The hottest biography of the week on Amazon belongs to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael D'Antonio, who has waded into the murky waters of all things Donald Trump and swum back with a 400-page report.
Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (St. Martin's Press) is one of those hefty tomes that seeks to say something new about the American dream through the lens of one man's life. Does it succeed? Short answer: eh, yes and no. Longer, more upbeat answer: D'Antonio is a great reporter who succeeds best when he keeps his subject in focus and stops trying to get so much of America's cultural landscape in the frame.
D'Antonio's book is phenomenally well-timed (indeed, publication of the biography was moved up from 2016 to take advantage of Trump's meteoric campaign). So if you can't get away from the Trump conversation, you can at least win it. In a book this size, there are bound to be some juicy nuggets, some dirt on this horrifying American antihero, and you could sound smart and interesting at your next party bringing them up.
On the other hand, your stomach sinks: Who has the time to read a 400-page biography any more? And one about Trump, for goodness sake -- a character whom, when you read too much about him, causes this medical condition:
Day two of reading the latest biography on Trump. Curled up in the foetal position, twitching.— Chris Taylor (@FutureBoy) September 24, 2015
Well, don't worry. We've got you covered. Presented below are the 18 most interesting takeaways from Never Enough. Not all of this is new information -- it won't be much of a surprise to discover Trump was a big-time liar -- but it is new evidence. And it's all more than intriguing enough to make you the toast of the Trump-based cocktail chatter.
1. Just call him Donald Drumpf.
Donald Trump's paternal grandfather left Germany as Friedrich Drumpf. A U.S. immigration official changed his last name to Trumpf. Friedrich later decided to drop the "f," and three generations of skulduggery-seeking entrepreneurs called Trump began.
Fred Trump, Friedrich's son and Donald's dad, was even less proud of his heritage. By the 1960s "Fred had become so self-conscious about his German heritage that he had begun to tell people he was Swedish," D'Antonio says.
2. Whatever he tells you about being a self-made man, he was born to wealth.
Read Trump's own Art of the Deal and you might imagine he came up from almost nothing, the son of a local developer who specialized at the unprofitable lower end of the market. In fact, Fred Trump Sr. was worth around $100 million at a time when that was an enormous amount of money. "In his prime," writes D'Antonio, "Fred Trump was among the richest men in America." (He was also called to testify before Congress about some very shady corruption scandals; it has also been alleged that he was once arrested at a KKK meeting.)
Granted, Fred expected much from his kids. But in return, they got everything but the silver spoon:
A gruff and demanding patriarch, Fred Trump required both his daughters and sons to work to earn their own money, but he was more keenly committed to training his sons for a life of fierce competition. “Be a killer,” he told them over and over. But he also indulged them in the way that a man with hard-won riches might. They attended private schools and vacationed in Florida in the winter and in the Catskills in the summer. When it rained or snowed, he let the boys deliver their newspapers via chauffeured limousine. “You are a king,” said Fred to Donald.
3. As a kid, Trump was a major bully -- and he admits he hasn't changed.
As shoddy as Trump's behavior at debates is, just be glad it doesn't include any of the following:
Erasers hurled at teachers and cake flung at birthday parties were notable examples of the problem-child behavior that separated Donald Trump from the other kids at the private Kew-Forest School ... He once said that he gave a teacher a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”
What's worse than all that is that Trump point-blank admits that he hasn't evolved beyond that age. "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same," Trump told the author. "The temperament is not that different."
Where did this temperament come from? Two sources, really: a tough-as-nails father and a coddling mother. What we think of today as quintessentially Trumpian language is, D'Antonio says:
A family trait that may have been handed down by their tough-talking father. Donald Trump saw a world inhabited by winners and losers, allies and enemies. When displeased, he would indulge in tirades spiced with expletives. Employees, rivals, critics, and associates would become, in his words, “stupid,” “dumb,” “losers,” or “wimps.”
