Trump, an accomplished self-promoter

Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success

By Michael D’Antonio, Thomas Dunne Books, 400 pages, $27

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,

By Donald Trump, Threshold Editions, 208 pages, $25

This is a tale of two books. The first, “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success”, by journalist Michael D’Antonio, is balanced, well-sourced and perfectly timed. The second, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again”, by Trump himself, is sweeping, thinly sourced and perfectly timed.

In publishing, dates matter. Coming midway between Trump’s presidential launch in June and the real test of his support in the Republican primaries early next year, these books hit that mark. In all other respects, they could hardly be less alike.

The first patiently chronicles the rise of perhaps our age’s most accomplished self-promoter. The second urgently self-promotes. “[T]here’s nobody like me. Nobody,” writes Trump. “I have proven everybody wrong,” he insists elsewhere. “EVERYBODY!”

By now, Trump’s story is a familiar one. Born in the vanguard of the baby-boomer generation in 1946, he grew up in style and privilege to Scottish-German parents in the New York borough of Queens. His father, Frederick Christ Trump, was already a wealthy man.

Others made more money — and won greater fame — from the protean business of constructing postwar middle-class New York. But few attracted as many investigations. The business was a dirty one. To get ahead you needed to game City Hall for the tax breaks and write-offs that made your ventures profitable, deal with the Gambino and Genovese-linked mob groups that controlled and set the price of cement, and contract with their unions.

Naturally, you fell prey to the occasional investigation. Fred was a master at sailing close to the wind without capsizing. Donald, the fourth of five offspring, was his best student.

Donald first came to public attention in 1973, when the civil rights division of the US Justice Department launched a case against the Trumps for allegedly discriminating between black and white tenants in the public housing that he ran.

Donald hired Roy Cohn, a notorious lawyer who had once worked for Joe McCarthy, the senator who spearheaded the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. It was a classic Trump response. If someone attacks you, hit back 10 times harder. If you are accused of something, label your accuser with something far worse. (It is a tactic he is putting to good use on the 2016 campaign trail.)

Cohn hit the government with a $100-million (Dh367 million) damages lawsuit claiming that federal officials were like “storm troopers” who had used “Gestapo-like tactics” to defame their client. The case was settled. Trump went on to win far bigger contracts.

In Trump’s world, money is the measure of success. According to his own book, he has made “more than $10 billion”. According to Bloomberg, his net wealth is around $2.9 billion.

D’Antonio aims to do more than explain the life of America’s best known property developer. He also links it to the unfolding story of Trump’s times. Trump was reared on the kind of self-help and get-rich-quick books that he now so frequently churns out himself (starting with “The Art of the Deal”, which came out in 1987, Trump has written more than a dozen).

Raised on Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936), the young Trump was taught that life was all about winning. His biggest influence was Norman Vincent Peale, a Presbyterian pastor whose book “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952) sold 2 million copies in its first two years.

Trump and his father regularly attended Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Peale’s theology was devoid of sin or guilt. The only belief it commanded was in oneself. Confidence was the key. Prosperity would follow. “Learn to pray big prayers,” advised Peale. “God will rate you according to the size of your prayers.”

If your reward is riches in this life, then wealth is the measure of your human worth. It is a key to understanding Trump’s way of thinking. In 2009, Trump sued a writer, Timothy O’Brien, and his publisher, for asserting that he was worth far less than the billions he claimed.

O’Brien estimated Trump’s net worth at somewhere between $150 million and $250 million — a fraction of what Trump was claiming. His book, “TrumpNation”, chronicled the bankruptcy of Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City. Trump sued O’Brien for $5 billion in damages. The case was dismissed.

It hit Trump where it most hurts — his reputation as a businessman. Success in business is the basis of Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s father’s business was worth around $200 million when Donald took it over in 1974. If he had simply invested it in the stock market, it would now be worth around $3 billion — or roughly the same as Bloomberg’s estimate of his net worth today.

Far from being a maestro, that would make Trump a pretty average operator. In contrast, Warren Buffett, a genuinely self-made man, was worth $40 million in 1974. Today his net wealth is more than $60 billion.

In “Crippled America”, Trump is described in a biographical note as “the very definition of the American success story” and “a deal maker without peer”. He is at pains to reject the notion that he inherited serious wealth. According to Trump, all he got from his father was a $1-million loan that he repaid with interest; the rest is fiction.

If D’Antonio, O’Brien and others are to be believed, the only thing that is self-made about Donald Trump is his life story. The truth matters because Trump’s campaign rests solely on the idea that he is uniquely qualified as a winner to revive America’s greatness. His campaign is himself. There are no original policy ideas. The White House needs a dealmaker who can turn America from a loser nation — “Uncle Sucker”, as he calls it — into a winner. Only a great man can make America great again. His dealmaking credentials must be without peer.

Trump’s case rests on his success as a luxury property developer. Roughly half the book’s photographs show his famous buildings — the Trump Towers in New York and Chicago, the Trump Plaza Hotel in New York, the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Trump golf courses in Miami and Scotland, and so on. No one else spans the retail spectrum as he does.

“I like the fact that Trump was the only brand that could sell a $50 million apartment and a $37 tie,” he writes. But Trump struggles to explain how his skill at branding high-end condominiums would somehow better qualify him than others to deal with China, Iran and others. Trump’s central foreign policy idea is to charge America’s allies, including Britain, for US policing services.

Barack Obama’s recent nuclear deal with Iran is singled out for criticism. In Trump’s telling, the Obama administration is giving Iran billions of dollars (in unfrozen overseas assets) to continue with its nuclear weapons programme.

“We literally paid them to force us to accept a terrible deal,” Trump writes. “That would be like me beginning negotiations to build another magnificent skyscraper along the Hudson with 50-mile views in all directions, and walking out with approval to put up a small three-storey building facing a wall.” You get the drift.

The same logic is applied across the globe. In the case of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), he would bomb their oilfields. “We would hit them so hard and so fast in so many different ways they wouldn’t know what happened,” he says.

In the case of China, which he labels an enemy, he would apply his unique business acumen. Under a Trump administration, the US would soon be eating China’s lunch rather than the other way round. “My name has become one of the greatest brands in the world,” he writes. “I know how to win.”

That is pretty much all there is to it. Trump’s book is a quick read. D’Antonio’s is not — but it is worth the time. The author spent roughly 10 hours with Trump before the latter cut off access. Among his more memorable interviews was with Ivana Trump, Trump’s first wife, who tussled famously with “The Donald” over a prenuptial agreement.

Elsewhere, Trump has written at length about “The Art of the Prenup” (the gist being that women are voraciously greedy and must be contractually restrained). D’Antonio’s description of Ivana today is a model of economy. Ivana’s words told him little. Her appearance spoke volumes. “She moves slowly,” writes D’Antonio, “and her face seems almost frozen by cosmetic intervention.” D’Antonio’s most revealing quote is Trump’s admission that he had not matured since he was six. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” says Trump. “The temperament is not that different.”

–Financial Times