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Sunday Times
All talk, no soul: a brush with Trump Twenty years ago Mark Singer was sent to interview the New York property mogul. What he found was a performance artist with a fast way with the truth and no interior life Mark Singer It is the autumn of 1996. I’ve been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974 and at this point Tina Brown is the editor. One morning my phone rings. Tina: “Trump! Donald Trump! I’ve just had breakfast with him at the Plaza. You’re going to write a profile of him. You’re absolutely going to love him. He’s totally full of shit — you’ll love him! I’ve told him he’ll love you. You’re doing it!” During our first encounter, in his office in Trump Tower, I grasp that, whoever or whatever I have previously imagined Trump to be, he is foremost a performance artist. Appearance is never not, at some level, artifice. My objective is to apprehend the person within the persona. There’s no point in asking Trump questions he has answered in print already. Anyway, I can come up with a few new ones — say, does Donald Trump have an interior life? No one’s ever asked him that, I bet. One Saturday, he and I spend a morning and afternoon one on one, touring construction projects in Manhattan and in Westchester County, north of New York City. He drives and I sit in the death seat, taking notes. As we cruise up Interstate 684, I ask about his early morning routines. What time do you wake up? Five-thirty am. What time do you arrive at your desk in Trump Tower? Seven or seven-thirty. How do you spend your time before leaving for the office? Reading the newspapers, etc. “OK,” I say. “You’re basically alone. Your wife is still asleep” — he was then married, but not for much longer, to his second wife, Marla Maples — “you’re in the bathroom shaving and you see yourself in the mirror. What are you thinking?” From Trump, a look of incomprehension. Me: “I mean, are you looking at yourself and thinking, ‘Wow. I’m Donald Trump’?” Trump remains puzzled. Me: “OK, I guess I’m asking: do you consider yourself ideal company?” Trump: “You really want to know what I consider ideal company?” Me: “Yes.” (At the time, I deemed his reply unprintable. But that was then.) Trump: “A total piece of ass.” Another Saturday, Trump and I had an appointment at Trump Tower. After I’d waited 10 minutes, the concierge directed me to the penthouse. When I emerged from the lift, there Donald stood. “I thought you might like to see my apartment,” he said, and as I squinted against the glare of gilt and mirrors in the entrance corridor, he added, “I don’t really do this.” That we both knew this to be a transparent fib — photo spreads of the 53-room triplex and its rooftop park had appeared in several magazines and it had been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous — in no way undermined my enjoyment of the visual and aural assault that followed: the 29ft high living room with its erupting fountain and vaulted ceiling decorated with neo-Romantic frescoes; the two-storey dining room with its carved ivory frieze (“I admit that the ivory’s kind of a no-no”); the onyx columns that had come from “a castle in Italy”; the chandelier that originally hung in “a castle in Austria”; the African blue-onyx lavatory. Very few touches suggested that real people actually lived there — where was it, exactly, that Trump sat around in his boxers, eating roast-beef sandwiches, channel surfing and scratching where it itched? Where was it that Marla threw her jogging clothes? — but no matter. We turned a couple of corners and ended up in a sitting room that had a Renoir on one wall and a view that extended beyond the Statue of Liberty. Years later, I became aware that the picture, La Loge, was a Renoir only if a reproduction of a Renoir qualifies as a Renoir. The original hangs in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. For $10m in 1985, Trump had bought Mar-a-Lago, a 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian castle built in Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1920s. The most direct but not exactly the most serene way to travel there, I discovered, was aboard Trump’s Boeing 727. My fellow passengers included Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late publishing tycoon and inadequate swimmer Robert Maxwell; Matthew Calamari, a telephone-booth-sized bodyguard and head of security for the entire Trump Organisation; and Eric Trump, Donald’s son, then aged 13. The gold-plated fixtures and hardware (sinks, seatbelt clasps, door hinges, screws), well-stocked bar and larder, queen-sized bed and bidet (with a leather-cushioned cover in case of sudden turbulence) implied hedonistic possibilities — the plane often ferried high rollers to Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City — but I witnessed only good clean fun. We hadn’t been airborne long when Trump decided to watch a movie. He’d brought along Michael, a recent release, but 20 minutes after popping it into the VCR he got bored and switched to an old favourite, a Jean-Claude Van Damme slugfest called Bloodsport, which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie”. By assigning to his son the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition — Trump’s goal being “to get this two-hour movie down to 45 minutes” — he eliminated any lulls between the nose-hammering, kidney-tenderising and shin-whacking. When a beefy bad guy who was about to squish a normal-sized good guy received a crippling blow to the scrotum, I laughed. “Admit it: you’re laughing!” Trump shouted. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it too?” After buying Mar-a-Lago, Trump had begun a programme of meticulous restoration. Tony Senecal, a former mayor of Martinsburg, West Virginia, who doubled as Trump’s butler and Mar-a-Lago’s resident historian, told me, “Some of the restoration work that’s being done here is so subtle, it’s almost not Trump-like.” Subtlety, however, is not the dominant motif. Weary from handling Trump’s legal work, Jay Goldberg, his lawyer, used to retreat with his wife to Mar-a-Lago for a week each year. Never mind the tapestries, murals, frescoes, winged statuary, life-sized portrait of Trump (titled The Visionary), bathtub-sized flower-filled samovars, Corinthian colonnade, 34ft ceilings, blinding chandeliers, marquetry, overstuffed and gold-leaf-stamped everything else, Goldberg told me; what nudged him around the bend was a piece of fruit. “We were surrounded by a staff of 20 people,” he said, “including a footman. I didn’t even know what that was. I thought maybe a chiropodist. Anyway, wherever I turned there was always a bowl of fresh fruit. So there I am, in our room, and I decide to step into the bathroom to take a leak. And on the way I grab a kumquat and eat it. Well, by the time I come out of the bathroom, the kumquat has been replaced.” Spring arrives and the profile is almost finished. I have everything but an ending. I also have a deadline. Late one night, I fax the story — 10,000 words; still no ending — to my editor. The clock radio on my night table is tuned to an all-news station. Top of the hour, the headline is: Donald Trump and Marla Maples are separating. Inconveniently, I’ve seen none of this coming. Conveniently, my article has abruptly become timely. Trump agrees to meet me in his office and my reward is an ending, an opening scene and a crystalline certainty about his interior life. Given his domestic vicissitudes, is he happy? Regretful? Self-reflective? His demeanour gives away nothing. Previously, he’s told me that in times of distress he confides in no one. Meanwhile, I’ve interviewed dozens of Trump acquaintances, among them a securities analyst who observes: “Deep down, he wants to be Madonna.” All of which informs my conclusion that he does not have an interior life: “He had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.” Evidently, Trump does not appreciate what I’ve written. I don’t hear from him directly, but he writes a spurned lover’s complaint to Tina: “Don’t ever ask me to do another story. You said, ‘It will be great — you’ll love it.’ You lied!” The nerve. Later that year he publishes the hostwritten book Trump: The Art of the Comeback and devotes a few pages to Tina and me. There I am on page 181, in the chapter called The Press and Other Germs: “He was not much of anything, nondescript, with a faint wiseguy sneer and some kind of chip on his shoulder.” Now it’s 2005. I publish a book, Character Studies, that includes my reporting on Trump. It is favourably reviewed by Jeff MacGregor in The New York Times — which three weeks later publishes a response from Trump that is sublimely deranged. “I’ve been a bestselling author for close to 20 years,” he writes. “Whether you like it or not, facts are facts.” He goes on to cite a review of his work by the humorist Joe Queenan. Lacking any aptitude for irony, Trump is oblivious to Queenan’s: “The highly respected Joe Queenan mentioned . . . that I had produced ‘a steady stream of classics’ with ‘stylistic seamlessness’ and that the ‘voice’ of my books remained noticeably constant to the point of being an ‘astonishing achievement’. “This was high praise coming from an accomplished writer. From losers like Jeff MacGregor, whom I have never met, or Mark Singer, I do not do nearly as well. But I’ll gladly take Joe Queenan over Singer and MacGregor any day of the week — it’s a simple thing called talent!” My book rockets from No 45,638 to No 385 on the Amazon list. Several fellow scribblers solicit advice on how to provoke Trump into attacking them too. I used to think the funniest thing I’d ever heard Trump say was when, one day in his office, he handed me a two-page unaudited personal financial statement and said, “I’ve never shown this to a reporter before.” I knew this could not possibly be true, just as I knew that his alleged net worth ($2.25bn) was fictitious. Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor of New York, once quipped: “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarised.” Then, as now, I never cared how much Trump said he was “worth”. I remain confident that a true appraisal would be a fraction of whatever figure he claims on a given day. His main selling point as a presidential candidate, of course, was that he’s a supergenius, an incredibly successful deal maker who will make fabulous fantastic deals that will have every citizen’s head spinning — a refreshing contrast to the “disastrous” deals of his Oval Office predecessors. At rallies no one seemed to mind that an authentic Donald Trump did not exist. There was only ‘Trump’ — a bloated bloviator with a pumpkin-pink coiffure Until June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator in the Trump Tower atrium and, with paid actors wearing “Make America great again!” T-shirts cheering him on, inaugurated his courageous effort to make “Mexican” synonymous with “rapist and drug smuggler”, I never thought he’d take the leap. I misread the moment, along with 100% of the commentariat. We knew that Trump would be gone long before the primaries. We got it completely wrong. Over the weeks and months that followed, his poll numbers vindicated his methods. Thousands of real voters with real fears and long-festering grievances thronged to his rallies. Among them were manifestly unrepentant haters, but that was not the majority sentiment. These were citizens whose resentment and anger had steeped in the blatant, chronic bad faith of their elected representatives. That he did not sound or behave like a typical politician won him points for authenticity. No one in the congregation seemed to mind — or even register — that an authentic Donald Trump did not exist. There was only “Trump” — a bloated bloviator in a navy suit and primary-coloured tie, with a laboriously tended pumpkin-pink coiffure that grew nowhere in nature. All was artifice. Trump held forth with bladder-testing stamina. But what was that coming out of his mouth? A stump speech of rambling self-aggrandisement and tough-talk soundbites: bigness, greatness, getting screwed, getting even, China, Mexico, Japan, the system’s rigged, losing, winning, head-spinning, an endless infomercial about his putative riches and fantastic fabulousness — flowing in intermittently filtered free association. The bombast spoke plainly of his tactics, if not necessarily of his objectives. I doubted that winning the Republican nomination, let alone winning the election, could be Trump’s genuine desire. The most logical rationale for his candidacy was the abiding obsession with his ever-metastasising brand. He spoke of himself in the third person. When a protester who repeatedly shouted: “Not all Mexicans are rapists. Not all Muslims are terrorists!” received a police escort to the exit, Trump said, “He looks like an Elvis impersonator. That’s strange because the Elvis impersonators loved Donald Trump.” He claimed that “on women’s issues and health issues there will be nobody better than Donald Trump”. This last load of chutzpah came from the itchy-Twitter-fingered author of: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” Here was an ostensible aspiring leader of the free world whose transparent anxieties about the adequacy of his genitalia dominated more than one news cycle. Watching the televised debate the first time Trump went there, I laughed and then winced. Two decades earlier, recounting the unravelling of his first marriage, his adultery with his future-second-ex-wife Marla Maples and its attendant New York Post headline quoting her saying he was the “Best sex I’ve ever had”, I had written that “an acquaintance of Marla’s blabbed about Donald’s swordsmanship”. Or so the Post had reported, but what had I been thinking? Yikes. No such thing had happened. The only plausible blabber was Donald himself. Plus ça change. Much of the fourth estate, first by not taking Trump seriously and then by taking him seriously, assumed roles as his witless enablers. For months, Trump played them like suckers at a sideshow. The more airtime and ink they gave him, the more he vilified them. No matter how much invective he showered, goading the rabble to hurl abuse at the unfortunate hostages in the media enclosure, the cameras kept running. I wonder how long it will take Trump’s bedrock partisans to grasp that they’ve been played too. Watching Trump work his base, I’m reminded of the trip we once made to Atlantic City, where he charmed the expectant patrons of Trump Castle, then the most conspicuously failing of his failing casino properties. The Castle had 2,239 slot machines, including, in a far corner, 13 brand-new contraptions themed after the Wheel of Fortune game show, which were about to be officially unveiled. On hand was a press entourage worthy of a military briefing in the wake of a Grenada-calibre invasion and a couple of hundred onlookers — all drawn by the prospect of a personal appearance by Vanna White, the hostess of Wheel of Fortune, who had been conscripted for what was described as “the ceremonial first pull”. The demographics of the crowd suggested that the most efficient machine would be one that permitted direct deposit of a social security cheque. Trump received warm salutations. A white-haired woman wearing a pink tracksuit and carrying a bucket of coins said, “Mr Trump, I just love you, darling.” He replied, “Thank you. I love you, too”, and then turned to me and said, “You see, they’re good people. And I like people. You’ve gotta be nice. They’re like friends.” Vanna pulled the crank and, after a delay that featured a digital musical cacophony, the machine spat back a few coins — whereupon the starstruck pensioners surged forward to part with that week’s grocery budget. As we headed for the exit, Trump said to me, “This is what we do. What can I tell you?”
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