. I shouldn’t say it, but when he went to the Military Academy, I was so relieved. He didn’t listen to anyone, especially me, and he tormented Robert. And, oh, Mary! He was such a slob. At school he got medals for neatness, then when he came home, he was still a slob! ”

“What did you do? ”

“What could I do? He never listened to me. And your grandfather didn’t care. ” She shook her head. “Donald got away with murder. ”

That surprised me. I had always assumed my grandfather was a taskmaster. “That doesn’t sound like him. ”

At the time, my grandfather was at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan getting a hip replacement. I think he had only ever been in the hospital once, when he’d had a tumor on his neck near his right ear removed in 1989. I don’t know if the timing of his hip surgery was a coincidence or if it had been scheduled after Gam was admitted so she wouldn’t have to deal with him while she recovered. His mental state had been deteriorating for some time and while he was in the hospital had definitely taken a turn for the worse. A few times, late at night, the nurses found him trying to leave wearing only boxer shorts. He told them he was going to find Mrs. Trump. Gam seemed pretty happy not to be found.

Donald’s perceived success with the Grand Hyatt in 1980 had paved the way for Trump Tower, which had opened to great fanfare in 1983. From his reportedly abysmal treatment of the undocumented workers who built it to the alleged Mob involvement, the project was steeped in controversy. The affronts culminated in the destruction of the beautiful Art Deco limestone reliefs on the facade of the Bonwit Teller building, which he razed to make room for his. Donald had promised those historically significant artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Realizing that removing them in one piece would cost money and slow down construction, he instead ordered that they be destroyed. When confronted with that breach of trust and taste, he shrugged it off, declaring the sculptures to be “without artistic merit, ” as if he knew better than the considered assessment of experts. Over time that attitude—that he knew better—would become even more entrenched: as his knowledge base has decreased (particularly in areas of governing), his claims to know everything have increased in direct proportion to his insecurity, which is where we are now.

The real reason Donald’s first two projects were acquired and developed relatively smoothly was in large part because of Fred’s expertise as a developer and dealmaker. Neither would have been possible without his contacts, influence, approval, money, knowledge, and, maybe most important, endorsement of Donald.

Before that point, Donald had relied entirely on Fred’s money and influence—although he never acknowledged it and publicly credited his own wealth and savvy for his success. The media were more than happy to go along without question, and the banks followed suit when Donald started to pursue the idea of becoming a casino operator in New Jersey, which in 1977 had legalized gambling in Atlantic City in an effort to save the flailing seaside resort town. If my grandfather’s opinion had carried any weight with him, Donald would never have invested in Atlantic City. Manhattan was worth the risk, as far as Fred was concerned, but in Atlantic City he would have nothing except money and advice to offer—no political clout or knowledge of the industry to draw on. By then Fred’s influence over him was waning, and in 1982 Donald applied for his gaming license.

While her brother was casting about for investment opportunities, Maryanne, who had been an assistant district attorney in New Jersey since the mid-1970s, asked Donald if he would ask Roy Cohn to do him a favor. Cohn had enough clout with the Reagan administration that he was given access to AZT, an experimental AIDS treatment, as well as influence over judicial appointments. Conveniently, a seat was open in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. Maryanne thought it would be a great fit, and Donald thought it might be useful to have a close relative on the bench in a state in which he planned to do a lot of business. Cohn gave Attorney General Ed Meese a call, and Maryanne was nominated in September and confirmed in October.

In yet another sign of Fred’s waning influence, Donald had purchased a $300 million–plus casino that would become Trump’s Castle sight unseen in 1985, only a year after he had bought Harrah’s, which became Trump Plaza. For Donald, too much of a good thing was a better thing; Atlantic City had unlimited potential, he believed, so two casinos were better than one. By then Donald’s ventures already carried billions of dollars of debt (by 1990, his personal obligation would balloon to $975 million). Even so, that same year he bought Mar-a-Lago for $8 million. In 1988, he’d bought a yacht for $29 million and then, in 1989, the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle for $365 million. In 1990, he’d had to issue almost $700 million in junk bonds, carrying a 14 percent interest rate, just to finish construction on his third casino, the Taj Mahal. It seemed as if the sheer volume of purchases, the price tags of the acquisitions, and the audacity of the transactions kept everybody, including the banks, from paying attention to his fast-accumulating debt and questionable business acumen.

