The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

Dedication

To the stars of my show:

Jason, Winsome, Jmar, and Miles

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: Welcome to Gotham

1.How Trump Happened

2.Two Nations, Under Trump

3.The Trump Republican Party

4.A New American Civil War

5.The Man Who Sold the World

6.American Strongman

7.What America Can Learn from South Africa

8.The Media in the Trump Age

9.Mr. Barr Goes to Town

10.Un-Democratic America?

Epilogue: After Trump, Who Are We?

Afterword to the Paperback Edition: The Bell Tolls

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Also by Joy-Ann Reid

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Welcome to Gotham

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.

I’m an agent of chaos.

—The Joker, from The Dark Knight

TO TRULY UNDERSTAND DONALD TRUMP, YOU NEED TO HAVE lived in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, when his business and marital escapades were a tabloid staple. Or maybe you just need to have grown up on Batman.

Gotham City—which the brooding billionaire Bruce Wayne polices as his vigilante alter ego—is an exaggerated, dystopian send-up of old New York. It’s filled with over-the-top villains who, like Batman, possess no actual superpowers but get by on their cleverness, their ostentatious wealth, and their ability to wreak havoc on the urban landscape.

Donald Trump seems ripped right out of that comic book supervillain universe. With his cantilever hairstyle, weirdly long signature neckties, bizarre syntax, and penchant for slapping his surname on everything he’s connected with—from buildings and golf courses to bottled water, board games, and, for a time, a sham university that promised anyone could learn to be just like The Donald—Trump and the cast of characters surrounding him could fit right in with Joker, Riddler, Penguin, and Lex Luthor.

Trump has existed on the outskirts of American celebrity and popular culture for the life spans of most Americans under the age of forty. He made cameos in movies like Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and on TV shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He sat in the guest chair on The Phil Donahue Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. And he performed mock-fights with World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon on multiple episodes of WrestleMania. (He even pretended to buy WWE’s lucrative Monday Night Raw franchise in an elaborate ruse in 2009, which tanked the entertainment company’s stock price, prompting Trump to quickly pretend to sell it back for twice the price.)

Despite his history of alleged housing discrimination against black tenants and his full-page ad in the 1980s calling for the return of the death penalty in the face of black and brown teenagers being accused of a gang rape they didn’t commit, Trump managed to work his way into mainstream popular culture. Early on, he was a tabloid-friendly rogue and celebrity hanger-on, and later, the king of the B-list stars who jockeyed for his approval on The Celebrity Apprentice.

Had he not signed on to the racist birther conspiracy, claiming that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States,¹ and plunged headfirst into the morass of anti-immigrant xenophobia that helped win him the presidency, the old Donald Trump might have carried on. He may have remained a cultural gadfly—that peculiar brand of celebrity whose views on everything from geopolitics to the Oscars are sought out for no particular reason other than that he is famous and quotable.

But Donald Trump did become president—and so, here we are.

As a candidate, Trump offered Republicans the taste of the celebrity status that Ronald Reagan had given them; something normally reserved for Democrats. That’s what attracted Sam Nunberg, the thirty-eight-year-old political adviser who toiled on Trump’s warm-up attempts at presidential runs and on the real presidential deal until he lost a war with Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski and was fired in the summer of 2015. (Nunberg says Lewandowski saw to it that old, racist posts on his Facebook page surfaced; he later apologized for those posts.) And though Nunberg readily says that Trump screwed him, he claims he would vote for him again in 2020, because Trump has delivered on Republican policies and judicial nominations.

I knew our campaign was doing well when I went into a restaurant after he announced, Nunberg said. "The TV was on CNN, and he was on, and people were watching. These were people who probably normally wouldn’t give a shit. But they were watching him."

Trump wasn’t just another politician doing a TV hit. He was an American mogul, an entertainer, Nunberg said. And he wasn’t rich from making microchips or selling stocks. It was from building. Construction. It was this image of success; of him being rich and he can make you rich. We were the WWE–Fox News version of the Obama campaign in the beginning, and I mean that as a compliment. It was aspirational. It was, ‘we can fight the system.’

Nunberg was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and nurtured on conservative talk radio, strident support for Israel, and suspicion of the Middle East. After volunteering for Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign, he worked for right-wing lawyer Jay Sekulow during the 2010 fight to prevent the construction of a mosque near the ground zero site of the September 11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan. (He says Trump wrote a bullshit letter at the time, offering to buy the land where the mosque was to be built, but the offer was just a PR stunt.) Nunberg’s parents were lawyers, and he became one, too. His father had worked for a law firm that Trump and his father had used for real estate deals. But Nunberg didn’t meet Trump in person until he was introduced to him in 2010 by yet another Gotham City character: Roger Stone—the villain with the Richard Nixon tattoo on his back.

