In January of 2005, the week before his third wedding, Donald Trump assured Billy Bush that this time he would be a better man. “I’m gonna show up, I’m gonna say ‘I do,’ and I’m gonna be a very good husband for a change,” he told the Access Hollywood host.
He said he planned to “come home more.”
“No dating,” he promised.
The lavish nuptials to Slovenian model Melania Knauss at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, kicked off a nonstop ego trip of a calendar year. The surprisingly successful debut of The Apprentice on NBC in 2004 had wiped away the stain of Trump’s personal and financial failures of the early 1990s. He had become one of the most ubiquitous names in American popular culture, and now, in 2005, he was cashing in with vigor. It wasn’t just Trump-branded buildings anymore. Trump launched Trump everything. Trump vodka. Trump cologne. Trump bottled water. Trump shirts and Trump suits and Trump ties. A Trump doll. A re-released Trump board game. Trump cell phone sounds. He was giving get-rich-quick speeches to packed convention center crowds for a million dollars an hour.
“That,” Tim Snyder, the construction manager for Trump Tower Chicago at the time, told me this week, “was a very intense year.” “Clearly, Donald had a lot of opportunities because of what was going on,” Scott Butera, then the CEO of Trump’s casino company, said in an interview. “He was becoming more of a household name than he already was,” said New York gossip columnist George Rush. “Because now he was on TV,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair added, “and not just on TV—on TV as the boss.”
It also, though, was a year in which he got on an elevator in Trump Tower, shook the hand of a 22-year-old receptionist and suddenly started kissing her on the cheeks and then “directly on the mouth,” that woman told the New York Times this month. It was a year, too, in which he pushed a People reporter against a wall in a room at Mar-a-Lago and forced his tongue down her throat, that woman recounted recently for her magazine—describing something that happened, she says, when Trump’s new wife was some six months pregnant with their son. And it was the year that Trump met again with Billy Bush and told him on the Access Hollywood bus—eight months after their conversation about his impending marriage—the specifics of the ways in which he foists himself upon women without their consent. “I just start kissing them.” “Grab them by the pussy.” “Like a magnet.” “I don’t even wait.”
In the mercurial life of Donald John Trump, here is one great truth: When he’s riding his highest, he is also at his most frenzied, his most volatile—his most self-destructive. To many people, his performances in the recent presidential debates might seem inexplicable: a leader on a national stage, given an audience of tens of millions of people, suddenly exploding the norms of politics, pledging to jail his opponent—or, as on Wednesday night, refusing to promise he’d respect the verdict of the election. But a close look at Trump’s behavior at his high-water marks, the moments of absolute peak Trump, suggest there is more than just coincidence at work—that escalating stardom propels him to say things and do things that end up haunting him later.
In the mercurial life of Donald Trump, here is one great truth: When he’s riding his highest, he is also at his most frenzied, his most self-destructive.
In the Access Hollywood tape, which has roiled Trump’s campaign since it was leaked two weeks back, he explicitly linked his celebrity to his sexual behavior. “When you’re a star,” he said, “they let you do it. You can do anything.” Trump has denied vehemently subsequent allegations of sexual harassment made by at least 11 women since his private conversation with Bush became public.
Trump’s behavior patterns at the peak of his game raises questions of what he would do if he actually ascended to the most powerful job on Planet Earth. Those who know him well told me essentially that Trump is Trump, no matter what, no matter when. He has been guided always, they say, by unbounded self-assurance and feelings of imperviousness and entitlement. And it’s of course impossible to say with certainty that the then-unprecedented burst of publicity for him in 2005 somehow led to that year’s alleged instances of sexual predation. Yet hundreds of thousands of words of coverage in newspapers and magazines plus transcripts of his interviews on radio and TV reveal a year in which he ratcheted up the intensity of his usual business M.O., turning attention into money into opportunity into (the most important thing) even more attention. It is a year that bears similarities to 1988—in which, in the potent aftermath of the publication of The Art of the Deal, Trump turned recklessly acquisitive in his business dealings and adulterous in his personal life, resulting in his hyper-public ‘90s flops. And it is a year in which, it is by now becoming clear, he was sowing the seeds of what is shaping up to be the marked, self-inflicted failure of his campaign.
