Charles Petzold

Donald Trump first attended a Republican National Convention in 1988 when Roger Stone was trying to convince Republican bigwigs that Trump would make a good Vice President to run with George Bush. The Convention was held in New Orleans that year, and Paul Manafort was deputy convention director. In her recent book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (Penguin Press, 2022), Maggie Haberman writes:

Housing was secured for Trump at a low-scale hotel, and accommodations were made for him to sit in the first lady’s box and visit the convention floor, including when Bush would formally accept the nomination.

To pass the time before the main event, Trump flew in a stunning blonde from Georgia whom he had been seeing in ways that had grown less and less discreet. Marla Maples stepped off a private plane and was whisked to Trump’s quarters, where she holed up with him for hours. Even a call from Frank Sinatra to Trump’s room did not lure him out; Trump said he was not available.

You might need to be reminded that Trump was married to the former Ivana Zelníčková at this time and they had three children. The youngest, Ivanka, was 6 years old.

Eventually, Trump was persuaded to come down to the convention floor:

Trump was mesmerized, enraptured by the display around him. It was like a giant sporting event, except in honor of one man. “This is what I want,” Trump said. (p. 98)

Unlike most other books about the Trump Presidency, Confidence Man reports on the whole of Trump’s life. He doesn’t declare for the 2016 Presidential race until page 205. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s New York City background gives her an ideal perspective for this job. Haberman’s parents met while they were working at the New York Post (the more conservative and sensationalist of New York City’s two major tabloids), and Haberman’s husband also worked at the New York Post at the time that they married, while she worked at the other New York City tabloid, the Daily News.

For readers who also spent many decades in New York City, the name of Marla Maples might trigger terrifying flashbacks. Even for those of us who avoid reading the tabloids, the headlines tend to jump out from the newsstands, and exposure to Trump scandals was unavoidable.

Although Trump had been seeing Marla in 1988, it wasn’t until 1990 that the New York Daily News reported on the affair, precipitating a very public breakup and divorce. The battle between Donald and Ivana was paralleled in the tabloids: The Daily News and their gossip columnist Liz Smith took Ivana’s side while Donald had the ear of gossip columnist Cindy Adams at the New York Post. Haberman writes:

At one point, their teetering marriage occupied the Daily News’s front page for twelve days straight.

Throughout 1990, the three parties leaked and gave interviews to the papers in an effort to frame themselves as sympathetic victims and others as aggressors, in an unending tit for tat…. News consumers were equally fascinated and horrified, like watching a car wreck where the victims repeatedly tried to hurt themselves more instead of accepting medical help. (p. 113)

A woman who was in an acting class with Marla Maples told New York Post reporter Bill Hoffmann that Maples “often boasted of a great ‘romance’ with Trump.” After the Post editors considered what the word “romance” implied, the headline became “MARLA BOASTS TO HER PALS ABOUT DONALD ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD’.” Any qualms that the paper’s editors might have had of exaggerating the quote were calmed when someone asked “What’s Trump going to do? Call a press conference and say, ‘It’s a lie, I stink in bed’?” (pp. 113–4)

It turned out that Trump loved the headline.

But wait, it gets worse! After Trump divorces Ivana and marries Marla, and two years after Marla gives birth to their daughter Tiffany, Marla is away at Mar-a-Lago while Trump and his ex-wife Ivana are at Trump Tower making a TV commercial together where they’re edging closer to each other and saying “It’s wrong, isn’t it?” and “But it feels so right,” and it turns out that it’s all about Pizza Hut’s new stuffed-crust pizza. (p. 127)

This is the Donald Trump that we New Yorkers knew before he became a national figure, and why we were so astonished at the idea that he was seriously running for President. But Haberman’s book reveals that Trump’s flirtation with politics goes back even further.

In 1973, Donald Trump’s name first appeared in the New York Times in an article describing the Justice Department’s lawsuit of Trump Management, Inc. for discriminatory rental practices against Black tenants. Around the same time, Trump met the notorious Roy Cohn, (p. 31) who remained an inspiration to him throughout his life. It was Roy Cohn, for example, who taught Donald Trump how he could save money by “a simple refusal to pay invoices submitted to him” (p. 105) and who first seems to have seen Trump’s political potential:

In 1984, Roy Cohn told a Washington Post reporter that she should profile Trump, because he was interested in getting into politics and believed he had the skills to be Reagan’s arms negotiator. The reporter, Lois Romano, was skeptical of Trump’s bluster but believed he could be fodder for a good story for the Style section. When it came time to discuss his actual ideas about negotiating a high-stakes treaty, Trump assured Romano that he would only need “an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles.” (p. 93)

That’s Dunning-Krueger Syndrome: an ignorance about the depth of one’s ignorance and an over-confidence (as the title of Confidence Man suggests) that anything one doesn’t know is trivially easy to learn. Much later when Trump spoke about the difficulties in repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, he said: “It’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.” (2/27/17) Trump doesn’t even seem aware that the word “nobody” applies only to him.

