The story of their transactional relationship offers a window on rarefied New York.
The
sensational, spidery plot of the most gripping game of thrones in
modern history is best captured by two images. The first is from Donald
J. Trump’s extravagant third wedding at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2005:
The junior senator from New York, glowing in gold silk and pearls,
smiles up at the mogul in white tie with genuine delight as he says
something that cracks up Hillary, Bill and Trump’s bejeweled bride,
Melania. Donald and Hillary look “just like teenagers in love” in the
flashbulb moment, as David Patrick Columbia, the editor of the website New York Social Diary,
notes dryly. The second, more sinister image is from the St. Louis
presidential debate last month: A Tang-colored Trump looms behind
Hillary like a horror-movie fiend as she makes a point, while three of
Trump’s guests in the front row, women who accused Bill of sexual
assault, give her the stink eye and Chelsea and Bill sit nearby looking
grim. What a difference a decade makes: from a Babylonian celebration,
with Hillary and Bill cozying up to Donald, to a seething face-off, with
Donald summoning ghosts from Bill’s scandalous past and threatening to
throw Hillary in the clink if he’s elected.
We
are in the final days of the first presidential contest between two New
Yorkers in 72 years, since Thomas Dewey ran against Franklin D.
Roosevelt: The 42-year-old Republican governor of New York used a
Trump-style attack on the 62-year-old Democratic president, calling him
“a tired old man.” On election night, the party and the wake will both
be held in Manhattan. Hillary will hold hers at the Javits Convention
Center, with its literal glass ceiling and, as The Times’s campaign
reporter Maggie Haberman noted, an air of trolling: Back in the late
1970s, Trump wanted to build the center and slap the Trump name on it,
but the city refused.
In
this historically dreadful and mesmerizing election, which could lead
to the death of the Republican Party and the ideological makeover of the
Democratic Party, the New York aspect has been largely overshadowed.
Only Lin-Manuel Miranda made a point of highlighting it, on “Saturday
Night Live,” urging people to take their minds off the crazy election by
coming to “Hamilton”: “It’s about two famous New York politicians
locked in a dirty, ugly, mudslinging political campaign. Escapism!”
In
the “single compact arena” of New York, E.B. White wrote, a gladiator
and a promoter can come together in a city vibrating with great
undertakings. “These two names, for the last two or three decades,
represent what has been incredible and vulgar about this country at the
same time,” says the Manhattan ad man and television personality Donny
Deutsch. “We can trace our downfalls or upticks as a society through
them.” The story of how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton rose and
reinvented themselves and embraced and brawled is the story of New York
itself. It is a tale of power, influence, class, society and ambition
that might have intrigued Edith Wharton, whose family once owned a grand
home down the block from what is now Trump Tower.
The Clintons started
their move to New York from Washington in 2000, so Hillary could pursue
her bid for the United States Senate and fly on her own after the
Monica Lewinsky scandal. She had never lived in New York, but
carpetbagging was no sin to cosmopolitan New Yorkers, who embraced Bobby
Kennedy when he decamped from Massachusetts and suburban Washington in
1964, so she looked North to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate seat.
When
they arrived, the Clintons found a lot of raw nerve endings among the
moneyed elite, who were bitterly divided following Bush v. Gore.
Although wealthy Democrats and Republicans in New York have largely
united around Hillary this time, business executives were more
suspicious of Gore than they were of the Clintons. In those days,
Democrats were complaining that the election had been stolen from them,
and Republicans were whinging that it had almost been stolen from them.
Hillary
knew she should not be seen as a Manhattan insider, so just as Bobby
chose Long Island as his base, she chose Westchester. She recast herself
as a Yankees-loving New Yorker in the city and a Chicago-born daughter
of the Great Lakes when she campaigned upstate. New York — and being a
senator in the horrific aftermath of 9/11 — would change Hillary. “It
toughened her up,” says Senator Charles Schumer of New York. “She’s
harder-nosed about things. Life did that, but New York did, too.”
Bill
also needed a reinvention. After the impeachment and the Marc Rich
pardon, he was in bad odor. He had to abandon plans to rent lavish
offices for their foundation in Carnegie Hall Tower for almost $800,000 a
year after critics pounced. He moved instead into offices in Harlem for
$210,000 a year. The mulligan-loving ex-president was snubbed by four
of the prestigious Westchester County golf clubs he reportedly tried to
join. As Trump marveled to me at the time: “Now Clinton can’t get into
golf clubs in Westchester. A former president begging to get in a golf
club. It’s unthinkable.” Bill started an elaborate campaign to improve
his image, making speeches at colleges and enlisting former cabinet
members and other surrogates to talk up his legacy. Once Bill moved up
in public estimation, he moved downtown with the foundation.