The Trump University money grab of 2005 led to class-action lawsuits calling the online training a scam, which led to press coverage throughout this past year painting him as more con man than businessman, which led him to lash out against the judge on the case who is of Mexican descent. The publication in 2005 of TrumpNation, an unauthorized biography by journalist Tim O’Brien, led Trump to file a lawsuit, which led to a deposition in which Trump was forced to admit under oath that he based his net worth partly on “my own feelings,” which helped contribute to the increasingly insistent questions about the veracity of his self-proclaimed business success. And the leaked lewd Bush tape from 2005 is what led CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the second debate to ask Trump if he ever actually had done what he had described, which led Trump to say no, he hadn’t, which now has prompted a rolling roster of women to say yes, he did.
Before these last 16 months of his presidential candidacy, during which he has reached levels of notoriety that even he likely never envisioned in his most feverish dreams, 2005 was a striking, spotlit moment. That year, in private, Trump was saying things that suggested an ego loose and raging like wildfire. “You can do anything,” he told Bush on the bus. “We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you,” he told Natasha Stoynoff of People.
Even in public, though, he was talking like a man who felt empowered. Emboldened. Fueled by fame.
“There’s something very seductive about being a television star,” he said.
“The success is one of the things that causes this big adrenaline rush for me.”
***
After the wedding—a ceremony in which his bride wore a $100,000 dress that took 28 seamstresses a thousand hours to make, an occasion that boasted a filet mignon dinner, a 5-foot-high cake with 3,000 roses of white icing and a guest list that included Shaquille O’Neal, Billy Joel, George Pataki, Rudy Giuliani and Bill and Hillary Clinton—Trump took no honeymoon. “I’m not a big vacation person,” he said. He did, however, find the time to make the publicity rounds.
Katie Couric, his NBC colleague, asked on the Today show about the secret to the success of his relationship with his latest spouse. Trump answered by talking mostly about himself.
“We’ve been together for five years. It’s been the best five years of my life,” he told Couric. “It’s been my best business years, my best personal years.”
He said more of the same in a phone conversation with longtime New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams.
“She’s a real person,” Trump told Adams when asked about his new wife. “She actually cooks for me. She cleans, too. She takes care of a house. … We’re together five years, and these five years for whatever reasons have been my most successful.”
He did not mention the bankruptcy proceedings of his publicly traded casino company stifled by $1.8 billion of debt. It was then not yet halfway through a seven-month slog in the courts. In the end, Trump would tout the restructuring as “amazingly positive,” although he insisted when necessary that he had next to nothing to do with his own casinos. “They’re not talking about me,” he said at one point to Jim Cramer on CNBC. “They’re talking about a public company.” At the time, an independent casino analyst described Trump as “a great promoter, a mediocre manager and a miserable financial custodian,” while Butera, his casino CEO, said “the Trump brand has never been better.” Remarkably, both of them probably were right.
This debt Trump was treating so blithely was in a way a vestige of an earlier moment when his growing confidence led him to disregard wise counsel from trusted advisers, when in the late ‘80s he bought willy-nilly and with borrowed money a yacht, a hotel, another casino, an airline. Now, though, he was shopping not for big-ticket items but for properties on which he simply could slap his name. Trump kept racking up licensing deals.
He trumpeted Trump Tower Tampa. “Other people will be going to Tampa because I’ve gone and led the path,” he told a reporter. “Supposedly I know what I’m doing.”
He reveled in the news that he had signed on for three more hour-long speeches about real estate and “wealth-building” for an outfit called the Learning Annex that would pay him $1 million a piece—many multiples more than former President Clinton was pulling in at the time. The director of the organization justified the eye-popping price, saying Trump was “a bigger draw than anyone in the world.”
