Here begins tape one
in the videotape deposition of Donald J. Trump
in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Case number...
Do you think Donald Trump is really a good businessman?
Donald Trump, in the scope of American business life,
really shouldn't be understood as someone in the tradition
of John Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, or Henry Ford.
He's P.T. Barnum.
How would you describe the Trump brand?
A luxury brand.
I think it's a brand where people know we get things done.
It's a very successful brand.
And it does well.
He's someone who is a showman,
and a self-promoter, and an adept marketer.
Is it fair to say you are the person
largely responsible for building that brand?
Yeah.
And is it fair to say that you are the individual
mostly associated with that brand?
Objection.
One of the great magic tricks he's pulled on the American public
is that he's become fixated in their mind as a great deal maker
and a great business operator.
That's certainly, I think, the person
the American electorate thought they were voting into power.
I obviously have credibility
because I now, as it turns out, became the Republican nominee.
People have said there's never been anything like this.
And I think the question looming over his presidency is:
at what point do the American people utterly lose confidence in him?
Did you think Trump would be president?
No.
Well, we did it.
It's unfathomable that he's elected president.
USA! USA!
I fucking loved it.
My wife took the kids out. She knew I'd be an animal.
And I was. I cried.
President Trump! President Trump!
I said, "This is ridiculous. He doesn't want to be president."
He never had to answer to anyone in his life, except maybe his father.
Know what I'm saying?
I've spent my entire life in business.
That is now what I wanna do for our country.
Honestly, I feel like we are all now living in a Simpsons episode.
I didn't dislike him at all. In fact, I like Donald very much. We had fun.
They said, "He's running for president." I said,
"Kim Kardashian would be a better president."
Fourteen years ago, we shot The Apprentice,
and now we're in that same war room,
watching results come back from a presidential election.
I think a lot of people who watched the show
believed in Donald Trump that we were presenting, this character.
He's managed businesses, and I think he can manage this country.
I think we all sort of rose up and said, "Now, wait a minute.
People, that was a scam. That was in entertainment."
He's somebody who has run a multi-billion dollar empire
that he's built from the ground up.
No matter whether you love Donald Trump or hate him,
the brand is powerful.
This country is hurt financially and needs some really good help,
and Donald's the one to do it.
I tried to warn the people.
I lost money, so, hey, he's not gonna do it to me.
He pays his own bills. He makes his own money.
And everything he puts his hands on turns great.
He profits off his name to the detriment of the public.
I think he'll create some jobs, I really do, you know.
I was very scared when he became president.
Everything I knew about his business past told me this is an impulsive person,
historically bad at judging risk and reward.
From this day forward,
a new vision will govern our land.
It was shocking to me that there were so many people
that bought into this shtick, so to speak.
The constant con.
We will make America strong again.
I liked the word "confidence."
I hate that it's shortened down to "con."
He didn't con you.
We will make America wealthy again.
- But he lies all the time. - Sure, we all do.
It's not my dog.
And, yes, we will make America great again.
You are a mover. You are a doer.
If you could make America perfect, how would you do it?
I think that, much like the mind,
I think that America is using very, very little of its potential.
I feel that this country, with the proper leadership,
can go on to become what it once was.
And I hope, and certainly hope, that it does go on to be
what it should be.
If you'd lost your fortune today, what would you do tomorrow?
Maybe I'd run for president.
I don't know.
My name is Barbara Res.
I worked with or for Donald for many years.
Probably 18, on and off.
I was vice president in charge of construction of Trump Tower.
I was in charge of construction on the Plaza Hotel.
I started on the Commodore Hotel project,
which is now the Grand Hyatt, in 1978.
It was a broken-down brick building, empty and in decay.
The neighborhood was kind of sketchy. Not very safe, even.
A lot of people had the opportunity
to take this property and do something with it,
and they didn't.
And Trump came along, and he did.
He negotiated an incredible tax deal.
He got Hyatt to sign on.
Was Trump's father involved at all in this?
He may have been, but I never saw him on the project.
He is a chip off the old block.
- My father, Fred. - Right.
I think Trump likes to say
that every venture he did in New York was outside of Fred Trump's influence,
but that's not the case.
Will you tell people in the film that this is my living room?
My name is Tim O'Brien. I'm a journalist and an author of three different books.
So, I was at the New York Times in 2005,
when I wrote and published a book about Trump,
The Art Of Being The Donald.
I wasn't sure whether or not he'd cooperate,
but he actually cooperated
enthusiastically and lavishly with the book.
I think Donald has always promoted himself publicly
as a self-made entrepreneur,
when, in fact, that's who his father was.
And I think that hangs over Donald.
The Trump family built the foundation of their riches
on middle-class housing in Brooklyn and Queens.
Donald definitely learned from Fred that emblazoning the Trump family name
on a piece of property was good for business.
Fred Trump knew how to stage events to get attention on his properties.
He would have young women in bikinis at some of the openings.
He would court the press and invite them to the openings.
But Fred Trump was authentically self-made.
And Fred ultimately passed all that along to Donald.
Trump has claimed over the years
that he only borrowed a million dollars from his father.
It has not been easy for me, and I started off in Brooklyn.
My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.
I came into Manhattan.
And that's one of the biggest myths he's put out there.
He inherited, conservatively, tens of millions of dollars from his father.
I don't need anybody's money.
I'm really rich. I'll show you that in a second.
♪ How rich can you get? ♪
Look, my brother Rev Run and I, we called him Richie Rich.
♪ This young boy, Richie Rich... ♪
We'd say, "I'm going with Richie Rich to Mar-a-Lago."
The reason we called him Richie Rich was 'cause he was the only person we knew
that actually appeared to be enjoying his stuff.
How did I meet Donald? It's so many years ago. I have no idea.
Probably over 25 years ago.
He wrote the forewords to my first two books.
As time goes by, and I'm pretty good at judging things like this,
Russell will get bigger and bigger.
Donald Trump's always been on a reality show.
Like, you watch him bigger than life, playing the role.
I felt like he went to sleep playing the role.
Donald was the image of the gold, over-the-top stuff.
So, I get why people aspire to be like him.
They want to own shit, too.
♪ Young Hova the God Nigga blast for me ♪
♪ I'm at the Trump International Ask for me ♪
Rappers rapped about success. "How do we get that?"
♪ Let me in now Bill Gates, Donald Trump ♪
♪ Let me in now Spin now ♪
Donald was, for the hip-hop community,
and for really all Americans and under-served community members
that he had achieved what they thought was the American dream.
♪ Up like Donald Trump Chain swings like nunchucks ♪
But he came from wealth, unlike most of the people--
Yeah, it's kinda crazy, right? He's just like the character.