With
Hillary’s Senate bid underway, the Clintons held out their tin cup.
They had been fund-raising in the city nonstop since 1990, but the asks
intensified as they started their foundation in 2001 and rubbed
shoulders with all the new wealth on Wall Street, which was driven by
hedge funds and technology funds. With book deals and lucrative speeches
and Bill’s role as an adviser to Ronald Burkle’s private-equity firm,
Yucaipa, the Clintons worked their way out of the debt accrued by legal
bills from a cascade of federal investigations to earn an estimated $230
million in the next 15 years.
As
the Clintons fashioned a new life in New York, Trump was transforming
himself as well — from a risk-taking developer facing bankruptcy to a
low-risk licenser of his name for other people’s projects, from a brazen
builder to a gilded reality-TV star on “The Apprentice.” He had come
out of Queens, a pushy New York kid with family money but no social
tools to climb the society ladder. “Even stuck out on Avenue Z, his head
was always in Manhattan,” says Wayne Barrett, author of the biography
“Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.” Gwenda Blair, author of “The
Trumps,” says Trump, resplendent in the ’70s in his three-piece burgundy
suit with matching shoes and matching limo, recalled “this strapping
lad from the provinces who comes to the city, like a figure out of
Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions.’ ”
The
New York society scene was set by the Rockefellers and the Astors with a
tradition of civility, philanthropy and the arts at its heart. Even
those who make money the rough way — especially them — adopt this
genteel facade. Michael Bloomberg is the quintessential emblem of this
model and Donald Trump is the quintessential raspberry to it. One top
New York foundation official who requested anonymity — many people will
only speak anonymously about the Trumps and the Clintons, because both
clans are known to be vindictive — notes that “in the community of
plutocrats and superachievers who come to New York, Donald Trump is seen
as persona non grata. He’s not a civic leader.” New York, this person
says, is a place where private-equity C.E.O.s like Henry Kravis and
Stephen Schwarzman see themselves making commitments to the public good.
Their status doesn’t come only from being in charge of powerful
corporations. “It also comes from some attachment to a hospital or
university or cultural center. Trump was never part of that ecosystem.”
When the tightfisted Trump hosts a charity event for veterans or a
charity golf tournament, it is dismissed as something to polish the
Trump brand. Trump has turned off many people in the worlds of real
estate, banking and law with his strong-arming, fee-shaving or stiffing,
bankruptcies and litigiousness. “Most real estate guys won’t go near
him,” a leading New York financial executive says. “You lie down with
dogs, you get up with fleas.”
Trump
thumps his chest about money, acting as if he’s Bloomberg-wealthy,
while the Clintons pretend they have less than they do. Trump wants to
belong, to get more legitimacy by elbowing his way into the power crowd,
while the Clintons passed that threshold of belonging after two terms
in the White House. A top media mogul dismisses all three as outsiders:
“No one here thinks of the Clintons as New Yorkers, and Donald is a
bridge-and-tunnel person. He’s always been a poseur in New York.”
Trump realized that
golf was his entree if he wanted to pal around with Bill Clinton, whom
he considered a kindred spirit in some ways — a great man who attracted
jealous haters. “Bill is kind of Trump with a dictionary,” one author
who has written about New York real estate says. Trump had been
obsequious in trying to lure Ronald and Nancy Reagan to his business
empire, and tried just as hard with the Clintons. He happened to have
his own country club with a golf course in Westchester, which he bought
out of foreclosure in the late 1990s. He closed the club in 1999 to
redevelop it from top to bottom and reopened it as Trump National Golf
Club in 2002. It was six miles from the Clintons’ house, and Trump could
play with him, ingratiating himself further by hanging photos of Bill
on the wall. As of June, Bill still had a locker at Trump’s golf club.
Trump
once told me that he rebuilt the club, in part, because he knew Bill
Clinton would need a place to play. As Don Van Natta Jr., an ESPN senior
writer, wrote in his book about presidents and golf, “First Off the
Tee,” Trump enjoyed playing with the ex-president. “He’s got a lot of
golf talent, but he really likes those mulligans,” Trump told Van Natta.
“If he misses a shot, he wants to take another crack at it. It’s like
life.”
Trump
greased the wheels of his relationship with the ex-president and the
senator, giving the Clinton Foundation a $100,000 gift from his own
foundation. According to “Trump Revealed,” by Michael Kranish and Marc
Fisher, Trump donated to Hillary’s Senate war chest six times between
2002 and 2009, for a total of $4,700, and between 1999 and 2012, he
switched his registration among the Republican, Democratic and
Independence parties seven times.
