Donald Trump: His Mother’s Son
1.
I pride myself on being that guy on the left who can make meaning out of even the most mindless right-wing text. With The Art of the Deal, I fear I may have met my match. About halfway through the book—chapter upon stultifying chapter about the time he flipped a housing complex in Cincinnati, the time he bought the Commodore Hotel, the time he negotiated with Bonwit Teller, the convention center he wanted to build in the West 30s—it hits me: the book reads like the memoir J. Peterman intended to write, based entirely on stories he bought from Kramer.
2.
Thomas Friedman and Trump ought to get on like a house on fire:
I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions. I’m a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision….When I’m in another city and I take a cab, I’ll always make it a point to ask the cabdriver questions.
3.
On page 52, Trump makes a big point of touting how little he cares about what architecture critics have to say about his buildings. On page 53, he writes about the response of the critics to Trump Tower, “I’m not going to kid you: it’s also nice to get good reviews.”
4.
If you’re wondering why Trump’s outfit seemed so furious about how much attention the Women’s March got and that the media reported such low numbers for the Inauguration, Trump explains it all to you:
The point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.
5.
More than a quarter-century before he was elected, Trump set out the roadmap to victory:
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.
Or, as Kellyanne Conway put it today on Meet the Press, “alternative facts.”
But don’t think Trump thinks you can fake your way through life. “You can’t con people,” he advises, “at least not for long.”
6.
And you thought my Jimmy Carter parallels were crazy:
Until then [the moment Carter asked Trump for a donation of $5 million for the Carter Library], I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job…
7.
Unlike his father, Donald Trump is willing to spend any amount of money to achieve greatness. He goes on and on—and on—about his refusal to cut corners, to do anything on the cheap. On page 61, Trump suddenly shifts gears: “That’s when I learned to be cost-conscious.” And when was that? When he began building low-income housing.
8.
In one paragraph, Trump says that while Harvard Business School may produce a lot of conventionally successful CEOs, it’s Wharton, where he attended, that produces the truly visionary entrepreneurs. “Wharton,” he says, “was the place to go.” In the next paragraph, he says that “there was nothing particular awesome or exceptional about my classmates” and a Wharton degree doesn’t mean much.
9.
On page 84, Trump tells you he has a “personal thing about cleanliness.” That’s the second time he’s said that.
10.
Speaking of repetition, you’ll recall that Trump likes to tell you, again and again, that he doesn’t go out to lunch. Yet we find him, again and again, going out to lunch. On page 91, he goes out to lunch yet again. For three hours.
11.
Like a lot of people who think they’re good judges of character, Trump likes “characters”—those outsized personalities who cut a distinctive path through life, the ones you never forget. The truth is, those people aren’t characters; they’re cartoons. But Trump loves them. “Irving was a classic.” “Pat was one of those great Irish personalities.” And so on.
12.
There’s one interesting moment of self-reflection in the book. Throughout The Art of the Deal, Trump styles himself as his father’s son. He’s tough, determined, gets the job done. The unmastered subtext of the book, of course, is the tension between father and son: the father builds low-income housing, the son shoots for the glamour of the sky; the son bridles at the father’s style, the father seems to dismiss the son’s. Like the time the father scoffed at the son’s faux-fancy tastes, expressed in the ornamentalism and indulgence of Trump Tower: “Why don’t you forget about the damn glass? Give them four or five stories of it and then use common brick for the rest. Nobody is going to look up anyway.” Trump just skates right by it.
But then Trump stops for one moment and offers this gem of self-knowledge:
Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he’d say. “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.
It’s clear that Donald Trump is very much his mother’s son. Which perhaps explains the Versailles fetish.