Donald would be like, "Look at my limo, Russ.
Look at my Trump water.
That's my helicopter. Look, my name's on the side."
He'd be excited if it was on TV or in a movie.
Like, "This guy is insane, right?" It was like watching a movie.
The other interesting thing about Trump is when he graduated from college,
he actually considered going to Hollywood,
before he inevitably joined his father's real estate empire.
But I think he saw real estate in a very similar vein as show business.
He saw himself as the great producer of dreams,
the spinner of tales.
The man who lived large,
with beautiful women in big houses, and told people what to do.
And he has always seen New York, and Manhattan, in particular,
as a piggy bank and as a stage.
I started working on Trump Tower in September of 1980.
Donald gave me a tremendous amount of authority.
Of course, I used to fight with him all the time
about him holding me responsible for things that I had no control over.
Are you proud?
Am I proud of this building? This is my building.
Anything that had to do with any part of this building
had to do with me.
But in terms of Donald's standing in the community,
this was the defining moment.
Trump Tower put Donald on the map,
and it was, without question, his most successful project.
Probably, it's the greatest thing the city ever did,
and I think the city is the first to acknowledge it.
It now, from a real estate standpoint,
has probably become the hottest city in the world.
And I guess a lot of things had to do with it.
Mostly, I feel, it was the psychology
of making New York a winner, as opposed to a loser.
What happens with Trump Tower
is Donald gets his first taste of real independent fame.
He had become the subject of national stories.
He was in Time and Newsweek. He was on television news shows.
Take a look at my next guest. This is Donald Trump, 33 years old.
He now has an apartment for sale
in a new Trump building called the Trump Tower.
You'll walk down the street,
and people will touch you, just for the good luck!
It's a strange phenomenon that's been taking place.
And he loved it. He reveled in it.
Please welcome Donald Trump.
Trump has this reptilian, knowing,
street-smart awareness of the powers of media.
He was out there doing his own PR
for Trump Tower, and he used pseudonyms.
He called himself John Baron, I think,
and he would talk to magazines and newspapers
as the representative of Trump.
Meanwhile, there really weren't any representatives of Trump.
In one case, famously, he called in to a People reporter,
and the reporter had the sense to record it, the call.
She likes to spin before she shits. I don't know why.
What people have to understand is,
long before the Internet, especially the '80s and '90s,
the way people's images were built
was how they were treated in the newspapers, the tabloids.
Anything floating around that became a big story,
usually started in the gossip columns.
O.J. Simpson started in the gossip columns.
Listen, the word "brand" wasn't even tossed around like it is now.
Brand was a cereal brand, Levi...
People didn't have brands, primarily.
And having done gossip in the '90s,
I find that I am responsible for building a lot of people's brand, so to speak,
particularly Donald Trump.
I met him as a gossip columnist at Newsday.
The column was Inside New York,
and Donald was a great source for us for inside information.
He also needed favors from us.
He provided tips, and that's the way that business works.
It's very quid pro quo, and he's the best at that.
When I'm at the New York Daily News and I'm running the column,
you get phone calls. You make phone calls in the morning.
You shake the trees and see what's there.
When you tend to talk to Donald,
it'd be an engaging 20, 30-minute phone call.
He'd love to talk about last night, clubs,
who said what, where was the pussy.
You know, "Was anybody talking about me?"
But he always wanted to be paid back in a particular way.
Regardless of what you mentioned,
he never really cared, as long as you said the word "billionaire."
So we didn't-- I didn't give a shit.
Let the man have his wealth in the paper.
Since you've made your Manhattan Trump millions,
you're up to a billion, more than a billion now.
I hope so.
- Right. - What are you asking?
A billion! You're worth a billion dollars?
Perhaps.
- Perhaps? - Perhaps.
Are we the low side of perhaps or the high side of perhaps?
He used the media
to keep this, sort of, financial ping-pong game going
about, "How rich is he?"
During the course of my reporting,
he'd given me a range of figures for his net worth
from, you know, one-plus billion, up to nine billion.
Total is eight billion seven hundred and thirty-seven million
five hundred and forty-thousand dollars.
And now, with the increase, it'll be well over ten billion dollars.
I'm not doing that to brag 'cause I don't have to brag.
I really didn't care how much he was worth.
No one cares as much about how much Donald Trump is worth
as Donald Trump himself.
In the same day, he would tell me he was worth one thing in the morning,
in the afternoon, he was worth another thing.
I had sources very close to him who thought, at the time,
that he had a net worth anywhere from 150 to 250 million dollars.
Which, by most standards, is comfortably wealthy.
But it didn't give him entree into the billionaires club,
and this is in the book.
Trump sued the reporter for over two billion dollars,
but the lawsuit exposed him to a close scrutiny of his finances.
He sued me for libel. During litigation,
that opened him to discovery on his bank records
and his business records.
I think I'm probably the only journalist who's ever seen his raw tax returns.
"You said the net worth
goes up and down based on your own feelings?"
Trump says, "Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is,
where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day."
He was forced to acknowledge that he had lied
or misrepresented the facts on more than 30 occasions.
And we ended up crushing Trump and his attorneys in court.
And I think it was largely due to the fact
that Donald Trump doesn't know when to stop.
You see, I think I'm right,
and when I think I'm right, nothing bothers me.
He believes that little voice that exists in his mind
that your own judgment is superior,
that you cannot fail,
and that anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about.
When Donald called you to work on the Plaza,
what was your feeling about the Plaza?
It was great for me. It was exciting because the Plaza's an icon.
I loved it.
I think it was like the ultimate trophy, and it was the ultimate New York thing.
It's an incredible building, and I love it.
After Trump Tower, when he bought the Plaza Hotel,
Trump was at an interesting point in his life at that time,
because he had everything to gain from using the notoriety,
and banks were willing to throw
humongous loans at him, as if they were snowballs.
He ended up using that money
to go on this shopping spree for anything he wanted to do.
He buys an airline.
I never thought I'd be doing this.
So just, everybody, have a good time,
and for many years enjoy the Trump Shuttle.
A football team.
This is really a very big day for myself,
and for the United States Football League.
He went down into Atlantic City,
and he got into businesses he didn't understand.
Are you smarter than everybody else?
No, I just have a certain amount of confidence,
that if I want to do something, I can do it.
Atlantic City is probably the largest
bureaucratic enterprise he ever ran, prior to becoming president.
My name's Jack O'Donnell.
I worked for Donald Trump in the late '80s and the '90s.
Donald viewed Atlantic City as a great opportunity,
a logical stepping stone for him to leave New York City for the first time.
But I was very surprised, quite frankly, at his lack of understanding
the moving pieces in operating a casino.