Back then, Donald’s favorite color scheme was red, black, and gold, so Atlantic City’s cheap glitz appealed to him almost as much as the allure of easy money. The house always wins, after all, and it was a good bet that anybody who could afford the buy-in would do well there. Atlantic City was completely outside of Fred’s purview, which also appealed to Donald. Setting aside the massive monetary investments made by Fred and others, operating a casino, unlike the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower, which were development projects that were ultimately managed by other entities, would be an ongoing business. As such, it would have been Donald’s first opportunity to succeed independently of his father.

Having his own casino provided Donald an outsize canvas; he could tailor that entire world to his specifications. And if one casino was good, two would be better and three even better than that. Of course, his casinos were competing with one another and eventually would be cannibalizing one another’s profits. As absurd as it was, there was a certain logic to his wanting more—after all, it had worked for his father. But Donald didn’t understand, and refused to learn, that owning and running casinos were vastly different from owning and running rental properties in Brooklyn, from the business model and the market to the customer base and the calculus involved. Because he couldn’t see that glaring distinction, it was easy for him to believe that more was better in Atlantic City, just as it had been for my grandfather in New York’s outer boroughs. If one casino was a cash cow, three would be a herd of them. He would do with casinos what Fred had done with his apartment buildings.

The only part of the scenario that defies explanation is the fact that the banks and investors in his first two casinos didn’t object more strenuously to his opening a third, which would cut into their own bottom lines. It made even less sense that he could find anybody interested in investing in it. Even a casual glance at the numbers—not least, the debt service—should have scared the most reckless lender away. In the late 1980s, nobody said no to Donald, thereby legitimizing another misguided project that had the ancillary benefit of bolstering the ego of a man who had no way of making it succeed.

In August of that year, Surviving at the Top was published, and within weeks it would become clear that the book’s subject matter and timing were bad enough to qualify as parody.

In June 1990, Donald missed a $43 million payment for Trump’s Castle. Six months later, my grandfather sent his chauffeur with more than $3 million in cash to purchase chips at the Castle. In other words, he bought the chips with no intention of gambling with them; his driver simply put them in a briefcase and left the casino. Even that wasn’t enough. The next day, my grandfather wired another $150, 000 to the Castle, presumably for more chips. Although those maneuvers helped temporarily, they resulted in my grandfather’s having to pay a $30, 000 fine for violating a gaming commission rule prohibiting unauthorized financial sources from lending money to casinos. If he wanted to continue lending Donald money to keep his casinos afloat (which he did), he would also be required to get a gaming license in New Jersey. But it was too late. Donald might have controlled 30 percent of Atlantic City’s market share, but the Taj was making it impossible for his two other casinos to make money (the Plaza and Castle lost a combined $58 million the year the Taj opened), the three properties carried $94 million in annual debt, and the Taj alone needed to pull in more than $1 million a day to break even.

The banks were bleeding money. Just as the Taj was opening, Donald and his lenders were meeting to try to figure out how to rein in and manage his spending. The possibility of more defaults and bankruptcies still loomed, and a solution had to be found that would protect Donald’s image, which, in turn, would protect the banks’ money. Without the veneer of success and confidence he projected (and had projected for him), the bankers feared that his properties, already in trouble, would lose even more value. His last name was the draw: without the name there would be no new gamblers or tenants or people willing to buy bonds and hence no new revenue.

