The Making of Donald Trump (17 page)
Neither aspect of that response was true.
First, Trump had long since confirmed to
People
magazine that he had been posing as John Miller when he planted the Bruni story. Second, even if the accusation were false, it was simply not credible that Trump was hearing about the existence of the tape for the first time from Guthrie. In fact,
The
Washington Post
had asked him about it before publishing its story the day before. Other news organizations were all over it immediately.
Trump carefully follows news about himself, sometimes even recognizing the bylines of reporters in distant cities. When John Rebchook of the
Rocky Mountain News
introduced himself to Trump after his 2005 Colorado speech recommending revenge as a core business strategy, for example, Trump praised some of Rebchook’s past articles about proposed Trump developments in Denver.
The Washington Post
’s article about planted news was not news to Trump.
After his false statement to Guthrie, Trump continued: “It doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and you can imagine that. And this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams.”
Guthrie did not pursue what Trump meant about “many scams.” Instead, she asked whether using a fake name “is something you did rather routinely, that you would call reporters and plant stories and say either you were John Miller or John Baron, but in fact it was actually you on the phone. Is that something you did with any regularity?”
“
No
,
and it was not me on the phone—it was not me on the phone. And it doesn’t sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that, and it was not me on the phone,” Trump said.
Hours later, Katrina Pierson, a Trump campaign spokesperson, appeared on CNN. “It sounds like a great impersonation,” Pierson said, “but it’s definitely not Mr. Trump.”
This particular deception fits into the long pattern of the way Trump conducts himself. He even revealed part of the purpose when speaking to Guthrie, though she did not catch on, as we are about to see.
• • •
Some people argue with the question posed to them, as Bill Clinton infamously did when he said under oath: “It depends on what your definition of is
is
.” Others veer off on verbal tangents, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction. Some celebrities arrange to talk to the cameras outside a hearing room just as the main witness against them is about to speak. Some say they need to check their records before answering. And many people use the one catchall that usually cannot be disproved:
I don’t recall
. That
last option would seem unavailable to Trump, since he declared in October that he enjoys “the world’s greatest memory.”
Trump’s emphatic
Today Show
denials left no escape hatch. There was no equivocation, no request for time to check the record, no hint of faded memory. His flat-out denials contradicted what
People
magazine published in 1991, as well as his 1990 Polish Brigade trial testimony, where, when asked about posing as John Baron, Trump testified, “I believe I used that name on occasion.”
So what would prompt Trump to deny the allegation on the
Today Show
call? Surely he must have realized that he’d be caught. This was not like his 2008 comments to Howard Stern, whose audience demographics do not encompass the typical fact-checker. Trump lied to Guthrie while on the cusp of becoming the GOP nominee for president, when his every public word would be captured and closely scrutinized.
A classic public relations strategy is to confront damaging information by getting it out fully and fast so you can put it behind you. To this end, defense lawyers often leak damaging information about their clients to reporters months before a jury will hear the case, sowing uncertainty about guilt in the prospective jury pool in the meantime.
The success of Trump’s strategy was illustrated that very
day on
CBS Evening News
with Scott Pelley. “Some mysterious audio tapes surfaced today,” the anchor said, playing the snippet about Trump living with Marla Maples and keeping three women on the side. “Is that Donald Trump pretending to be someone else?” While CBS reporter Chip Reid noted that Trump had acknowledged being John Miller in 1991, Pelley did Trump the favor of converting a matter of clear fact into a matter fraught with doubt. Turning hard fact into
who knows?
is one of the most effective strategies for blunting bad news, as public relations executives have advised clients for decades.
On the
Today Show
,
Trump employed another of his strategies for deflecting inquiry into his past, chastising Guthrie for even asking about the tape recording. “And when was this, twenty-five years ago?” Trump said. This is where Guthrie did not grasp what Trump was up to. “You mean you are going so low as to talk about something that took place twenty-five years ago about whether I made a phone call … Let’s get on to more current subjects.”