The Donald's behavior was set from childhood; he credits the respect he got from his father to the fact that “I used to fight back all the time.” As for Trump's Scottish-born mom, Mary Anne:
[British TV journalist Selina] Scott concluded that as a mother who had known true hardship in her childhood Mrs Trump had spoiled her son. “He was Mummy’s boy,” said Scott, “and terribly spoiled as a child. He had everything he wanted and never had much taken away from him.” Trump reminded Scott of bullies she had known in her school days: “I came across embryonic Donald Trumps. Usually people lose that trait of saying, ‘I want it. You give it to me, or I will smash you.’” Trump, she said, had not lost that trait.
4. Violence, and the need to win all games at all costs, dominated Trump's life at school.
Trump was faced with far worse than his father's anger when he was sent to cadet school in New York. There his bete noir was a "screaming US Army war veteran" named Theodore Dobias:
“In those days they’d smack the hell out of you. It was not like today where you smack somebody and you go to jail,” said Trump decades later. “[Dobias] could be a fucking prick. He absolutely would rough you up. You had to learn to survive.”
Dobias, who coached Trump in baseball and football, had no love lost for the kid either. "He always had to be number one in everything," he told the authors. "He was a conniver even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win.”
Later in life, this manifested itself in a skiing incident with his first wife Ivana, who was an internationally rated skiier (but may have lied about being in the Olympics). When Ivana beat him down the slope just one time, here's what she said happened next:
"Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. So we find his skis down the mountain with the instructor. He went foot bare up to the restaurant and said, ‘I’m not going to do this shit for anybody, including Ivana.’ He could not take it, that I could do something better than he did.”
5. He liked Broadway musicals -- but failed in his one attempt to produce a Broadway show.
A love of violence led the young Trump in two directions -- both to a life of juvenile delinquency and to a longer-lasting love of Broadway. Early in the book we learn:
Donald had been sneaking into Manhattan on the subway and acquiring a small collection of switchblades. (He and a friend had been inspired by the Sharks and the Jets of West Side Story.)
Then later, before Trump even begins to make it as a real-estate developer, he enters another trade where his strong sense of promotion could have reaped dividends. Sadly, it didn't.
In the winter of 1969–70, he dabbled in the entertainment business as the coproducer of a Broadway play. The critics did not find much to like in Paris Is Out!, which told the story of a squabbling, middle-aged suburban couple. “I neither hated it nor liked it,” wrote Walter Kerr. “I simply sat there and looked at it.”
6. He doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, but he has always had a weakness for women. And he likes to watch.
You may know about Ivana Trump and the messy divorce. You may know about his homewrecking on-again, off-again romance with Marla Maples. But did you know that even back in cadet school, Trump was identified as the official “ladies’ man” of his class in the academy yearbook, Shrapnel? Or that later on, in the go-go 1980s, Trump got his kicks watching impromptu live sex shows at New York's hottest club, without the contemporary excuses of booze or cocaine?
“I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed, on a bench in the middle of the room," Trump told an earlier biographer, Timothy O'Brien, about his nights at Studio 54. "There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.”
His conversational focus hasn't changed much, according to this anecdote from the filming of The Apprentice:
Trump sought to bond over guy talk, said [Trump PR guy James] Dowd, “almost to the point of annoyance. The man talks and talks and talks— about sports, or women. The amount of conversation about sex and women is endless."
7. His brother, an airline pilot who drank himself to death, couldn't handle his father.
We've heard of Fred Trump Jr. before. In The Art of the Deal, he's the subject of the Donald's one regret, that he didn't tell him to enjoy his flying career more. Apparently at the time, both Fred Sr. and Donald considered Fred Jr. a waste. The truth was a little more complex, as becomes clear when Fred tries and fails to follow his father into the construction business:
Given the chance to renovate an old building, Freddy installed brand-new windows. His father berated him when he found out because he thought the old ones would have served well enough for a few more years ... Donald wished Freddy would have tried harder to show them he could control himself. Also, Trump men were supposed to be tough, even when dealing with each other, but when his father lashed out at Freddy, he was so hurt he seemed to physically shrink.
