Trump Revealed by Michael Kranish & Marc Fisher

Author:Michael Kranish & Marc Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

14

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Empire

About thirteen hundred miles southeast of Moscow, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a gleaming thirty-three-story building rose like a massive copper-colored sail in the heart of downtown. The sign at the building’s elegant peak said, in English, TRUMP TOWER. Down at ground level on a spring day in 2016, however, the structure was only a shell, with a broken window and a section of stone façade chipped out like missing teeth. At night, the building was completely dark but for the glowing white lights of the TRUMP sign.

A couple of security guards and a sleepy caretaker kept an eye on the place, its grounds overgrown with weeds. A huge globe that announced TRUMP sat in a fountain filled with sand and litter, near the locked-up front entrance and another huge sign proclaiming TRUMP INTERNATIONAL HOTEL & TOWER. Inside, the massive lobby—finished in lovely sand-colored tiles with black and gold trim, with mirrored ceilings, and a chandelier sporting a dreamy ribbon of golden bulbs—was covered in construction dust. Reception desks stood sealed beneath plastic wrap. A huge circular staircase remained sheathed in plastic and cardboard. On the second floor, a pool finished in copper-colored tiles awaited water. Next to a sauna that smelled of fresh cedar, a gym was equipped with exercise machines still in cardboard boxes.

A caretaker leading a tour pointed the way with the flashlight app on his phone, stepping around loose wires hanging from unfinished fixtures in a basement passageway because there was neither electricity nor water in this Trump Tower, a huge construction site frozen in time.

• • •

BY THE EARLY 2000S, when The Apprentice launched him from New York household name into a national phenomenon, Donald Trump was already looking well beyond the Atlantic and Pacific horizons. He gazed north, south, east, and west and saw a world that needed Trump. In late 1999, developers broke ground on six Trump World residential towers in South Korea; the next year, Trump promoted a nearly $900 million Trump Tower in Berlin that he called “a bridge between New York and Berlin.” In 2003, Toronto’s City Council approved a seventy-story Trump International Hotel & Tower, which would have been the city’s tallest building. Later that year, Trump unveiled plans for villas around a golf course in the Grenadines in the Caribbean. In the first decade of the new century, he announced projects including hotels, condos, offices, and golf courses with the big gold TRUMP stamp in Dubai, Israel, Panama, Scotland, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Turkey.

In 2007, he created the Trump Hotel Collection, a luxury brand targeting the richest 5 percent of global travelers. With his three oldest children now full-fledged executives in the business, the Trump Organization not only added properties in major American cities from Fort Lauderdale to Waikiki, but sharply accelerated its global expansion. Between 2011 and 2015, Trump announced deals in more than a dozen countries, including two projects in Indonesia in 2015, when he was already running for president.

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