Trump does not want reporters telling people, especially voters, about anything in his past that does not add a sheen to his marketing image. On the campaign trail, Trump dismisses questions about his past as beneath the dignity of journalists, even as he raises decades-old issues about the conduct of his Democratic opponent’s husband.
A few weeks before the
Today Show
call, Trump called me at home. He said my questions about his seeking leniency for the drug trafficker who managed his helicopters were so outdated that he didn’t remember anything. He then threatened to sue me if he didn’t like what I wrote.
Together, these strategies—muddying the facts and deflecting inquiries into past conduct—help ensure that Trump’s carefully crafted public persona will not be unmade. He will
not suffer the curtain to be pulled back to reveal a man who tricked society into thinking he was all wise and all powerful.
Trump’s comments to Guthrie also raise another question: who gave
The Washington Post
that 1991 tape recording? The newspaper said a condition of obtaining the tape was promising never to reveal its source.
Sue Carswell, the only other voice on the tape, told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Trump had to be the source.
Had Carswell wanted to make news, she could have sold a piece with her byline about the 1991 interview and Trump’s subsequent confession that he was Miller. Kelly asked Carswell what explanation Trump had offered her in his confession that he was John Miller. “He had no explanation,” Carswell said. “He just moved the conversations along.” She added that Trump then proposed that he, herself, Maples, and a
People
editor go out, which they did.
That Trump might put out a tape and then deny his own voice may seem beyond belief to many people, or at least like something a reporter could benefit from making up. But it makes perfect sense to journalists who are accustomed to publicists dishing on clients or defense lawyers revealing troubling information about defendants. That’s the strategy: get bad news out, muddle it, and hope people do not get a clear appreciation of the facts.
One more telling detail shows that Trump was not honest when he spoke to Guthrie on the
Today Show. The Washington Post
explicitly asked Trump about the John Miller episode just before publishing its report. “The phone went silent, then dead,” the newspaper reported. “When the reporters called back and reached Trump’s secretary, she said, ‘I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.’ ”
Trump has stymied many journalists (and some law enforcement investigations) in his career, but sowing doubt and threatening litigation are not his only strategies to manage his image and puff up his credentials. Trump has also accepted awards—many awards—that he gave to himself, with help from a friend with a criminal past.
T
rump
International Golf Links, a breathtaking seaside course in Aberdeen, Scotland, advertises itself as “the world’s greatest golf course.” That boastful description does not come from Trump. Not exactly, anyway. When the links opened on the treeless dunes in 2013, the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences bestowed the honor in a ceremony near a windswept tee. Trump, wearing a red baseball cap, khakis, and a windbreaker, grinned as he posed with academy president Joseph Cinque, who wore a blue suit for the occasion. The two men held aloft a gaudy, gold-colored plaque declaring that the Trump links was the only golf course in the sport’s country of origin to be awarded the coveted Six Star Diamond Award.
The American Academy of Hospitality Sciences holds its honors in very high esteem, calling its Star Diamond awards “the most prestigious emblem of achievement and true quality in the world today.” At the
2014 Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve
party, Cinque presented Trump with the academy’s lifetime achievement award, evidently the only time the academy has selected someone for this distinction. In all, the Academy has bestowed at least nineteen of its five- and six-star Diamond Awards on Trump golf courses, Trump Tower, a Trump restaurant, the Trump Taj Mahal casino hotel, and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Citing them as stamps of the finest quality, Trump uses these “very prestigious, coveted” awards to encourage people to spend their money at his resorts.
But these awards are not nearly as hard to win as even a single star in the Michelin guides or a strong rating from Zagat. Michelin, the French tire company, employs teams of undercover restaurant inspectors whose identity is concealed even from top company executives. Michelin awards are so highly coveted that chefs who manage to attain three stars are said to have contemplated suicide at the prospect of being reduced to just two. One star alone can result in a restaurant booking all its tables months in advance. The American Zagat guides, meanwhile, gather the impressions of thousands of diners to evaluate the quality of restaurants, hotels, cabarets, and even golf courses.
