Sizing up the end of the 20th century, an NBC TV executive said that superficiality had triumphed over substance. “All the stuff our parents told us didn’t come true,” said Rosalyn Weinman, PhD. “No one cares if you’re good. People only care if you’re good-looking and rich.”
Having won the attention of the press and public as a rich and good-looking man, Donald Trump continually sought to keep it. To stay good-looking he battled against middle-age weight gain, wore a uniform of expensive suits and devoted great effort to keeping his hair. “The worst thing a man can do is let himself go bald,” he had once told casino executive Mark Estess.
Trump denied he underwent surgery for hair loss, but beginning around 1990 his coif became the subject of frequent speculation in the press. Once a helmet of brown, it became an extravagant complex of swooping strands that moved from one side of his head to the other, and others that went from back to front. All this effort led Time magazine to consult a stylist and publish a diagrammed account of how it was done, presented under the headline “The Secret to Donald Trump’s Hair”.
On occasion Trump would invite an interviewer to examine his head to see if it was real. But the media’s fascination with Trump’s hair didn’t revolve around the question of whether it was real. What was significant was what it said about his audacious vanity.
Trump was unable to change his hairstyle because it got him noticed, and there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do for attention. In 1999 he went so far as to renounce his membership in the Republican Party and engage in an extended flirtation with the Reform Party of the United States of America, which was preparing to field a candidate in the 2000 presidential election.
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One could have said that the Reform Party would amount to little more than an outlet for the frustrations of those who believed, more as a matter of faith than fact, that Bill Clinton had won election as president because his GOP opponents were insufficiently conservative. A legacy of the businessman Ross Perot’s failed 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, the Reform Party was so small and disorganised that it stood no chance of winning a national election. Perot’s showings had, however, qualified it for more than $12 million in federal aid in the 2000 campaign.
Trump joined the party in the autumn of 1999 and said he was considering a run for the Reform Party nomination. He also expressed some ideas that would have appealed to mainstream Americans, but were anathema to many Reform Party stalwarts. For example, Trump said the Republicans had “moved too far towards the extreme right” and that he was capable of capturing more than the “really staunch-right wacko vote” by reaching middle-of-the-road Americans. But the core of the Reform Party was “staunch right”, and Trump would never win the party’s nomination by veering left. He did make himself more visible with every appearance in the press, where his audience could be rewarded with outrageous statements. On Cuba: Fidel Castro is “a killer and should be treated as such”. On his ideal running mate: Oprah Winfrey because “she’s popular, she’s brilliant, she’s a wonderful woman”. On candidates who are proud of their humble backgrounds: “They’re losers. Who the hell wants to have a person like this for president?”
In the amalgamation that was his platform, Trump included items from the left side of the political menu, including a big, one-time tax on the rich to trim the federal deficit, a policy to allow gay soldiers in the military and universal employer-based health insurance with subsidies for the poor.
Trump said that he believed he had “huge” public support. He also noted that he enjoyed two great advantages over other candidates: first, he was extremely well known, and second, he was extremely rich, which meant he could pay for his own campaign and forgo the effort and obligations that come with soliciting donations.
“Trump promoted his hotels and his book at the party’s expense
In 2000 Forbes estimated Trump’s wealth at $1.7 billion, which made him the 167th richest man in America. The magazine explained that Trump believed he was worth “more than $5 billion” but “back on Earth” his fortune was “considerably less”. Trump’s view of his political capital was similarly inflated.
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However, Trump never let on that his campaign was a joke. Instead he presented himself as a serious candidate whose business success qualified him for the highest office in the world. In this way, the Trump-for-president folly may have been the first pseudo campaign in the history of the presidency, a determined effort to exploit the political process by a man whose real purpose was profit.
As the Reform Party convention drew near, Trump attacked Governor George W Bush of Texas as inexperienced. He said that he was offering voters a businessman’s “eye for the bottom line”, which was an odd kind of offer, given that his Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts operation was about to post a loss of $34.5 million for the last quarter of 1999. Trump also derided his most likely opponents, Al Gore and Bush, as “Ivy League contenders” without a hint of embarrassment about his diploma from the University of Pennsylvania, which was an Ivy League school.
Political veterans such as Dick Morris observed that Trump was publishing a new book, The America We Deserve, which might get a boost in sales from the author/candidate’s appearances on TV talk shows such as Larry King Live (CNN), The Early Show (CBS) and The Tonight Show (NBC), which invited him to talk politics. Many of his ideas were dismissed as unworkable. For example, a one-off tax on the rich was labelled “harebrained” by the economist and securities analyst David Jones, who said it could cause a stock-market collapse. (A former IRS commissioner called it “wacky, constitutionally”.)
