Revealing the True Donald Trump: A Devastating Indictment of His Business & Life (2016)

our secret why don't we why don't we get started my name is Marty Baron I'm the executive editor of The Washington Post and we're really delighted that all of you came out came out this evening to the post we're happy to to welcome you here tonight you're going to get a chance to meet some of the journalists and the editors behind the posts book Trump revealed as you know this was an exhaustively researched book about the life and the career of Donald Trump you know the post has a long tradition of delving deeply into the presidential nominees of each major party and this year given Donald Trump's shall we say novel and oversized presence in the political arena there was an opportunity to do a book and we were happy to seize that opportunity and we're especially grateful to Scribner so we're here all these folks who just came in just on time for for making that possible I'm not going to mention all of them but I do want to mention that we have publisher nan Graham raise your hand man there we go and we have editor-in-chief Colin Harrison here thank you for all you did they worked incredibly fast and incredibly hard and with impressive skill throughout and we're very grateful from the post there were two dozen journalists who worked on this book they needed to both work quickly and to go very very deep and that's why we deployed such a large team Scott Wilson our national editor who unfortunately could not be here this evening assembled that team drawing from throughout our newsroom from every department in our newsroom and it all all of us came together and in a matter of months this evening you'll hear from five of the people who worked on this book and you know with the co-authors were michael kranish who is here and mark fisher right behind me and I'll try to step away they were the primary authors of Trump revealed but everyone this entire team contributed to it and this represents a comprehensive emanation of Donald Trump's life his personality his business dealings and his long-running encounters with politicians and politics we believe this the kind of in-depth reporting that readers expect from the post and with that it's a special pleasure for me to introduce tonight's moderator and one of the co-authors of the book Trump revealed senior editor Mark Fisher Thank You Marty and thank you all for coming out it's great to see such a big crowd but I think I understand why so many of you are here there's one thing that Americans just can't seem to find enough of these days it's information about Donald Trump well but actually that's kind of true because he is the first major party candidate in 60 years since the white eisenhower who has not previously held elective office and what that means is that he has not been vetted in the way that most politicians are as a matter of course as they run for various offices so obviously he's had celebrity for decades and celebrity is actually a very different kind of attention from having your life and career and background rigorously examined in the way that would help voters understand how you think how you make decisions and what you really believe in as Michael and I have been making the rounds on TV and radio appearances in promotion of this book we've found that the single most effective way to sell this book was one single Trump tweet from a guy named Donald J Trump late of Jamaica estates New York he the night before the book was actually released so he couldn't possibly have seen it he put out a Trump they tweet saying he calling the book a hit job and saying that it was boring and shouldn't buy it and of course our numbers went soaring after that so we're tremendously grateful to him since he informed 11 million of his closest friends about the book but what was fascinating about that was that that he obviously couldn't help himself any rational campaign adviser would have told him just ignore the thing but he couldn't help himself and so he did this and it was awesome so this was confirmation of a major theme in the book which is that this is a man who deeply believes that the proper response the only proper response to anything that could be at all critical is to attack and to attack hard and we trace in the book the derivation of that characteristic of Donald Trump which traces not only to his childhood and having a father who taught him to be a killer and warned him against being a nothing but also to his relationship with Roy Cohn the infamous New York attorney who was kind of his mentor in his 20s when he was just starting out on his own in business it Marty mentioned the origins of this book they want to give you a little more on that before we get going with the discussion this book came together in late March so if you recall back to the primary season it was really only around that time that it became very clear that Donald Trump was the likely nominee and so at that point this team of more than 20 reporters was put together and the deal that we struck with Scribner came to was finally signed on a Thursday and the plan was to announces to the public the following Monday so the next day Friday I called Hope Hicks who was Donald Trump's press secretary as a courtesy to let her know that this would be announced on the following Monday and also to ask her we wanted to have a series of interviews with Donald Trump we wanted to get as much of his time as we could because although we had this large team of reporters who would be digging into every aspect of Trump's life looking at records and documents talking to everyone from his friends and classmates and neighbors as he grew up all the through his business associates partners competitors then there's contractors and so on and we wanted as much time as we could get with him and so like so I explained the deal that we'd made and the book that we'd be doing and how a lot of reporters would be calling them and before I could get the full explanation out home picks cut me off and she said you are profiteering off mr. Trump which was kind of curious given that he spent a good chunk of his day talking to reporters nearly all of them from profit-making institutions or ideally profit-making situations and she was not open to that line of reasoning and she cut off the conversation said we will not be cooperating with this book you're on your own and so we have thought well that was a fairly likely outcome anyway that didn't really affect our plan for how to report out this book but then lo and behold the following Monday she called back and said that she had had a chance to as she put it tell mr. Trump about your fabulous idea and and she said that he actually liked the idea and that he wanted us to come up to Trump Tower as often as we like for as long as we like because he wanted to this book to be fair and accurate and he wanted to get the real story out about his life so one interest in curiosity there was that his own press secretary who'd worked with him for a number of months didn't realize that he would very much like the opportunity to talk about his favorite subject himself but it indeed as we talked to Trump in the weeks that followed he regularly extended our interview time doubled and tripled the amount of time that he spent with us he took all questions some of them he answered more in more detail than others but he indeed had us back time and again he spoke