FROM CROFTER’S GRANDSON TO PRESIDENT
Bankruptcies, divorces and a reality TV star: The wheeler-dealer extraordinaire
What really stood out as I gazed around the scene at a $500-anight hilton hotel in Manhattan yesterday morning was the sea of red baseball caps. they seemed especially incongruous because the guests wearing them were dressed in expensive designer suits and cocktail dresses.
this was Donald trump’s victory party, and without those garish caps — sporting his ‘Make america great again’ slogan — it would have seemed unashamedly elitist (complete with beer at $10 a bottle and wine at $13 a glass).
But thanks to this all american headgear, typically worn by blue-collar workers, the hundreds of millions watching on tV could see that trump was showing solidarity with the army of disaffected voters who propelled his campaign to victory.
there was, of course, great irony about a man who inherited wealth and who often likes to boast about being ‘really, really rich’, claiming to be in touch with the millions of ordinary americans whose average wage has (shockingly) declined since 1999.
Yet throughout the long campaign, trump turned this potential weakness into an asset, branding himself the ‘true blue-collar billionaire [who] shows hillary Clinton is out of touch’.
During the Presidential debates, he even managed to present his apparent failure to pay income tax for 15 years as an electoral asset, rather than a liability, arguing that it ‘makes me smart’.
he built his campaign on a simple premise: his business acumen demonstrated exactly why he would be good at running the country. Close scrutiny of his affairs, though, leaves the extent of that famous acumen open to question.
What is certainly true is that trump has always possessed a genius for selfpromotion. For years, his name has been emblazoned in gold capital letters across hundreds of licensed products and ventures — not only hotels and golf courses but kitsch consumer products.
These include trump home Furnishings, a range of gaudy cushions and light fittings that help homeowners ‘ live the trump lifestyle’, and success By trump, an aftershave that ‘captures the spirit of the driven man’. his showbusiness career, which peaked when he presented the apprentice in the U.s. from 2003 to 2015, helps drive the brands. It includes 30 years of cameo appearances in movies including home alone 2 and the fashion satire Zoolander.
Yet behind the bravado and celebrity status, he has also presided over a succession of failures.
they include a mortgage company, luxury holiday provider, airline and brand of steaks sold on the shopping channel QVC with a sales pitch in which trump declared: ‘Believe me, I understand steaks. It’s my favourite food!’
a former butler revealed trump eats them so well done they ‘would rock on the plate’.
the failed enterprises also include trump University, a collapsed business school that purported to train students in how to make millions from property investments. several former students, some of whom lost their life savings, are due to take trump to court next month.
as a property investor, his track record has been similarly mixed. a timeshare venture that bore his name in Baja California in Mexico went bust in 2009, leaving investors $32 million out of pocket (trump settled a lawsuit from them in 2013). and casinos in atlantic City, New Jersey, have collapsed on no fewer than four occasions.
his property career stretches back to childhood. he was born in 1946, one of five children of Fred, a self-made property developer, and Mary, a crofter’s daughter from the Isle of Lewis, who emigrated to New York in 1930.
trump’s father was a somewhat shady figure who had been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927 and made a fortune in the postwar