8. Despite his military training, Trump was declared unfit to fight in Vietnam -- because 'deformities.'
Not only did Trump consider Vietnam "stupid," the former athlete had a legit excuse for not serving. And he'll still show it to you today:
When he reported for a military physical in September 1968, he was found medically unfit. His new classification, 1-Y, permitted him to be called only in case of national emergency ... As he talked, Trump slipped off his black loafer and pointed to his heel, where a little bulge pushed against his sock. “Heel spurs,” he explained. “On both feet.” The deformities qualified a would-be draftee for a medical deferment.
9. A brooding fatalist in his 20s, Trump thought he'd be dead by now -- and that he'd never marry.
This little nugget comes courtesy of a famous architect:
Edward “Ned” Eichler, whose family had founded a large and innovative home-building company in the San Francisco Bay Area ... was impressed by the younger man’s energy, even though he sometimes spoke in fatalistic terms. He recalled that Trump explained his impatience by saying he expected to die before age forty. He also told Eichler, “I’ll never marry.”
10. It has never, ever been clear how much money Donald Trump has. He may not even be a billionaire today.
Trump has been exaggerating his wealth, and downplaying his father's, since the beginning of his career. So much of his wealth is private, however, that it's impossible to get an exact read. Here's one of the early clues, during the prenup negotiation with Ivana, that Trump was mostly hat, less cattle:
Donald faced a demand that he prove his public claims of great wealth — a $200 million fortune and $14 million in recent profits — with a display of real liquidity. According to documents later made public, Donald’s taxable income at the time was less than $2,200 per week.
Then when he opens his first casino in Atlantic City:
Despite People magazine’s having anointed him a billionaire, the [New Jersey] state’s Division of Gaming Enforcement concluded that Trump’s own bank accounts held less than $400,000.
Finally, here's Deutsche Bank estimate of Trump’s wealth in 2007: $788 million. Not bad, but certainly not the $10 billion Trump has recently claimed. This may be complicated by the fact that Trump considers an intangible concept, his "personal brand," to be worth somewhere in the region of $6 billion.
11. Trump likes to fib a little bit about virtually everything. This too came from his father.
In the 1970s, Donald invented an entire human being to make statements on his behalf:
Although he appeared from time to time in the press, John Baron (sometimes spelled Barron) was a name that Trump and at least one of his employees hid behind when they didn’t want their identities attached to a statement ... A handy fiction, Baron was a character out of Fred Trump’s book. In his day Fred had used the name Mr. Green to hide his identity when he called certain people. The ruse was so familiar to members of the extended family that a lawyer/ brother-in-law often told Donald that he wondered how soon after being issued a subpoena John Baron would take sick and die ...
Whenever Trump spoke to the press, he addressed so many old and new claims that even the best fact-checker would have been hard-pressed to sort them all out. In one interview Donald revised his defense of the destruction of the Bonwit artwork, saying that it would have cost him not $32,000, but $500,000 to save it. The $32,000 figure had been offered by his alter ego John Baron, which meant that, as far as the public was concerned, Trump wasn’t contradicting himself. In 1983, press estimates of Fred Trump’s fortune would shrink it from the $200 million reported in 1976, to just $40 million, which made Donald’s accomplishments seem far more impressive. A year later, as The Times caught up with Fred Trump, he was credited with controlling $1 billion in assets and the family remained Swedish, and not German. (In this article The Times demoted Ivana from Olympic team member to “alternate.”)
12. No, seriously, Trump's lies are truly pathological -- and he even admits some of them.
On The Apprentice:
The audience shrank to 7.5 million in its sixth season, and he demanded that his press man, Jim Dowd, promote The Apprentice as the top-rated show on the air. “He felt that I wasn’t telling the story that the show was number one, when it was [actually] number seventy-three,” recalled Dowd. He added that reporters literally laughed at him when, on Trump’s instructions, he demanded they publish “corrections” of articles that did not describe The Apprentice as the top program on TV.
On the simple math of how large his stake was in a Manhattan real estate project:
He explained that he was so inclined to look on the bright side of things that he regarded his 30 percent interest in the West Side yards development as 50 percent. Why? Because “if the seventy percent owner puts up all of the money, I really own more than thirty percent. And I have always felt I own fifty percent, from that standpoint.”