with a number of the reporters who are in the front row here tonight on the phone and in person as they went into greater depth on topics that they were digging into we had people working on this book who were experts in reporting on Atlantic City on finances on casino gaming on organized crime connections we had people who looked into his his brief experience as a sports franchise owner in the US Football League and and so on all through every chapter of his life and one of our goals here therefore was was that kind of completeness and another was transparency we know and we document in the book that Donald Trump is a highly highly litigious person in fact he has sued the author of the previous biography for five billion dollars and we asked him Michael and I had a certain curiosity about that when we were talking with Trump and so we asked him about that case and he said that he actually never read the book so I'm kind of puzzled by that so how do you go about suing somebody for five billion dollars when you've actually never read the book and he said well you could probably say this along with me people told me it was a bad book a classic trumpism and he didn't see anything untoward about that and so he was alternately with us very gracious very generous with his time very open to answering questions and yet every once in a while he would slip in a threat about how if it was a bad book as he put it he would come after us and he would come after the post so there was this kind of alternating graciousness and tension through the whole relationship that we had with him and and this kind of binary approach where you know it's either a good book or a bad book this is something that's also shot through the book shot through his life one of the things that makes him decide whether a book or an article is good or bad is whether it questions the extent of his wealth and this is this is a several anecdotes in the book about his sensitivity to that question when he sued Timothy O'Bryan the author of the other biography Trump lost twice in that lawsuit and what triggered the lawsuit was indeed a chapter questioning whether Donald Trump is as wealthy as he claims to be and if you've been watching the campaign closely you know that his number that he gives for his wealth varies a lot he sometimes says 9 billion 10 billion 12 million dollars and we don't have any way of giving you a definitive number of what he's really worth because he hasn't released his tax returns but we do have ways of coming to the conclusion that he's probably not worth nearly as much as he says he is in fact a judge in that libel case came to exactly that conclusion in almost those exact words and in fact in a deposition in that case which we have as part of the archive that backs up in this book Trump was asked directly how do you come up with this number that you bandy about about how much you're worth and he said quote it depends on how I feel on a given day now there's actually something legitimate about that because his brand is his name and his name is what gives value to many of his properties and other businesses and so people decide to stay at a Trump hotel or go to a Trump golf course in part because of that name so there's a clear value to it and putting a number to that value is more in art than a science but how he assesses himself is he assess the actual assessed value of properties anyone can look up in the tax rolls and he adds the value that he connects from his name his reputation and his brand so he is a tricky figure to write about in that sense in fact when he was Comedy Central the cable channel was going to do a roast of Donald Trump some years back and the directions went out to the comedian's who were going to be roasting him that unlike most of these roasts his family is fair game you could joke about his kids you can joke about his background any of that is totally fair only one thing in comedians were told they may not joke about and that was the extent of his wealth so he's a tricky character to write about but we did have this great team of folks who even here from tonight and when I turn over to michael kranish my co-writer who will give you a couple of examples of the things that made Donald Trump what he is today thank you Mark they can ready for coming out here it's a great honor to be part of this project I don't know if post folks know this but I was a kid growing up in DC I was a Washington Post paperboy for about five years so oh the ink is not quite worn off and I'm thrilled to be here and working on this project I want to tell you a story that explains I think why biography is so important in writing about a presidential candidate we do fantastic stories and biography is sort of the threads of all those stories that we try to put together because in the case of Donald Trump you have a man who has never run for public office or held public office so there's an awful lot that we don't know about him even though he's one of the most covered figures of our generation so if you look at a person's life how they've dealt with crises that to me is one of the most important things someone who has dealt with dark moments in their life and certainly Donald Trump fits that category very very well so I want to take you to the morning of October 10th of 1989 in Atlantic City it's a bright sunny day and three of Donald Trump's top casino executives he's got two casinos at this moment and he's about to open a third the Taj Mahal and these three casino executives are about to take a helicopter ride to New York City to meet with Donald Trump and to promote a boxing match to be held at one of his casinos and so the three men get on board a Sikorsky helicopter and take the flight to New York they have a press conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York they meet with Donald Trump at Trump Tower on the 26th floor and the meeting goes a little bit long and they can no longer take the skorsky back to Atlantic City so they booked another flight a charter flight and they take it Italian made a gusto helicopter and they so they go to the heliport New York City they aboard the helicopter and a few minutes into the right there over the Garden State Parkway and what they couldn't have known was that there was a small scratch on one of the rotor blades at a 2200 feet that helicopter basically burst apart and the three men and the two crew were both killed and it is one of the most tragic days in Donald Trump's life and certainly for the people who were killed in that tragedy and for Donald Trump I asked him about this we had a separate interview where I talked to him extensively about this incident and he does say aside from the deaths of his parents and his brother Fred jr. that this was most difficult day of his life because these men were in charge of making sure that he would be successful Donald Trump had built some buildings of course in New York City Trump Tower and he was taking a big gamble in Atlantic City at that time this was the only legal casino operation in the East Coast and Donald Trump wanted to be the biggest and best operator so he had two casinos was about to open the third and suddenly the people who were in charge of that had perished Donald Trump had not really focused himself on that business in fact at the time he was having an affair with Marla maples and as he said it interviews for this book that he had taken his eye off the ball and then