He had two properties that he owned by the time I came to work for him,
the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle.
I had been hired by a gentleman by the name of Stephen Hyde.
Steve Hyde was to run all of Donald Trump's casinos,
with Mark Etess and myself.
The three of us were kind of married,
you know, in terms of operating the business.
Despite Donald Trump, we were exceptionally successful.
We were generating close to $100 million in cash.
Annually.
Trump's next frontier is the biggest.
The resort's Taj Mahal, still under construction.
We think the Taj Mahal is beyond belief, from any standpoint,
and we think it's gonna be a tremendous success.
The Taj Mahal
was gonna be the largest casino in the world.
Money was gonna be spent
that had never been spent in Atlantic City. A billion-dollar casino.
This is the Taj.
That's the second tower of the Taj Mahal.
My name is Martin Rosenberg,
and I've lived in Atlantic City for 75 years.
We've done about seven or eight buildings in Atlantic City
This is our work.
The glass in the towers, glass over here,
mirrors, doors, bathroom enclosures, things of that nature.
I started doing the Taj Mahal,
and Donald Trump took over, and he said to me,
"How much is it gonna cost to finish it?"
I gave him a number.
He said, "That's way too much.
Are you gonna do a good job?"
I said, "We always do a good job.
That's why we do a lot of the work in Atlantic City."
He said, "Okay, you got the job."
What they didn't reckon on, in Atlantic City,
is that he would want to essentially try to consume the whole market.
Trump was already strapped financially
when he decided to go after the Taj Mahal.
And it was a project so expensive and big that it was beyond both his managerial
and financial abilities to run properly.
When it came to financing the Taj Mahal,
Donald, under oath, in front of the Casino Control Commission,
claimed that he would have no problem.
Banks were dying to give him the money,
and that it was gonna be low-interest money,
and swore up and down
that he didn't have to rely on junk bonds.
A junk bond, that's a bond
rated BB+ or lower.
And with the insider trading scandal growing,
many investors question just how safe those junk bonds are.
Based on those statements,
the Casino Control Commission approved the license for the Taj Mahal.
And, of course, it wasn't shortly after that
that Trump had actually secured financing through junk bonds.
When it came to the Taj,
it wasn't just big banks who owned those bonds.
A lot of the bonds were owned by individuals
who weren't necessarily wealthy, who had a stake in that property.
For the Taj Mahal to cover its interest payments,
gamblers will have to lose more than a million dollars a day.
Steve Hyde and Mark Etess and myself, we had a big task ahead of us.
Quite frankly, we were all worried about it.
And then, I was notified of the accident.
On the way back from the press conference for a big boxing match,
the helicopter crashed.
Steve Hyde, Mark Etess, and John Benanav were killed.
You were supposed to go on that plane, true?
I was going to go,
from the standpoint that they said, "Do you wanna come with us?"
And I said, "I think so, but maybe I'm just too busy."
I was that close, so it would have been, like, a 50-50 deal.
I had an immediate sense of outrage
because I knew it just wasn't true.
So, it doesn't matter what happens. He's gonna take an event,
and he's gonna turn it into something about Donald Trump.
One step beyond your wildest imagination,
a billion-dollar dream come true.
Donald J. Trump's Taj Mahal.
The eighth wonder of the world.
The Taj Mahal was the worst casino opening in the history of gambling.
A monumental disaster. I had never seen anything like it.
For the opening of the Taj Mahal, we had 2,400 press credentials.
Nobody's seen anything like it.
The problems were so bad with the slot operation,
and the lack of training and preparation.
They could only open a portion of the slot machines.
What about the slot machine thing where they were down?
The slots were so hot.
We had people playing so hard and so fast--
- They blew out the slots? - They blew apart.
We had machines...
- Was it too much? - ...that were virtually on fire.
One of the fundamental things
that you always have to know about the operation of a casino,
because it's money...
It's money going in, money coming out.
You have to know how much money do you have in the house.
They could not even answer that question.
The announcement that Trump was looking for a buyer for his Shuttle
was an early indication that Trump was running into a cash-flow problem.
One report has that Shuttle losing $85 million a year.
You owe a tremendous amount of money.
- Are you gonna sell the Plaza? - Know why?
- Because I have great assets. - Sell the Shuttle?
It's unlikely the Shuttle gets sold.
The Shuttle is doing very well.
- We started with 12% of-- - Not enough to pay back your debts.
Barbara, other people owe money far in excess of what their assets are.
They have lousy assets.
I have great assets.
He didn't pay attention to the bottom line. He didn't care.
That's always a dangerous place to be for a real estate developer,
because if the economy turns down,
or any of your projects you control aren't throwing enough money off,
you can't pay your debts back.
The Taj Mahal was a financial disaster,
and it was the first of Trump's casinos to go into bankruptcy.
When Donald was having issues,
Fred Trump showed up at the casino with $3 million
and converted the cash into chips.
Now, normally, you might say, "That happens every day."
But because he put $3 million in, took the chips and left with the chips,
it winds up, in effect, being a $3 million loan to the casino.
So, time and again, he's reached into the Fred Trump security vault
to get money to paper over his own financial mistakes.
I do remember
at the point of time when Donald was having his financial problems,
that he sort of turned on the people in Atlantic City that worked for him
and it was a change that I saw in him.
I mean, I saw him develop into a kind of mean-spirited person,
but I had this very special relationship with him.
And it's hard to pull away from that
even though, you know, a lot of people that worked with him when I was there,
really hated him.
Donald had pushed the button with me
too many times on Steve and Mark,
where I'd seen him blame them for problems that he created.
I saw it in the newspaper.
We wound up speaking on the phone.
I said, "Please, don't do this.
Nobody's gonna understand you blaming somebody that's dead."
I said, "These guys' wives are reading the newspaper.
Their children are reading the newspaper. Why would you do this?"
The amazing part about it, as passionate as I could be...
"They're dead. What does it matter, really?"
That was his answer.
"They're dead."
And before I could even think, I just said,
"Go fuck yourself," and I hung the phone up.
At the end of the job, I was owed about one and a half million.
I called up his construction manager, I said, "What's going on?"
He said, "Marty, you'll have a check in two weeks."
Two weeks go by and no check.
Donald Trump disappointed his many creditors today.
He announced he could not make payments
of more than $30 million.
The banks have come calling
and he doesn't have the money to pay them back.
Having borrowed three billion dollars,
Trump now owes interest of nearly one million dollars a day.
We're not gonna get the money.
So you're talking about at least 200 or 300 contractors.
And some of them from all over the country.
Trump's story in Atlantic City
should have been the most successful story in the history of gambling,
had he not screwed it up.
Sources point out
the bankers do not want Trump to file for bankruptcy.
