This piece by Michael Kruse is one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read about Donald Trump during the interminable five years that he has been at the center of everyone’s nightmares. After I was done with it, I was struck by the fact that while he is obviously a very seriously psychologically damaged person, the model he has shown to America — or, more accurately, reflected about America — is the model of a deeply unethical, immoral faction of our fellow citizens. That 40-45% of Americans admire this monstrous demagogue is extremely worrying:
It has been well-documented that the 45th president operates with evident disregard for norms and rules. But over the past 5 ½ years of reporting I have determined that he abides by a firm code of conduct as predictable as it is confounding. In more than 60 stories in the Politico Magazine oeuvre that came to be known as “Trumpology,” I documented how his unswerving allegiance to a certain set of principles, unprincipled as they might seem to some, elevated him to the pinnacle of global power. If widespread polling holds true on Election Day, these same traits and tics, and rock-ribbed beliefs, might also be the reasons he’s ousted from office.
Much has been made recently of this election as a referendum on the president not just as a politician with a set of policies, but as a person. This list—compiled using excerpts from my pieces and my interviews with sources who have known him most of his life—is the distillation of his worldview, a condensed sketch of Donald Trump as a man. And no matter what happens, and whether or not he retains his grip on the White House or decamps in defeat to Mar-a-Lago, these truths will continue to guide his behavior—and the way we perceive it.
1. Attention is power
“He is of the mindset,” according to the late Jim Dowd, who did public relations for Trump, “that the more his name is dropped, the more a kind of hypnosis, for lack of a better word, there is to the American public.” “If people pay attention, that’s what matters,” Trump once said. “You can be a horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get ratings, you are a king.” The central gambit of Trump’s entire life is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity—“that,” as I once wrote, “if you’re watching, he’s winning.”
2. Words don’t matter
“He’s always understood it,” Roger Stone once told me. “That how you look is more important than how you sound. How you come across is more important than the words you use.”
3. Everything’s a show
“Donald Trump is the host of his own show,” longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf once told me. “A performance artist,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said. “He sees himself as a Broadway character,” former “Apprentice” contestant Sam Solovey said. He’d “stage-managed Miss Universe,” Newt Gingrich said. “He’d stage-managed professional wrestling.”
4. People are props
Men? “Central casting.” Women? “Accessories to his brand.”
5. The crowd knows
“He’s not a book-reader so much as a room-reader,” I wrote; “an instinctual gauger and tweaker and torquer of crowds,” I wrote. Crowds, for him, are “rolling, roiling, visceral focus groups.”
6. Conflict is the key
“Trump’s energy,” a former close associate told me, “comes from conflict.”
7. Nothing motivates like fear
And he is a product of New York of the ’70s and ’80s:
Trump, who in the ’70s had identified the city’s insecurity and fear and found a way to benefit from it, now tried to do so again. He paid a reported $85,000 to put in four New York newspapers a full-page ad that called for the death penalty. “What has happened to our City?” he wrote in the ad. “What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law, who wantonly trespass on the rights of others? What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” He seethed about “roving bands of wild criminals” and “crazed misfits” and longed for a time when he was a boy, when cops in the city roughed up “thugs” to give people like him “the feeling of security.” …“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump said in the ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate.”
8. Division works
And politics, in the estimation of Stone, Trump’s longest-running, off-and-on adviser, is a Machiavellian combination of showmanship and combat—not about “uniting people” but about “dividing people.”
9. Life’s a fight
It’s one of his most consistent convictions:
That Trump would so quickly in the wake of the Mueller investigation commit a brazen act some critics say representsan egregious and impeachable abuse of power has mystified many observers. How could he have so blithely ignored the lessons of the nearly three-year investigation? But those who know him best say this is merely the latest episode in a lifelong pattern of behavior for the congenitally combative Trump. He’s always been this way. He doesn’t stop to reflect. If he wins, he barely basks. If he loses, he doesn’t take the time to lie low or lick wounds. … Regardless of the outcome—up, down or somewhere in between—when one tussle is done, Trump reflexively starts to scan the horizon in search of a new skirmish. “The discomfort he feels in the moment of peace that follows a victory is so intense that he will do whatever it takes to find new fights,” biographer Michael D’Antonio told me.
10. Chaos is fuel
“The prince of chaos,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. “Chaos creates drama, and drama gets ink,” former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg explained. “This is a new kind of presidency. He’s followed the tabloid model, and it got him to where he is, and it’s the model that will be followed until it doesn’t work. And it has worked. He’s sitting in the Oval Office.”