suddenly he had to look at what was going on and he realized that he was in deep deep trouble so there was one person he got a phone call from shortly after the accident that name I've been saying was John O Donnell and O Donnell was supposed to have been on the helicopter ride but instead he was in Hawaii competing an athletic event and he sent a junior executive O'Donnell now basically had all this operation on his shoulders and Donald Trump's met with him but he came back from Hawaii and he said now it's your turn and that he said don't leave me and O'Donnell later said that this is the first time he'd seen such fear uncertainty and Donald Trump's eyes and his voice and long story short because I want to give everybody a chance to talk and questions and so forth what happened next was that things had gone so bad Donald Trump had gone so deeply in debt that there were great great problems despite the public acclaim for the opening of the Taj Mahal and pretty soon all three casinos went into bankruptcy and there were three other corporate bankruptcies and a lot of people were fired Donald Trump in a fashion that we were familiar with now said someone who was running the casino had a Type C personality and he blamed others but as I mentioned he also told us he'd taken his eye off the ball so if we tell the story in great detail in the book about how he managed to survive the nadir of his career in Atlantic City and the fact that he did survive tells you something he basically had to look out for himself and as he told us he said I was looking out for Donald Trump I needed to survive and that's what mattered at the moment and he did survive so with that story and understand how he reached some depths and also why those who have underestimated would do so at their peril thank you very much so when it turns to some of the other reporters who worked on the book Bob O'Hara was a reporter in the post investigations unit and he did some of the very difficult document work on this book as well as finding some people who are willing to talk about that period that Michael was just talking about in Atlantic City some very rough times for Donald Trump and Bob you learned a lot about Trump's business style and about the kinds of characters he was willing to associate himself with in order to get a start in a very rough and tumble of Atlantic city's casino world tuxedos a little bit about that it's actually remarkable because it was a long time ago but it feels very fresh and I think predictive in some ways about the type of personality that he is probably the most formidable character that he connected himself with was Roy Cohn and if people don't remember Roy Cohn it's he's worth looking into he he was the brains behind the McCarthy hearings in the 50s and he was a brilliant something of a prodigy as a young man and was a pretty much a savage legal mind who focused on attacking as much as possible and never apologizing and he ran into Trump in early 70s and Trump embraced him and they became they developed an interesting relationship that was both legal and friendship and Cohn sort of squired him around New York introduced him to a lot of powerful people and I think that that was prob we set the tone for much of the rest of this career cone represented in through the 80s and there are qualities that we see and Donald Trump now some of the harsher qualities that are remarkably similar to Roy Coons methods methods and demeanor and just briefly tell us a little bit about assembling the documents that gave us insights into Trump's finances in that period well there's a there's a massive trove of information and we probably tapped while we capped a lot of it but there's a lot of material to be examined one of the things that we found is that Donald Trump has surrounded himself in complexity and kind of a cloud of obscurity throughout his career deals or complex answers are complex and vague oftentimes and the documents that we were able to compile particularly from the casino Control Commission in New Jersey helped us to cut through the fog of obfuscation and to get to particulars and the one that was most striking to me and it was so striking I actually did not believe it for a while until I reported it thoroughly and realized it was true was that when Donald Trump was trying to get his third casino vataj he had to show that he was financially capable of managing himself and then making it thrive and he promised the regulator's that he was not going to use junk bonds to finance the qaj and in the his testimony which is in black and white you can actually read it online he says that people that use junk bonds are losers in effect and that they're stupid and that companies that use junk bonds are in effect chunk and it was only and they approved his move to go forward and it was only a few months later that he could not raise the money at the low prime rates that he had promised and used junk bonds and in making that decision and actually signing off on those junk bonds he sealed his fate and his whole empire was almost certain to go down the tubes as was predicted by a financial analyst who was watching everything very closely so that's the kind of detail that we were able to mine to get to the particulars rather than the generalities that had surrounded him and that he surrounded himself with Mary Jordan is the National reporter of the post who led the group of reporters who looked into Donald Trump's family his relationships with his wives three wives at his five children and as part of that we made an effort to talk to all of those people talk a little bit about what that was like and what came out of it so I got the women and Karen Heller is here another great reporter and boy was that interesting okay there has never been a president who has three wives alive walking around that's never happened right and where are they we know everything this guy is on the air all the time where is his first wife Ivana the famous one who is the one in fact she's from the former Czechoslovakia who coined the term the Donald the Donald used to refer to him she's also the one when they had a wicked wicked public divorce was a cover every day of tabloids said don't get mad get everything okay this woman likes to talk and she just disappeared never seen her second wife she's still alive she's been married four times the Donald went to her fourth wedding but Marla maples comes along and he's still married inconveniently to the first woman and so this was hidden for a while but then there was this big scene in in Aspen at Christmastime and the two women were fighting over Donald he loved it it was in the paper at that time he wasn't running for office and he loved loved that women he was on page six with tabloids in New York in fact many many people we talked to said he cultivated this he loves being in the newspaper about this this woman and now Along Came and that woman and Along Came Marla maples with a great name former beauty pageant winner in Georgia it wasn't even like Miss Georgia it was like miss peach but but she was very obviously very good-looking and younger and in the end he got divorced from yvonna married marla where is she she's gone you don't see her at all during this campaign she is around it it is really stunning especially and the last thing I just posted a story that couple hours ago today about his current life or I should say his Third Way because if you say current