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''The 1990 Playboy Interview With Donald Trump''
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The Playboy Interview With Donald Trump
Mar 1, 1990 49 min read
Playboy sat down with a young Donald Trump in 1990 where he teased a future in politics
Donald Trump sits alone. He hasn’t slept in 48 hours. At six a.m., perched high in the bronze-coated jewel of his empire, Trump Tower, he’s bent over a mammoth Brazilian-rosewood desk, scrutinizing spread sheets. No insomnia, no gnawing worries. “Pressure,” he surmises, sipping an iced Coke, “doesn’t upset my sleep,” a standard four hours nightly. “I like throwing balls into the air—and I dream like a baby.” Three hours later, blond hair marshaled, he announces, with standard chutzpah, his seven-and-a-half-billion-dollar bid to gobble down the nation’s premiere airline, American. On the strength of his 120-dollar-a-share bid, the stock vaults from 16 dollars to 99 dollars. The 43-year-old billionaire, who owns huge blocks of American Airlines stock, smiles broadly. A week later, with the market tumbling 190 points, he withdraws his offer, perhaps temporarily. Despite some reports that insinuated his American raid was only cardboard, a ploy to rattle up his stock, Trump stares into space: “Nope. I want it.”
Yup. If it’s the best, and it’s for sale, Donald Trump’s stomach begins to growl. He captured troubled Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi’s onyx-and-gold-plated yacht for a mere $29,000,000—now it’s worth $100,000,000. Then he bought the Eastern Shuttle for $365,000,000 and transformed it overnight into the Trump Shuttle, complete with comfortable cabins and stewardesses rustling in virgin wool and pearls.
A year earlier, he had bought the Plaza Hotel for $400,000,000 and is now lovingly restoring her without a name change. Her make-over will be supervised by the Czech mistress of Trump’s kingdom, Ivana, a former Olympic skier and fashion model. At home, Ivana presides over a 100-room Trump Tower triplex, recently expanded from 50 rooms “Better closet space,” she jokes). Trump, proud of the salmon-marbled atrium of Trump Tower, where no expense was spared, says, “I bought the whole damn mountain! You’ve never seen that color before. Ivana suggested it because it makes people look better.”
The couple also has a 47-room country house on ten acres in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the well-publicized 118-room Mar-a-Lago Marjorie Merriweather Post estate in Palm Beach, their commute time shortened by the 727 jet and the French-made military Puma helicopter.
The Trump Princess, or the Khashoggi “boat,” as Trump now calls it, has gotten cramped, so a Dutch shipyard is confecting not a Princess but a full-fledged Queen costing more than $175,000,000.
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Such ostentation, despite a catalog of charities and good deeds done for sick kids, has predictably yielded a rich crop of snipers. Spy magazine, the New York—based humor monthly, cheerfully carries on a scabrous vendetta against the Trumps, comparing them to Dickensian monsters. Time did a cover story on the decay of Atlantic City and chided Trump for helping create a crime-plagued urban blight divided between welfare cases and high rollers. On the Upper West Side, Manhattanites attack him for his proclaimed desire to build an enormous complex, Trump City, complete with a 150-story sky-scraper; Phil Donahue charges that Trump’s casinos pillage the gullible; an aide close to outgoing mayor Ed Koch calls Trump “the most arrogant s.o.b. who has ever stepped onto the earth.” Ah, well. To be young, blond and a billionaire. It doesn’t seem to matter. The most daunting entrepreneur since the Astors, Vanderbilts and Whitneys, Donald John Trump has made his “art of the deal” work—not just for making money but for crushing adversaries, too. Case in point: Merv Griffin.
Ten months after Griffin bought Trump’s Resorts International Inc. for $365,000,000, for which Trump had paid $101,000,000 the year before, Griffin found himself holding a busted balloon. Not only had he inherited the hotel-casino’s $925,000,000 debt but he embarrassingly had to report first-half losses of $46,600,000. There’s now talk of a possible bankruptcy for Merv and a possible lawsuit against Trump. Looking beyond his one-billion-dollar Taj Mahal opening in Atlantic City next month, Trump has plenty to consider. There are rumors of his building casinos in Nevada and his buying Tiffany’s, NBC, the New York Daily News or the Waldorf Hotel “I’ve got to have the Waldorf,” he coos jokingly into the phone. “I can’t sleep without it”). And the Presidency? No, that takes an election, and it is clear that Trump is not that patient. Too much to do!