ABC announced it was commissioning a two-hour made-for-TV Trump biopic to run during sweeps week in May. “I’m a ratings machine,” Trump told the New York Daily News. “They know that, and they’re taking advantage of that.” He didn’t care if the person who played him could act, he said. “As long as he’s great-looking.”
With his rocketing celebrity came a raft of books that to varying degrees challenged his self-promotional narrative. An authorized biography by Robert Slater called No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump came out, a far less fawning biography by Gwenda Blair called Donald Trump: Master Apprentice hit the shelves (“Trump has carved out a career in self-aggrandizement,” she wrote in the refashioning of her earlier work about three generations of Trumps), and O’Brien’s TrumpNation, which would poke sourced-up holes in some of Trump’s most inflated financial claims, was on the way. But Trump did not cede the publishing arena to his critics. And his titles sold considerably more copies, as more readers evidently preferred his version of who he was. Trump followed three books in 2004 (Think Like a Billionaire, How to Get Rich, The Way to the Top) with a quickie about tips for golf in 2005 (“Have fun—and a hole in one!” he, or somebody, wrote in the introduction). The editor in chief of Random House wanted more. “We are looking forward to publishing a library of books by him,” he told Publishers Weekly.
“People dig me, OK?” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question about his pervasive popularity.
He called The Apprentice “a big fat monster.”
“I guess it’s a tribute to New York, it’s a tribute to business,” he told the Tampa Tribune, before getting to the finer point: “And it’s certainly, I guess, a tribute to me in a certain way, because I’m the one that does it.”
Trump watched one episode of The Apprentice in March in a church in New Jersey in a room with hundreds of members of his nearby golf club, according to the Star-Ledger of Newark. “I love to watch myself!” he exclaimed.
In April, a month in which he gave Hillary Clinton $2,000 for her Senate re-election campaign, Trump told Howard Stern on the radio that he was looking forward to having more kids with his new wife. “I like kids,” he said. “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.” That same month, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun to promote his upcoming Miss USA beauty pageant, he explained why he had enjoyed watching pageants as a kid (“I always liked watching beautiful women.”) and also why he now appreciated owning them as a man (“The primary thing I want to do is go back and meet all the contestants.”). The pageant that month in Baltimore was hosted by Access Hollwyood hosts Billy Bush and Nancy O’Dell—about whom, Trump would tell Bush later that year on the bus, “I did try and fuck her.”
May was a big month. Trump was learning that with celebrity came a revenue stream that required practically no effort.
He gave a Learning Annex speech to 46,000 people in Los Angeles who paid $499 a ticket to hear him tell them to “never give up,” “go with your gut,” and “don’t lose your momentum.” Flanked by security guards protecting him from the crush of the crowds, he signed autographs for two hours.
It gave him a cost-free advertising platform. All he had to do was work in a broadside on some subject of guaranteed and widespread interest.
It gave him a cost-free advertising platform. All he had to do was work in a broadside on some subject of guaranteed and widespread interest. In a Trump Tower press conference that doubled as publicity for the next night’s season finale of The Apprentice, he trashed the Freedom Tower proposal for the fledgling rebuilding effort at Ground Zero, calling acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind “an egghead.” He said the Libeskind building looked like “a skeleton.” He said the new Twin Towers should be just like the old Twin Towers—only taller—to show the terrorists who’s boss. “If we rebuild the World Trade Center in the form of a skeleton,” he said, “the terrorists win.” With memorabilia from The Apprentice positioned as a backdrop, in the marble atrium with the Trump Store, the Trump Bar and a poster advertising “Donald Trump, the Fragrance,” Trump said he wasn’t doing this to promote himself or the next night’s season finale of his show. The event elicited attention from the New York media and the national wires.
The same week his casino company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts was now Trump Entertainment Resorts, the $1.8 billion of debt was now $1.25 billion of debt, and Trump was still the chairman making $2 million a year), he announced the creation of Trump University. It was, the Associated Press reported, an Internet-based, for-profit, non-degree-granting school with “CD-ROMS, consulting services and Learning Annex-type seminars.” Courses cost $300 each. “When I make speeches, a lot of people show up, a lot of people,” Trump said at another press conference at Trump Tower. “There’s something out there,” he said at a juncture that was perilously close to the overheated apex of the housing bubble, which he already was aggressively pooh-poohing, “and I thought this would be a good time to take advantage of it.”