In addition to fronting Donald the money to cover his businesses’ operating expenses, the banks reached an agreement with him in May 1990 to put him on a $450, 000-a-month allowance—that is, almost $5. 5 million a year for having failed miserably. That money was just for personal expenses: the Trump Tower triplex apartment, the private jet, the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago. In order to sell his image, Donald needed to be able to continue living the lifestyle that bolstered it.

In order for the banks to keep tabs on him, Donald had to meet with them every Friday to report on his expenditures as well as progress he’d made selling assets such as the yacht. In May 1990, there was no denying how dire the situation was. As much as Donald complained to Robert that the banks were “killing” him, the truth was that he was beholden to them in a way he had never been to his father: he had never been on a leash before, let alone a short one, and it chafed. He was legally obligated to pay the banks back, and if he didn’t, there would be consequences. At least there should have been.

Despite the restrictions, Donald continued spending cash he didn’t have, including $250, 000 for Marla’s engagement ring and $10 million to Ivana as part of their divorce settlement. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he couldn’t spend whatever he wanted no matter what the circumstances. The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.

In a way, you can’t really blame Donald. In Atlantic City, he had become unmoored from his need for his father’s approval or permission. He no longer needed to talk himself up; his exaggerated assessment of himself was simultaneously fueled and validated by banks that were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at him and a media that lavished him with attention and unwarranted praise. The two combined rendered him blind to how dire his situation was. My grandfather’s myths about Donald were now being reinforced by the world at large.

Regardless of who was disseminating them, however, they were still myths. Donald was, in essence, still Fred’s construct. Now he belonged to the banks and the media. He was both enabled by and dependent upon them, just as he had been upon Fred. He had a streak of superficial charm, even charisma, that sucked certain people in. When his ability to charm hit a wall, he deployed another “business strategy”: throwing tantrums during which he threatened to bankrupt or otherwise ruin anybody who failed to let him have what he wanted. Either way, he won.

Donald was successful because he was a success. That was a premise that ignored one fundamental reality: he had not achieved and could not achieve what he was being credited with. Despite that, his ego, now unleashed, had to be fed continually, not just by his family but by all who encountered it.

New York’s elite would never accept him as anything but the court jester from Queens, but they also validated his pretensions and grandiose self-image by inviting him to their parties and allowing him to frequent their haunts (such as Le Club). The more New Yorkers wanted spectacle, the more willing the media were to provide it—even at the expense of more important and substantive stories. Why bore them with hard-to-follow articles about his convoluted bank transactions? The distractions and sleights of hand benefited Donald enormously while giving him exactly what he wanted: the ongoing adulation of media that focused on his salacious divorce and alleged sexual prowess. If the media could deny reality, so could he.

By some miracle, I had gotten into Tufts University after boarding school, and despite dropping out the second semester of my freshman year, I graduated in 1989. A year later, just before my grandfather’s modest purchase of $3. 15 million worth of casino chips, I entered the graduate program in English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

Two months after the semester started, my apartment was burgled. All of my electronics, including my typewriter, which was essential for school, were taken. When I called Irwin to see if I could get an advance on my allowance, he refused. My grandfather thought I should get a job, he told me.

The next time I visited my grandmother at the House, I explained the situation to her, and she offered to write me a check. “It’s okay, Gam. I only have to wait a couple of weeks. ”

“Mary, ” she said, “never reject a gift of money. ” She wrote me the check, and I was able to buy a typewriter later that week.

I soon got an angry call from Irwin. “Did you ask your grandmother for money? ”

“Not exactly, ” I said. “I told her I got robbed, and she helped me out. ”

While going through the canceled checks of all of his personal and business accounts, as well as my grandmother’s, as he did at the end of every month, my grandfather had discovered the check my grandmother had written to me, and he was furious.

“You need to be careful, ” Irwin warned me. “Your grandfather often speaks of disowning you. ”

I got another call from Irwin a few weeks later. My grandfather was angry with me again, this time because he didn’t like the signature with which I endorsed my checks.