life sometimes people think it's there's more coming but but anyway so his is for third wife Mel Melania Trump she was Miss she has not been heard of since the Republican National Convention on the 21st of July we're in the homestretch of a presidential campaign where is if he wins she is the first lady of the United States she has an office in the White House he has a public platform and she is literally gone silent it's very very unusual as many things in this campaign are unusual okay so three wives all of them are not talking while the kids are but just if I could for a minute let's go a bit roll back the book on his life about what it used to be about Donald and women he used to go on Howard Stern for instance use the shock jock and he's gone all the time and Stern would say Donald what do you think about Diane Sawyer would you do her you know and all this kind of talk and they would go bit and was much more graphic than that and he was always talking about women he was always talking about how Princess Diana got away from him you know if he only had a chance really to go you know but women defined him and I think when we talked to people who know him who knew him in 80's and 90's they said you know what there are a lot of rich people in New York there are a lot of rich people who had buildings in New York but there was only one Donald Trump who was always in the paper with some other who wanted him that was a direct quote from someone who knew him so I think for a long time women got attention for Donald Trump and for some reason I think he liked attention and and I think that that he when you go to his office I've interviewed his office and I've been talked to Melania on the phone it's very striking that there's only really good-looking women in the office he talks about when his appearances not stop I mean he's 70 years old and I know a lot of older people often you know when they see somebody they they say it but it's very unusual to have a presidential candidate and he's getting tripped up on this every every so often because appearances do matter so in contrast to the old days where he just loved talking about Donald Trump and women we don't hear from them anymore Mary had a specially revealing interview with Donald Trump's lawyer about this question of how Trump had spent years and years cultivating this playboy image and inviting reporters to come out and see him at a club when he would be there with the prettiest models and and and and yet his lawyer told you that when the cameras were turned off it was actually a very different kind of dynamic well he would go to all the nightclub openings in studio 54 in the day you know especially during this gap when he wasn't married there was a time after Marla maples and before Melania announced that he wasn't married and he lists the scene but he was very careful about how he spent his time because it was where there were cameras and he was always with models he would call modeling agencies up and in fact when he had parties make sure that his own parties had a ratio of 5 to 1 gorgeous women to men and he was constantly surrounding himself with with women and at opening so I said to his lawyer Jake Kolbert I said you know how did he have time for this he's always telling me that he's work as you know when he worked how could I do all this stuff Mary I mean I'm working I have all this money and responsibility I break buildings have you seen my great buildings you know how could I possibly have been with all these women at so is Jay Gould rude this and he agreed completely he said actually you know he just likes he's on the Trump Tower and he works in part of it he really just likes to take the elevator up and turn on the tube and watch TV and so I said this to Trump and then Trump said well you know maybe it wasn't as glamorous as it's all out to be so I mean image you know he was great at getting attention I mean how many women did he really have and how much TV did he have he I don't know Robert Samuels is a national political reporter at the post and Robert looked into the transition that Donald Trump made from celebrity to politician and the roots of his interest in running for office and so tell us a little bit did he see this as a completely different kind of pursuit or it was a kind of a natural progression for him right well one of the governing questions that I was really interested in finding was why is this man doing this and it was very clear from speaking with people who knew him that at some point he didn't realize the phenomena and the movement that we've seen sweep across the country what we know through his pulse through his political life and affiliation is that he didn't really have much stomach for partisan principles between 1999 and 2012 he changed political parties seven times he's donated between 1995 and 2012 he donated 3.1 million dollars by himself without looking at his companies to all sorts of politicians he donated to Clinton he donated to Carter he loved Ronald Reagan so what is this about really and to do that we started looking at lots and lots of footage and interviews that he's done over the years and we talked some people into showing us the unaired unedited versions of this of these tapes and early on from his very first major network television interview in 1980 we see a theme that starts to emerge he's talking about a building and then he begins to rail on the idea that America is being laughed at that there's something that's happening in the political system where leaders aren't strong enough like they used to be and he begins to ponder whether or not politicians today can be like in Abraham Lincoln and he says Abraham Lincoln could never win in 1980 because he was too ugly he did not look good on TV and he didn't know how to master the media and the President of the United States in this modern era needs to know how to do these skills and so what we see over the course of time is Donald Trump assessing politicians and presidents on their ability to affect messages to affect messages to communicate messages effectively and to figure out whether or not they make the country feel great again and everyone does a pretty okay job until Obama who he considers a total disaster by this point in 2012 Donald Trump has mastered the celebrity that he said those great minds in 1980 did not master he's become the star of The Apprentice he has his Twitter following that everyone enjoys because he's talking about everything from whether or not Barack Obama's from the United States to whether or not Katy Perry's marriages are going to work out and he decides that he is in fact the person who could best symbolize the greatness and tough leadership of America and so there's a lot of there's been a lot of skepticism about whether or not Donald Trump wanted to do this whether he wanted to run for president but it is true that days after Romney lost that election he was the one who filed an application to the Patent Office and he copyrighted one phrase and that phrase was make America great again and so you see the thematics of his campaign starting from early on in his public persona but it's been it had been something had been thinking about and toying around with for several decades great what there's one piece of video that you got from it was an old Rona Barrett celebrity interview from 1980s which had never aired or we've got parts of it that had never aired and he was