It would freeze all of his assets and payments on some very big loans.
Trump basically recognized that he was too big to fail
and the billions of dollars he owed to the banks
made him continuously necessary to the banks.
The bankers are also reported to put Mr. Trump on an allowance.
$450,000 a month.
Perhaps Trump is proving that the very rich
are different from most of us.
Even when they just have more debts than we do.
A lot of people were hurt in Atlantic City.
There were a lot of expectations that just never materialized with Trump.
He used to run round saying, "Atlantic City is my cash cow."
He ate the cash and didn't take much for anybody else.
It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars
that the bond holders took a bath.
And quite frankly,
I have no idea what he did with the hundred million dollars a year
that we sent up to New York.
So whether he paid debts with it or not, or he kept the money for himself,
I'll never know.
I think Donald Trump believed that the Taj Mahal
would change Atlantic City forever.
And that's ultimately what happened.
I was 15-0.
And then I had one very bad year.
I had a bad year. Maybe it was my fault-- a lot of people's fault.
It was also the government's fault.
A lot of smart people are in deep trouble right now and I'm not.
Remember the '80s,
the yuppies, the buyouts, junk bonds and, especially, the Donald.
So when people ask about what Trump was doing
from the early '90s to about 2004,
from a business perspective, he really wasn't doing very much.
- Didn't know we were coming? - Absolutely.
You said, "Come on up." How busy can you be?
I'm not busy. I have nothing to do.
You know my truth, I have nothing to do. I wish I had more to do.
He'd become this punchline of jokes
about the excesses of the 1980s.
And our guest tonight, the next president, Donald Trump.
Once caught a sexually transmitted disease from himself.
And he kept himself in the public eye,
by being a ubiquitous and easy-to-get presence on talk shows.
How do I go about creating the capital that I need to start my business
when all I have is my knowledge and my training?
Meet a wealthy guy.
He was mostly doing things like talking about J. Lo's backside.
- Of course - It's true.
And talking about foreign policy.
If you go to Japan and try to sell something, forget about it.
They are beating the hell out of this country.
Hey, look, I know politicians.
I know politicians perhaps better than you know politicians,
and you interview them.
And he ran, quote, unquote, "for president" in the early 2000s.
People who have been watching you,
who know you, who like you, say this is all just a public relations stunt.
He sees it as a help to his business
because he's also Trump, the brand.
And he has his name on everything.
The man who was the darling of the '80s
is seen in the '90s as a man in trouble, and he knows it.
When people say something false, I attack those people.
More people should have that attitude
and I think you'd find a lot more accurate reporting, including yours.
What was inaccurate so far?
I thought your demeanor was inaccurate.
I thought that questions that you were posing to people in my organization
were inaccurate and false and unfair.
Questions can't be inaccurate.
Let's talk about what we talked about yesterday. I--
You know what? Do this interview with somebody else--
We talked about this yesterday on the phone.
This is what you--
Do the interview with somebody else, really.
You don't need this. Do it with somebody else.
I think Donald Trump is walking through the world
as the director and producer, and star of his own movie.
Who knows better about hard times than me?
And he will tell himself any narrative he needs to
about why he's successful and why he's such a survivor.
I had a company, it was doing well.
I had tremendous debt, like this country.
And in 1990, the whole country, it just went very, very bad.
We've screened a lot of movies together
with a humongous feed bag of potato chips at his side
every time we watched a movie.
Let's see.
Hold it right there.
Let's do one more.
And I remember when we were watching Sunset Boulevard together,
and there's this moment in the film
where Gloria Swanson and William Holden are together on the couch
and they're screening an old Norma Desmond film, a silent movie film.
And as they're watching it, Gloria Swanson's character, Norma,
becomes more and more agitated
about the fact that Hollywood has forgotten her.
And she stands up
and turns to William Holden in the spotlight and says...
Those imbeciles! Haven't they got any eyes?
Have they forgotten what a star looks like?
I'll show them! I'll be up there again, so help me!
And at the moment she says that dialogue, Trump stopped it,
and looked at me and he goes, "Isn't that dialogue great?"
You really think this is the right thing for us to be doing, Ivana?
What will people think?
Let 'em talk.
This was the guy who had fallen from the mountaintop.
- Then it's a deal? - Yes, we eat our pizza the wrong way.
He was essentially reduced to being a huckster.
A Big N' Tasty for just a dollar?
How do you do it? What's your secret?
And he was trying to figure a way out of that problem.
But he still retained celebrity traction.
This is what was originally called the West Side Rail Yards.
Trump bought it in the 1970s.
When he got into trouble with the banks, they wanted to take that away from him.
But they decided he was worth more alive than dead.
And his name had a tremendous amount of value,
and he ended up licensing his name on these projects
and got a lot of money for that.
After this was over, he was finished being a developer of any stripe.
He wasn't a major developer before that.
He had only done a handful of projects,
compared to some of the families that have developed in the city
and the dynasties of developers.
Who was Trump? He was nobody.
Well, Donald Trump's name is on a lot of the buildings
but that doesn't mean he owns those buildings.
His name is on the Trump International building in Columbus Circle,
but General Electric owns that building.
His name is on Trump Tower,
but most of the space in Trump Tower is now owned by the condominium owners.
And the property beneath the building is owned by someone else.
I'm the biggest developer in New York by far
and I'm doing more than any...
I'm building 90-story buildings all over.
But he was never the biggest real estate developer
in New York by any measure.
By either the value of the property that he had sold
or the square footage he owned.
But I believe it was the West Side Yards
that launched him in his new role as a licensing and development operation.
I'm Adam Davidson. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.
A friend of mine and I founded NPR's Planet Money.
Adam Davidson, of Planet Money...
And we spent years covering business and economics
and I can't remember Donald Trump's name ever being mentioned.
The Trump Organization, even the most generous readings
are it's a $10 billion or so, maybe $20 billion business.
That's a lot of money, and certainly a lot more money than I have,
but there are families who have much bigger businesses.
And you will never ever hear of them.
In business terms, his business didn't really turn a profit.
Because he could have, at many points in his life,
just put all his money in the stock market and made more money than he did.
A key change in the Trump Organization's business model
starts sort of accidentally in the late 1990s.
The business starts turning international.
One of the people who worked for Trump was visiting South Korea.
He's meeting with some Korean businesspeople.
They mention they're building buildings.
He says, "What are you calling those buildings?"
They said, "They don't have a name."
He said, "How about you call them the Trump Buildings?"
The businesspeople liked that idea.
Trump was a famous name in Korea. "Yeah, sure."
That turned out to solve a lot of problems
for Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.
Certainly by the 2000s,
no major bank is gonna lend him any money.
