The Making of Donald Trump (16 page)

But Handros would not bow to intimidation. She posted the movie trailer online. After upwards of a million people people watched it, she updated the opening sequences for today’s voters. Then Handros put the entire film on YouTube, where a half million people watched the eighty-minute movie. She then made it available for rental or purchase on iTunes, hoping people might organize parties to show friends what Trump did not want them to know.

Trump stopped posing as John Baron after the Polish Brigade trial testimony and a screening of the suppressed documentary exposed his alternate identity to some New York journalists. He switched to the name John Miller. This deception also came to light, but that didn’t stop him from resurrecting John Miller during the 2016 presidential campaign.

T
he
unraveling of Trump’s John Miller deception began with an NBC
Today Show
report in late June 1991. The nationally televised morning program said Donald Trump had just dumped his longtime girlfriend, Marla Maples—a curvy blonde the tabloids called “Trump’s Georgia Peach”—and taken up with Carla Bruni, a sleek Italian model and singer. The story made the cover of the
New York Post
(a tabloid where Trump often planted items about his business successes), as well as the tabloid
Newsday
.

That major news organizations would report on the romances of a real estate developer is a testament to Trump’s success in creating public interest in his life, or at least those aspects he wanted covered: Trump the Modern Midas and Trump the Great Don Juan.

Sue Carswell, a reporter for
People
magazine new on the Trump beat, called the Trump Organization seeking an interview
with Trump. Minutes later she got a callback and turned on her tape recorder.

The caller identified himself as John Miller. He said he had just been hired to handle Donald Trump’s public relations because The Donald was too busy to return calls himself, given “the important, beautiful women who call him all the time.” He listed pop singer Madonna, actress Kim Basinger, and Carla Bruni specifically. For a freshly hired Trump publicist, Miller seemed exceptionally informed about his boss. He gave lengthy, detailed, and nuanced observations on Trump’s emotional state, his relationships with various women, and his eagerness to marry again.

Refuting the
Newsday
report that Trump had left his wife Ivana for his longtime mistress, Miller said that Trump “didn’t leave for Marla. He really left for himself. He didn’t leave for Marla. He never left for Marla. He was going to leave anyway. Marla was there, but he was going to leave anyway. So now he has somebody named Carla who is beautiful … Carla is a very beautiful woman from Italy whose father is one of the wealthiest men in Europe.”

Carswell asked for the name of the father. “Her father’s name is …” Miller paused, evidently realizing he didn’t know the father’s name. “Her name is Carla Bruni Fredesh,” he said. “I don’t know how to spell the last name.” It was spelled Tedeschi. The father Trump referred to (Alberto Bruni Tedeschi) is a classical music composer and scion of an old industrial family; Carla Bruni’s mother is a concert pianist.

Miller told Carswell that Bruni had a fling with guitarist Eric Clapton before starting “a big thing” with Mick Jagger, “and then she dropped Mick Jagger for Donald, and that’s where it is right now. And again he’s not making any commitments to Carla, just so you understand.”

Bruni later said that Trump had indeed called her a few days before the
People
interview.
She told Trump that her sister would be joining her in New York, and—according to author Harry Hurt III, in his book
Lost Tycoon
—Trump offered Bruni and her sister a room gratis at his Plaza Hotel across from Central Park. Bruni accepted the offer, even though, as she later said, she had no interest in a liaison with a man she referred to as “the King of Tacky.”

“
He’s living with Marla and he’s got three other girlfriends,” Miller continued, describing an intense competition to become the second Mrs. Donald J. Trump. “When he makes the decision, that will be a very lucky woman … competitively, it’s tough. It was for Marla and it will be for Carla.”

Carswell was not fooled. She knew almost immediately that John Miller was actually Trump. But before writing her account, Carswell played her tape recording for gossip columnist Cindy Adams. “That’s Donald,” Adams said.