The
friendship, on both sides, was a transaction. Not personal, as they say
in the “The Godfather” — just business. Trump’s life in New York was
all about promoting the brand and making money for the family business.
It was the same for the Clintons. A former Clinton White House official
puts it more bluntly: “This was a classic Clinton go-where-the-money-is
move.”
“They
all played the same game in the same town with the same thing in mind,”
says Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who
was invited to Trump’s third wedding and served prison time for tax
fraud and other felony charges. “Better your relationships and build the
business. It’s all about money and getting ahead and hedging your bets
and playing the angles.”
Trump
wasn’t on the dinner-party circuit. He lived in a narrow alternate
universe called Trumpworld, and his favorite way to spend the evening
was ordering a steak or cheeseburger (well done) from Fresco by Scotto,
eating quickly and watching a sporting event on TV. “Trumpworld is a
world he weaves for his own needs and desires, depending on what they
are and when they are,” says Louise Sunshine, a former Trump
Organization vice president, noting that Clintonworld is much broader
and more global.
Though
the Clintons might show up at some events and galas and friends’
birthday parties, they were never really around enough to become part of
the society dinner-party circuit, either. When I asked Trump last
summer to describe his relationship with the Clintons, he was neutral:
“As a businessman, you have to get along with all politicians,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say it was a close relationship.”
Hillary
presents the trip to Trump’s wedding as a lark. “The dates worked,” a
friend says. But some of her aides expressed surprise that she was going
to such a gaudy affair; they believed Hillary rearranged her schedule
because she thought Trump was a more important donor than he was.
The
senator and former president beamed in pictures, mingling with the
starry crowd, which included Heidi Klum, Barbara Walters, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Sean Combs, Usher, Steve Wynn, Derek Jeter, Don King,
Simon Cowell, Gayle King, Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, who got in
trouble for her enterprising move of bringing a purse-cam. Paul Anka,
Billy Joel, Elton John and Tony Bennett all performed.
André
Leon Talley attended with Anna Wintour because the bride was going to
be featured on the cover of Vogue, where he was then American editor at
large. He had flown to Paris to shop with Melania for the dress — she
chose a John Galliano for Dior strapless gown worth $230,000 and a Vera
Wang cocktail dress to change into later — and he was “on duty” at the
wedding and the reception paying attention to the “birthday cake of a
dress” when Melania “was walking around or dancing.” He calls Melania
“the most silky, well moisturized, meticulously groomed woman” he has
ever known, adding that “dehydrated skin is so unattractive.”
Trump
was a reality-show star now, starting his third hit season of “The
Apprentice” on NBC. Just as his taste in his apartment at Trump Tower
was “like Louis XIV dropped acid,” as Timothy O’Brien, author of
“TrumpNation,” describes it, so was his third wedding straight-up
Versailles. “This was a man building a ballroom for his trophy wife,”
Talley said. “It was Baroque, the way he loves it. The marble was flown
in from Italy, and the ceiling was like a palace, all gold, painted by
artisans flown in from France. He had a full-on live symphony
orchestra.”
David
Patrick Columbia, the society editor, asserts that the Clintons were
another accouterment: “Donald liked the fact that the Clintons were
there because it was just another affirmation of who he had become in
his life, a successful person. That’s what matters to him.”
Perhaps the collision
of Donald Trump and the Clintons on the biggest stage of all was
inevitable. But was it orchestrated? At the restaurant in Trump Tower
last summer, I asked the mogul about the “Manchurian Candidate” buzz,
about that phone call he got from Bill Clinton in May 2015, when the
businessman and reality star was making up his mind whether to run. The
Washington Post quoted four Trump allies and one Clinton associate as
saying that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in
the Republican Party.
Roger
Stone, author of “The Clintons’ War on Women” and a longtime confidant
of Trump’s, claims that Bill urged Trump to get in the race and told him
he thought he could get the nomination. “That’s why the people with the
tinfoil hats are convinced the whole thing is a setup,” Stone says.
“Bill can’t help himself from giving advice. He loves the game. He’s the
great kibitzer.” Stone said Trump also asked Bill three years ago if
anyone could be elected president as an independent, and Bill told him
no.
I
tried to get to the bottom of this murky story that day at Trump Tower,
but when you’re dealing with Bill and Donald and truth, it’s an elusive
goal.
“Did Bill tell you that you should run?” I asked.
“He didn’t say one way or the other,” Trump replied, over a plate of meatballs.
To
make the whole conspiracy wackier, when I began fact-checking this
story, the Trump Tower version flipped, with Trumpsters saying that the
phone call entailed Bill trying to talk Donald out of running because
the former president knew that Trump could beat Hillary.
This
new version was met with eye-rolling and mockery from Clintonistas.