“Irwin, you’ve got to be kidding. ”

“I’m not. He hates the fact that it’s illegible. ”

“It’s a signature. ”

He paused and softened his tone. “Change it. Mary, you’ve got to play the game. Your grandfather thinks you’re being selfish, and there may be nothing left by the time you turn thirty. ” But I never understood what he meant by “the game”—it was my family, not a bureaucracy.

“I don’t see what I’m doing wrong. I’m getting a master’s degree at an Ivy League university. ”

“He doesn’t care. ”

“Does Donald know about this? ”

“Yes. ”

“He’s my trustee. What does he have to say? ”

“Donald? ” Irwin laughed dismissively. “Nothing. ”

My grandfather hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but he’d been struggling with dementia for a while by then, so I didn’t take the threats too seriously. I did, however, change my signature.

Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect. Although I had all of the material things I needed—and luxuries such as private schools and summer camp—there was a purposely built-in idea of uncertainty that any of it would last. By the same token, there was the sometimes dispiriting and sometimes devastating sense that nothing any of us did really mattered or, worse, that we didn’t matter—only Donald did.

Trump Management, which Donald often referred to as a “two-bit operation, ” was doing fairly well. Fred paid himself more than $109 million between 1988 and 1993 and had tens of millions more in the bank. The Trump Organization, the company Donald ostensibly ran, was, however, in increasingly serious trouble.

Reduced to a monthly allowance—that a family of four could have lived on comfortably for ten years but still an allowance—and shut out by the banks, which finally refused to lend him more money, Donald fully believed that whatever was happening to him was the result of the economy, the poor treatment he received from the banks, and bad luck.

Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook. Even with the untold millions of dollars Fred spent, he couldn’t prevent Donald’s failures, but he could certainly find a scapegoat, just as he had always done when his missteps and poor judgment caught up with him, as when he blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Donald knew that taking responsibility for your failures, which obviously meant acknowledging failure, was not something Fred admired; he’d seen where it had gotten Freddy.

It’s very possible that back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fred didn’t know just how deep Donald’s ineptitude ran. Acknowledging weakness of any kind in the son on whom he had staked the future of his empire and for whom he had sacrificed Freddy would have been nearly impossible. It was much easier to convince himself that Donald’s talents were wasted in the backwater of Brooklyn; he simply needed a bigger pond in which to make a splash.

As the Commodore Hotel slowly transformed into the Grand Hyatt, Fred was so blinded by the success with which Donald manipulated and debased every part of the process in order to get his way that he seemed to forget how vital his own connections, knowledge, and skills were; neither the Hyatt nor Trump Tower would have seen the light of day without them. Even Fred’s head must have been turned by all of the attention Donald generated for two projects that, if developed by anybody else, would have been considered fairly commonplace occurrences in Manhattan.

Fred had known all along what games Donald was playing, because he’d taught Donald how to play them. Working the refs, lying, cheating—as far as Fred was concerned, those were all legitimate business tactics. The most effective game for both father and son was the shell game. While Fred kept churning out projects and solidifying his status as a “postwar master builder, ” he was fattening his wallet with taxpayer money by skimming off the top and allegedly committing so much tax fraud that four of his children would continue to benefit from it for decades. While the rubes focused on the salacious details Donald kept generating for the tabloids, he was building a reputation for success based on bad loans, bad investments, and worse judgment. The difference between the two, however, is that despite his dishonesty and lack of integrity, Fred actually ran a solid, income-generating business, while Donald had only his ability to spin and his father’s money to prop up an illusion.

Once Donald moved into Atlantic City, there was no longer any denying that he wasn’t just ill-suited to the day-to-day grind of running a few dozen middle-class rental properties in the outer boroughs, he was ill-suited to running any kind of business at all—even one that ostensibly played to his strengths of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement and his taste for glitz.

