Chapter 1Jamaica Estates

Foreword

The storeroom is the thing I keep returning to. Not the ballroom with its gold leaf and its chandeliers, though the boxes were stacked there too, on the stage where an orchestra was meant to sit; and not the office, though the office held its share. The image that organized this book for me was smaller and more banal than any of that: a bathroom at a private club in Palm Beach, off a corridor the members walked past on their way to lunch, with banker's boxes of federal records set on the marble beside the fixtures, some of them marked at classification levels a career intelligence officer would need clearance and a windowless room to read. The records belonged, by law, to the National Archives. They had been kept, instead, next to the towels.

My earlier subjects had to be assembled out of what they withheld. The president who spoke in deniable fragments, the operative who left no transcript because leaving no transcript was the point — you reconstructed those men from the negative space, from the memo never written and the meeting that officially did not occur. I had come to take that for the biographer's condition: that a life lived close to power is a life spent, above all, not leaving evidence.

Donald Trump falsified that assumption the way he has falsified so many of the assumptions the American system was built to rely on. Here was a man who left everything. Who kept the boxes. Who put his name in gilt on the tower and then on the airline and the steaks and the university and the ballot, and who said, on a recording a biographer could later obtain, holding a document he described as a secret plan, that he understood he could no longer declassify it — and kept it anyway. The difficulty with this subject was never the scarcity of the record. The difficulty was its volume, and its contradiction, and the fact that he had narrated most of it himself, out loud, in a voice that did not appear to distinguish between what was true and what was merely useful.

I expected to write about concealment. I found myself writing about its opposite: about a man for whom the assertion was the instrument, for whom saying the thing was very nearly indistinguishable from doing it, who had learned before he built anything in Manhattan that the announcement of a deal and the closing of a deal are two separate events, and that the press does not always wait for the second before it writes about the first. I had come to explain how a man conceals. I stayed to explain how a man declares.

I worked the way I have always worked, from the public record and nothing beyond it: the indictments and the court filings, the sworn certifications and the trial transcripts, the memoirs of people who worked for him and then wrote it down, the contemporary reporting, the oral histories already on the shelf. I conducted no interviews for this book. I did not need to. The record a life like this leaves behind is not a scarcity to be supplemented but a flood to be organized, and the biographer's task here is not access but arrangement — deciding which of ten thousand documented facts belong in the load-bearing wall and which are only weather.

He is worth a book because the machinery built to take his measure could not take it. He is the first former president to be criminally indicted and the first to be convicted — thirty-four felony counts in a Manhattan courtroom, sentenced ten days before his second inauguration to an unconditional discharge that carried no prison, no probation, no fine. The documents case, the one the storeroom names, never reached a jury; it was dismissed before trial on a constitutional theory about the special counsel's appointment that no court had accepted before it, and the classified papers went back to the Archives with the conduct itself never adjudicated. Two further cases dissolved into delay. He was re-elected while all of it was pending. A subject is worth the years when the institutions assembled to judge him arrive late and leave early, because the failure to judge him tells you more about the country than any verdict could have.

I did not come to this subject an admirer, and I have not left as one; that was never the transaction. I came to find out how the country arrived at the storeroom — how the records ended up beside the towels, and how the man who put them there ended up, twice, holding the codes. What I found was that the storeroom is not an aberration in the story. It is the story, compressed into a single room: everything kept, nothing discarded, all of it his, and the law forever arriving after the fact. A biographer hopes his subject will resist him. This one resisted to the last page.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · Jamaica Estates

The house had twenty-three rooms and a chauffeur and a cook and a brick facade with white columns out front, and it sat on a corner lot in the part of Queens where the streets had names from English novels (Wareham, Wexford, Aberdeen), and it announced itself, from across the lawn, as the largest house on the block. This was the point. Fred Trump had built it around 1950 for his wife and his children, and he had built it the way he built everything: bigger than it needed to be, with the columns added not because the structure required them but because columns, in the architectural vocabulary that Fred Trump had absorbed by climbing out of Brooklyn into Queens, signified arrival. The columns said: a man lives here who matters. A man lives here who has money. The neighborhood was Jamaica Estates, restricted by covenant when Fred bought in, and the covenants were the kind that did not need to be written down twice, and the house faced Midland Parkway, and it was the house in which Donald John Trump grew up — born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital, while the family still lived in a smaller house nearby on Wareham Place, the fourth of five children, the second son, the boy who would later say that his earliest memory of his father was the sound of his father working.