He defaulted so many times, declared bankruptcy so many times.
And you can't be a real estate developer if you can't borrow money.
And this licensing deal solved that problem "bigly."
Trump's business was already in financial trouble at that time.
And he starts to look abroad. He starts to get lots of deals overseas.
He didn't have to borrow any money, and he didn't have to do any work.
As much as he's put out in the world
that he is the Energizer Bunny
of the American business community and real estate,
he's always been a little bit lazy.
He can get animated from time to time when there's a deal in front of him,
but for a good chunk of his career, up until The Apprentice,
he was waiting for the phone to ring.
♪ Money, money, money, money ♪
♪ Money ♪
Trump is back.
♪ Money ♪
The Apprentice really, overnight,
repositioned him in the American imagination
as the embodiment of deal-making savvy, capable entrepreneur
and business success.
♪ Money can drive some people Out of their mind ♪
- My coffee maker broke. - Okay.
But I can still make it.
The first season was a shock, a complete surprise to everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
- It's really strong. - No, I like strong.
What did he think of that first season?
Did he treat it seriously? Did he treat it as a joke?
No, no, no. It was one of his many things to do that day to save his empire.
There's nothing better in my book than a comeback.
We went a little further on the tongue-in-cheek aspect of Donald,
thinking how funny is it to have this washed-up five-time bankruptcy guy,
who lives in a golden palace that other people are paying for,
how funny is it that
he is now the "executive" in charge of this big corporation?
- Georgette, I'm going over to Sony. - Okay, sir.
- So just hold my calls. - Yes, sir.
So, 2004, NBC "Must See TV" consisted of one big, huge show
called Friends.
Butted-up against it, chasing it in the ratings
was an hour-long reality show called The Apprentice.
It was a Thursday night "Must See TV" program.
It's a construct almost from the very beginning.
If you were to walk around Donald Trump's actual office in Trump Tower,
- you'd see the wood's kind of chipped. - It's a mess.
"Is that from the '70s? Wow. And what's that smell?"
Hi, good morning. It's Rhona in Mr. Trump's office.
It's still Midtown Manhattan, it's still Trump Tower,
but it wasn't the empire that we were going to have to sell to people.
We needed to gussy it up a bit, and we did.
Let 'em come in.
Everyone, please go in to see Mr. Trump.
The boardroom was created.
There wasn't a room like that in Trump Tower.
No.
So it was created like on a set.
The chair was selected very specifically.
But this is the thing, everything that we could create,
we did so with an extra added edge of patina.
It was a mood. It was absolutely a mood.
We were trying to recreate that scene in Network
- when Ned Beatty is confronting-- - Mr. Beale.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale.
That same sort of intimidation...
The world is a business, Mr. Beale.
Come on, Kwame. Time is money.
- We worked hard on this thing. - Yeah.
Giving it a look, giving it a style.
You know that shot of Donald when he comes down to announce his candidacy?
We used that shot many times.
Good morning.
We put on this Funkadelic kind of music,
and we'd sit back and go, "This is ridiculous."
But we thought it was funny.
Just didn't know how many people would actually look at that and go...
- "That's cool. That's wild." - "That's real. This guy's amazing."
He's entertaining, fun to watch.
You talk to most people about watching a rally, they're like, "Yeah."
But you hear Trump's coming to Clemson, and everybody goes nuts.
We grew up with The Apprentice.
I remember watching that TV show. That's when he had me,
'cause I'm trying to be CEO one day.
I think most of the Republican Party and a good portion of Democrats
failed to recognize how much The Apprentice...
solidified his image
in the minds of the very voters who ended up supporting him.
Let me ask you a question.
- Meat Loaf, should I run for president? - Absolutely.
Who would not vote for me?
My name is Randal Pinkett.
I was the winner of Season 4 of The Apprentice.
When you become the winner,
you get a one-year contract working for the Trump Organization.
One of the rules of thumb that I developed over the course of my apprenticeship
was I will not take anything to Donald unless I can articulate it and frame it
in the language of what's in it for Donald.
If I can't do that,
there's really no point in bringing it to him. None.
Overall, it was a good experience. Think about it.
The Apprentice opened a door of opportunity for me, which I seized.
But the realities of the job, again, was working for Donald.
I got the job done, but I learned the culture of the Trump Organization.
That culture was not one that reflected my values.
What a group of killers.
It was an unnecessarily combative culture.
Even for simple things that I would get into disagreements with people,
they would threaten me.
Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously.
Okay? Just knock the hell...
I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.
I really got to see
how those public behaviors translated into his private business.
People who had done business with Donald would say to me,
"I tried to do business with Donald, he took advantage of me."
"Donald got the best of the deal." "He raked me over the coals."
"I'll never work with Donald again."
I heard that regularly from people I didn't even know,
just came to me out of the blue at airports, restaurants, on the street.
You really have to watch the people that you're doing business with.
Donald will align himself with other businesspeople
who may be dubious or suspect.
They will license, borrow, impute his name to their efforts.
The Trump Organization was always what people call "open for business,"
meaning he'd hear any offer that came his way.
Just look at Trump Towers SoHo.
Located in the center of Manhattan's chic artist enclave,
the Trump International Hotel and Tower in SoHo
is the site of my latest development.
Trump SoHo was his only recent development on the island of Manhattan.
This 50-story building will be the first condominium hotel in the city
with world-class accommodation.
And he presented it on The Apprentice as a Trump project.
As if Trump himself dreamed of it, paid for it, built it.
This brilliant $370 million work of art
will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.
But it was not funded by Trump himself.
It was funded by a group of guys,
some of them happened to be from the former Soviet Union
with some pretty sketchy ties.
In the late 1990s, a guy named Tevfik Arif shows up in America.
Tevfik Arif was from Kazakhstan.
He was associated with some of Kazakhstan's more notorious oligarchs
who are known as being unbelievably corrupt.
A prostitution ring
has been rounded up on the Savarona.
The leader is said to be a Kazakh billionaire, Tevfik Arif.
He’s the business partner of Donald Trump.
He moved to a Russian neighborhood on Long Island,
and one day met one of his neighbors who also spoke Russian, Felix Sater.
He was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Brooklyn.
He had a few months as a successful trader on Wall Street.
But one night, he gets in a bar fight.
And in the midst of the fight,
the stem of his margarita glass goes in the guy's face.
Felix ends up going to jail.
When he gets out, there's no more Wall Street career.
So he starts doing one of these pump-and-dump schemes,
almost exactly the same scheme as the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
Sound fair enough?
Fuck you!
He gets arrested for that, and he turns State's witness.