When Fred bragged about Donald’s brilliance and claimed that his son’s success had far outpaced his own, he must have known that not a word of it was true; he was too smart and too good at arithmetic to think otherwise: the numbers simply didn’t add up. But the fact that Fred continued to prop Donald up despite the wisdom of continuing to do so suggests that something else was going on.

Because Fred did deny the reality on the ground in Atlantic City. He had already shown himself impervious to facts that didn’t fit his narrative, so he blamed the banks and the economy and the casino industry just as vociferously as his son did. Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.

There was still plenty of publicity to turn Fred’s head, and thanks to the banks that father and son maligned, the extraordinary financial reversal didn’t put a dent in Donald’s lifestyle. Finally, there was the slow-rolling toll that his as-yet-undiagnosed Alzheimer’s was beginning to take on his executive functioning. Already susceptible to believing the best of his worst son, it became easier over time for him to confuse the hype about Donald with reality.

As usual, the lesson Donald learned was the one that supported his preexisting assumption: no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be okay. Knowing ahead of time that you’re going to be bailed out if you fail renders the narrative leading up to that moment meaningless. Claim that a failure is a tremendous victory, and the shameless grandiosity will retroactively make it so. That guaranteed that Donald would never change, even if he were capable of changing, because he simply didn’t need to. It also guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.

As the bankruptcies and embarrassments mounted, Donald was confronted for the first time with the limits of his ability to talk or threaten his way out of a problem. Always adept at finding an escape hatch, he seems to have come up with a plan to betray his father and steal vast sums of money from his siblings. He secretly approached two of my grandfather’s longest-serving employees, Irwin Durben, his lawyer, and Jack Mitnick, his accountant, and enlisted them to draft a codicil to my grandfather’s will that would put Donald in complete control of Fred’s estate, including the empire and all its holdings, after he died. Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert would effectively be at Donald’s financial mercy, dependent on his approval for the smallest transaction.

As Gam later told Maryanne, when Irwin and Jack went to the House to have Fred sign the codicil, they presented the document as if it had been Fred’s idea all along. My grandfather, who was having one of his more lucid days, sensed that something was not right, although he couldn’t say exactly what. He angrily refused to sign. After Irwin and Jack left, Fred conveyed his concerns to his wife. My grandmother immediately called her oldest child to explain what had happened as best she could. In short, she said, “it simply didn’t pass the smell test. ”

Maryanne, with her background as a prosecutor, had limited knowledge of trusts and estates. She asked her husband, John Barry, a well-known and respected attorney in New Jersey, to recommend someone who could help, and he asked one of his colleagues to look into the situation. It didn’t take long for Donald’s scheme to be uncovered. As a result, my grandfather’s entire will was rewritten, replacing one he had written in 1984, and Maryanne, Donald, and Robert were all named as executors. In addition, a new standard was put into place: whatever Fred gave Donald, he would have to give an equal amount to each of the other three children.

Maryanne would say years later, “We would have been penniless. Elizabeth would have been begging on a street corner. We would have had to beg Donald if we wanted a cup of coffee. ” It was “sheer luck” that they had stopped the scheme. Yet the siblings still got together every holiday as though nothing had happened.

Donald’s attempt to wrest control of Fred’s estate away from him was the logical outcome of Fred’s leading his son to believe that he was the only person who mattered. Donald had been given more of everything; he had been invested in; elevated to the detriment of Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert (and even his mother) and at the expense of Freddy. In Donald’s mind, the success and reputation of the entire family rested on his shoulders. Given that, it makes sense in the end that he would feel he deserved not just more than his fair share but everything.

I was standing at the window of my studio apartment looking at the rush-hour traffic clogging the 59th Street Bridge when Donald called me from his plane, not a usual occurrence.

“The dean of students at Tufts sent me a letter you wrote. ”

“Really? Why? ”

It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. One of my professors had been up for tenure, and before I graduated, I had written a letter in support of him. That had been four years earlier, and I’d forgotten all about it.