Finally, D'Antonio wrings a confession from his subject:
it can be amusing to challenge him on certain claims. When he told me the western coast of Ireland is like “Florida” and a certain Scottish farm is called “a killing field,” I got him to admit that both statements were products of his own mind, and nothing more.
13. He once fired two of his workmen because Johnny Carson told him to.
There was a very weird incident at Trump Tower with one of Trump's early tenants, talk-show legend Johnny Carson, and it showed Trump to be something of a craven coward in the face of those even more famous than he.
After two maintenance men entered the apartment, Carson became certain, based on no evidence, that the men had stolen a very valuable coat. Trump tried to convince him that the coat was of an upper-class style that such working-class guys would not be seen dead wearing it. Then:
Not satisfied, Carson demanded the men be fired. As he would later explain, Trump concluded that he “had no choice” because an important man had issued an ultimatum. Trump summoned the men back to his office and said, “Fellas, he said you stole it, you’re fired.” The workers left the building severed from their jobs.
Months later Carson would discover the coat in the back of a closet. He telephoned Trump to report the find with chagrin, if not regret, for his demand that the workers be dismissed. “But I fired two fuckin’ guys for you” was Trump’s reply.
14. Trump isn't just subconsciously afraid to examine himself. He's consciously afraid of it.
There's some more fascinating pathology buried deeper into the few interviews D'Antonio secured with Trump, before the Donald cut off access:
Trump revealed himself to be defended even against self-evaluation: “When you start studying yourself too deeply, you start seeing things that maybe you don’t want to see. And if there’s a rhyme and reason, people can figure you out, and once they can figure you out, you’re in big trouble.”
And even one hint that, deep down, Donald knows that all his fame and fortune have not brought happiness:
“Have you ever heard of Peggy Lee? ‘Is That All There Is?’ It’s a great song because I’ve had these tremendous successes and then I’m off to the next one because it’s, like, ‘Huh, is that all there is?’ That’s a great song actually, a very interesting song."
He's quite up front about how thin-skinned he is, too. "With Twitter you’ll say things that you can regret because you’re doing them instantaneously, okay?" Trump explains at one point about his famously off-the-cuff tweets. "But you’re being very honest. That’s nothing compared to [what they say about] me. They’re always knocking the shit out of my hair."
15. His anti-scientific stance isn't anything new either.
Trump denies global warming and thinks juvenile vaccines cause autism. This much we know from the recent GOP debate. But it wasn't the first time he's flown in the face of scientific fact. Here he is in the 1980s deriding the well-documented dangers of asbestos: “One of the great cons is asbestos. There’s nothing wrong except the mob has a strong lobby in Albany … because they have dumps and control the trucks.”
16. Trump expects to dine out for free.
Here's a revealing anecdote from Tom Griffin, the American lawyer who sold Trump the land for a golf course in Scotland that was to cause him many headaches:
Throughout the meal [Tom] Griffin felt as if he were dining with an actor playing a part. “It was Donald Trump, playing Donald Trump.” When “the waitress came up with the bill,” said Griffin, “Donald said to her, ‘Usually, I get comped in these situations.’” Griffin supposed that Trump meant that businesspeople gave him freebies wherever he proposed to invest heavily in the local economy. “She went to talk to the manager, who said he would agree if Trump would pose for a picture with the staff.” The staff filed out. Trump posed. The dinner was free.
17. He still doesn't like to shake hands, even now.
Trump is famous for being a germaphobe -- almost as much as his hero Howard Hughes. Has he changed now he's doing the handshake circuit known as a Presidential campaign? Not a bit of it. Here's what D'Antonio notices at the start of their first meeting: "We clasp hands and then I watch closely as he slips behind his desk and discreetly brushes his hand against the fine fabric of his expensive suit."
18. Trump doesn't think this book is going to be successful -- and he might sue.
Finally, the bestselling author Trump tried to explain to D'Antonio how to twist the truth and sell more copies: “It’ll probably be a bad book and I’ll regret doing it," Trump said. "But, okay, I could sue you if it’s bad, but I won’t bother because the book won’t sell. People want positive, inspiring. That’s what you should write if you want a success.”
Thankfully, D'Antonio didn't listen.