WASHINGTON — Who is Donald Trump, really?
Supporters and detractors, alike, think they already know. But many voters — and journalists — have been trying to figure out the answer to that question since Trump first announced he was seeking the Republican nomination last summer.
Now, a new biography from a team of reporters and researchers at The Washington Post aims to provide some answers.
“Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money and Power” went on sale last week joining bookshelves already stuffed with election-year polemics.
But Marc Fisher, one of the book’s co-authors, told WTOP there’s a need for a comprehensive look at the real estate mogul turned reality show celebrity vying to be the 45th president of the United States.
Trump is the first major party candidate since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 making a bid for the White House without ever having previously served in public office, Fisher said.
“So there’s all kinds of stuff about his life from his ancestry to his upbringing, to his education, to his business career, all the way up to today where we’re trying to understand: Why does he act the way he does?” Fisher said. “How does he think? How does he make decisions? What are the principles and values that brought him to this point, and how can we predict how he might behave as president? That’s all new territory.”
Fisher and his team conducted scores of interviews for the 448-page book — even sitting down with Trump, himself, for more than 20 hours of interviews.
“Donald Trump is really a very consistent guy,” Fisher said. “And what we’ve seen is that over the decades, he actually has talked a lot about some of the themes we’ve heard this year, whether it be immigration or trade, competition with China, the sense of putting America first — those are themes he’s been hitting since the 1980s.”
The book delves into Trump’s “rambunctious” upbringing as the son of a wealthy New York real estate developer, Fisher said, and examines his own successful, if controversial, career as a Manhattan real estate bigwig. For example, Trump and his father were accused in the 1970s of excluding black renters from their properties in Brooklyn and Queens, which later became the subject of a lawsuit, which Fisher called “one of the most important racial discrimination cases the federal government ever brought in New York.”
Fisher pointed to the contradictions in Trump’s famous persona.
On the one hand, Trump is known on the campaign trail for his boisterous rallies.
“He has a great knack for understanding what will get a rise out of a crowd, and what will get crowds to cheer him,” Fisher said.
But when reporters met with him in his spacious office in Trump Tower overlooking Central Park and 5th Avenue for those one-on-one interviews, they encountered a different Trump, entirely.
“When you sit down with Donald Trump in his office … he’s a much quieter guy,” Fisher said. “He’s more thoughtful. He’s not the blustery guy yelling at rallies. It’s a very different kind of presentation.”
In general, Fisher said, Trump is much more complex than he’s given credit for. Still, Fisher said at different points during those long hours of interviews, Trump “threatened” the journalists.
“He was generous and gracious with his time — he gave us many more hours of interviews than we’d ever expected — but every once in a while he would say, ‘If this is a bad book, I’m going to come after you.'”
