As a tenacious fighter Donald Trump cut his teeth on the often tumultuous and challenging world of Manhattan New York real estate. His “Miracle on 34th Street” mentioned in an earlier post proved his budding acumen in the outmaneuvering of his competitors, but he is far from being an undefeated champion in the ring of business, media, and politics. Many of his other skirmishes, however, are worth mentioning, among them:
• In the wake of his 34th Street “Miracle”(the triumph of his new New York City convention center), Trump jumped at the chance to pull off another major real-estate development coup. This one involved the once preeminent Commodore hotel, a city landmark boasting two thousand guest rooms, built in 1919 next to New York City’s perpetually busy Grand Terminal and named after legendary railroad magnate Commodore Vanderbilt. Except this wasn’t going to be the construction of something new and shiny from the ground up; this time it would be restoration of a hotel once teeming with affluent visitors but now falling apart at the seams from the inside out. Entire floors had been roped off as unusable. Hookers propositioned clients in the lobby, and ownership was in arrears of $6.6 million in real-estate taxes on a hotel losing $1 million a year. Trump acknowledged the unseemly grunginess, but he also saw great opportunity. This time the obstacles included an estimated purchase price of $10 million, a desperate need for a city-authorized tax abatement, and a remodeling proposition possibly requiring a gutting of the building. Just for starters. 1
Again, Trump went to work on multiple levels whacking his way through miles of red tape and minions of doubting Thomases, at once calling on and meeting with architects, city officials, bankers, and even a member of the renowned Chicago-based Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt chain of upscale hotels (but none of them based in New York City—yet), trying to get them to buy in (they did). It was a slew of insurmountable tasks, and it took many months of showing off and touting impressive-looking and -sounding plans, cajoling, and arranging of more meetings. Trump ultimately bullied and cajoled his way through the dustup storms and smoke-filled meeting rooms and restaurants to pull together all the disparate pieces to make it happen. He had rescued the Commodore from either a wrecking ball or oblivion in restoring it and repopulating it much to the delight of his accountants, impressing power brokers from one city borough to the next. Fred’s kid had his stuff together.
• Fast forward to the mid-1980s, where we find Trump, about to turn forty, in a verbal war with New York City Mayor Ed Koch. For the first time, it’s business mixed with for-real politics as The Donald comes out swinging, blasting city government for its lackluster performance—or, actually, lack of it—in renovating Wollman Rink in Central Park, a popular venue for skaters, especially around Christmastime, skaters basking in their daily reenactments of Currier & Ives-like scenery.
The rink’s renovations, which had begun in 1980, were still dragging on into 1986. It was symptomatic of governmental agencies not getting the job done, and Trump took notice. This time his punching bag was the embattled Koch, and the verbal war played out in the city’s media. The argument—and the inefficiency of the renovations—quickly ended when Trump agreed to finish the job himself, at no expense to the city. He completed the rink’s fixes in three months at a cost to himself that was well below what the city had budgeted. Trump claimed victory, revealed more wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, and gained the kudos of many in the city. 2
Note that in his best-selling 1987 book The Art of the Deal (fifty-two weeks on best-seller lists, including The New York Times), Trump opens by saying, “I don’t do it for the money.” That might be laughable to his critics and even many of his supporters, but it has a ring of sincerity to David Brody and Scott Lamb, authors of The Faith of Donald J. Trump. They write, “. . . Though we have avoided playing the part of an armchair psychologist with Donald Trump, several people we interviewed who consider themselves to be friends or on friendly terms with Trump stated their opinion that they don’t believe Donald Trump’s relationship with money flows from a heart of greed. . . . These off-the-record friendly interviewees sense that Trump’s ambition stems from a deep-rooted need to command respect—a basic, simple drive to prove that he is the best.” 3 In all the different ways Donald Trump brags—boil it down, reduce to lowest terms, expose the foundation—that’s it: To be the best!
Trump not only relished such tussles, he feasted on them. Longtime business associate Ned Eichler said this about his occasional golfing rival: “The biggest project, the one with the most apartments, that’s what was exciting to him. He thrived on conflict, the bigger the better. He loved it. People like him always do.” 4
• As you’ve probably figured out by now, fighting the good fight can involve not only spoken word and deed, but also a pen, which can be mightier than a sword. After The New York Times once ran a review of a book that included some of what Trump described as “juvenile remarks” made about him, he wrote a letter to the Times that was published and later chosen “Best Letter of the Year to the New York Times Book Review” by New York magazine.
Trump’s scathing yet somewhat amusing retort to the Times included digs at both the reviewer, Jeff MacGregor, and the author of the book in question, Mark Singer, a New Yorker writer who had at one time interviewed Trump. Singer’s interview with him was an occurrence recalled by Trump in his letter to the editor as a meeting in which “this writer (Singer) was drowning in his own misery.” Trump’s letter also targeted MacGregor, adding “Jeff MacGregor . . . writes poorly. His painterly turn with nasturtiums sounds like a junior high school yearbook entry. Maybe he and Mark Singer belong together. Some people cast shadows, and other people choose to live in those shadows.” 5
• Included among the eighteen Republican candidates who filed to run for president for the 2016 election was one Donald Trump, whose entry into the contest was greeted by the usual cavalcade of guffaws and insults from Democrats and many in the media. By the time the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland ended on July 21 that year, Trump was last candidate standing. Written off by most pundits at the beginning, Trump steadily rose through the ranks of GOP candidates, his last human hurdle being Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whom he vanquished by a final delegate count of more than 3-to-1.