remarkably similar in the way he talked about political issues but he was also very frank about he could be sort of dynamic about what was making him decide to run and not to run it was that it's interesting and maybe it's because it was so early in Donald Trump's political career but Rona Barrett really got probably the best information out of Donald Trump's and any interview that I had seen us notwithstanding and if you see you see him going through he said he says Donna Rona Barrett asked well do you want to be President goes no it's it's to me know of a life I love building I'm an artist I love building my buildings and over time it really affects him and he starts to take to this idea that huh maybe one day I could be President particularly because people continuously ask him whether or not he wants to be the president of the United States and he shows up in polls through through the decades again and again not because he was running for anything we could but because of his name recognition people put him on polls and and he did very well so it kind of built but we want to turn it over to all of you to take your questions so if you will raise your hand one of the folks who the microphones will come by and start you grab go ahead yep you discuss his personality was he warned did he look you in the eye was he reserved did you see him with melania a little bit about his personality sure in our interviews at Trump Tower they were in his office on the 26th floor with this glorious view of Central Park and Fifth Avenue and he was very courteous and it was because I said before quite generous with his time we never saw Melania we did see his kids would wander in Ivanka and Eric would wander in from time to time and talk with him about business trip they were going on or problem at the property in Miami but he's very soft-spoken in that setting you get none of the bluster that you familiar with from the rallies and he on the other hand it is difficult to have a linear conversation with him you can ask him about stuff and he he knows his field extraordinarily well if you ask him about business deals he made in 1978 he will remember building materials and subcontractors names and the whole process of making working through a negotiation but if you ask him anything that veers off of what he knows best the knowledge base is very thin and he tends to change the topic very quickly a sentence or two and he's off on to something else it has his sort of base topics that he goes back to when he's a little bit flustered about not knowing something and so he'll just all of a sudden start talking about his TV ratings here is another thing that he would do is I spoke to him only on the phone several times if he was pressed on something he would almost seem to get caught in a groove and he would repeat the same thing over and over and over again and sometimes one of my colleagues Drew was especially adept at this he would sort of say mr. Trump mr. Trump and kind of bring him back he's on course and then we'd move on but it sort of joking aside it was it was really a pronounced thing to be talking with someone who seemed to veer off again caught in a groove he's a completely different person I think in in person he's really charming is very nice he knows your name and he looks at you I mean everyone says that it's not this bombastic guy that you see on TV and everybody that's worked with him over the years say I turn on the TV I work with this guy for 20 years turn on the TV I know who this is gentleman here yep Walton Huntress of the aspects of trumps life and experiences that you researched what of the challenges or situations were most analogous to the actor that kind of challenges a president faces and and what can we learn from those I mean you've you've your book has researched I'm looking forward to the chance to read it how he dealt with women how he dealt with celebrity we don't with you know and and in business deals but this is clearly not a direct analogy to what a president would face and so what can we learn what what is most instructive in this in understanding what he would what he would be actually like as a president Michael well you know it's a great question and the the parallel is what he did running his businesses and nearly all the businesses that I ran were private businesses so they're difficult to examine until you go through ancillary sources like sino control commission records which Bob and other reporters did for example he did at six corporate bankruptcies he has often said he had four corporate bankruptcies this is instructed to understand how he sort of thinks and clearly there were six and we asked him to explain what he when you say four what do you mean and he said well I think of the three casinos as one bankruptcy in fact there were three separate court actions for pre-packaged bankruptcies as they call them there clearly were three separate ones but him it's one and part of it he wants to put the best image out there but the answer directly to your question is that he was told by his father don't go deeply into debt and as Bobble Harrell mentioned he end up going into junk bonds he was of millions or even billions of dollars in debt time and again he thought that he was not going to survive we talked to a person who was basically given the job of negotiating with bondholders and banks and that person told us that he was very concerned this is someone who knew Donald Trump as well as anybody and he was very concerned about Donald Trump at this moment he said I'm looking at him bankruptcy after bankruptcy he's in a midst of a huge divorce he's building humiliated day after day in the front pages of newspapers and I worried that you know he might take his own life it's a very striking statement for someone who actually feels affectionately about Donald Trump and what he said was but when I walked into the office of Donald Trump there he was his suit was perfect his tie was perfect as well and he would say you know what's next what do we do next and he had this ability for whatever reason to instead of looking at oh my gosh there's all these terrible problems to try to be thinking positively one of his mentor's was no more Vincent Peale of the power of positive thinking that could even mean that he's attached from reality if you look it that way or that he just is so positive oriented they just want to think about some of the deep problems he had but the reality is is that while he certainly says he's a great business person that his businesses had trouble time and time again drew Harlow could talk more he's here in the audience that reporter who worked on this but he had a public company at one point one time only because they had to raise a lot of capital and that company did do well at first it paid Donald Trump millions of dollars the stock ticker of djt for his initials but the stock price went from something like $35 to 17 cents and the shareholders were very angry there were lawsuits filed that we write about but the bottom line is is that Trump was able to survive another example of being at the absolute depths and finding a way for himself to survive and this is instructive this is you know Donald Trump views it as you know I am there it's his words are a one-man army and he talked in one of his books about the power of narcissism for example he cited a book by that name and he said it's a very powerful thing if you want to be successful