TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald by Timothy O'Brien

Author:Timothy O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781504027496
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

TRUMPBROKE

In a world of more than six billion people, there are only 587 billionaires. It’s an exclusive club. Would you like to join us?

—DONALD TRUMP, THINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE

By 1993, with his casinos in hock, most of his real estate holdings either forfeit or stagnant, and his father slipping into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, Donald, at the age of forty-seven, had run out of money. There were no funds left to keep him aloft, and as the bare-bones operation he maintained on Fifth Avenue started to grind to a halt he ordered Nick Ribis, the Trump Organization’s president, to call his siblings and ask for a handout from their trusts. Donald needed about $10 million to fund his living and office expenses, but he had no collateral to provide his brother and sisters, all three of whom wanted a guarantee that he would repay them.

The Trump children’s share of their father’s fortune amounted to about $35 million each, and Donald’s siblings demanded that the developer sign a promissory note pledging future distributions from his trust fund against the $10 million he wanted to borrow.

Donald got his loan, but about a year later he was almost broke again. When he went to the trough the second time, he asked his siblings for $20 million more. Robert Trump, who briefly oversaw Donald’s casinos before fleeing the pressure of working for his brother to take over Fred’s real estate operation, balked. Desperate to scrape some money together, Donald asked Alan Marcus, one of his advisers, to contact his brother-in-law, John Barry, and see if he could intervene with Robert and his other siblings.

“John and I spoke about it a few times,” Marcus told me. “In fact, we spoke about it in the conference room in Trump Tower. John then went around and addressed it with the family.”1

Barry successfully lobbied other members of the Trump clan and another handout was arranged, with Donald agreeing again that whatever he failed to pay back would be taken out of his share of Fred’s estate.

“We would have literally closed down,” said another former member of the Trump Organization familiar with Donald’s efforts to keep the company afloat. “The key would have been in the door and there would have been no more Donald Trump. The family saved him.”2

Donald disagreed with this version of events. “I had zero borrowings from the estate,” he told me. “I give you my word.”3

But Marcus and two other executives who worked closely with Donald all said that the family’s financial lifeline gave the developer the support he needed to get through the rough waters separating his early years of overblown, overhyped acquisitions and the later years of small, sedate deals preceding his resurrection on The Apprentice. Both of Donald’s parents died during that time, he parried with Ivana Trump in a bitter divorce battle that hinged on properly valuing his dwindling assets, he remarried and divorced again, and then he did what anyone else in his situation would do when confronted with limited options—he ran for president of the United States.

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