Along the way, Trump broke many of the unwritten rules of campaign and debate performance, generating record crowds at his rallies and turning televised debates into must-see TV. Along the way he did some poking and bomb lobbing of his own, ridiculing Florida Senator Marco Rubio for being vertically challenged (“Little Marco,” the 6-foot-3 Trump kept calling him) and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina for her physical appearance (“Look at the face! Would anyone vote for that?” Trump remarked to a Rolling Stone magazine reporter when Fiorina’s face popped up on a nearby TV screen). Just when you thought Trump’s unpresidential posturing would mean a loss of support, his numbers kept going up.
The debates at one point turned into a war with sexism overtones between Trump and Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly. This was after Kelly had posed a question for Trump that he—and many pundits watching—thought was more accusatory than inquisitive, as Bill O’Reilly would later describe in his book The United States of Trump. The next day, Trump, speaking on CNN, took a swipe at Kelly, facetiously saying about his debate questioner that, “You could see she had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of . . . wherever.” The reaction across America was swift and condemning. Trump later said he had meant to say “nose” in place of “wherever,” the latter an apparent reference to a woman’s menstrual cycle. 6 Trump was financing most of his campaign, so he wasn’t worried about losing donors. When updated polls came out, he was still well ahead in the Republican field. He was, in a sense, politically bulletproof, and when he went through with his pledge to skip the next Fox News-sponsored debate unless the network removed Kelly as one of the moderators, there was no stopping him, at least in the GOP world.
“That was a turning point for candidate Trump,” O’Reilly wrote. “He began to understand that his in-your-face presentation was actually inoculating him against bad press and pressure groups. The more outrageous his rhetoric, the firmer his supporters stood by him. Modern politics had never seen anything like this.” 7 Marco Rubio tried these same ultra-honest, slap-in-the-face tactics, which fell flat. Apparently, only Donald Trump could speak his mind and remain standing!
• Once Trump was elected president in November 2016, the hits kept coming. Opponents would take a roundhouse swing and miss, and Trump would bob and weave before throwing a haymaker at his latest opponent’s kisser. Roll the highlights reel . . .
When some National Football League players started taking the lead of activist San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in kneeling in protest during the pre-game playing of the national anthem, Trump shot down the players’ actions, saying, “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem, or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country,” Trump said, having at one time referred to the activist players as “SOBs” during a speech in Alabama. . . . 8
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller ended his twenty-two-month investigation into alleged collusion ties between Russia and Trump regarding the 2016 election, Mueller’s conclusion being that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump with a crime, Trump simply said, “The case is closed! Thank you.” . . . 9
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spearheaded impeachment hearings in 2019 against Trump over the content of a telephone conversation between him and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019, Trump simply referred to his accusers as the “do-nothing Democrats,” while he was leaving the country to fly to London to attend a NATO summit, tweeting, “Heading to Europe to represent our Country and fight hard for the American People while the Do Nothing Democrats purposely scheduled an Impeachment Hoax hearing on the same date as NATO. Not nice!” 10 While House Democrats had a healthy majority to rubber stamp articles of impeachment sent forward to the Senate, Republicans had the upper hand in the Senate, where it would take 67 votes to oust Trump. Arguments were made on both sides in a Senate trial presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Acting as jurors, senators voted to acquit Trump by a count of 52-48. Again, Trump had fought and survived, even though the odds against his being found guilty in a fervently partisan Senate had been stacked higher than Trump Tower.
Let’s end this segment by pretending to be a researcher for the long-time-running TV game show Family Feud. One survey question I would ask of one hundred people would be, “Name one word that best describes Donald Trump.” I would guess that arrogant would be among the top six or seven answers on the board. Let Trump himself explain why I’m on the right track, and get a free tip from Trump in the process:
“Someone asked me if I thought I was a genius. I decided to say yes. Why not? Try it out. Tell yourself that you are a genius. Right away you will probably wonder why and in what way you are a genius. And right away you will have opened your mind up to wonder—and to asking questions. That’s a big first step to thinking like a genius, and it might unlock some of your hidden talents.” 11
Notes:
1. Blair, 278.
2. Daniel Kurt, Investopedia. “Donald Trump’s Success Story.”
3. David Brody and Scott Lamb, The Faith of Donald J. Trump (New
York: Broadside Books, 2018), 120.
4. Blair, The Trumps, 266.
5. Donald J. Trump with Meredith McIver, Trump: Never Give Up:
How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,
2008), 126.
6. O’Reilly, 144.
7. O’Reilly, 145.
8. Adam Edelman. “Trump Says NFL Players Who Kneel During
National Anthem ‘Maybe Shouldn't Be in the Country,’” nbcnews.com,
May 24, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumpsays-
nf l-players-who-kneel-during-national-anthem-maybe-n876996,
viewed March 8, 2020.
9. John Fritze and David Jackson, “Donald Trump Reacts to Robert
Mueller’s First Public Statement: ‘Case is Closed!’” USA Today, May 29,
2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/29/donaldtrump-
reacts-robert-muellers-statement-case-closed/1269744001/, viewed
March 8, 2020.
10. Dan Mangan, “Trump Says Democrats ‘Not Nice!’ for Holding
Impeachment Hearings While He’s Overseas—but GOP Did Same to
Clinton,” cnbc.com, December 2, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/
trump-criticizes-democrats-for-impeachment-timing.html, viewed March
8, 2020.
11. Trump, Trump: Never Give Up, 132.