The Art of the Boast

By MARGARET CARLSON Sunday, June 24, 2001
    • TRUMP: SURVIVING AT THE TOP by Donald J. Trump with Charles Leerhsen

    Random House; 236 pages; $21.95

    Inside every fat ego there must be a thin, self-revealing book struggling to get out. Why else would Random House have given a large pile of money to a self-promoting, vulgar real estate developer to recount how great it is to be him? His first book had a slight story line. No one wheedled bigger loans or built gaudier buildings on a shoeshine and a smirk than the swaggering kid from Queens.

    But the sequel, written with Newsweek senior writer Charles Leerhsen, coming as it does at a time of financial and marital meltdown, is all aimless anecdotes in which the only point is to make Donald Trump look good and to avoid answering important questions like: Was it really Ivana's idea to start the "the Donald" business? Just how much in hock is the Donald, Brazil-like or kneecap-breaking hock? Was Ivana's plastic surgeon under the impression that she was entering the Witness Protection Program?

    Pages are spent explaining in number-crunching detail why Trump didn't pay too much for the Plaza or the Trump Shuttle, and why it wasn't loony to go into competition with himself by building the Taj Mahal just as Atlantic City gambling was peaking. He tries to pass off his Las Vegas, Eurotrash tastes as sophisticated (he once compared the garish murals on his ceiling to the Sistine Chapel) and an attitude as a philosophy. "Momentum, when you think about it, is what surviving at the top is all about." Imagine if he didn't think about it.

    While he says many famous people want to pal around with him, he chooses to spend much of his spare time with his "friend" Mike Tyson, the fighter who behaves as if he has taken one too many punches to the head. He identifies with Howard Hughes, of the long fingernails and hotel-as-booby-hatch, who shared Trump's aversion to germs ("I'm constantly washing my hands"). His heroes are Richard Nixon (for being a real killer and giving Barbara Walters the brush-off) and Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. A great achievement was whomping his good friend Merv Griffin, "who never built anything bigger than a Wheel of Fortune set" but who foolishly thought he could take on the guys with the huge Erector sets. Trump says he worries about his three kids, which seems to mean squeezing them into his busy schedule -- even when they don't have an appointment with him.

    He also settles scores with "some jerks with word processors," at TIME and the Village Voice, as well as with Frank Sinatra (for calling Ivana and his own wife "the scum of the earth"), the late, libel-proof editor Malcolm Forbes (for cutting Trump off the Forbes' 400 list after Trump had kicked Forbes and his young boy companions out of the Plaza's Oak Bar), and Leona Helmsley (a bully perhaps too much like Trump himself).

    In the most self-serving chapter, Trump is outraged that the breakup of a couple with His and Her publicists, a couple fighting over custody of the gossip columnists with vigor usually reserved for fighting over the children, should be chronicled in the press. Marriage is just another deal, and shorting it with a prenuptial agreement was a kindness really, a way of looking after his employees who might not get paid if a scorned wife were someday to take him to the cleaners.

    He makes it clear "for the sake of fairness" that the separation is his idea and that Ivana never stopped loving him. Next to him, the grasping, brassy co-conspirator turned victim seems sympathetic, undergoing facial perestroika only to end up with pouty lips and thickened eyebrows that left her looking curiously like Donald in drag, a female Baby Huey. He certainly wouldn't have brought up Ivana's "heavy emotional baggage" or that mysterious previous marriage of hers if the New York Post hadn't dredged it all up first. No one should think for a minute that it was "the beautiful young actress" Marla Maples who broke up his marriage or "the unbelievable array of women" Trump finds at his feet. Not at all. It was just that he and Ivana had grown apart, and now he had to get on with the rest of his life. Even Oprah would blush.

    Trump's last chapter is a "modest proposal" for restoring America to its former glory "in a matter of months" by a blue-ribbon coup undertaken by a group of cowboy businessmen like himself who would "be vested with as much authority as our Constitution would permit." The power to levy taxes, declare war -- he doesn't enumerate.

    He hasn't ruled out democratic means, and if he runs for office, it will be on a platform consisting of the death penalty and a 20% surtax on Japanese imports; or maybe it's a platform of death penalty for the Japanese. It's hard to tell, he's so mad at them for making those cars Americans keep buying instead of Buicks. Trump once said he was too busy to run for President, but who knows now? Restructuring debt leaves a man with a lot of time on his hands. George Bush may be the only person with any reason to read this book.