What Fred Trump did was build apartments for the federal government. That was the empire. It is important to be precise about this because the mythology that would later attach itself to the family (the mythology of the Manhattan deal-maker, the gold-leaf magnate, the developer who put his name on the skyline) required that the origin be obscured, and the origin was the FHA. Fred Trump had figured out, in the late 1930s and then more fully in the years after the war, that the United States government would underwrite mortgages for working-class housing in the outer boroughs of New York City under the Federal Housing Administration, and that a developer who understood the underwriting formulas, who understood how to inflate the cost basis on submission, who understood how to extract a builder's fee that exceeded his actual cost of construction, could harvest the difference and walk away with the spread. This was the mechanism. The mechanism was federal money channeled through a private actor who took a cut on the way through. By 1954, Fred Trump owned or controlled some twenty-seven thousand apartment units across Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and he had become, by the standards of the outer boroughs, immensely rich, and he had also been called before a Senate Banking Committee subcommittee that summer to answer questions about how exactly he had pocketed roughly four million dollars in excess profits on the Beach Haven complex in Brooklyn while still drawing a federal mortgage. He pleaded ignorance. He blamed the architects. He paid no penalty. He went home to Jamaica Estates and went back to work.

This was the father Donald Trump grew up watching. A man who got up at six. A man who drove out to his job sites before breakfast and walked the buildings and looked at the framing and shouted at the foremen. A man who collected rent personally, in his car, in cash, in the bad neighborhoods, well into his sixties. A man who wore three-piece suits to construction sites because he believed the workers needed to see the suit. A man who was cheap, famously, almost theatrically cheap. He picked up unused nails on his properties and put them back in the bin. He turned the lights off when he left a room. He would not let his children buy soda from a vending machine because the markup was robbery. The story Donald Trump would tell, decades later, about his father, was the story of a man who knew the cost of every single thing in his world and refused to pay one cent more than the cost. This was offered as praise. It was also accurate.

What the story tended to leave out was the federal housing case of 1973. In October of that year, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice filed suit against Trump Management Inc. (Donald, by then twenty-seven years old, was the company's president; Fred remained chairman) alleging a pattern of racial discrimination in rentals at thirty-nine of the company's apartment complexes across the boroughs. The case was United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump and Trump Management, Inc. The evidence was specific to the practice and damning by volume. Black testers sent by the Urban League were told no apartments were available. White testers sent the same week were shown apartments at the same buildings and offered leases. Building superintendents had been instructed, the government alleged, to mark applications from Black tenants with a code (a "C" for "colored," in some accounts; a "9" in others), and to redirect those applications to a handful of buildings designated, internally, as the buildings where Black tenants were permitted to live. The case dragged for two years. Donald, in his first significant exposure to a federal investigation, did what he would do every time after: he counter-sued, alleging that the Justice Department had defamed the Trump organization, demanding a hundred million dollars in damages. The countersuit was dismissed. In 1975, the Trumps signed a consent decree without admitting wrongdoing, agreed to a series of remedial measures including listing vacancies with the Urban League, and the case was closed. Three years later, in 1978, the Justice Department came back: the Trumps, the government argued, were not complying with the consent decree. The matter was settled again. No one went to jail. No fine of consequence was paid. The episode entered the family's mythology as a victory (they had not admitted guilt, they had not lost), and it entered the public record as the first federal investigation of Donald Trump, who would go on to be investigated, indicted, sued, and eventually convicted more times than any American who has ever held the presidency.