So this Kazakh refugee, basically with a sketchy past,
meets this hustler from the streets of Brooklyn,
and they create this company Bayrock.
Tevfik Arif happened to have an office in Trump Tower.
Felix Sater shows up one day at Trump's door and says,
"Hey, I can get you some business. I can make some deals for you."
And so for Trump SoHo, what Felix Sater arranged was
for the main money to come from a man named Tamir Sapir.
He was a cab driver in New York City in the '70s.
Suddenly this cab driver from Brooklyn is doing these massive deals
in the former Soviet Union,
where he becomes a multi-billionaire very quickly.
I know from sources that many people told Trump,
"Don't do business with these guys."
Why didn't you go to Felix Sater and say,
"You're connected with the mafia. You're fired."
Well, first of all, we were not the developer there.
That was a licensing deal.
- But your name was on it. - A very simple licensing deal--
But your name is on it, Mr. Trump.
Excuse me, but you're telling me things that I don't even know about.
A long-time deputy of Donald, a guy named Abe Wallach, said to me,
"Trump doesn't do due diligence. He goes with his gut.
And if he has a gut feeling that he likes you
and that you pass a test which he thinks you've got good genes..."
that's how Abe put it, "then he'd do business with you."
Do you solemnly swear...
Trump later, during litigations, including my own, was asked under oath...
I do.
...by attorneys whether or not he knew Felix Sater.
If he were sitting in the room right now,
I really wouldn't know what he looked like.
Trump knows Sater. He knows him very well.
They've spent a lot of time together.
Trump asked Felix Sater to show his two children around Moscow.
Felix Sater had an office two doors down on the same hallway as Donald Trump.
We're standing in Trump SoHo. It's the tallest building in SoHo.
One of the tallest buildings in downtown. Doesn't get any better.
So, while Trump is on The Apprentice pitching Trump SoHo as his project
that is wildly successful, it is the exact opposite.
They've only sold a fraction of the units,
and he's using The Apprentice to desperately gin up business
for this collapsing enterprise.
And the building does eventually fail and then sold on to other owners,
although it maintains the name Trump SoHo.
The way the Trump Organization worked
was just literally a handful of high-ranking executives.
His kids Donald Jr. and Ivanka,
his lawyer, Michael Cohen,
few other occasional deal makers.
In 2010, Felix Sater goes into the Trump Organization
and becomes sort of an official deal maker.
So they start doing business
with some of the sketchiest people in some of the sketchiest countries.
One of the deals I'm most familiar with is his deal in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan is a very corrupt country.
It's nestled between Russia, Iran and Georgia.
But even for Azerbaijan,
Trump did business with people who are unbelievably corrupt.
Trump Organization does this deal with the Mammadov family
for Trump Tower, Baku.
The Trump Tower was in a pretty lousy neighborhood in Baku
to have a luxury tower,
so the building made no sense economically.
That's a huge red flag.
The project was with two different sitting members
of the Azerbaijan government.
A huge red flag.
A very long flight, but I'm here in Baku, Azerbaijan. Check it out.
Ivanka oversaw this project.
She met with Anar Mammadov,
the son of the transportation minister, Ziya Mammadov.
And then, about as big a red flag as it gets,
the US officials considered Ziya Mammadov to likely be laundering money
for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
This is the single biggest state sponsor
for terrorism in the world.
We think Trump made around $5 million for the deal. And...
Forget morality, let's say you don't care,
it's just bad business.
Just from a simple risk-reward calculation,
what should be the basic skill of a businessperson,
the deal was insane.
You're taking $5 million today,
but the risk to doing business with people like this,
if the Department of Justice got a hold of it,
is hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure.
And a great example of this is the Trump Tower, Moscow.
Trump has expressed many times he wants a Trump Tower, Moscow.
So Sater starts talking to a guy he grew up with, named Michael Cohen,
who became a high-ranking executive at the Trump Organization
and is now Trump's personal attorney.
Pretty soon, they signed a letter of intent,
which is the first phase before a development.
But then, they're not getting the right permissions from the Russian government,
and Michael Cohen sends an e-mail to the PR department at the Kremlin,
saying, "Hey, can we get this moving?
I represent Donald Trump and we wanna make this a deal."
The thing is, this all happens in January 2016,
in the middle of the presidential campaign.
Trump knew, because Michael Cohen says he spoke to Trump about it three times,
that his own high-ranking executive was reaching out to the Kremlin
to try and get political favors to get a Trump Moscow built.
I don't know this for sure, but there's certainly a theory
that he never imagined he would become president.
I may make money running for president.
It's very interesting.
And the very fact that he authorized this supports that idea.
Donald Trump is notoriously short-term in his thinking
and making cash quickly without being discerning
is one of the great Achilles' heels of Donald Trump.
It's what's gotten him into bed at times with questionable people.
It's what's made him plaster his name on so many different products,
he's essentially become a human shingle.
♪ When I'm thinking Arby's ♪
♪ I'm thinking Chicken Naturals When I'm thinking tasty ♪
♪ I'm thinking Chicken Naturals ♪
Trump has scores of ventures that are affiliated.
That either are licensing his name...
When it comes to great steaks, I've just raised the stakes.
Or have cut Donald into an equity stake to the venture. I'm talking scores.
You seize opportunity.
You get a hit TV show, and the show isn't even on that long,
and you're thinking, fragrance, board game, books, suits.
And you get all that out there.
I've been on the air for 11, coming up on 12 years, not one product.
I saw the rise of his multiple ventures in 2005 when I won.
People come to him wanting to do deals.
Donald did such a great job of marketing himself as successful,
and the most successful, that you would never know
that there are so many failed ventures.
So many people who were left with their hand out.
So many people who never got what they expected,
'cause that's not the story he tells.
My name is Jenna Knudsen.
My name is Doug Tumen.
This is a rags to riches to rags kinda story.
You know, because when I first met you, you were living in a little--
In a single-wide trailer.
- I'll put that out to America. - Right.
Eight years ago, I became a single mom with two young children.
And I needed to find a way to have an income.
I was introduced to Ideal Health.
It was a health and wellness company
with customized vitamins in a profession called network marketing.
It's word-of-mouth marketing.
It's like seeing a movie and recommending it,
except you get paid.
I had all of these people on the products, loving it,
and then one day I went out to my mailbox and I took out my paycheck,
and the check was for over $10,000 for one month.
So I went from single mom and struggling to really successful in this company.
So the company was doing well, in the multi-millions
and it really took off.
I remember being in Santa Monica, California, with Lou DiCaprio,
one of the founders and he said,
"We're partnering with somebody who's gonna change the face of our company."
He made me play a guessing game and I was able to say,
"Is it Donald Trump?"
And as soon as I said that, he smiled.