Carswell’s
People
magazine story began in a most unusual way: “There are interesting stories, there are moving stories, and there are funny stories. And there are stories that are simply bizarre.”

After hearing the tape, Maples told
People
she was “shocked and devastated … I feel betrayed at the deepest level.” She added that she doubted Trump was with Bruni. “I think he’s making this whole thing up to get a playboy image,” she said.

Just days earlier, Maples had accompanied Trump to his birthday party in Atlantic City. She had been kept out of sight for years. Sometimes she appeared at public events, but always with a beard (a man posing as her boyfriend) to throw off suspicion that she and Trump were having an affair. This
was to be a triumphant night for a long-suffering mistress, her first public event with Trump as a couple, even though he was still married to Ivana.

On their way to the event, two miles away at the Trump Taj Mahal casino, Maples and Trump argued over whether his shirt was appropriately formal. They appeared happy at the party, but things must have devolved thereafter. The next morning, the doors to their twenty-sixth-floor suite at Trump’s Castle were off the hinges. Tom Fitzsimmons, a former boyfriend who often accompanied Maples to Trump events and who had come to accompany them to the airfield for the trip back to New York, found Maples in tears and Trump about to walk out the broken doorway. After Hurt reported the incident, I checked with my own sources, who confirmed the fight and said there had been other arguments that left physical evidence.

Just days after the Taj birthday party, NBC’s
Today Show
and the tabloids reported—without identifying their sources—that Trump had had it with Maples and had taken up with Carla Bruni. That set in motion the events that ended two weeks later (July 8, 1991) with
People
magazine outing Trump as John Miller. Carswell had caught “Donald Trump posing as a fictitious PR man” for himself. Soon after the article came out, Trump called Carswell and fessed up.

Three months later, Marla Maples appeared on
Designing Women
, a long-running CBS sitcom that often used humor to explore serious topics, in an episode called “Marriage Most Foul.” The plot was about men who were dishonest in business, two-timed their women, and were underendowed. Maples appeared on screen as herself, and the show’s regular characters asked her a series of obvious questions. One was whether it was true, what Maples was quoted as saying in the
New York
Post
. On February 16, 1990, Trump’s grinning face filled the
Post
cover next to what Maples had supposedly told her real-life girlfriends: “Best Sex I Ever Had.” Not true and never said it, Maples answered, looking directly into the camera as the actresses discussed in mock shock that a newspaper would ballyhoo a made-up story.
Designing Women
being entertainment, not journalism, it may be that Maples was just kidding.

The episode ended with actress Dixie Carter’s character phoning Trump: “Hello? Mr. Trump? I hope I’m not disturbing you. I’m just calling you to say—on behalf of the American public—Mr. Trump, we no longer care
who
you date, we really don’t. You are no longer obligated to alert the news media every time your pants are on fire because
we don’t care
.”

More than two years after that episode aired, the competition to pick the next Mrs. Donald J. Trump ended. The winner was Marla Maples, the long-suffering mistress Trump had publicly humiliated more than once, and the only woman on John Miller’s list who had actually slept with Trump. Two months before the wedding, she gave birth to Trump’s second daughter, whose future breast size Trump would speculate about on national television before the baby was a year old.

Years later, Trump was handed an opportunity to clear up the matter. Instead, he revived the myth that he had had an affair with Bruni. It happened during one of Trump’s many guest appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show. Stern, his cohosts, and his guests engage in crude sexual banter, try to encourage women guests to show their breasts, and debate whether they are aroused or turned off by various women in the news.

In 2008, soon after French president Nikolai Sarkozy left
his wife to marry Carla Bruni, making her first lady of France, Stern asked Trump on-air about why he was no longer with Bruni. Instead of acknowledging that they had never been together, Trump replied that Bruni was a “very flat-chested woman, not your kind of woman, Howard.” Trump disparaged Bruni’s bra size as “smaller than A cup—minus A.”

