Too Much and Never Enough How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man Hardcover by Mary L. Trump Ph.D 2020 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Civil Servant in Public Housing

There is a through line from the House to the Trump Tower triplex to the

West Wing, just as there is from Trump Management to the Trump

Organization to the Oval Office. The first are essentially controlled

environments in which Donald’s material needs have always been taken

care of; the second, a series of sinecures in which the work was done by

others and Donald never needed to acquire expertise in order to attain or

retain power (which partly explains his disdain for the expertise of others).

All of this has protected Donald from his own failures while allowing him

to believe himself a success.

Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for

Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits.

Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind,

he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used

Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his

own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of

accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which

he could be duped by more powerful men.

There was a long line of people willing to take advantage of him. In the

1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnists discovered that Donald

couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his

shamelessness to sell papers. That image, and the weakness of the man it

represented, were precisely what appealed to Mark Burnett. By 2004, when

The Apprentice first aired, Donald’s finances were a mess (even with his $170 million cut of my grandfather’s estate when he and his siblings sold

the properties), and his own “empire” consisted of increasingly desperate

branding opportunities such as Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump University. That made him an easy target for Burnett. Both Donald and the

viewers were the butt of the joke that was The Apprentice, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon.

For the first forty years of his real estate career, my grandfather never

acquired debt. In the 1970s and ’80s, however, all of that changed as Donald’s ambitions grew larger and his missteps became more frequent.

Far from expanding his father’s empire, everything Donald did after

Trump Tower (which, along with his first project, the Grand Hyatt, could

never have been accomplished without Fred’s money and influence)

chipped away at the empire’s value. By the late 1980s, the Trump

Organization seemed to be in the business of losing money, as Donald

siphoned untold millions away from Trump Management in order to

support the growing myth of himself as a real estate phenom and master

dealmaker.

Ironically, as Donald’s failures in real estate grew, so did my

grandfather’s need for him to appear successful. Fred surrounded Donald

with people who knew what they were doing while giving him the credit;

who propped him up and lied for him; who knew how the family business

worked.

The more money my grandfather threw at Donald, the more confidence

Donald had, which led him to pursue bigger and riskier projects, which led

to greater failures, forcing Fred to step in with more help.

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