The American Academy of Hospitality Services employs neither secret hospitality investigators nor popular opinion. Instead, the American Academy of Hospitality Services awards are chosen, according to the academy itself, by its board of trustees.
For years, those trustees included none other than Donald J. Trump, who held the title “Ambassador Extraordinaire.” Trump’s distinctive signature appears on the academy’s plaques alongside that of president Joseph Cinque. In Aberdeen, Trump was accepting an award from a board on which he was a member.
The ties between Trump’s organization and the academy
that finds his properties and his person so worthy of accolades run deep. A
majority of the trustees bestowing these awards on Trump and his properties were Trump’s employees, friends, or retainers. Recent trustees include Ivanka, Trump’s oldest daughter, and his son Donald Jr. There’s also the chief operating officer of the Trump Organization, Matthew Calamari, and the general manager of Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey—which itself received a five star Diamond Award from the academy.
Another trustee was Anthony Senecal, Trump’s longtime butler and recent historian at Mar-a-Lago, who posted on his Facebook page in 2016 that “pus headed” President Obama “should be hung for treason” and that President Trump would “put an end to the corruption in government !!!”
Senecal, decked out in formal butler attire, including a bowler hat, proudly posed for a picture pointing his umbrella at one of the Diamond Awards given to the Florida resort at which he works.
In his role as ambassador extraordinaire, Trump also bestowed awards. With Cinque at his side, Trump gave Knicks basketball forward Amar’e Stoudemire a framed, gold-looking plaque in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in 2010. The award bore the engraved signatures of both Trump and Cinque. In a 2009 video tribute, Trump praised Cinque, saying, “There’s nobody like him—he’s a special guy.” The year before that, Cinque was one of the judges at the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant.
Beyond having a board stacked with trustees that no one could call objective, another unusual aspect of the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences is its president’s career in the hospitality industry. He has none.
• • •
Cinque is known by other names. One is “Joey No Socks.” Another is “The Preppy Don.” If those sound like names that might be associated with a figure involved in organized crime, it’s because they are. New York police with a search warrant knocked on the door of Cinque’s Park Avenue South apartment in 1989. Cinque declined to let them in. The police applied a battering ram. Inside the apartment they found a trove of stolen art, including two Marc Chagall prints valued at $40,000. They had been taken in an art gallery heist. Cinque made a deal to plead to a misdemeanor, but prosecutors scrapped the plea bargain after Cinque was seen talking to John Gotti, the “dapper don” who became head of the Gambino crime family by arranging the murder of his predecessor, Paul Castellano—one of the secret owners of the company that supplied concrete for many Trump buildings.
Gotti told Cinque that he would “take care of the DA,” an apparent reference to Anne Heyman, the prosecutor who had offered the plea bargain. Writer John Connolly, a former New York City police detective who wrote many revealing articles about Trump, mobsters, and corruption in high places, broke this story in
New York Magazine
in 1995.
Heyman ordered a more thorough investigation of Cinque. She alleged that the investigation showed that Cinque “was dealing drugs out of his apartment and fencing stolen artwork.” Heyman also said that Cinque’s apartment on Central Park South appeared to be a retail outlet for stolen clothing, including Armani suits and silk shirts. In 1990, Cinque pleaded guilty to a felony: receiving stolen property.
Cinque described himself very differently in an interview with Connolly, an interview in which he channeled Trump. He bragged about his prowess with women and described his rich new friends. Cinque admitted that he had associated with
“the wise guys” in his salad days in what he called “the wholesale used-car business,” but said he gave that up after he took three bullets as the victim of a robbery. Cinque lifted his shirt to show off his scars. The police suspected the scars came from a failed mob hit. Cinque said that experience changed his life. He decided to go uptown and hang out with “Muffy, Buffy, and Biff … These trust-fund preppies need someone like me to keep them out of trouble.” Hence the moniker “The Preppy Don.”