The billion-dollar baby was born in the exclusive Jamaica Estates in Queens, New York, on June 14, 1946, to a mere millionaire, real-estate developer Fred Trump, who had racked up his $20,000,000 fortune building low-to-middle-priced homes and apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. Among the five little Trumps, only Donald seemed to have a passion for mortar and bricks, riding around construction sites with his father- “who ruled all of us with a steel will”—and showing younger brother Robert, now a low-profile V.P. in the Trump organization, who was boss in their 23-room house. At the age of eight, little Donald borrowed Robert’s cherished toy blocks, glued them together into one giant skyscraper and never returned them, thereafter exercising his fantasies about changing Manhattan’s skyline. His father, who harped on the importance of “knowing how to make a buck,” regarded mop-haired Donald as “rough and wild,” shipped him off to the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson and, some say, forever instilled in him a gnawing sense of inadequacy that fueled the boy’s ambition.
There followed two years at Fordham and two years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance, then a few years diddling in middle-income housing until, at the age of 28, Trump delivered the punch that launched him. Taking a hard look at Manhattan’s troubled fortunes, he fastened onto the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad as his ticket into the big time and nimbly plucked options on Penn’s Hudson River railroad yards, now the site of New York’s Convention Center, and its 59-year-old Commodore Hotel, now the Grand Hyatt. The coup was in his persuading bankers to lend him $80,000,000 and in talking politicians into awarding him a $120,000,000 tax abatement.
Persuasion, hype and chutzpah thereafter defined the Trump style, welded to a scrupulous management technique.
In 1979, at the age of 33, he snapped up the Fifth Avenue site of the old Bonwit Teller for $20,000,000, won a $140,000,000 tax abatement and three years later finished Trump Tower, a 68-story dazzler that includes a six-story atrium and today draws 100,000 visitors daily, with residents such as Johnny Carson and Steven Spielberg.
Amassing a fortune his father never dreamed possible—a cash hoard of $900,000,000, a geyser of $50,000,000 a week from his hotel-casinos, assets thought to total 3.7 billion dollars—Trump soon became as captivated by mystique-making as by money-making.
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>Chief Judge James Boasberg
'' When someone tries to sucker-punch me, when they’re after my ass, I push back a hell of a lot harder than I was pushed in the first place.''
' Do you think George Bush is soft?
I like George Bush very much and support him and always will. But I disagree with him when he talks of a kinder, gentler America. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist. I think if we had people from the business community—the Carl Icahns, the Ross Perots—negotiating some of our foreign policy, we’d have respect around the world.'
What would President Trump’s position on crime be?
I see the values of this country in the way crime is tolerated, where people are virtually afraid to say “I want the death penalty.” Well, I want it. Where has this country gone when you’re not supposed to put in a grave the son of a bitch who robbed, beat, murdered and threw a ninety-year-old woman off the building? Where has this country gone?
What would be some of President Trump’s longer-term views of the future?
I think of the future, but I refuse to paint it. Anything can happen. But I often think of nuclear war.
And how would President Trump handle it?
He would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies; he’d have a huge military arsenal, perfect it, understand it. Part of the problem is that we’re defending some of the wealthiest countries in the world for nothing…. We’re being laughed at around the world, defending Japan—
Wait. If you believe that the public shares these views, and that you could do the job, why not consider running for President?
I’d do the job as well as or better than anyone else. It’s my hope that George Bush can do a great job.
You categorically don’t want to be President?
I don’t want to be President. I’m one hundred percent sure. I’d change my mind only if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes.
Sometimes you sound like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.
I don’t want the Presidency. I’m going to help a lot of people with my foundation—and for me, the grass isn’t always greener.
But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?
Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican—and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.