was that truth could be drowned out by counterclaims and legal threats, and that the Justice Department wasn’t to be treated as an enforcer of enlightened laws or stalwart of American democracy. Sometimes it was the enemy, and you fought it.
EVIDENCE OF RACIAL ANIMOSITY WOULD CONTINUE TO FLARE UP throughout Trump’s career, and he would establish himself as the most xenophobic mainstream presidential candidate in recent history. The United States, he said, had become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He directed a stream of vitriol at America’s southern neighbor. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” That Trump’s buildings existed largely because of the labors of thousands of immigrants seemed irrelevant to him.
“He used to say, ‘Donald, don’t go into Manhattan. That’s the big leagues,’” Trump said of his father in his announcement speech. “I said, ‘I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings.’” With his father’s financial backing, Trump was able to take that leap. In 1975, he embarked on his first big deal, reaching an agreement with the Hyatt chain to acquire a tired 1919 hotel, the Commodore, in midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal, and transform it into a gleaming Grand Hyatt. It was a springboard to all the deals that followed.
In the ensuing decades, the deals got bigger and Trump got richer, but six times his companies entered bankruptcy, including after his misguided acquisitions of Atlantic City casinos, a luxury airline, and the legendary Plaza hotel. Debts and real estate reversals cost him access to conventional capital, as leading financial institutions increasingly refused to lend to him. In the late 1990s Trump was forced to turn to less discriminating sources of funds, most prominently Deutsche Bank. The German firm—Europe’s largest investment bank—had embarked on a major expansion into real estate lending and faced mounting suspicion that it was allowing itself to serve as a conduit of illicit cash for Russian oligarchs. Trump’s financial disclosures during the election showed he owed $360 million to Deutsche Bank, which by then was under multiple investigations for money-laundering schemes and massive mortgage-related fraud. Three days before Trump was sworn in as president, Deutsche Bank reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the Justice Department.4
Trump had always borrowed heavily in building his empire, calling himself the “King of Debt.” It was a common strategy in real estate development, using others’ money to reduce risk and multiply buying power, launching more and larger projects in the hope of collecting commensurate rewards. “He always used other people’s money, not cash,” said Barbara Res, who was a senior executive for Trump in the 1980s. “He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he put up the brilliance.”5
Then in the mid-2000s, he abruptly changed course. The Trump Organization went from being a builder of high-end real estate, one that acquired properties and oversaw construction, to a licensing operation that took hefty fees from other developers for permission to affix the Trump logo on their hotels and condos. The king of debt also went on an inexplicable cash-spending binge, buying instead of building. In the nine years before running for president, he spent more than $400 million in cash on an assortment of properties, including a $12.6 million estate in Scotland, several homes in Beverly Hills, and $79.7 million for golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.6 He then plowed more millions into renovating and maintaining these properties, often, curiously, at a substantial loss.
A private company, the Trump Organization provided no explanation for how it had emerged from such financial peril in position to spend such sums. Trump “had incredible cash flow and built incredible wealth,” his son Eric said. “He didn’t need to think about borrowing for every transaction … It’s a very nice luxury to have.”
The shift toward licensing revenue was propelled by an unexpected break. In 2002, Trump was approached by the producer of the Survivor series on CBS to take part in a new reality show dubbed The Apprentice. Trump saw the tremendous promotional potential. (“My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he said.7) Trump began slapping his brand on a motley array of products, including menswear, steaks, vodka, and get-rich-quick classes at Trump University that would end in yet another class action lawsuit.
Even as his business evolved, Trump still saw himself as a real estate tycoon. His search for partners willing to pay millions merely for the use of the Trump brand—while shielding the American mogul from virtually all the financial risk—led him far from Manhattan into murky overseas terrain. Trump-branded projects in Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, Brazil, and Indonesia put the future president in business with multiple individuals and companies suspected of money laundering, political corruption, and other categories of fraud.8
Russia had drawn Trump’s attention for decades. He pursued numerous deals to build a skyscraper in Moscow, starting in 1987 when he traveled to Russia to survey potential sites as part of a proposed partnership with the Soviet government.9 He tried again in 1996, announcing plans for a $250 million “Trump International” complex, and several times more in the ensuing decade.
None of those projects materialized. But while Trump could never gain a foothold in Moscow, Russian money began flowing out of the country and finding him. Endemic corruption under Putin had created an entire class of kleptocrats, loyalists enriched by the diversion of money extracted from the country’s oil and mineral wealth as well as other formerly state-owned assets. Many sought to move their mounds of currency overseas in case the Kremlin sought to grab them back, and money began surging into Trump’s portfolio.
In the United States, Trump-branded properties were increasingly sustained by an influx of cash from questionable foreign sources. His children Donald Jr. and Ivanka came under investigation for their promotional claims and the financing surrounding a forty-six-story condo hotel in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood built with substantial backing from investors from the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of condos at Trump-branded beachfront towers in South Florida were purchased by limited liability corporations—entities that mask the true owners’ identities, a perfectly legal arrangement but one that can conveniently be used to hide the conversion of illicit cash into Western assets. Among the buyers who did disclose their identities, at least five dozen had Russian addresses or passports. All told, they spent a combined $98.4 million on sixty-three condos.10 In 2008, the future president sold a Palm Beach estate to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, just four years after buying it for $41 million. His son Donald Trump Jr. said that same year that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.”
These dim corners of Trump’s empire mostly escaped the attention of a public captivated by the blinding glare of his brand. His rambling announcement speech was widely ridiculed by political experts as proof that his campaign was just another vanity project, that Trump wasn’t even making any pretense to be a serious candidate. But away from Manhattan and the Beltway, voters saw a Midas who might be able to transform a troubled American landscape. With their budding adulation, Trump began planning to take possession of a more prestigious piece of real estate: the White House.
Trump made only passing reference to Russia in his 2015 announcement speech, though months later he was secretly pursuing yet another potential deal to build “Trump Tower Moscow.” The project was spearheaded by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a Russian-born associate, Felix Sater, who had an office in Trump Tower and carried Trump-branded business cards. (Sater had spent time in prison for stabbing a man and had separately been convicted of fraud. Aiming to reduce his sentence, he became an FBI informant.)
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen in an email touting the project.
ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR LATER, TRUMP TOWER WAS THE SETTING for a far smaller gathering