The man who hired the lawyer for that case was Donald, not Fred. The lawyer was Roy Cohn. Donald had met Cohn at Le Club, a private discotheque on East 55th Street, in late 1973, shortly after the Justice Department complaint landed. Cohn was forty-six years old, a New York fixer of nearly limitless underworld and political connections, the former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, a man who had never, in his entire legal career, taken the position that any client of his had done anything wrong. Cohn's strategy in the housing case was the strategy he applied to every case: never settle, never apologize, attack the accuser, generate noise, exhaust the opposition. The strategy had a moral architecture and a tactical architecture and Donald Trump absorbed both. Roy Cohn, in the years between 1973 and his death from AIDS in 1986, would teach Donald Trump three things that the rest of the man's career would be the application of: that any accusation could be neutralized by a louder counter-accusation; that loyalty was the only currency that mattered, and that the only loyalty worth having was loyalty extorted by fear; and that the press could be managed, leveraged, weaponized, fed, and seduced, but never trusted, never befriended, and never, under any circumstances, addressed honestly. By the time Cohn was dying, by the time he had been disbarred for misappropriating client funds, by the time he was begging old friends for help with his medical bills, Donald Trump had cut him off and was no longer returning his calls. Trump, asked decades later about this, would acknowledge it without apology. The lesson had been learned. There was no remaining use for the teacher.

But all of that was ahead of him. In 1946, in Jamaica Estates, the boy was new. He was the fourth child. The first three had been Maryanne in 1937, Fred Jr. in 1938, and Elizabeth in 1942. Robert came two years after Donald. Of the five, the one whose existence shaped Donald most consequentially was Fred Jr. (Freddy, as the family called him), who was the eldest son and therefore, by Fred Sr.'s assumption, the heir. Freddy was sensitive. Freddy did not want to take over the apartment empire. Freddy wanted to be a pilot. He went to Lehigh, he joined the Air National Guard, he became a TWA pilot flying 707s out of Boston in his twenties, and he was, by every account from the period, very good at it. His father considered the work beneath the family. To be a pilot, Fred Sr. told his eldest son, was to be a glorified bus driver. The contempt was unrelenting and unconcealed. Freddy quit TWA in 1965 and went to work, miserably, at the family company. He started drinking. The drinking accelerated through the late sixties and through the seventies, and on September 26, 1981, Freddy Trump died of a heart attack brought on by alcoholism, in a hospital in Queens, alone. He was forty-two years old. Donald was thirty-five. He would say later, repeatedly, in interviews, in his books, in passing remarks to reporters, that watching his older brother's life had taught him never to drink. This was true. He never drank. What he did not say, and what was nevertheless evident to anyone who watched the family at close range, was that he had also taken from his brother's death a different lesson, the lesson Fred Sr. had been teaching all along, which was that softness destroys, and that to survive a Trump childhood (to survive being Fred's son) required the construction of a personality that was incapable of being shamed. Freddy had been capable of being shamed. Freddy was dead. Donald was not.

By that point (by the early 1970s, before Freddy's death but well after Freddy's relocation to the family company) Donald had also done his own institutional time. He had been, as a boy, a problem. The accounts vary on the specific incidents. Donald himself, in The Art of the Deal, would describe punching a music teacher in the second grade because, he said, he did not think the man knew anything about music. Whether or not the punch landed (the teacher, when reached by reporters decades later, did not remember it), the broader pattern was real: he was disruptive, defiant, physically aggressive with classmates, and by the time he was thirteen Fred Sr. had decided that the local schools were not going to be sufficient. In September 1959 Donald was sent upstate, to the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson, where the cadets wore gray wool uniforms and slept in barracks and were subjected to a regime of corporal discipline overseen, in part, by retired drill instructors who had served in World War II and Korea and who hit the cadets when the cadets failed to perform. Donald spent five years there. He did well. He was named a captain his senior year. The school's official assessment of him, in his graduation yearbook, identified him as a "ladies' man." His more candid assessment, given decades later, was that what the academy had taught him was that there were two kinds of people in any institution and the only thing that mattered was being on the right side of the line. He used the word "winners" and the word "losers." He had been using those two words to organize his perception of the world ever since. They were the operative vocabulary of his life.

