Trump: How to Get Rich

One good tactic for speeding up a deal is to show a lack of interest in it. This will often make the other side rekindle their efforts to get something going. I was very interested in a deal once, but I had a hunch that it wasn’t a good idea to look too eager to these people. I would put off their calls and do my best to appear aloof. Then I said I’d be traveling for a couple of weeks and would get back to them after that. While I was traveling, they used the time to modify their position and present to me almost precisely what I’d been hoping to get. It saved us all a lot of negotiating time.

A good tactic for slowing down a deal is to distract the other side. One way is to drop hints about whether a certain aspect of the deal should be looked into further, or to mention other deals and properties as examples. That will set them off in a direction that consumes their time and focus. While they’re off on a tangent, you’ll still be on target.

One time, I was in the middle of a negotiation that seemed to be speeding out of my control. I suddenly asked the other side if they knew the history of a particular development, implying that their understanding of it might be crucial. They figured the development must have had some bearing on what we were trying to accomplish together, so they backed up a bit, took some time to investigate it, and gave me control of the negotiations with enough time to assess everything at my leisure. I got the upper hand.

Life at the top means the phone calls never stop.

Be Strategically Dramatic

In 1999, I began construction on the tallest residential tower in the world, Trump World Tower at the United Nations Plaza.

The location was terrific—the East Side of Manhattan, close to the United Nations, with both river views and city views. It was hot stuff, but not everyone was happy about it, especially some diplomats at the United Nations, who didn’t want their thirty-eight-story building to be outclassed by our ninety-story tower. According to CNN, UN secretary general Kofi Annan acknowledged talking with New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani about the project and how to stop it.

It will not fit here, the Ukrainian ambassador, Volodymyr Yel’chenko, told CNN, because it overshadows the United Nations complex.

When the protests became vocal, I used my own brand of diplomacy and refused to say anything critical of the United Nations. I predicted that many ambassadors and UN officials would end up buying apartments in the building. Sure enough, they have.

But as soon as we were in business, the city hit us with an enormous tax assessment, costing us over $100 million more than we thought we should pay. We decided to take the only action possible. We sued the city for $500 million.

For four years, we fought this case. The city lawyers held their ground, and we held ours. We could have given up. It’s not easy to take on the government and win, especially when the issue is taxes, but I knew we had a case.

Finally, after many conversations, we reached a settlement. The city agreed to cut our taxes seventeen percent and give us the ten-year tax abatement that we sought if we would agree to withdraw our lawsuit and subsidize two hundred units of affordable housing in the Bronx.

The lawsuit saved us approximately $97 million. We never would have gotten any of it if we hadn’t taken dramatic action.

Sometimes You Still Have to Screw Them

For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. I once made the mistake of saying that in front of a group of twenty priests who were in a larger audience of two thousand people. I took some heat for that. One of them said, My son, we thought you were a much nicer person.

I responded, Father, I have great respect for you. You’ll get to heaven. I probably won’t, but to be honest, as long as we’re on the earth, I really have to live by my principles.

When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.

Be paranoid. I know this observation doesn’t make any of us sound very good, but let’s face the fact that it’s possible that even your best friend wants to steal your spouse and your money. As I say every week in The Apprentice, it’s a jungle out there. We’re worse than lions—at least they do it for food. We do it for the thrill of the hunt.

Recently, I’ve become a bit more mellow about retribution and paranoia. Although I still believe both are necessary, I now realize that vengeance can waste a lot of time better spent on new developments and deals, and even on building a better personal life. If you can easily dismiss a negative from your life, it’s better to do so. Seeing creeps as a form of corruption that you’re better off without is a great time-saving device.

Still, sometimes you’ve just got to screw them back.