“Bill Clinton is not Frank Underwood,” a former top aide says. “I
guarantee you he did not call Trump with an uber-plan, where he was five
moves down the chessboard. He has a theory: You’ve got to give a lot to
get a lot. But he doesn’t meddle like that, telling people to get in
and get out. Trump shouldn’t flatter himself that Bill gave a damn one
way or the other. Trump was just another guy on the call list.”
No
matter how Trump got into the race, the way he has conducted it has
made Bill burn. Trump escalated his attacks after the Billy Bush hot
mike incident, dragging Bill’s accusers back onto the stage. No one else
would have gone there or said, as Trump did, that Hillary had “one of
the great women-abusers of all time sitting in her house, waiting for
her to come home for dinner.” As a Clinton ally ruefully notes, “The
last 15 years, everyone had forgotten about that, and now it’s back.”
Trump also eagerly pounced to lash the Clintons to an astonishing new
twist in the F.B.I. email investigation, involving Anthony Weiner, the
estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and his sexts
to a 15-year-old North Carolina girl.
New
York elites have gone from flabbergasted that Trump got this far to
debating how the Trump family and one of Trump’s top strategists, Jared
Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and the publisher of The New York Observer,
will be received if they have to slink back into town. Some people say
the attitude toward the Trump children will be more lenient; others
think that the Trump brand is irrevocably damaged and that the whole
family will be pariahs.
“Will
the word ‘Trump’ be used almost in profanity for some time to come
among average New Yorkers?” asks Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic
political consultant. “Likely so.”
It
may be beginning to dawn on Trump that he has thrown acid on his brand.
He left the campaign trail during the final push to promote his new
Washington hotel. The hotel is clearly struggling, cutting its expensive
room rates and losing the famed chef José Andrés after Andrés decided
Trump was “a racist, a divider.” I went to check it out recently, and it
had a deserted feel. There was one African-American family posing under
the Trump sign — giving a thumbs-down — and a strip of yellow crime
tape across the front after vandals wrote “Black Lives Matter” on it.
“I
can tell you, in my crowd, they would rather not do anything associated
with Trump,” says one advertising and marketing big shot. “People are
nauseated by what he’s doing.”
Cindy
Adams, the New York Post columnist, disagrees: “He’ll go back to being
the most famous face on this planet. No, his brand won’t be hurt. Trump
will be Trump. Everybody will still want to meet him.”
Trump
has said he hopes that Chelsea and Ivanka — who shared the problems of
coming of age when their fathers were enmeshed in very public affairs —
can remain friends. But on the Clinton side, people privately play down
the friendship, saying that Ivanka, as with her father and the Clintons,
was the one pushing the alliance. “There’s no Ivanka-Chelsea
relationship,” the foundation executive says. “There was an Ivanka P.R.
moment. It was a transaction. They both got what they wanted.”
Some
say it will be hardest for Kushner, an Orthodox Jew who got in deep
with helping Trump as anti-Semitic sentiment swirled around the
candidate. Joe Conason, author of “Man of the World” and a former
employee of Kushner’s at The Observer, says: “People will remember this.
Maybe you could get away with this in parts of Florida. But in New York
City, this doesn’t fly.”
One
friend of Trump’s from the real estate world is worried that Trump does
not understand how the groups he has derogated and demeaned will wreak
revenge on him. “He’s alienated women,” the friend says. “He’s alienated
wealthy people. He’s alienated people from the Middle East. He’s
alienated people from Latin America. These are all fertile ground where
people could buy condos from him.”
At
the annual Al Smith dinner last month at the Waldorf Astoria, a
white-tie charity fête put on by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York
that brings together high society and media and features humorous
speeches by politicians, Trump was greeted warmly enough after he was
introduced by Al Smith IV. “A kid from Queens with a big heart and a big
mouth is without question a New York institution,” Smith said.
But
when Trump began to make harsher cracks about Hillary toward the end,
out of sync with the tone of the event, he was repeatedly booed —
spurned by the same Manhattan elites whose approval he had spent so long
seeking. Afterward, he fled quickly with Melania without talking to
anyone. As Trump returned to the seclusion of his Fifth Avenue Xanadu,
he was playing a scene of megalomania and mortification straight out of
one of his favorite movies, “Citizen Kane,” about the fall of a brash
New York mogul who flew high, gave politics a shot and then had a steep
fall after a sex imbroglio. “ ‘Citizen Kane’ was really about the
accumulation,” Trump once said. “At the end of accumulation, you see
what happens, and it is not necessarily all positive.” Hillary,
meanwhile, was spotted nearly 20 minutes after he left, still laughing
and mingling with the crowd.
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