“The letter was to show me how great you thought Tufts was. It was a fund-raising thing. ”

“I’m sorry. That was rude of him. ”

“No, it’s a fantastic letter. ”

The point of the conversation was eluding me. Then Donald said, apropos of nothing as far as I could tell, “Do you want to write my next book? The publisher wants me to get started, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for you. It’ll be fun. ”

“That sounds incredible, ” I said. And it did. I heard the plane engine rev in the background and remembered where he was. “Where are you going, anyway? ”

“Heading back from Vegas. Call Rhona tomorrow. ” Rhona Graff was his executive assistant at the Trump Organization.

“I will. Thanks, Donald. ”

It wasn’t until later, when I reread the letter, that I understood why Donald thought it would be a good idea to hire me—not because it was “fantastic” but because it demonstrated that I was really good at making other people look really good.

A few days later, I was given my own desk in the back office of the Trump Organization. A nondescript, open space with drop ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and huge steel filing cabinets lining the walls, it had a lot more in common with the utilitarian office of Trump Management on Avenue Z than the gold-and-glass walls lined with magazine covers featuring Donald’s face that greeted guests out front.

I spent the first week on the job familiarizing myself with the people who worked there and the filing system. (To my surprise, there was a folder with my name on it containing a single sheet of paper—a handwritten letter I had sent to Donald my junior year in high school. I’d asked if he could get me a pair of tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. He couldn’t. ) I kept to myself for the most part, but whenever I had a question, Ernie East, one of Donald’s vice presidents and a very nice man, helped me out. He suggested documents that might be useful, and on occasion he’d put some file folders on my desk that he thought might help. The problem was that I didn’t really know what the book was supposed to be about beyond its broad theme, which I cleverly deduced from its working title, The Art of the Comeback.

I hadn’t read either of Donald’s other two books, but I knew a bit about them. The Art of the Deal, as far as I understood it, had been meant to present Donald as a serious real estate developer. The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, had done a good job—which he has long since regretted—of making his subject sound coherent, as if Donald had actually espoused a fully realized business philosophy that he understood and lived by.

After the embarrassment of the poorly timed publication of Surviving at the Top, I assumed that Donald wanted a return to the relative seriousness of its predecessor. I set about trying to explain how, under the most adverse circumstances, he had emerged from the depths, victorious and more successful than he had ever been. There wasn’t much evidence to support that narrative—he was about to experience his fourth bankruptcy filing with the Plaza Hotel—but I had to try.

Every morning on the way to my desk, I stopped by to see Donald in the hope that he’d have time to sit down with me for an interview. I figured that would be the best way to find out what he had done and how he had done it. His perspective was everything, and I needed the stories in his own words. He was usually on a call, which he’d put on speaker as soon as I sat down. The calls, as far as I could tell, were almost never about business. The person on the other end, who had no idea he or she was on speaker, was looking for gossip or for Donald’s opinion about women or a new club that had opened. Sometimes he was being asked for a favor. Often the conversation was about golf. Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot. ”

When he wasn’t on a call, I’d find him going through the newspaper clippings that were collected for him daily. Every article was about him or at least mentioned him. He showed them to me, something he did with most visitors. Depending on the content of the article, he sometimes wrote on it with a blue Flair felt-tip marker, just like the one my grandfather used, and sent it back to the reporter. After he finished writing, he’d hold up the clipping and ask for my opinion of what he considered his witty remarks. That did not help me with my research.

A few weeks after Donald hired me, I still hadn’t gotten paid. When I brought it up to him, he pretended at first not to understand what I was talking about. I pointed out that I needed an advance so I could at least buy a computer and a printer—I was still writing on the same electric typewriter I’d bought with Gam’s help in grad school. He said he thought that was the publisher’s problem. “Can you talk to Random House? ”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Donald’s editor had no idea he’d hired me.

