Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 33

us because it took the pressure off Dad; he and my grandfather had little left to say to each other. It didn’t happen often that Donald was at the office at the same time we were, but it was much worse when we crossed paths. He acted as though he owned the place, which my grandfather seemed not only to encourage but to enjoy. My grandfather was transformed in Donald’s presence.

In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and my grandfather for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to die Schwarze, as my grandfather put it. It was one of the largest federal housing discrimination suits ever brought, and the notorious attorney Roy Cohn offered to help. Donald and Cohn had crossed paths at Le Club, a swanky members-only restaurant and disco on East 55th Street that was frequented by Vanderbilts and Kennedys, an array of international celebrities, and minor royalty. Cohn was more than a decade removed from his disastrous involvement in Joseph McCarthy’s failed anti-Communist crusade. He’d been forced to resign from his position as the senator’s chief counsel, but not until he’d wrecked the lives and careers of dozens of men because of their alleged homosexuality and/or ties to communism.

Like many men of his vicious temperament and with his influential connections, Cohn was subject to no rules. Embraced by a certain segment of the New York elite and hired by a diverse pool of clients such as Rupert Murdoch, John Gotti, Alan Dershowitz, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Cohn entered private practice back in New York City, where he’d grown up. Over the ensuing years, he became very rich, very successful, and very powerful.

Though Cohn was flashy where Fred was conservative and loud where Fred was taciturn, the differences between them were really of degree, not kind. Cohn’s cruelty and hypocrisy were more public, but Fred had, in the intimate context of his family, also mastered those arts. Fred had also primed Donald to be drawn to men such as Cohn, as he would later be drawn to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un or anyone else, really, with a willingness to flatter and the power to enrich him.

Cohn recommended that Trump Management file a countersuit against the Justice Department for $100 million over what he alleged were the government’s false and misleading statements about his clients. The maneuver was simultaneously absurd, flashy, and effective, at least in terms of the publicity it garnered; it was the first time that Donald, at twenty-seven, had landed on a newspaper’s front page. And although the countersuit would be tossed out of court, Trump Management settled the case. There was no admission of wrongdoing, but they did have to change their rental practices to avoid discrimination. Even so, both Cohn and Donald considered it a win because of all the press coverage.

When Donald hitched his fortunes to the likes of Roy Cohn, the only things he had going for him were Fred’s largesse and a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority. Ironically, the defenses he had developed as a young child to protect himself against the indifference, fear, and neglect that had defined his early years, along with his being forced to watch the abuse of Freddy, primed him to develop what his older brother clearly lacked: the ability to be the “killer” and proxy his father required.

There’s no way to know precisely when Fred started to notice Donald, but I suspect it was after he shipped his son off to military school. Donald seemed amenable to his father’s exhortations to be tough, a “killer,” and he proved his worth by bragging about the random beatings he received from the upperclassmen or pretending not to care about his exile from home. Fred’s growing confidence in Donald created a bond between them and an unshakable self-confidence in Donald. After all, the most important person in the family, the only one whose opinion mattered, was finally showing him favor. And unlike Freddy, the attention Donald received from his father was positive.

After college, when Donald was finally out in the world using his father’s connections to make more connections and using his father’s money to create his image as a burgeoning Master of the Universe, Fred knew that anything his son got credit for would redound to his own benefit. After all, if Donald was embraced as an up-and-coming dealmaker, that was entirely to the credit of Fred Trump—even if Fred was the only person who knew it.

In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald’s success had far exceeded his own. “I gave Donald free rein,” he said. “He has great visions, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Donald is the smartest person I know.” None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

After Steeplechase, Fred had lost a lot of ground. If he wanted to expand the reach of his empire, he would need a new playing field and a surrogate. He needed Donald to go out in the world and create the brand. It hadn’t taken Fred long to realize that his profligate middle son wasn’t suited to the unglamorous, tightly budgeted, and highly regimented routine of running rental properties. But with his father’s backing, maybe he could use his hubris and shamelessness to make the push into Manhattan. Fred wasn’t living vicariously; he was intimately involved in all aspects of Donald’s early forays into the Manhattan market, getting things done behind the scenes while Donald played to the crowd up front. Fred made it possible for Donald to play a role that fulfilled his own desire for recognition while allowing his son to garner the reputation as a Manhattan developer that Fred had always aspired to. Fred would never get the public recognition, but it was enough for him to know that the opportunities Donald had to make his