Stern asked if it was true that Bruni had broken up his romance with Marla Maples. “Not true,” Trump responded.

Stern pressed. “Did you date her?”

“May I say no comment,” Trump said, laughing.

Stern pressed further. “Did you date her?”

“Can I say no comment? Let me just say no comment, I’m trying to be a diplomat for this country. As a great diplomat, Howard, as a great diplomat for this country, let me just say no comment.”

“I don’t understand something,” Stern said, referring to a photo he was eyeing of Bruni in a bikini. Stern called her “magnificent” and asked Trump, “Is she not that hot?”

“Well, let’s say that there are better … there are better by large margins,” Trump said.

Stern continued, “Why would Donald Trump stop banging Carla Bruni? She looks magnificent in this picture.”

“Well, you stop her, when you meet somebody better … it’s a complicated thing. But I know Carla, and, um, but I just don’t want to comment …”

“Was she bad in bed?” Stern asked.

“I can’t comment on that,” Trump said.

Stern asked why, giving Trump a perfect opportunity to come clean and be diplomatic at the same time. Instead, Trump said, “She’s gonna marry the president of France. I want to have good relationships with France, right. I don’t want to be criticizing the first lady of France.”

When Stern suggested this might have to do with Trump planning to erect some building in France, Trump, as he often does in interviews, picked up what the interviewer said and suggested that it had some truth to it.

Stern continued to ask what it was like to have sex with Bruni.

“I know her, I know her well,” Trump said, again implying they had been lovers, “but I can’t comment on that ‘cause I want to have good relationships with the wonderful country of France.”

Trump never told the simple truth that he had never done more than talk to Bruni. He did not disclose that she had denounced him to his face, as Hurt and others reported, for planting stories about their nonexistent relationship.

“
Trump is obviously a lunatic,” Bruni told the
Daily Mail
, a London newspaper, a few months later. “It’s so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all.”

The reasons Trump was not forthright and candid are, ultimately, known only to Trump. But the
Howard Stern Show
was not his last opportunity to come clean about his use of fake identities to create the impression that the world’s most desirable women were banging on his bedroom door. The next time he was presented with a chance to set the record straight, Trump chose to tell a whopper on national television. This time, it served a very specific purpose: to advance his pursuit of the Oval Office.

D
onald Trump relies on two core strategies to manage the public image he has spent decades creating, polishing, and selling.

In the first, he exploits a common weakness of news reporting: the recitation of “facts” without analysis of that which goes unsaid. Trump often threatens to sue journalists, ensuring caution from publishers and broadcasters who want to avoid a costly lawsuit—even one Trump cannot win. This tends to discourage investigation beyond the official talking points.

Trump spent two years suing author Tim O’Brien and his publisher for writing that his net worth was probably not in the billions, but rather the hundreds of millions. After a court dismissed the case, Trump made it clear that he merely wanted to harass O’Brien, not necessarily win damages. “
I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,”
Trump bragged. It was a comment that fit cozily within his philosophy of revenge.

In his second core strategy, Trump distorts information, contradicts himself, and blocks inquiries into his conduct by journalists, law enforcement, business regulators, and other people’s lawyers. Again, the record shows decades of Trump’s skill in pursuing this strategy successfully.

Trump put both strategies to work in the days after he became the presumptive Republican nominee for president, after his last two primary opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out in early May 2016.

On a
Friday morning, Trump called NBC’s
Today Show
. A quarter century earlier,
Today
had reported Trump’s imagined affair with Carla Bruni as fact, based on a story that Trump himself had planted under a different name. With Trump as the presumptive nominee, that tactic was back in the news. The day before the
Today Show
call,
The Washington Post
had published a story about Trump posing as men named John Baron and John Miller. On its website, the newspaper posted a 1991 tape recording of Miller speaking to
People
magazine’s Sue Carswell.

“Is it you [on the tape]?”
Today
host Savannah Guthrie asked.

“
No, I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time,” Trump answered.