you have to think in that sort of tunnel vision way you know only about making sure that you do survive and another one of his points of the book think like a billionaire he advises that you have a quote short attention span unquote so either he sees that as an attribute or he knows he has this particular disposition and he tries to put it in the most positive way but examining that business career and seeing you know as we try to do in the book you know the peaks and the valleys and exactly how he's operated it seems to be the best guide for how he might try to operate as one huge question comes up there is that he is the first president who has a lot of foreign Holdings as people look at his foreign policy you know he's expanding abroad Kevin Sullivan orthere went to Azerbaijan we had reporters in Moscow looking at his dealings there in Panama and we've never had anybody who would be in the White House who has their global business empire and so your good question is is how would this work if you're going to divide divestment is it enough to divest himself is the Trump Organization with the kids I mean the value goes up of his holdings all around the world and he is increasing his worldwide holding it goes up if he's in the White House I you know if you think about what do presidents do they synthesize information and come to decisions they persuade people of their positions and they they have a program of some kind well Donald Trump is not someone who takes in information very deeply he we asked him about how he makes decisions whether what he reads and he says he doesn't read reports or briefings or anything like that he doesn't like to read anything of any length he will keep he believes that he make comes to decisions by gut by instinct and so he very much wants people to come in and tell him about something orally and he believes that he will get the nub of it in a matter of seconds he's obviously very good at persuading people that that he knows a way forward but when it comes to persuading people individually in the way that the president has two to one coalition's and and achieve compromises that's something that he's done very little of in his career he talks about being a great negotiator and we've certainly spoken to some of his business associates who credit him for that but we've also spent a lot of people who worked with him who say that it is all about getting his way and he's not one to to reach compromises this over here good Mike that note right here wonder oh he's strong anti Mexican narrative in this campaign which has pretty much defined the campaign where does it come from and did you have people in Mexico researching or looking into his deals there could it come from his frustration apparently he didn't go very well down there well I was the bureau chief in Mexico for five years with my husband Kevin Sullivan and we went to interview the last two presidents to talk about this Vicente Fox in Philly spelled their own and as far as we can tell and especially having been at rallies it comes from a lot of people in America like what he has to say and he knows that he gets reinforced every day it may be the most popular thing he says there's no hint that he's always mean not like Mexico or anything he his gift is that he is saying this is what we keep hearing at rallies and talking to millions of Americans they're fed up and he says and he'll tell you that interviews too is that he's a reflection of what people want you know he thinks that our immigration policies have been wrong wanted to amplify that I think one thing that's safe that with Donald Trump although we can't be sure of it is that he's actually the embodiment of a populist politician and we've had a history of those going back 200 plus years and they emerge periodically and the patterns are very similar they say what people want to hear they try to they try to appeal to people to anger and frustration and it's possible the Donald Trump doesn't have any animus towards Mexicans and that he's only playing the cards that he sees are out there for him to play with and if that's the case we should be troubled because what we need to some degree in our leaders I suppose is is a general sense that they're telling us what they really feel in the truth and at least pursuing policies that are sort of generally in the interest of the country to add to what Bob saying I'd like to contrast this what his current position on Mexicans with what he said in the previous time when he was really close to running for president in 1999 and 2000 at the South point he was considering running as a third party candidate against Pat Buchanan's remember him and Donald Trump said that the reason he'd be a better Reform Party candidate than Pat Buchanan was he was all about inclusiveness and he did not like the way Pat Buchanan spoke about numbers of people including Jews blacks gays and Mexicans what we're seeing now when you go to the rallies and you experience that and he said it himself is that when the crowd gets low he loves to bring out the issue of who's going to build the wall because the crowd goes nuts it's a way to add something to the political perspective that people can understand and that they have a very visceral response about and for him that's very important in fact we've spoke to a number of people who are talking to him about the decision to run for president and when he talked about the issues that were really important to him the relationship with Mexico didn't really come up in fact a number of them were surprised when he talked he made the allusions to rapists and criminals crossing the border in the first speech one of the people who we spoke to was most who's closest to Trump gave us some guidance and said when you're trying to understand his motives always go first to the idea that he thinks of himself foremost as a showman and he will always choose the most provocative line of attack because he wants to get in response the affirmation from the crowd yes sir over here I want to ask about something that's really important in a president and that's his temper I want to let you know that in the 80s in early 90s I was in charge of promoting Atlantic City so I'm a little bit of knowledge about this when Donald Trump saw an article in the Atlantic City press or worse an editorial he pulled the newspaper off the newsstands in all of his hotels and Atlantic City magazine which they also owned he didn't like what the casino Association did he stopped paying the dues which was 25 percent of the budget so I always think of him as petulant I was ordering if you found in your research anything that would give you some guidance as to what his temper will be like if he gets elected he he said that he's you know said it many times that I can be a screamer quote unquote and I'm familiar with the anecdote you're talking about in Atlantic City and the person I referenced when I started talking this evening was John O'Donnell who wrote a book called trumped exclamation point and in that book he repeatedly cites these temper issues and temperament issues and in fact O'Donnell got so frustrated with this temperament that he ended up quitting the scent of a note saying I'm leaving I asked Trump about this he said no Jack O'Donnell didn't quit I fired him so he's go back and forth over this but you do hear that from a number of people and Trump himself has said that he has a screamer those are