Read Online Trump and Me by Mark Singer - Free Book Online

“I’m
really
rich,” Trump likes to say. Or the long form: “Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.” (As ever, in the eye of the beholder.)
    In the early nineties, Trump stiffed his creditors for eight-hundred million dollars, give or take. Later, whenever this fact was mentioned, he reflexively insisted that it had never happened. Except that it had, and subsequently no one with a lick of sense was willing to lend him fresh money. Gail Collins, of
The New York Times
, once referred to him as a “financially embattled thousandaire.” Trump sent her a copy of one of her columns with, across her photograph, the chivalrous scrawl “The Face of a Dog!” In 2005, Timothy O’Brien, then a
Times
colleague of Collins, published a book,
TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald
, in which he estimated Trump’s net worth at $150 million to $250 million. Not unpredictably, Trump sued for $5 billion, alleging that this lowball calculation constituted libel and defamation. The case was dismissed four years later, after Trump acknowledged during a deposition: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings…and that can change rapidly from day to day.”
    Given that O’Brien later stated, “My lawyers stripped the bark off of him,” I admit it’s awfully Trumpish of me to claim credit for his salutary outcome. Nevertheless I must mention that, early in the proceedings, I wrote a short piece in
The New Yorker
advising O’Brien to string Trump along rather than immediately cutting him a ten-figure check. I confessed my envy and, in an open letter of sorts to Trump, begged him to try to make my life miserable, too: “Please, Donald…Once and for all, sue me. I need the aggravation. Not to mention the royalties.” For a change, I didn’t hear back. I’m guessing his subscription had expired.
    The sage observation that “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized”—courtesy of Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor of New York City—offered a simple enough rule to live by, and it’s never gone out of fashion. A healthy democracy depends, I suppose, upon the vigilance of a free press whose members feel personally affronted by the brazen mendacity of the powerful. I’m just not that touchy. With Trump, I always knew that it wasn’t my intelligence per se that was being insulted by the transparent distortions that burbled from his lips; that was just the way the man talked. I feel confident that Trump never budged from his initial estimation of me as a hapless schmuck. Still, given his campaign-trail pronouncements about the press—“scum…terrible…lying disgusting people…I hate some of these people, I hate ’em”—I’d say we got along swell. As long as he kept talking, what could go wrong? Unless Trump was having an off day megalomania-wise, he was never not good copy. Before he lifted his eyes to the horizon and decided the moment was ripe to take over the entire world, the hometown press dreaded the prospect that he might freeze us out. How would we feed our families?
    • • •
    The ascendant Trump familiar to New Yorkers during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s was hardly harmless. He possessed a talent for inducing targeted outrage—the hair-trigger litigiousness helped—among public officials, real-estate competitors, business partners, casino shareholders and bondholders, and tenants in buildings that bore his name. He called Ed Koch, a three-term mayor, a “moron.” He said, “The city under Ed Koch is a disaster.” (Sound familiar?) Koch returned the favor with “greedy, greedy, greedy”—if Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right.” Still, the damage in those days was relatively localized. Whatever games Trump was playing, the spoils in retrospect seem quaintly small-potatoes.
    In 1975, when Trump was pursuing his first major Manhattan real-estate