I wanted to win a national election and thought Trump could win, Nunberg says of his eagerness to sign on. I thought it was cool that Obama went on the late-night shows. I thought the [John] McCain ad showing Obama speaking to millions of people and showing Paris Hilton and slamming him as a Hollywood celebrity was the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. He said he all but screamed at the time: You just won him millions of votes!

Nunberg thought his party was living in the 1950s. And though Trump was his own version of the Mad Men era, to Nunberg, he was a Mad Man for the twenty-first century. He and Trump share a sensibility he likens to a retired New York City firefighter or cop who mainlines Fox News, plus Rush Limbaugh and Mike Levin on talk radio and thinks to himself, this country has gone to shit, and we need a guy in the White House who’s willing to punch a few holes in the wall to make it like it was when I was coming up.

Trump seems like "one of them who made it. He grabbed the brass ring and the trophy wives and the all-gold penthouse. Even if his Horatio Alger story was a lie—he inherited millions from his dad and never needed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps—Trump’s fans appreciated that he was hated by the Chamber of Commerce crowd and the fancy set in Manhattan. They liked that because they felt those elites" hated them, too. If Gotham needs a Batman, it also needs a Joker. And Trump was their Joker, sowing chaos on their behalf and taking the whole Injustice League with him to the White House.

The trouble is, he didn’t seem to actually want to be president. What he did want was to put on the greatest presidential campaign show of all time.

When he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce that he was a candidate, wife Melania was smiling and waving silently beside him in a white sleeveless dress with a bare neckline. Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World was blaring on loudspeakers. Crowds lined up along the upper floor railing, watching the couple descend, hooted and cheered. The woman chosen to introduce him, daughter Ivanka Trump, one floor below and also in white sleeveless, was clapping along to the music, standing beside a makeshift podium in front of a backdrop of blue curtains and a row of huge American flags with gold eagles on top. All the Trump children, from Barron up to Donald Jr., were there, waiting in the wings. Emblazoned on the podium was the campaign’s slogan: TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Trump poured it on. "That is some group of people—thousands!" he exclaimed, marveling at the crowd behind the phalanx of media and photographers. Nunberg recalls the crowd consisting of a couple hundred people, including some hired extras paid $50 apiece to cheer Trump on and wave premade signs. They had been hired by Extra Mile, a subcontractor of a company called Gotham Government Relations. When The Hollywood Reporter revealed that fact, via emails its reporter obtained,² Lewandowski issued what would become a familiar Trumpian denial. Mr. Trump draws record crowds at almost every venue at which he is a featured speaker, he deadpanned to The Hollywood Reporter. The crowds are large, often record-setting and enthusiastic, often with standing ovations. Mr. Trump’s message is, ‘Make America Great Again.’³ The FEC later dismissed a complaint about the whole affair.⁴ But the circus had officially come to town, and even the controversy was part of the show.

According to one longtime Republican political operative who knows and supports him, Trump never seriously believed he would be elected president. The Republican field was shaping up to include an armada of heavyweights vying for the jump ball after two terms of President Obama. A bank of current and former governors, including Jeb Bush of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, John Kasich of Ohio, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, entered the race. So did media favorite Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, and libertarian firebrand Rand Paul. Famed neurosurgeon Ben Carson jumped in, too, along with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. The entries produced gushing media reviews calling it the finest Republican field in a generation. Surely one of them would take the nomination, and leave the reality show performer behind. Even Trump privately said so.

Trump also told people that every time he had started running for president—in 1988, 2000, and 2012—the money started pouring in. He claimed he’d made a fortune on the birther stuff, which piqued the interest of billionaire cranks who suddenly took an interest in him. It wasn’t clear whether Trump actually believed the conspiracy theory questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace, though his antipathy for, and some would say envy of and obsession with, Obama was never in doubt.

During the early months of the campaign, the Republican operative said, Trump told him and a U.S. senator who later became a fellow supporter of the president that his presidential bid would be a marketing boon to his newest hotel, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. I’ll run for president for a few months and get a bunch of publicity and boost the room rates, the operative says Trump explained. You can’t buy that kind of publicity, and when you run for president, you get it for free.