his own words as to how that would reflect you know Bob mentioned Roy Cohn Roy Cohn was the lawyer for Donald Trump when the US government sued Donald Trump on his father Fred Trump for race bias in 1973 and Roy Cohn advised Donald Trump when you're hit hit back ten times harder or a hundred times harder and that you know is the root of his personality to a great degree he absorbed that lesson actually settled that case eventually but time and time again we see cases words you have a lot of lawsuits and he is you know he has imbued that philosophy hid himself in that case also gave him an animus towards the federal government he settled the case only after dragging it out and attacking righteously the prosecutors through roy cohn and that's an aspect that he's more than a screamer he is very open about wanting to punish people who he often uses his phrase viciously attack me and you know a lot of politicians one payback can come an hour later but so he fits into that mold and it's worth noting that a lot of Americans find this appealing again I think that there's a lot of people who think this guy when he's hit says he can hit ten times harder and that's what he's going to do out there they like his you know confidence and he is clearly feeding off of enormous amount of Americans were like what they see on TV and that pugnacious attitude is something that we trace in the book all the way back to his childhood and with number of examples and stories going back to elementary school of really kind of ruffian behavior as he calls it yes sir guys really amazing people thank you all for sure on your side okay my question my question is which is very scary for me is that after 2000 the press said they fell down on the job in not going after Bush's motives for going into Iraq and it wasn't until a day or two ago I have seen the press begin to say this isn't true and not merely report on what he is saying but some juxtaposition of it he said this this day said that they they and actually confronted because you know I'm very scared about voters who as you said let their passions they like what they hear but my credo is let's get the fact that argue about conclusions what do you expect the press to do what is the obligation of the press to hold him accountable I'm not definitely told that the Washington Post but in general to hold him accountable and say you can't or you can't make these allegations when the facts Brian all right we've actually I'd say everywhere we go we got a question about this sense that many people have that there's been light or non aggressive coverage of Donald Trump we also get the same question about Hillary Clinton and you know I think the reporting that went into this book also said more than 30 major stories that appears in the post over the last few months that go into great detail in in pushing back against Trump's own narrative own version of his life and successes and career but you're right there are other aspects of a news media that have not been as aggressive in doing the reporting that we think is our obligation in any presidential campaign in any campaign so you know I think particularly in television there are real questions to be asked about giving over vast stretches of time to running his rallies and so on you know greatly more time than was given to other candidates but you know we can't control what they do we we decided that this was our obligation to do this deep reporting and commit enormous resources to this book and the stories that have appeared in the paper will continue to appear in the post I mean the post has been banned by Trump for and you know I mean he hates what we write we have-we have a fact checker full time we've had all these big stories but you know it is a key question I think the debates and strong moderating in the upcoming debates is absolutely critical because that's when everyone's watching because people look at one story and then they call up they'll see one story about Hillary Clinton and they'll say why aren't you going after Donald Trump and then they'll see one thing about Donald Trump and why this so the the debates are a rare time they're both there and it's going to depend a lot on the moderators and on the rock or vote just to be clear he made the idea that you know hasn't been talked about the last couple of days this has been written about for months by other organizations by organization many times the fact checker that Mary mentioned I mean they do extraordinary work where they check everything in almost real-time and there's a story up today that basically they went over again what Donald Trump said he did not he said that I was against the war from the beginning but in fact every fact check has shown that that's not the case that he said on Howard Stern but he was not he didn't say he was against the war at that time so every time that statement is made the facts I could put things out to say no that's that's not actually correct so all the way in the back [Music] what he says or is it all just part of the show it depends what he's saying uh I mean it's hard to believe sometimes when talking to him that he actually means what he says I think it's also important to note that you know there's an accuracy question and there's an honesty question for people and for many people who support Donald Trump it's not so much the facts but it's the genuine passion that he elicits when he's speaking and I think that's a very important distinction to make and it's an important distinction to acknowledge the fact that he gets up there and he says something that aligns with people it's an empowering feeling for those who feel that the Obama years have disenfranchised their ideas of how the country should operate and what a political leader should be and one of the things that has been so important for its candidacy is that skill is one skill that Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that she really struggles with and so I think you know when we talk about this genuine question I think a lot of voters are wondering whether or not the person in the candidates are genuinely listening to them and on that front Donald Trump is yes press with how many of our institutions are being privatized and I see this as potentially giving other people who have aspirations to enter into a power structure the chance are we are we looking to a day when we're going to profit from many of trumps pawn in our political system I don't know where to start I think you know I'm I'm out there I'm talking to voters a lot and I think in some senses yes I I mean I think people have been drawn I mean it seems so far ago but you know six months ago everyone was talking about Bernie Sanders and the impact that he was having on the Democratic the Democratic Party in that process and I were seeing a lot of different types of voices entering to the standard two-party system and that will inevitably change who people pick and how they perform in terms of when they're trying to in vote yes sir I've been pondering is building on this other question and a lot of people seem to say well the checks and balances he's not really going to do we think you're going to do what reason we really think with the forces that he's unleashed and the legitimacy by the attention given to some of the racism and bigotry and things like that that forces have been unleashed in our society that the checks and balances we think exist maybe won't