After the academy he went to Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx, for two years, and then in the fall of 1966 he transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a bachelor of science in economics in 1968. The transfer would later become the subject of considerable mythology. Trump claimed for years that he had graduated first in his class. He had not. He claimed that Wharton was the most difficult business program in the country to get into. The undergraduate program in 1966 was substantially less selective than the graduate MBA program with which it was sometimes confused. He claimed that he had gotten in on his own merit. The admissions officer who accepted his transfer application, James Nolan, would later tell the journalist Gwenda Blair that he had been asked to take a look at Donald's application as a personal favor to Donald's older brother Freddy, who had been Nolan's friend at Lehigh. The point of cataloguing these embellishments is not, in the end, that Donald Trump lied about his college credentials. The point is the texture of the lying, the indifference to whether the lies were checkable, the willingness to assert what was useful and to keep asserting it long after it had been disproven. This too was a habit that organized everything that came after. The lie was not a deviation from the man's career. The lie was the machinery of the career.

He graduated from Wharton in May of 1968. He was twenty-two years old. The Vietnam War was at its height. By the end of that year more than half a million American troops would be on the ground in Southeast Asia and more than thirty thousand would already be dead. Donald Trump did not serve. He had received four educational deferments through college and, in October 1968, just a few months after graduation, a fifth deferment on medical grounds, bone spurs in his heels, certified by a podiatrist named Larry Braunstein who rented an office space in a building in Queens that Fred Trump owned. Two of Braunstein's daughters, decades later, would tell the New York Times that their father had told them the diagnosis had been a favor, a favor done for the landlord, in exchange for the implicit understanding that the rent would not be raised. Whether or not the bone spurs were real, the consequence was unambiguous: Donald Trump did not go to Vietnam. He moved into Manhattan instead. He took a small apartment on Third Avenue. He would, across the subsequent five decades, speak about the Vietnam era with a consistent casualness that revealed, in its lack of apparent self-consciousness, the degree to which his own non-service had not been experienced as any kind of privation or shame. He would, in 2015, describe the sexually transmitted infections he had avoided during his years of dating in New York as his "personal Vietnam," a comparison whose offensiveness was absorbed by his campaign as a routine of controversy generation that required no apology and no correction. He told Stern, in the same period, that avoiding sexually transmitted infections while conducting multiple simultaneous affairs was like "combat" and that he felt "lucky" to have survived. The framing was not a metaphor; it was the texture of a personality that had genuinely not registered, in any emotional or moral sense, the difference between the sacrifice he had avoided and the sacrifice others had made. He started showing up, every morning, at the office of Trump Management on Avenue Z in Brooklyn, to learn the family business from the bottom up, which is to say from the rent rolls.

The rent rolls were the school. He learned them under his father's eye, building by building, vacancy by vacancy, what each unit could be made to yield, and where the slack was, and which superintendents could be trusted with the money and which could not. By 1971, Fred had named Donald president of the company, partly because Freddy had failed at the same role and partly because Donald, even at twenty-five, displayed a temperamental fitness for the work that the older brother had never displayed. The company by then owned somewhere between fourteen thousand and twenty-seven thousand units, depending on how the holding companies and partnerships were counted, and Donald held them all in his head. He was, by every account from the period, a competent operator of an outer-borough rental empire, disciplined about the numbers, ferocious about collections, unsentimental about evictions. The social texture of those early years as company president was recorded, with reportorial care, in Gwenda Blair's 2000 biography The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, which drew on interviews with associates from the Brooklyn and Queens years and established an operating portrait of a young man who was simultaneously eager to impress his father and determined to exceed the limits of his father's ambitions. Blair found, among the Queens real estate community of the period, a consistent characterization of Donald as unusually aggressive even by the standards of an industry that rewarded aggression: he was known for demanding the highest possible rent at the first available opportunity rather than accepting slightly less rent in exchange for tenant continuity, and he was known for proceeding to eviction at the first permitted moment in any arrears situation rather than working through informal accommodation with tenants. Both tendencies were Fred Trump's tendencies, practiced more aggressively. The company was his father's school. He graduated quickly. None of that satisfied him. He had decided, almost from the moment he stepped into the company, that the company itself was not enough. The company was Brooklyn and Queens. The company was the FHA. The company was his father's empire and the empire of his father's vocabulary. Donald wanted Manhattan. Donald wanted a name that was bigger than the borough.

