Maggie Haberman’s Trump
Confidence Man – The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America
Haberman covered Trump for many years, grew up in the same community of Queens, New York and had many interviews with the ex-President. She traces him from growing up in Queens to the White House and then back to Palm Beach. Most of what she writes is already well known, but the collection and synthesis are compelling. It tells the story wonderfully well but does not do much analysis of the reasons for his rise and the impacts of his programs.
For most of his adult life, Trump has been a compulsive liar in his business and professional worlds, and he has fulsomely taken advantage of local, state, and federal governments for his own financial benefit. That was his pattern as a New York developer through to the White House. He learned to successfully bully others and lie quite very early in his career, and it has served him well throughout. He survived multiple bankruptcies, serial cheating on his spouses, unpaid taxes, roller coaster finances, and countless personal scandals. What stuck with me were his “never say die” persistence towards his own personal goals in the face of all the obstacles (that he had largely created for himself), and his ability to charm and persuade or to bully and corrupt those who got in his way.
What struck Haberman was how much he was a creature of the New York milieu of the 70’s and 80’s in which he was formed. His instinctual racism and his autocratic vision of strong man governance derived from the old-style Brooklyn borough presidents and the divisive racial politics of New York City. He grew up very rich due to his developer father, Fred Trump; learned early on to bully his brothers. He always had to be a winner to gain his father’s approval. He was a mediocre student at Fordham and Wharton. He joined his father’s real estate development and construction business of affordable homes that catered to the middle classes in the outer boroughs of New York City. Trump shifted his focus to Manhattan luxury developments, and those attracted to the bright lights of the city, and he rose to personal prominence through endless self-publicity. He teamed up with the lawyer Roy Cohn, who practiced a scorched earth version of law on behalf of his clients; Cohn helped Trump get favorable consideration from New York’s City Hall for tax breaks on his proposed projects to develop the Westside landholdings of the bankrupt Penn Central. He teamed up with Roger Stone on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy, an alliance that has endured to the present day. He got involved with Mafia controlled unions in the building of his New York City developments; they made death threats to those city officials questioning Trump’s proposed developments. Trump hired the very same officials who had opposed him onto his own payroll.
In New York City during this time frame, city finances were in perilous shape, requiring deep cuts in public services. Crime had been rising, and the unions promoted a campaign, called “Fear City”, to persuade public officials to reverse the cuts in the municipal workforce.
A young woman jogger was raped and killed in Central Park in the middle of the night. Trump jumped to the fore calling for the conviction and death penalty for the Central Park 5 and led a campaign for their conviction. This started his rise to public prominence as a noteworthy political figure and force. It turned out that all the Central Park 5 teenagers were innocent, were wrongfully convicted, and served more than a decade in jail before the real killer was caught, identified by his DNA, and convicted. Trump never apologized.
He supported Rudy Giuliani in his first run for Mayor of New York City. Giuliani lost and claimed it was due to election fraud among the minority voters who had supported his opponent.
Trump branched out into acquiring and building Atlantic City gambling casinos. He made his first connections in the late 80’s with Russians about building/managing/developing a hotel in Moscow. Trump went into very serious debt acquiring new properties, such as the Plaza, at inflated prices with bank loans at high rates of interest and over-building his new casinos. Then along with his marriage to Ivanka, imperiled by his affair with Marla Maples, everything crashed. Trump had to sell valued properties and renegotiate his loans, submit to financial oversight, restructure his debts, put his properties into bankruptcy, and take bail out funding from his father. Eventually, he recovered in part by taking some of his business public so that shareholders shouldered some of the financial risk. As his next venture, he bought and developed luxury golf courses and resorts.
Before the 2000 election, he and Roger Stone and Tony Fabrizio assessed his chances for a Presidential run as a candidate for the Reform Party, a party initially founded and funded by Ross Perot. They discovered that he was known by 97% of voters, and 78% would never vote for him due to all the personal and financial scandals associated with him.
Fortuitously for him, he was signed to a reality show, the Apprentice. It was a hit, and Trump became a national star. It transformed the public’s perception of him to coincide with his starring role in the reality show. Haberman recalled interviewing an Iowa woman voter, convinced she knew the measure of the man because she had watched him assiduously on the reality show.
His business moved from developing luxury housing to “branding”. In other words, he would license the use of the Trump name on a building built or developed by someone else, to symbolize “luxury”. He would license his name for steaks, vodka, chairs, vitamins and mattresses, even a misbegotten Trump University.
After the real estate debacle and financial collapse of 2008, he and Roger Stone began to associate with the Tea Party, Steve Bannon and the right-wing populists who rejected both the Democratic Party and the mainstream Republicans. He launched himself into public political view by espousing and promoting the lies of the birtherism conspiracy, that Obama was born in Kenya.
In 2015 he opened his political campaign with a pack of lies attacking undocumented Mexican immigrants, who often work the hardest, most dangerous and lowest paid jobs, due to their immigration status. He segued into attacks on Muslims with a series of lies about his actions on and after September 11 and the conduct of Muslims living in New Jersey. He and his campaign continued with endless lies about himself, insults about his Republican competitors, attacks on the media, and then with Russian assistance turned his vituperation on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. And to the surprise of nearly everyone, including the author, he overcame all the scandals about his own past conduct and won the Electoral College in 2016 with victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Once inaugurated as President, he had to choose staff, cabinet members and decide on a legislative agenda with the GOP leadership. These were challenges since he had never been an elected politician or worked closely with the Congressional and other important national and state leaders; he did not know or understand from firsthand inside experience, how the US government worked. Likewise, he had little to no experience in foreign affairs and no familiarity with other world leaders. He lacked an inner circle of experienced and talented people he trusted who knew how the federal government worked and how to make it work. He did not know what the legal, ethical, and other boundaries and other red lines were, and he was unwilling to abide by them when advised by others.
His major legislative success was a series of large tax cuts for the wealthy and for large highly profitable corporations. His other big success was adding three very conservative justices to the Supreme Court who then overturned the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade protecting women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of families to decide when to have children and how many. He dramatically changed the Republican Party’s orientation towards nativism, high tariffs and barriers to international trade, non-interventionism and isolationism, alignment with and support for autocracies, disdain for other western Democracies and their leaders, and confrontation with China. Finally, he kept the economy, which Obama had rebuilt after the collapse of 2008, on a track of solid and steady growth. He might have been re-elected but for the Covid pandemic.
His electoral downfall was due to his handling of the Covid 19 crisis. He downplayed it despite the mounting infections, hospitalizations, and death toll. He got on TV and made an utter fool of himself touting bleach and chloroquine. He pandered to the anti-vax extremists and to those who denied the seriousness of the threat, or the public health values of mask wearing and keeping a safe distance. By the time, the debates rolled around in the fall, he caught Covid, was hospitalized, and was close to death but for the medical interventions of the medical professionals, those whom he had earlier mocked.
Then he refused to acknowledge his electoral defeat, sought to corrupt multiple state election officials, lied repeatedly to his followers about widespread fraud, and encouraged his most violent supporters to overturn his defeat and return him to office, thereby eliminating American democracy. In this he was not successful, but instead gave grounds for his second impeachment in the House, and for potential federal and state criminal charges and possible convictions of Trump and some of his closest allies.