exist and I get really troubled for instance when you see former members of senior officers on both sides get involved and it just I wonder what kind at what point do we become close to a banana republic you know at what point do are we being to say well he's really doesn't mean it does it really matter if he doesn't really mean it if he's really about power and the forces that he's unleashed become bigger than him and you have like the SA out there or you have I've heard this so many times that you know it's really just a presidency I mean and they're not kidding they say look at Washington I mean as Congress really not much gets done it's the image he's a strong guy and number two he's not the same old thing so that's what they're electing and for some amazing reason so then we started writing a story about actually the president has a lot of power I mean it seems so obvious but you're like you can get us into a lot of trouble very quickly and we should keep writing that because that sentiment is out there and even more than that that you'll talk to people in your site well you support the Muslim ban but you how would that work exactly and then you start talking about the money and how it work and they go well you know we don't think he's really going to do that because it's just more like that he's going to be strong against it and he'll be thinking about how what he wants to keep that people and the same with the wall you're like wait a minute it's 2,000 miles how much how much money would that cost and again so he's getting this benefit of because people want him to say it they shouted the rallies and yet they're like oh we don't really expect it's going to build it it's the sentiment it said he wants to it's that we're he's telling us I hear you you're fed up with all the immigration and a lot of people who think that NAFTA was bad took their jobs so he's just better than his opponent kind of connecting with people through TV there's a there's another aspect to your question and it comes from the word Unleashed I've had this in the back of my mind for a long time before the election but it's really coming to a play in the last several months which is I think what we're seeing now has been in play has been developing and unfolding and unpacking itself for about 15 or 20 years maybe twenty five years and the separation the lack of comedy in Congress the ironically with the rise of the Internet we've seen a surge a deep deepening of anti intellectual behavior and I sort of feel like it's come into play almost cresting now at this election and to me that's the more trouble those are the undercurrents that are more troubling because it's not who gets elected president necessarily it's deeper trends in our society which I suspect we'll be exploring after the election because they're not going to go away immediately but I would just have one cautionary note because there's an assumption often about Trump opponents that the rallies are these gatherings of extremists and racists and so on and it's just not the case there are there are crazies at his rallies to be sure they're extremists but there are also a lot of I did a story a few weeks ago about Obama Trump voters and there are a lot of them and these are people these are the Hope and Change voters and these are people who saw in Barack Obama someone who heard exactly the kinds of things that Robert and Bob mentioned and and took that to heart and reflected what the frustrations and troubles that people were going through and a lot of those same people see that in Donald Trump and those are not extremists so a time for just one last question yes ma'am thanks to that term skills Asia vetoes required you know if you credit everything yeah I mean that's what you would mean you he would say that I mean and people respond to his confidence and he said he has said that he will get really smart people around him and I mean it's all about the confidence and he is not I mean he has not said you know what is Aleppo yet but but we did learn that he would have caught Osama bin Laden before 9/11 today but seriously I think I think the undercut of your questions are really important thing to explore and throughout this country I think there's a big debate over what is the requirement for a president right and for Donald Trump he said what the requirement was 30 years ago and he reiterated it 20 years ago and that was a person who could Rhian reinvigorate the spirit of America who has boldness and pomposity those are his words and so does he fit think he fits the requirement absolutely I think I mean the question is a sort of values question on what the presidential seat be and that's you know that's where things get interest what's remarkable at Trump is that he's always had this very small circle of people he can really rely on they're usually a couple of family members with the casinos there were one or two people like I mentioned who died in a helicopter crash and time and time again you see that there's one or two vital person the persons who can really tell them what to do he does prefer having an acolyte he doesn't like to be told that he's wrong and so oftentimes you see people being fired you seen again in this campaign he's gone through two campaign managers already so that would be a big question for him as president he would have to tackle many many issues that he doesn't know anything about and we rely on that advice how would he organize that and synthesize that so I think that's one of the big questions he talks about getting things done the best way is an army of one and it's very hard to run a country with just one person and I would say that this is going to be a key thing in the debate because Hillary Clinton has made it's a polar opposite she's had all this experience in government and he is certainly going to answer this and say that he has a temperament he's shown through his businesses and he has the confidence to get the right people around him if he's right he'll completely redefine what it means to be president given his biography his track record his lack of experience in the public life if he's right he'll be the first person to come this far an election he is the first person to come this far in an election campaign and if he's elected that will he'll break all the molds and he has a ready answer for your question which is when things go right he he was fully prepared he knew what to do and he takes all the credit and when things go wrong and we show this at various stages throughout his career when things go wrong the system is rigged we've heard these words from him in recent weeks and that is that is exactly the phrase that he uses throughout his life when he's faced with troubles or failure so when we hear that now you can sort of see the gears moving and he is he's not oblivious to his position in the polls and so he's preparing himself and all of us for the message that he will have if he loses so I think we have to leave it there but thanks so much for coming out and supporting the book [Applause]

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 1,047,964

Rating: 4.2604184 out of 5

Keywords: business, money, biography, memoir, professional, academic, leaders, notable people, books, history, accounting, internal audit, risk management, committee, insurance, forex, stock market

Id: bPhfxJ3dpO4

Length: 67min 13sec (4033 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017