One night, as I sat at home trying to figure out how to piece together something vaguely interesting out of the uninteresting documents I’d been poring over, Donald called. “When you come to the office tomorrow, Rhona’s going to have some pages for you. I’ve been working on material for the book. It’s really good. ” He sounded excited.

Finally I might have something to work with, some idea about how to organize this thing. I still didn’t know what he thought about his “comeback, ” how he ran his business, or even what role he played in the deals he was currently developing.

The next day, Rhona handed me a manila envelope containing about ten typewritten pages, as promised. I took it to my desk and began to read. When I finished, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was clearly a transcript of a recording Donald had made, which explained its stream-of-consciousness quality. It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met. The biggest takeaways were that Madonna chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive and that Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater who had won two gold medals and four world championships, had big calves.

I stopped asking him for an interview.

From time to time, Donald asked about my mother. He hadn’t seen her in four years, ever since Ivana and Blaine had given Gam an ultimatum just before Thanksgiving: either Linda came to the House for the holidays, or they did. They found their not-exactly sister-in-law too quiet and depressed, and they just couldn’t have a good time with her there. My mother had been in the Trump family since 1961, and though I never understood why my grandfather required her presence at holidays after my parents divorced, she always went. More than twenty-five years later, my grandmother chose Ivana and Blaine, without factoring in how the decision might affect me and my brother.

Now Donald said, “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother. It might have been better if we’d cut her off after a couple of years and she had to stand on her own two feet. ”

The idea that anyone else was entitled to money or support he or she wasn’t obviously earning was impossible for Donald and my grandfather to fathom. Nothing my mother had received as the former wife of the oldest son of a very wealthy family, who had raised two of Fred and Mary Trump’s grandchildren almost single-handedly, had come from my grandfather, and it certainly hadn’t come from Donald, yet they both acted as if it did.

Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him. He did once give me $100 to get my car out of impound. And after my father died, Donald was the only member of my family, other than my grandmother, who included me in anything. But his kindness had become so warped over time—through lack of use and Fred’s discouragement—that what he considered kindness would have been practically unrecognizable to the rest of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but when we had that conversation, Donald was still receiving his $450, 000 allowance from the banks every month.

One morning as I sat across from Donald at his desk going over the details of our trip to Mar-a-Lago (Donald thought it would help me with the book if I saw his Palm Beach mansion firsthand) the phone rang. It was Philip Johnson.

As they chatted, Donald suddenly seemed to get an idea. He put the phone on speaker. “Philip! ” he said. “You have to talk to my niece. She’s writing my next book. You can tell her all about the Taj. ”

I introduced myself, and Philip suggested I come to his house in Connecticut the following week to discuss the book.

After Donald finished the call, he said to me, “That’ll be fantastic. Philip is a great guy. I hired him to design the porta-co-share for the Taj Mahal. It’s tremendous—I’d never seen anything like it. ”

After we finished discussing the logistics of our trip to Florida, I left the office and headed to the library. I had no idea who Philip Johnson was, and I’d never heard of a “porta-co-share. ”

In the limo on the way to the airport the following day, I told Donald that I’d arranged to meet Johnson at his home, which I’d learned at the library was the very famous Glass House that he, a very famous architect, had designed. I had also discovered that the thing Johnson had designed for the Taj—what Donald called a porta-co-share—was a porte cochere, basically a large carport. I understood why Donald had wanted Johnson to be involved in the project; he wasn’t just famous, he also traveled in the kind of circles Donald aspired to. I didn’t, however, understand why Johnson would bother designing the Taj’s carport. It was a very small-scale project that seemed not worth his while.

When Donald picked up a copy of the New York Post less than ten minutes into the car ride, I knew he had no intention of giving me information for the book. I’d begun to suspect that he’d hired me without consulting his publisher because he didn’t want to be micromanaged by the people there. It would also be a lot easier to put off his niece, who wasn’t under contract and was barely getting paid, than a professional writer, who would most likely have a significant stake in the success of the book. But we were about to be trapped together on a plane for two hours, so I hoped he might talk to me then.