The ABC Trump biopic tanked—“This has nothing to do with me; I am a ratings machine,” Trump was sure to tell the Daily News—and then he turned his attention to his Miss Universe pageant being held in Bangkok, Thailand, the last day of May. It was being hosted again by the Access Hollywood hosts, Bush and O’Dell (“I moved on her like a bitch …”).
In June, Trump turned 59, and he bought as a gift for himself a nearly $500,000 Mercedes.
In July, he went to Washington, where he cockily told a Senate hearing a much-discussed $1.2-billion renovation of the United Nations headquarters in New York was much too much, and that politicians were being taken for a ride, and that he could do it for less than half that, and would if they wanted. (They didn’t.) “We have major slime in New York, and much of that is in the form of contractors,” Trump testified, making senators snicker.
“I’d like to do it for humanity,” he said.
In August, he found the time to write a letter to the editor of the New York Post, responding to a cartoon that had suggested his hair was not his own. “I would like to set the record straight,” Trump wrote. “I do not wear a ‘toupee.’”
***
The successes of a year like 2005 didn’t fall on fallow ground. In some sense, Trump was ever-ready to be maximum Trump. “I think he did feel like he was bigger and greater and more successful than ever,” said Blair, the biographer, when I called her recently, “and had the right to do stuff—and who would stand in his way?” But then she added: “I think he always feels bulletproof.” Fellow biographer O’Brien concurred. “I don’t think he’s ever not felt enabled,” he said.
Even so, said Rush, the gossip columnist, “just the exposure he had on TV, and the power he had to select contestants—that may have gone to his head, and maybe he felt that he could get away with more than he had in the past.”
“I think he always feels bulletproof,” says one Trump biographer. “I don’t think he’s ever not felt enabled,” says another.
There’s an alternative theory, shared by those who’ve worked with him, that the problem isn’t confidence going to his head—it’s that Trump is curiously insensitive to ups and downs. “You might perceive times as good or bad or better or worse,” said Butera, the casino CEO. “I’m not sure he looks at it that way.” Trump, he explained, is never not confident, is never not self-assured, and thus: “It’s hard for me to say he felt a certain way, and so he behaved differently. I think Donald is who he is, and says what he says, and does what he does.”
Said Snyder, the Trump Tower Chicago construction manager who worked closely with Trump that year: “He is very proud of his accomplishments, no two ways about it. But I never saw him take advantage of him being who he is.”
Still, it is hard to read through the things that were going on in September of 2005, the month the notorious Access Hollywood tape was created on the way to making Trump’s cameo on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, and not discern a kind of cresting megalomania, a vibe of nothing can hurt me.
Trump went on Stern’s show and ranked the female members of the cast of Desperate Housewives based on their physical appearances, using his usual 1-to-10 scale. Nobody scored above a 7.
He went on Tony Danza’s talk show after the New York Post reported his wife was pregnant (her first child, his fifth), and said he was pleased. “I want to keep proving that I’m young, still have it, so I did this,” Trump told Danza. “I’m very happy for her,” he added, “and for myself.”
He teamed up with Warner Music Group to sell cell phone ring tones. “Why not answer the phone?” his voice would bellow rather than a standard notification. “You could be missing out on some really big business!” “When Donald Trump’s voice is coming out of your cell phone,” Trump explained, “everyone around you will know you mean business.”