Always unconventional, Trump didn’t deliver stump speeches to political audiences. It appeared that he made just one traditional campaign-style foray, which brought him to south Florida to speak to Cuban Americans for a day. Otherwise he travelled the country via private jet and pocketed $100,000 an appearance for the business advice he dispensed at seminars, where he shared the stage with Tony Robbins, a janitor turned self-help guru. Robbins, who in recent years had legal troubles that cost him more than $870,000, organised the Results 2000 speaking tour for himself, Trump and others he called “the masters of our time”. But while Robbins advertised these events as “seminars”, for which attendees paid as much as $229 apiece for tickets, the Trump committee described them as “speeches”. On the day of the Results 2000 event in Hartford, Connecticut, a Trump aide told a reporter for the New York Daily News that while others expended great amounts on their campaigns, “Trump is making money running for president”.
When Trump arrived for the Results 2000 event in St Louis, a reporter for the P ost-Dispatch newspaper dutifully noted the big private jet with “Trump” emblazoned on it and informed her readers that the man would be speaking at the 19,000-seat arena where the local pro hockey team played its games. The crowd heard roughly thirty minutes of Trump’s business advice, much of which could be found in his books, including Donald’s Rules of Success, which included “think big” and “be paranoid”.
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After his St Louis speech, Trump stayed in character as a politician until the middle of February, when he went on television to announce that he was ending his campaign because “the Reform Party is a total mess”. The other side of the story came from Reform Party stalwarts who complained that his campaign had never been serious. They believed that he ran to get people to buy his books, purchase tickets to hear him speak, and drop their cash at his gambling halls.
“Donald Trump came in, promoted his hotels, he promoted his book, he promoted himself at our expense and I think he understands fully that we’ve ended the possibilities for such abuse of our party,” said Patrick Choate, a Reform Party leader.
Trump would admit that his political gambol had been good for his business interests. For example, without his supposed candidacy he would not have drawn press to an airport hangar in St Louis when he jetted into town to address a crowd of people who had bought tickets to hear him speak about life, business and the secrets of success.
Not one to leave the measure of his success to anyone else, Trump published an account of his experience days after he took himself out of contention. His self-portrait was of a man who was thwarted by the rules and stymied by those in the Reform Party who were so extreme they believed a conspiracy of the powerful ran the country.
Trump also took a swipe at Al Gore because he appeared to be tired as he trudged through snowy New Hampshire seeking votes. In contrast, Trump said, “I had enormous fun thinking about a presidential candidacy and count it as one of my great life experiences.”
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It is hard to argue with the idea that thinking about running for president was more fun than actually doing it. Trump said that his presidential flirtation “doesn’t compare with completing one of the great skyscrapers of Manhattan”, but he wouldn’t rule out a reprise in 2004.
“No one cares if you’re good. They only care if you’re good looking and rich
Weeks later, stock-exchange officials halted trading of shares in Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts as word spread that the company was going to file for bankruptcy. Under the company’s reorganisation plan, the stockholders’ share of the firm’s value would decline from more than 40 per cent to less than 5 per cent. Investors who had put money into Trump bonds would fare better, suffering just a single-digit loss.
In the reorganisation plan Trump was given a $2 million annual salary, plus expenses, to continue running the firm. He received as well a minority stake in the Miss Universe pageant, which the firm owned with the NBC television network, and a three-acre piece of Atlantic City real estate valued at $7.5 million. When shareholders sued, Trump paid them $17.5 million and agreed that the lot would be auctioned and the proceeds distributed to them.
Remarkably, Trump’s personal net worth, as estimated by Forbes, actually increased as his casino/hotel company stumbled and declined. In 2003, he was estimated to have a fortune of $2.5 billion, which made him number 71 in the United States. In 2005 the figure would be $2.7 billion, which made him number 83.
How could Trump fall a dozen spots even as he gained $200 million? For the very rich, the new millennium had brought astounding increases in their net worth. As of 2005, more than 20 Americans held assets valued at greater than $10 billion. During this period the income gap between the top 1 per cent and every other American had grown wider, upward mobility had decreased and the median net worth for American families, minus the value of their homes, had remained essentially unchanged since the 1980s at about $20,000.
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Wages had barely risen during this same period and job security in the private sector had declined. Traditional company-paid pensions almost disappeared, replaced by savings plans that workers were supposed to fund and manage themselves with the aid of Wall Street. (According to free-market wisdom, those who invested in corrupt companies such as Enron, which went bust in spectacular fashion, had only themselves to blame for their losses.)
For those Americans who sought advice to help them cope, Trump offered two new books, T rump: How to Get Rich and Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.
Two weeks after Trump announced the end of a campaign that never actually began, he accepted a phone call from the vice-president, Al Gore, who would face George Bush in the general election. Gore wanted Trump’s backing and the billionaire said he was open to the idea. He never did supply what Gore sought, and as the election season progressed, Trump faded from the national political conversation. He had, however, achieved an important goal, establishing himself as a worthy source of commentary on the electoral game despite the fact he had never formally run for office.
Extracted from Never Enough by Michael D’Antonio. © 2016 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St Martin’s Press, LLC