The property had been the Old Post Office and Clock Tower on Pennsylvania Avenue. The federal government had tried for a dozen years to develop the historic building, with everyone from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff to supporters of a National Women’s History Museum offering bids. Trump and his financial partners won out in 2012, with the promise of millions of dollars in rent payments going to federal coffers. Trump even staged his belated admission that Barack Obama was indeed American-born against the backdrop of a soft launch for the hotel, inviting the assembled campaign press on a tour after dropping the admission as a terse one-liner.

The hotel—which one person who has known Trump and his sons professionally since 2003 said was clearly designed under the direction of Ivanka and the Trump sons, and not their father, since its interior is not all gold—didn’t initially command the luxury rates the family had hoped for, particularly after famed chef José Andrés backed out of a deal to open a restaurant in the hotel, in protest against Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. (The Trump Organization sued Andrés for $10 million, and the two sides settled in April 2017.)

The Republican operative describes Trump as a man fixated on his money like no billionaire they’d ever met and carrying a giant chip on his shoulder inherited from his Queens-developer father, who had felt locked out of the Manhattan real estate market because he wasn’t part of the club—something Trump made it his mission to rectify. Win or lose, Donald J. Trump for President would make them all pay attention. And it would put tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of a man who may never have had as much of it as he led people to believe.

Nunberg agrees that Trump’s 2012 trial balloon was entirely for show. But he says Trump genuinely looked at that 2015 field of standard-issue politicians and thought, I can beat those guys. And while he admits Trump could have been telling a true believer what he wanted to hear, Nunberg says that at a minimum, Trump wanted to be number one in the polls. Trump knew the Clintons, and how formidable they were. After all, during Bill Clinton’s tenure, he was a supporter. Nunberg says Trump still believed the Clintons liked him. And he thought winning the White House against a potential first woman president would be harder than stopping the first black president had been. Yet Trump seemingly gave no thought to what actually holding the office of president would entail. According to Nunberg, the weighty issues around what being president of the United States would actually mean simply never came up.

Still, when Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, he had all the trappings of a real campaign: the blue suit, red tie, and flag pin; and a small but dedicated staff, who wrote a speech they knew the candidate would never deliver verbatim. Staffers, including Nunberg, distilled the address into bullet points set in a large typeface, punctuated with phrases like Mission, Commitment, Authentic, and We have had enough! in a document marked Big Day.

Lewandowski red-lined the speech Nunberg wrote, eliminating whole paragraphs and lines that (to Nunberg’s annoyance) turned up in Ivanka Trump’s introduction speech. Trump was supposed to talk about his rise through the ranks of New York real estate, and how he could translate his success into America’s. Our country needs a comeback, he was meant to say, and politics as usual has to stop. Trump was to describe how government was failing the American people and that having dealt with politicians all his life, he knew better than anyone that they are all talk and no action. The theme of the speech was: it is time—to change the system and to change Washington. The American dream is dead! began the closing line, which Lewandowski added in red. But, with your help, we can bring it back bigger and better than ever. Together we can make America great again!

Instead, Trump unleashed a forty-six-minute rant as the cameras rolled. He sneered at the other presidential candidates and their supposed lack of understanding of air-conditioning. They sweated like dogs at their announcements, he said. He carped about China and Japan beating America, about how our country doesn’t win anymore and the rest of the world was laughing at us. And he delivered a notorious riff about Mexico sending its crime, drugs, and rapists to America. Instead of delivering an inspirational speech that would force the pundit class to take his presidential campaign seriously, he walked up to that podium and blew himself up, the Republican operative said.

Perhaps Trump was disgorging whatever he had taken in from his favorite channel—Fox News—the night before. Maybe he saw all those people and cameras, and being a natural showman, simply began performing. Maybe all of the resentments and prejudices that had built up inside him over his seventy-plus years just came spilling out. Or perhaps he was exhibiting what political strategists say can happen to any candidate for high office when the reality of what it all means, and the responsibility, really hits them. The pressure can melt a man down, they say, and make him commit the most deviant act he can think of just to relieve the pressure of duty.

But to Trump’s surprise—and to the world’s—his bill of complaints was exactly what the Republican base wanted to hear.