It was a moment of excitement because everybody felt
now we are going to be a billion-dollar company, guaranteed.
And it just seemed like it was only gonna get better and better.
At Trump University, we teach success. That's what it's all about. Success.
Donald Trump is the world's most famous businessman.
I'm Ron Schnackenberg.
I started at Trump University in October of 2006.
When I started at the organization,
we were selling a 12-month long portfolio of products.
It started with the real estate investment training program.
We called it the "Reit." And this is all online.
It was a really solid program.
I went through it, I enjoyed it.
So I felt like I was getting super early in at a start-up
with the CEO being Donald Trump who was, in my eyes, a huge success.
The sales team was, like, in this little closet.
As we grew, 'cause we grew pretty quick.
Set up, like, kinda like this.
And this would be the, like, the sales pit is what we called it.
It was kind of Boiler Room-esque.
For the first several months, it was all over the phone.
I was making more money than I'd ever made before.
We had more leads than the three of us could phone.
That's a good problem to have if you're making your money on commissions.
Life was really good. It was fun. That lasted for four to six months.
But the business drastically changed into something
that I just wasn't necessarily comfortable with.
But it became kind of fly-by-night-ish type of seminar program.
And we were now selling $1,500 to $35,000 seminars.
Mr. Donald J. Trump.
The launch of the Trump Network was an event.
And it's exciting and Donald Trump gets up on stage
and he starts talking about the Trump Network.
You know, it's funny. I just came from the final shooting of The Apprentice.
Has everyone heard of The Apprentice?
And every time Donald Trump would talk about the Trump Network,
he would use the same words. Which we now call Trump speak.
We want to be the biggest in the industry. I believe we can.
We will have so much winning if I get elected
that you may get bored with winning.
"It's gonna be great. It's gonna be huge."
And you are going to be successful. We're all gonna be successful together.
"This is gonna be so big.
You guys aren't gonna believe how big."
I'm really a good businessman. I'm so good at business. Oh!
You people are gonna be so rich so fast, you don't even...
When he was on stage, every bit of confidence that he projected was about us.
He made you feel like, through him, you could have the life that you wanted
and when people are looking for a way, it's easy to believe him.
And let's make this the number one network marketing company anywhere.
We are going to make America great again. Thank you.
My name is Sherri Simpson.
I'm an attorney in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
I handle foreclosure defense and bankruptcy cases primarily.
In 2010, the real estate prices in South Florida
had just dropped so incredibly low.
It really was an opportune time to buy and I have a 17-year-old daughter
so I was looking for something to help my daughter.
Trump University sent a mailer to my office
and said we're offering this free seminar. Come and learn from the master,
come and learn from Trump himself.
He'll teach you all of his secrets. Come, come, come.
Come. Come. Get all the knowledge that you need to be successful in real estate.
Come to the Sheraton Hotel. It's free.
When you first walked in, there was a huge cutout of Donald Trump.
And the guy gets up.
Pulls out his American Express black card, and puts it under the little projector
and asks everyone if they know what it is...
Starts going on to say, "Don't you wish you had one of these, you know?
This means that you are successful. You made it.
This is what you guys should want."
"But in order to really, really do this, you need to sign up for our mentorship."
The Gold Elite Mentorship was $35,000.
And I didn't even have that kind of money.
"You must be very aggressive,"
one passage from the playbook reads.
"If they complain about the price, remind them that Trump is the best!"
One of the front-end pitch guys
told everyone to go home and increase their credit limits.
Sure enough, Sunday afternoon, when it comes time to wrap up the seminar
and he's saying, "Now it's time to use that newly available credit
to fund that $35,000 program.
To sweeten the deal, I'll tell you what we can do.
We can let you partner with somebody and so it's half-off."
I don't know. Maybe I'm susceptible to sales pitches.
But there was a lot of excitement.
A lot of buzz that it was him and we would learn from him.
And these are all people that are handpicked by me.
I really believed in him.
Because at that time, this is 2010, all I knew about him
was that he was a successful real estate investor.
What everyone later came to find out
was that this was the licensing deal that he had done other places.
I've become a very rich guy.
A billionaire many times over by taking action.
We had to pay him for everything. For every conference call,
for every time he showed up...
And once the original buzz was over, there was no follow-through on his end.
So the money left the company to go to Donald Trump,
and eventually, when it wasn't being promoted,
people stopped rushing to join the company.
After the seminar, a couple came and talked to me
and they wanted to buy it.
I started talking to them about their current situation.
I learned that the person didn't have a job,
and this was their fallback.
So I asked how he was gonna pay for the program,
and he was gonna take out some equity from his apartment.
I wasn't comfortable with it and an hour or so later,
he tracked me down with his new business partner that he had just met.
And so I was really disappointed to know that one of the other salespeople
had gotten hold of him and they ended up buying it.
Playbooks for the sales team coach them on how to market the courses,
even to single mothers with three children who, quote, "may need money for food."
I was reprimanded for not selling the program to this guy.
They brought me into the office and said, "This isn't right.
Who are you to say that this person can't afford this program?"
And it was very clear that, ethically, we were not in line.
I went back to my desk
and drafted a resignation letter and resigned,
and they showed me the door 15 minutes later.
Then one day, I go to my mailbox and there is no paycheck.
So I called up the founders and I just said, "What's going on?"
And they told me, "Little cash-flow problem.
You're going to get paid. It's just tough."
I did call the Trump Tower
and I spoke to his executive assistant, Cathy.
And basically, it was,
"I'm sorry. We're not affiliated with the company anymore," and that's it.
And we never got paid again. Ever.
We were devastated. We were in a state of crisis.
This was our life. This was little kids saying,
"Mom, is everything gonna be okay?" It was tough. It was really hard.
The mentor was supposed to be handpicked by Trump.
It was supposed to be somebody that he had taught.
Did you spend time with people that go into the Elite program?
I was very much involved with the school
from the standpoint of, I see instructors.
I talk to instructors. I talk to people.
I check resumes. It was very important to me.
And the mentor dropped off the face of the Earth.
He had never met Donald Trump. Didn't know Trump from Adam.
Do you remember when you said this? "I'm a former license agent broker.
At 29, I became the top 1% broker in the country.
I build homes in Atlanta, Georgia. And I used to live in Beverly Hills."
Yes. If I said those things, they're true. I did live in Beverly Hills and I--
We have no record of you ever living in Beverly Hills.
Okay, well...
We can't find your broker's license anywhere.
Okay.
And I have no idea what homes you built in Atlanta, Georgia.
- You build homes in Georgia? - I'm not prepared to answer today.
I'm trying to reach them. I'm e-mailing, calling...
I'm getting no response. And then it just shut down.
