Me and Donald Trump
I tell a story in Episode 8 about getting assigned, in the summer of 1988, to go downtown to where Donald Trump had his big stupid boat docked and interview him about the thing, which he had recently bought because it was the latest shiny bauble to drift across his eyeline.
Trump was at the time merely a megalomaniac real estate shyster, not the global figure he would eventually become. This is important to know, because when I tell people — as I tell Mat this week — that I met Donald Trump and had a chat with him on the upper deck of his big stupid boat, they generally want to know why I didn’t push him overboard and save us all a lot of trouble. As I explain in the episode, it wasn’t because I’m opposed to murder, although I am. (In most cases.) It was because I didn’t have a crystal ball to gaze into, one that would project an outcome which seemed plainly nuts at the end of the Eighties. Instead I did what I could, which was be mean about him and his big stupid boat in the pages of a widely-read national magazine.
I wish I could tell you I have a vivid sense memory of having met the future president. The truth is, I can’t. Which should tell you something: He struck me as a deeply unimpressive person — vain, silly and vapid. This was another reason to suspect that in the grand scheme of things the guy was going nowhere except, inevitably, to a grifter’s fate of bankruptcy and obscurity. He didn’t have anything surprising to say, or clever, or enlightening, about the boat or anything else. In fact he didn’t seem that interested in the boat, except as an avatar of his own magnificence. He didn’t even seem interested in the million-dollar view it afforded him of the New York City skyline — I remember him gazing out across it with the same flat, incurious look you or I would give a blank wall — until he realized that view included some average hardworking people who were inexplicably besotted with him. That, he was interested in. That got his attention. It should have gotten mine. But in the summer of 1988 the world of 2016 and beyond was as far away as Mars, and just as unknowable.
Here’s the story as it ran in Newsweek in July of 1988. (Click image to embiggen.)
/BB
(Note: Writers at Newsweek did not, as a rule, write their own headlines or subheads. For that reason I assume no responsibility for dubbing Trump “the world’s most bouyant billionaire,” a terrible bit of wordplay that made me gag then as it does now.)