AS HIS IMPROBABLE CANDIDACY BARRELED TOWARD THE WHITE House, Trump had no trouble discarding anyone around him who came up short in his eyes and thus became a loser. That soon included Nunberg. And it eventually included Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Cohen, whose father survived the Holocaust and whose mother was a nurse, grew up in a New York suburb on Long Island. He started as a personal injury lawyer before veering into real estate law and a taxi medallion business that ultimately crashed along with his legal fortunes. He went to work for the Trump Organization in 2007 after helping him with a recalcitrant condominium board the year before, and soon became Trump’s brass-knuckled bruiser. He played the heavy with nosy reporters and once said he would take a bullet for the man whom he, like all Trump employees and associates, called only boss or Mr. Trump—even after working for him for a decade. When the FBI raided his offices in the spring of 2018, Michael Cohen’s journey to turning state’s evidence on the boss, and Trump turning on him, began.

During dramatic, televised testimony in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on February 27, 2019, Cohen told his version of the story behind Trump’s decision to run for president. He too said Trump ran for president as an elaborate marketing scheme to promote his hotel business—just not in the United States. In Cohen’s telling, after decades of trying and failing to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, Trump hoped that climbing onto the ultimate global stage, as a presidential candidate, would finally put him in position to ink a Russian deal that would make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great, Cohen said. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation—only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump would often say this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign—for him—was always a marketing opportunity.

Cohen was describing what could be the longest long con in American history.

In testimony that was likened to the 1973 Watergate hearings, when then–White House Counsel John Dean publicly implicated President Richard Nixon in crimes that ultimately led to his resignation under the threat of impeachment, Cohen said he had been mesmerized by Trump. So much so that he was willing to do things for him that [he] knew were absolutely wrong.⁵ Among them: arranging payoffs to women—most notably a pornographic actress and a former Playboy playmate—with whom Trump had conducted affairs, to keep their stories from negatively impacting the election. In some instances The National Enquirer would buy the lifetime rights to stories that might hurt Trump, in consultation with Cohen and purportedly, the Trump campaign, and then bury the stories instead of publishing them.

Cohen said he made one such $130,000 payment to pornographic star Stephanie Clifford, stage name Stormy Daniels—taking out a home equity loan to do it—and was reimbursed by Trump via $35,000 checks, some affixed with Trump’s giant, Magic Marker signature while he was in the Oval Office. Cohen also admitted he lied to Congress about the proposed Moscow tower, when he claimed in an August 2017 letter to the Oversight committee that the negotiations had stopped in January 2016, while Trump was going through the Republican primaries.

The talks actually dragged on at least through June, while Trump, having dispatched the Republican A-team, was on his way to the Republican National Convention. To hear Trump’s longtime friend and TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani—the bombastic former New York City mayor—tell it, the talks on building a Trump Tower Moscow might have dragged on right through Election Day.

Cohen came to Congress to set the record straight. He had been convicted of tax evasion, financial fraud, and violations of campaign finance laws, including for the $130,000 payment to Daniels. And Cohen said he not only arranged to pay Daniels and other Trump paramours not to tell their stories but he also lied repeatedly to Melania about the boss’s sexual affairs.

The once-brash Cohen came to Congress a humbled man. Months earlier, he had confided to another seminal New York figure, the Reverend Al Sharpton, now the host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, and to his attorney, Lanny Davis, onetime special counsel to President Bill Clinton, that he was prepared to plead guilty without cutting a special deal for himself because he wanted the opportunity to tell the truth and be redeemed. The purge would be public and total. Cohen was headed to prison to serve a three-year sentence after pleading guilty to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He had been disbarred. He had gone from the guy who issued Trump’s threats to a recipient of them. The thuggish taunts from the president, delivered via social media against the once-trusted lieutenant he now called a rat, rattled Cohen and his family. So much so, that he asked congressional Democrats for protection prior to his testimony, and even sought to delay it.

In the space of two years, Cohen had gone from deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee—a position he accepted during the first year of the Trump administration despite being a longtime Democrat—to Public Enemy Number One, for daring to turn on Trump. He faced a relentless barrage of attacks from Trump’s über-loyalists on the dais, who appeared to be auditioning to replace Cohen as Mr. Trump’s new pit bulls.

The day before his testimony, one of those replacements, Florida congressman Matthew Gaetz, tweeted at Cohen what sounded like a threat of a coming smear. Hey @MichaelCohen212, Gaetz’s tweet read, do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot. Immediate outrage followed, with some calling for Gaetz to be investigated for witness tampering. Florida politicos wondered where a congressman from their state could have gotten alleged dirt—likely invented—about a Trump confidant who lived in New York City. Some openly wondered if it was the latest mischief by Roger Stone, who had been silenced by a gag order as he faced criminal charges of his own, following an indictment by the special counsel investigating Russia’s cyberwarfare, hacking, and interference in the election in which Trump became president.