He made a pit stop at a Macy’s at a mall in Orange County, California, to pitch the “Donald J. Trump Signature Collection” of shirts, watches and ties, telling a crowd of roughly 200 people that had gathered in the menswear department that he was “going to make these the hottest-selling shirts and ties,” that he hoped they all watched the upcoming first episode of the fourth season of The Apprentice—and that the Piaget watch he was wearing cost $100,000 more than the $85 to $250 watches in the collection that bore his name and that he was there to hawk. “Enough of this bullshit,” he finally said, according to an article in the Orange County Register. “Let’s get on with the autographs …”
And two days before he got on the gossip show bus with Bush, he flew to Colorado, where he spoke for 90 minutes to 2,000 people who paid $149 to attend a local business expo in rural Loveland. He wore a black suit and a pink tie and unleashed a blunt, disorganized, profane presentation, according to reports in the Denver Post, the Fort Collins Coloradoan and the Greeley Tribune.
He said the event’s organizers were “giving me a freaking fortune to speak to you people.” He said Saddam Hussein was “nice compared to some people on Wall Street.” He said off-shoring jobs was bad for America but good for business. He said it was critical to have a prenuptial agreement. “Women are tough hombres,” he said. “You have women in this audience who are smarter than the men they’re sitting next to.”
“To be a winner, you have to think like a winner,” he told the crowd.
“When you become a loser, no one wants to talk to you,” he said.
Except he did, he added: “I love hanging out with losers,” he explained, “because I can tell them about me all the time.”
“I love hanging out with losers,” he explained, “because I can tell them about me all the time.”
He was asked during the question-and-answer session how to handle disloyal business associates. “Screw them back 10 times harder,” he said. “At least they’re going to leave you alone, and at least you’ll feel good.”
He was asked how smaller companies can compete with larger companies. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you try suing their asses off?”
He was asked about ethics.
“The big problem with ethics,” Trump said, “is if you don’t have them, you’re eventually going to get caught.”
Eventually, he was.
Two days after his Colorado rant, he said what he said to Bush on the bus (“I moved on her very heavily …”).
And 11 years after that, the hot mic tape would torpedo his teetering presidential prospects—teetering because of this pattern, a pattern that first manifested in the late ‘80s, and a pattern that has tracked over this last year and a half, and especially in the general election, as Trump has achieved a sustained level of adulation and attention that makes the first two stages of their sort look relatively mild, earning record numbers of primary votes, doing what few predicted he would be able to do, and yet undermining his own shocking success, turning surges in polls into manic, damaging jags, seemingly incapable of avoiding petty fights, of backing away from Twitter in his restive wee hours, of forgoing the easy applause at rallies as opposed to quietly studying issues and policies of consequence. Remember the last time he found himself in a window of such potential? Remember the last time he had a real chance to be president? It was just before the first debate. It wasn’t even a month ago.
So it was back in 2005. As temperatures dropped, as fall became winter and the days got shorter, Trump recorded a rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a duet with Regis Philbin for a Christmas album available for purchase from Hollywood Records for $18.98. But he also blamed Martha Stewart and her spin-off version of The Apprentice for the slipping ratings of his own show. “There’s only one Trump,” Trump told the Daily News. And he feuded with Tim O’Brien about his biography. Trump called O’Brien a “terrible writer” and his book a “pile of crap.” O’Brien called Trump “Baby Huey with a measure of P.T. Barnum tossed in.” And Trump accosted the People reporter, based on her account, in December at his Florida resort, with his pregnant model wife just outside the room, pinning her against a wall, plunging his tongue into her mouth, assuring her they were going to have an affair, referencing at one point his hyped dalliance in the early ‘90s with his mistress, his mistress who would become his second wife, invoking the memorable headline, a sensational headline he loved, about how he had given her the “BEST SEX” she had ever had.
And in the last week of 2005, the Republican state Senate majority leader floated a rumor that Trump was interested in running for governor of New York. Between Christmas and New Year’s was a slow news week, and sources quickly shot it down, but Trump stayed quiet, letting the idea percolate for days. The New York tabloids had their customary fun. Donald Trump? Elected office? The papers ran with a few cycles of ha-ha copy.
“What would life be like with Donald Trump in the statehouse,” the Daily News wondered. “Lawmakers could take a break from those long budget negotiation sessions by playing newly installed slot machines. … New York would gets its first First Lady named Melania. … State’s motto ‘Excelsior’ would be changed to ‘You’re Fired!’”
People thought it was a joke.