11. There’s no such thing as going too far
Even if it’s not always helpful:
When Trump is riding highest, he is simultaneously at his most manic and self-destructive. He overreaches and oversells. He doubles down. In the arc of Trump’s life, from his fevered buying spree in 1988 in the wake of the fame-spiking sales of The Art of the Deal to his wild couple of years in the aftermath of the image-laundering launch of “The Apprentice” to his rowdy and improbable political ascent, the craters of his most marked failures follow closely on his most consequential successes. He is this way, say people who know him well, because of his unshakable self-assurance and nerve but also because of his insatiable appetite for attention and conflict.
“It’s true of everything he goes into,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “He will hunker down and do something well—and then he thinks he’s Zeus.” And that’s when the trouble starts. “Because he’s not Zeus.”
12. Bigger is always better
In the ’80s, on the Upper West Side, he wanted to build a “mammoth mall” and a “giant garage” and apartments “above the clouds.” “New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” he said. “And frankly, so do I.”
13. The answer to any problem is always more Trump.
It’s part of how the Trump show gets old: Even as its numbers dipped, heinsisted [“The Apprentice”] was still on top; he picked fights with critics and blamed others; and maybe most notably, he took on an even bigger role. Rewatching the show’s first season, he is the star—no question about that—but it’s surprising how infrequently he appears; he introduces the tasks, and then mostly vanishes as his teams bicker and compete until the climactic boardroom scenes when he fires somebody. But in the second season, things change. There’s less team, more Trump. He makes more appearances in the middle, and the boardroom scenes are longer. And it’s not only that he’s there more. The volume is turned up. He’s meaner. More performative. There are more soaring shots of his plane. More over-the-top shots of his scowl. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s hard to miss, too.14. Exhaust the enemy
“He sues,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res told me. “He uses it to wear people out, whether it’s financially or emotionally,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me. “Did he learn from the Television City debacle that he shouldn’t get too big, too fast, too loud? No,” Brendan Sexton, a former president of New York’s Municipal Art Society, told me. “Maybe what he learned is … think big, talk big, make a big splash. And let the other guys fight to keep up with him.”15. It’s good to be selfish
“He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government,” Michael D’Antonio said days before his inauguration. “It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem.” “More than any person I’ve ever met, he’s focused on how things impact him,” former Trump Shuttle president Bruce Nobles told me.16. Altruism is for losers
It’s on the long list of lessons he learned from his two most important mentors: What Fred Trump and Roy Cohn had in common was their deep immersion in patronage politics—old-school, clubhouse-style favor-trading, used to grasp private gain under the guise of public good. “You take care of the boss and the boss takes care of you,” as veteran New York political operative Hank Sheinkopf described it to me. Operating within the Democratic machines of Brooklyn and Queens, Fred Trump for decades made shrewd connections and large, dutiful donations in exchange for preference in properties, pricing and zoning. And Cohn? Cohn was a virtuoso in “the trade of human calculus,” his biographer wrote, “of deal making, swapping, maneuver, and manipulation.” Watching and emulating these two, the canny younger Trump reportedly looked, too, to fabled Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito as a model. Esposito once was caught by an FBI wiretap saying there should have been an 11th Commandment: “Think of Thyself.”
17. Trusting is for losers
“There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and “cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “They want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife.”18. Loyalty is for losers
“Despite Trump’s protestations about the utmost importance of loyalty, biographers and others have said his notion of the concept evokes a cross between the Mafia and the urban political machines of the past,” I once wrote. “You take care of the boss, and the boss takes care of you,” as Sheinkopf put it. Trump’s definition of loyalty is, and always has been, the opposite of complicated, according to those who know him the best. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” in Stone’s words. “I never particularly thought,” Nobles told me, “that he was loyal to … anybody.”19. Taking blame? For losers
“He won’t say anything that happened was his fault,” longtime New York public relations expert Paul Holmes told me. “Every failure he’s ever had,” O’Brien said, “he has blamed it on outside forces.”20. Losing is for losers
It’s how he succeeds without succeeding: He flopped as the owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but the league as a whole. He blew up his first marriage, married his mistress, and then divorced her, too. He bankrupted his casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University—for which he settled a class-action fraud lawsuit [in 2017] for $25 million). Other risk-taking businessmen might periodically cop to falling short while pivoting to what’s next. Not Trump. He has dealt with his roster of losses largely by refusing to acknowledge them as anything other than wins.“If you knock Donald on his ass, he will tell you the best position to be in is on your ass,” a former Trump Organization executive told me. “He knows of no other way,” former New York Daily News writer George Rush told me, “and that is to spin until he’s woven some gossamer fabric out of”—he searched for the right word—“garbage.”
“My main purpose in life is to keep winning,” Trump once said. “And the reason for that is simple: If I don’t win, I don’t get to fight the next battle.”
There are 25 more insights on page 2, all them spot on. It’s is just shocking that such a demented person could assume power in the first place. But as I said, it’s even more shocking that so many people admire him.
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