In 2010, Trump was introduced to Steve Bannon:

The unkempt Bannon was not the kind of person Trump instantly took to. But his Wall Street credentials got him a second look. The two men met at Trump Tower and had an open-ended conversation about politics. Trump talked extensively about China and said that the country — which was on a trajectory to soon have the world’s largest economy — was ripping off the United States through its trade practices. Bannon talked positively about populism, and suddenly Trump piped up. “That’s exactly what I am — a popularist,” Trump said. Bannon corrected him. “No, it’s populist,” he said. “Yeah, popularist,” Trump responded. (p. 177)

By this time, much of America was getting a more curated impression of Trump via his TV show. The Apprentice was supposed to be filmed in Trump’s own offices, but the threadbare offices and chipped furniture revealed a “crumbling empire” (in the words of an Apprentice producer). To make it look good enough for TV, they had to build stage sets. Trump’s famous line “You’re fired!” was borrowed from Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. (pp. 154–7)

The Apprentice didn’t reflect Trump’s business reality at all, but as Haberman writes, “the show helped create a new reality for Trump.” She continues with a personal note:

I didn’t fully realize it myself until I was in Dubuque, Iowa, at a half-open airport hangar, on a cold January day a year and a half after Trump had concluded his fourteenth season as host of The Apprentice. It was the final week before Iowa’s Republican caucuses, and as I waited for his campaign rally to being, I approached people in the crowd to ask them why there were there. I presupposed it was to witness a spectacle that would soon come to an end, as Trump’s other flirtations with electoral politics always had.

One middle-aged man gave me a strange look when I asked and assured me he would be casting a ballot for Trump at the caucuses. I asked him why he planned to do that. Without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, his voice earnest, “I watched him run his business.” (pp. 157–8)

That’s one of the more chilling passages in Confidence Man, and there are still 350 pages to go.

Eventually real historians will write histories of this era and perhaps give us a better overview. Until then, books by Washington Post reporters, New York Times reporters, and others are essential. Trump has had such a toxic influence on American politics that it is vital we understand him and his appeal. This is someone who clearly lacked the character, temperament, or intelligence to be President, and who did not even seem to enjoy the job, but who thrived for the glory and prestige, and particularly the feedback of massive crowds of adoring fans. To Trump, the real tragedy of COVID was not being able to hold big rallies. “Can you believe this is happening to me?” he asked. (p. 425)

Trump didn’t expect to win the 2016 election. “The part he had most enjoyed was seeing how close he could get, in a campaign that had been built around making him feel good, often headlining more than one large rally a day.” (p. 258) But he definitely didn’t like losing in 2020. Trump’s most corrosive influence on American politics has been his continued assertion that he actually won the 2020 election (“by a landslide”) and that Biden is in the White House solely as a result of massive voter fraud.

What’s worse, Trump has managed to convince tens of millions of voters of this absurdity. He has essentially split America into two distinct visions of reality, in the process leading his followers into open revolt and threats of civil war. This has gone far beyond the acts of a petulant child. It has evolved into a dangerous scheme to undermine electoral trust and sow discord in the mechanisms of democracy. There’s a name for that. John Kelly, Trump’s second Chief of Staff, described Trump as a “fascist.” (p. 369), which is arguably worse than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s characterization of Trump as a “fucking moron.” (p. 311)

As I write this, midterm elections are in two days. It now seems as if voters will be punishing the Democrats for inflation and a perceived increase in crime. Trump has had an enormous influence on these elections. He hand-picked many of the candidates in swing states, and he gives special preference to those who help spread the Big Lie. (I learned from Confidence Man that Trump has known Herschel Walker — the improbable candidate for Senate in Georgia — since 1983.) Hundreds of election deniers are running in races across the country. It is believed that following the midterms, Trump will declare for the 2024 race, despite federal and state justice departments nipping at his heels.

Who does Trump think he is putting our country through such torture?

The character flaw that emerges most clearly from Confidence Man is that Trump views everything solely as it affects him. He has no sense at all that he should be doing what’s good for the country. In the days following the 2020 election, as it became obvious to many in Trump’s administration that he lost, more marginal figures such as Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell offered him some hope. Haberman writes:

Trump was willing to speak with almost anyone whom he thought could offer him a solution to the worst predicament he could imagine: being turned into a loser by the entire country. (p. 465)

Is that the explanation for why Trump has obstinately persisted with the Big Lie? Is it because he can’t tolerate being perceived as a loser?

Haberman’s analysis brings to mind Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6th Committee about Trump’s reaction after the Supreme Court denied his last challenge:

The president was fired up about the Supreme Court decision…. He had said something to the effect of, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark, this is embarrassing, figure it out, we need to figure it out, I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

Some people have interpreted this as Trump not wanting people to know he lost the election, but it seems that Ms. Hutchinson is speaking about Trump’s distress at losing the Supreme Court request. Still, it’s much the same.

Being perceived as a loser seems a petty excuse for Trump to drag the rest of the country through his narcissistic delusions. It seems like something that … OK, like something that only a loser would do.