Trump: How to Get Rich

Dan Ratheris not one of my favorite people. A few years ago, he wanted to profile me for 60 Minutes. As we toured Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Golf Club in Florida, he couldn’t have been nicer or more respectful. I was sure the interview would be a total home run.

When the interview aired, it couldn’t have been nastier. He showed me giving a speech to an empty room at a poorly planned event, when the day before I’d given the same speech to a standing-room-only crowd. But 60 Minutes didn’t air that speech. They just wanted me to look as bad as possible.

Dan Rather is an enigma to me. He’s got absolutely no talent or charisma or personality, yet year after year, CBS apologizes for his terrible ratings. I could take the average guy on the street and have him read the news on CBS and that guy would draw bigger ratings than Dan Rather does. When I see Rather at Yankee games, I stay away from him. However, I will say one nice thing about him: Recently, he was the emcee at a Police Athletic League dinner for District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, one of the great men in the history of New York City. Dan called me and told me he felt very uncomfortable being the emcee of a dinner for which I was the chairman. I told him I appreciated the call and that it would be fine with me if he was the emcee. He did a nice job, but I’ll never forget what he did to me on 60 Minutes. People don’t change their stripes.

I’ll conclude this with a story about Howard Cosell, a spectacular sportscaster who I got to know during the last ten years of his life. People either loved Howard or hated him—there was no in between—but he was really the best at what he did. As Howard grew older, though, he became nastier, even toward the people who loved him and had helped make him a success. He always felt that being a sportscaster was beneath him. He longed to run for the U.S. Senate.

Howard could sit on a dais with sports figures he hadn’t seen for thirty years and quote their exact statistics. His memory was amazing. Then he wrote his final book and knocked almost everyone he knew, from Roone Arledge to Frank Gifford, one of the finest people around. It did a lot of damage to him, because all of his friends turned against him. I remember saying to him, Howard, you can knock twenty percent of the people, maybe twenty-five percent or thirty percent of the people, but you can’t knock everybody. You didn’t say anything nice about anybody in the book. It was the wrong thing to do. I believe in knocking people, but you can’t knock everybody.

That’s a rule I try to follow, in this book and in my life.

A Week in the Life

In The Art of the Deal and in my other two memoirs, I included a chapter about a typical week in my life. When I met Mark Burnett, the creator of The Apprentice, he told me it was his favorite chapter in the book, and a lot of other readers have told me the same thing. So, back by popular demand, here’s an example of what an average eventful week was like in the fall of 2003.

This chapter doesn’t have any specific advice on how to get rich, but it will show you how I have fun, and I doubt I’d be as successful as I am if I weren’t having such a good time.

MONDAY

9:00 A.M. I have a meeting with architect Costas Kondylis, an elegant way to start the week. Costas and I have worked on several very successful projects together, including the Trump World Tower at the United Nations Plaza, Trump Park Avenue (at Fifty-ninth Street and Park Avenue, just completed), and, together with Philip Johnson and Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Trump Place, my sixteen-building development along the Hudson River. Some of you might remember that site as the West Side yards, which I have been involved with since 1974, when I first secured the option to purchase them from the Penn Central Railroad. That was my first major deal in Manhattan. Close to thirty years later, here we are discussing the fifth and sixth buildings under construction. (Never give up.)

My eldest son, Don Jr., is also at the meeting. We are on schedule with construction, and the first three condominium buildings have proven to be very successful. However, neither Costas nor myself is likely to ever rest on his laurels, and we are troubleshooting, going over every detail. If Costas hadn’t been an architect, he’d have made a very good surgeon—he’s just that meticulous. We get along famously, and I’d put him up there with Philip Johnson as one of our most outstanding architects.

We are also discussing the reaction to the city park I developed and donated to the city, which is on the West Side yards property. I hate to disappoint people, but my detractors were not pleased about this twenty-five-acre gift. What can I say? Except that you can’t be all things to all people, no matter how hard you try.