When we got into the cabin of the jet that was waiting for us on the tarmac, Donald spread out his arms and asked, “So what do you think? ”

“It’s great, Donald. ” I knew the drill.

As soon as we reached cruising altitude and we could unbuckle our seat belts, one of his bodyguards handed him a huge stack of mail after setting a glass of Diet Coke next to him. I watched as he opened one envelope after another, then, after examining the contents for a few seconds, threw them and the envelope onto the floor. When a large pile accumulated, the same guy would reappear, pick up the wastepaper, and throw it into the garbage. That happened over and over again. I moved to another seat so I didn’t have to watch.

The staff were waiting as the car pulled up to the entrance at Mar-a-Lago. Donald went off with his butler, and I introduced myself to everybody else. The fifty-eight-bedroom mansion with thirty-three bathrooms outfitted with fixtures plated in gold and an eighteen-hundred-square-foot living room that sported forty-two-foot ceilings was as garish and uncomfortable as I’d expected.

Dinner that evening was just me, Donald, and Marla. She and I had met a few times before, but we had never had a chance to get to know each other one on one. I found her friendly, and Donald seemed relaxed with her. She was just two years older than I was and about as different from Ivana as a human being could be. Marla was down to earth and soft spoken where Ivana was all flash, arrogance, and spite.

The next day, I spent the morning exploring the property. There were no other guests, so the entire place felt empty and strangely quiet. I talked to the butler to see if he had any interesting stories, got to know some of the other guys who worked there, and then took a quick swim before lunch, which was scheduled for 1: 00 p. m. As formal as Mar-a-Lago was in some ways, it was also much more casual than our usual family gathering places, so I felt comfortable wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch, which was being served on the patio.

Donald, who was wearing golf clothes, looked up at me as I approached as if he’d never really seen me before. “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked. ”

“Donald! ” Marla said in mock horror, slapping him lightly on the arm.

I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious. I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit. Unfortunately for the book, that was about the only interesting thing that happened during my entire visit to Palm Beach.

Back in New York, Donald finally got sick of my asking him to sit for an interview and handed me a list of names. “Talk to these people. ” Included were the presidents of his casinos and Maryanne’s husband, John. Although that was potentially helpful, he didn’t seem to understand that writing the book without any input from him would be close to impossible.

I met with all the presidents of the casinos. Not surprisingly, a lot of their answers were canned, and I realized that they weren’t going to give me dirt on what was happening in their boss’s business at the height of the chaos and dysfunction. The trips weren’t a total waste of time; I’d never been down there before, and at least I got a sense of the place.

My meeting with John Barry was even less productive than the trips to Atlantic City.

“What can you tell me? ” I asked him.

He rolled his eyes.

Finally Donald told me his editor wanted to meet with me. A lunch was set up, and I arrived at the restaurant thinking he and I were going to be discussing next steps. It was an expensive “in” place in Midtown, and we were seated at a small, cramped table near the kitchen.

With very little preliminary conversation, the editor told me that Random House wanted Donald to hire someone with more experience.

“I’ve been working on this for a while, ” I said, “and I think I’ve made some progress. The problem is, I can’t get Donald to sit down with me for an interview. ”

“You can’t expect to play a Mozart concerto the first time you sit down at a piano, ” the editor said, as if I’d just learned the alphabet the day before.

“Donald told me he likes what I’ve done so far, ” I said.

The editor looked at me as if I’d just proved his point for him. “Donald hasn’t read any of it, ” he said.

I stopped at the office the next day to clear out my desk and hand over anything that might be useful to my eventual replacement. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t even mind that Donald had had somebody else fire me. The project had hit a wall. Besides, after all of the time I had spent in his office, I still had no idea what he actually did.

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