Gaetz soon apologized under pressure from the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and his tweet made him the target of an investigation by the Florida bar. Still, he showed up at the Cohen hearing to sit in the gallery, in what many interpreted as a bid to intimidate the witness with his presence. It was the kind of tough-guy tactic that not long before, might have been pulled by Michael Cohen.

In his testimony, Cohen called Trump an enigma. He has both good and bad, as do we all, he said in his opening statement. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.

Cohen went on to describe a man who was virulently racist in his presence. He said Trump told him as they rode through a black neighborhood while Obama was still president, that no decent country had ever been run by a black person, calling all black-run nations shitholes and saying black Americans were too stupid to vote for him. Cohen says he threatened Trump’s former schools on the candidate’s behalf, not to release Trump’s grades or SAT scores, while Trump publicly demanded that Obama release his. Trump’s attempt at proving Obama had been admitted to Columbia University and Harvard Law School on the basis of race, not talent, was a frequent trope among white conservatives who resent the idea of affirmative action, which in their view is nothing more than reverse racism against white people. Trump tapped into that resentment.

When a North Carolina Republican congressman, Mark Meadows, who like Trump had trafficked in Obama birtherism, angrily dismissed Cohen’s accounts of Trump’s racism by having a black HUD appointee, Lynn Patton—whom he had invited to the hearing—stand up and silently display, with her bodily presence, that Trump could not possibly be racist—Cohen barked back: You don’t know him. I do.

And Cohen said Trump admitted to faking a bone spur injury to obtain deferments and avoid the Vietnam War, dismissing those who did serve or were drafted as suckers. You think I’m stupid? Cohen says he told him. I wasn’t going to Vietnam.

As Cohen’s testimony dominated the day, Trump was thousands of miles away. He had finally made it to Vietnam, his detractors noted wryly. He was openly pitching for a Nobel Peace Prize to match the one Obama received during his first year as president, by meeting for a second time face-to-face with murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. But the summit was a failure. And Trump found himself staying up overnight in Hanoi to watch as Cohen spilled his secrets.

Cohen spoke of a man whose narcissism and obsession with public perceptions of his wealth and success seemed to consume his life and were now devouring the country. Questioned about his change of heart regarding Trump, he described a crisis of conscience. He said he was driven away from Trump by the president’s performance at a summit in Helsinki, Finland, where Trump bowed down to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, just as he now did with Kim. Citing his family’s own escape from the clutches of Nazis in Europe, he spoke of an ugly incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Trump proposed a moral equivalence between American Nazi rioters and their victims. And he spoke of watching the daily destruction of our civility to one another under Trump’s rule.

Cohen declared himself responsible for the goon squad tactics being aimed at him from the dais by Republican members of Congress, saying, I did the same thing that you’re doing now, for ten years.

I can only warn people, he added, the more people that follow Mr. Trump, as I did, blindly, [the more] are going to suffer the same consequences that I am suffering.

Cohen had dire warnings for the country, too. When Mr. Trump turned around, early in the campaign, and said, ‘I can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it,’ I want to be very clear: he’s not joking. He’s telling you the truth, he said.

Cohen likened his former boss to a Mafia-like figure. When he goes on Twitter, and he starts bringing in my in-laws, my parents, my wife, what does he think is gonna happen? he asked. "He’s sending out the message, that he can do whatever he wants; [that] this is his country. He’s becoming an autocrat. Cohen even voiced his fear that if Trump were to lose reelection, in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power."

Cohen ended his testimony on a dramatic and cautionary note. My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything, he said. My family’s happiness, my friendships, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation and, soon, my freedom. And I will not sit back, say nothing, and allow him to do the same to the country.

Perhaps it was too late.

TWO YEARS INTO DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY, ALL OF AMERICA was Gotham City. Trump seemed to believe he could treat the federal government like a resistant New York mayor or city councilman, blustering and bullying to get his way. The darkness—of racism and xenophobia and mutual suspicion that he carried with him into the White House—seemed to cover the land.

As old-line Republicans fled, Washington seemed overrun with cartoon villains. There was the Treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs financier who bankrolled Hollywood movies and posed with his actress wife in front of sheets of money. There was Ms. Patton, the Trump son’s wedding planner turned HUD administrator who was used as a human show-and-tell during the Cohen hearings, and who had been handed control of all of East Coast public housing. One of his few media surrogates was the former New Jersey governor, fresh off his own scandal-plagued tenure in office, who had once prosecuted and jailed the father of Trump’s son-in-law and current chief White House adviser.

A parade of those discarded by the White House