The first move toward that name began in 1974, when Donald (twenty-eight years old, with no real cash of his own and no track record outside his father's portfolio) secured an option on the Penn Central Railroad's rail yards along the Hudson River on the West Side of Manhattan, sixty acres of land along the river running from 59th Street to 72nd Street, the largest undeveloped tract south of Harlem. He did not buy the option. He had no money to buy the option. What he had was Roy Cohn, and what Cohn had was an introduction to Victor Palmieri, the trustee then administering Penn Central's bankrupt estate, and what Donald had (and this was the new thing, the thing his father had never had and would never have) was the willingness to walk into Palmieri's office, a man he had never met, and present himself as the developer who was going to build on the largest piece of underdeveloped land in Manhattan. He had no architect. He had no plan. He had no financing. He had a name that nobody in Manhattan recognized and a father whose money he had not been allowed to touch and a corner office on Avenue Z. He walked in and he asked for the option. Palmieri, who was a sober and serious man, was charmed. The option was granted.

Donald did not, in the end, develop the West Side rail yards. He held the option for several years, attempted to interest the Lindsay administration and then the Beame administration in financing a convention center on the site, failed to close, and let the option lapse. The site, after much further drama, would eventually become Riverside South, developed in the 1990s in collaboration with a consortium that did not include Trump. None of this mattered. What mattered was that for the first time, Donald Trump had been in the newspapers (the Times, the Daily News, the Post) described as a Manhattan developer with a deal in his pocket, when in truth he was an outer-borough rental operator with a free option on someone else's land. He had learned, before he had built anything in Manhattan, the trick that would underwrite everything he would build in Manhattan. The trick was that the announcement of a deal and the closing of a deal were two different events, and that the press did not always wait for the second to write about the first, and that a man who could announce convincingly enough could become, in the public mind, the man who had done the thing whether or not he had done it. The man who had done the thing, in the absence of any actual doing, became the brand. The brand became the leverage. The leverage became the financing. The financing became, eventually, the thing itself.

He was twenty-eight. He was driving a Cadillac his father had given him. He was wearing the suits his father had taught him to wear and using the lawyer his father had not chosen for him. He was reading the obituaries every morning because Roy Cohn had told him to read the obituaries every morning. (You learn, Cohn had said, who has died and which estates are about to be liquidated and which families are about to be in court.) He was not yet famous. He was not yet hated. He was a young man on the make in a New York City that was, in 1974, in the middle of a fiscal collapse, running out of money to pay its police officers, headlined by a Daily News front page that would become iconic the next year (FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD), and he had recognized, before most of the people around him had recognized, that the collapse of the city was the opportunity of his lifetime. Manhattan real estate was about to become available at prices that would never again be possible. The Commodore Hotel, on East 42nd Street next to Grand Central, was bankrupt. The Hyatt chain was looking for a New York flagship. Donald Trump, with his father's connections and Roy Cohn's lawyering and a tax abatement that he was about to extract from a desperate municipal government to a degree no developer had ever extracted before, was about to make his first deal.

That was the next chapter. In the house in Jamaica Estates, in the back bedroom on the second floor, the boy who had punched the music teacher and been sent to the academy and learned the rent rolls and read the obituaries was already, by the end of 1974, gone. He had moved to Manhattan. He would never come back to live. The columns were still there, on the corner of Midland Parkway, and his mother, Mary, was still there, and the chauffeur was still there. But the house had done its work. It had produced a son who was incapable of imagining that the world would ever, under any circumstances, deny him what he had decided he was owed. The rest of his life was the test of that incapacity.