And I had no idea until it ended up on the news.
Students of Trump University who are suing him
are calling the real estate courses a fraud.
This is thousands of people who were taken for millions of dollars.
They claim the university used high-pressure sales tactics
and never taught real estate success.
- You didn't learn anything? - No.
He took my self-respect and he embarrassed me.
This was a lie.
The only person who was guilty of a cheap publicity stunt
is America's leading expert on cheap publicity stunts, Donald Trump.
A law firm reached out and said, "Hey, would you be willing to testify
and give your story of your experience?"
When something hits my ethics, I'm gonna share my truthful feedback on it,
and so, that's what happened.
Once I found out that litigation had started,
I said, "I will join in with you."
I think I'd be more comfortable with my attorney talking to you
about all of the legal ramifications of everything.
What happened in this case is that the defendant in the lawsuit
was elected president of the United States.
That doesn't happen every day.
I don't settle cases.
I don't do it because that's why I don't get sued often.
Because I don't settle unlike a lot of other people.
We just learned that Donald Trump has agreed to settle the lawsuits
related to Trump University. It's for $25 million dollars.
I think Trump was absolutely correct when he tweeted that
that's a small fraction of the exposure he could have faced had he lost at trial.
Trump University took in close to $50 million in tuition.
Under the RICO statute, the damages are tripled.
So if the case goes to trial, he's pushing $200 million in exposure.
I think he owes us everything that we paid.
He needs to be stopped.
I had been looking at this settlement.
It struck me as really odd based on my knowledge as a class-action lawyer,
that the class members did not have the opportunity
to opt out of the settlement.
When I drilled into it, I saw that they had been promised
that if there was a settlement, they'd have the opportunity to opt out.
The only way to stop it is a real judgment in a court of law.
She's filed a motion with the San Diego federal court.
I believe that the president is gonna go to trial for fraud.
And I am very confident that we're gonna win.
The world doesn't change without people standing up to people like Trump.
My name's Walt Shaub.
I used to be the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
And now I'm with the Campaign Legal Center.
I worked under three different presidents. Bush, Obama and Trump.
There were times when things would get heated
with folks from both the Bush and the Obama Administrations.
But they always respected you for standing up and doing your job,
and in the end, we were always able to work it out.
Everything changed when the Trump Administration came in.
The morning after the election, I sent them a congratulations e-mail
and said, "I was looking forward to working with you."
And then they disappeared. Just gone.
And a few weeks went by before I managed to get Don McGahn,
who is counsel to the president, to meet us.
And from the moment I met him,
I was struck by how little he knew about what was going on.
In fact, at one point, Don McGahn even raised his voice
in our very first meeting with him.
I stopped the meeting and went and got him some cookies and coffee,
'cause I thought he was having a low blood-sugar moment.
It didn't get better from there.
Things went downhill for the rest of the time that we dealt with them.
One of the issues with the Government Ethics program is
it's based on an assumption that the president cares about ethics,
and he's gonna hold his staff accountable.
But from the start, when the president declared
he was not going to divest his financial interest,
he departed from an ethical norm
established by every president before him since the 1970s.
You learn very little from tax returns,
but nevertheless, I really have a very, very clean company.
One of the biggest scams that President Trump has tried to pull
is making it sound like he's stepped back from his businesses.
My two sons, who are right here, are going to be running the company.
They are going to be running it in a very professional manner.
They're not gonna discuss it with me.
Then you have cabinet officials and foreign governments
moving their events to the president's hotel.
A member of the ruling family of the UAE and Turkish Airlines
were among the sponsors of this Turkish-American conference
at Trump International Hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.
At his New Jersey property, there was a flyer saying,
if you rent the facility for an event, the president might pop in on you.
And he's made good on that.
- Everyone having a good time? - Yes, sir.
Looking good, Donald.
You're literally engaging in pay-for-play by selling access to the government.
The president has spent roughly one-third
of his time in office at Trump properties,
including his current working vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey,
and 25 days at his Mar-a-Lago resort where membership fees
have doubled to $200,000 since he took office.
But even beyond that, just using the presidency to advertise businesses.
Trump Steaks. Where are the steaks?
Do we have the steaks? Right. We have Trump Steaks.
Go buy Ivanka's stuff is what I would tell him.
She developed another unbelievably entrepreneurial,
wildly successful business that bears her name.
The man tweeted at one point, "Everybody should buy L.L. Bean products
because they supported me in the campaign."
Dow Chemical donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.
And most recently sent letters to three federal agencies
asking them to ignore pesticide studies.
Should I give this pen to Andrew? Dow Chemicals.
The president misusing the presidency to give free advertising
to his own properties whenever possible.
Hello, everybody.
This was the liberal college town
of Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday.
Jews will not replace us!
The alt-right is behind these attacks in Charlottesville.
But you also had people, very fine people on both sides.
Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?
Where is it?
Oh, boy, it's gonna be... It's in Charlottesville. You'll see.
Is it near the winery?
It is the winery.
I know a lot about Charlottesville.
I own one of the largest wineries in the United States, in Charlottesville.
It's just the complete monetization of the presidency.
The thing I'm most worried about regarding the intersection
between the Trump brand and Federal Government
is that we now no longer have the ability to assess whether his decisions
are based on his policy aims or his financial interests.
When you have Trump praising Erdoğan in Turkey when he seizes more power...
President Erdoğan and I are also discussing
the need to reinvigorate our trade and commercial ties.
...or inviting a murderer like Duterte to come stay in the White House.
He's popular in the Philippines.
He has a very high approval rating. I look forward to meeting him.
And then you learn that he's got
Trump-branded properties in Turkey and in the Philippines.
You start wondering, "Does he admire these men for their authoritarian traits,
or is he trying to make a buck?" And whatever the answer is,
even if you wanna give him the benefit of the doubt,
what's wrong is that we have to even ask the question.
Back in Washington, the Government Ethics watchdog
who raised red flags about Trump family business dealings, resigned today.
It was a difficult decision to quit,
but it was a lot more difficult to watch the ethics program being dismantled.
I had been there for the better part of 17 years.
And I now had been dealing with a White House that was determined
to drive a Mack Truck through any loopholes
they could find in the ethics program.
Every deal I've looked at contains unbelievable ethical lapses
and many of the warning signs of criminal activity.
But sometimes I wonder, if maybe his greatest fear is,
he doesn’t know what he's done.
The way the Trump Organization worked is
that there were these people in the world,
who knew they could make a connection
between Trump and people with money to set up a deal.
When you have these people in the world wandering around cutting deals,
you don't know what you've agreed to.
But that is not a legal defense.
There's a concept called "willful blindness."
You are guilty if you knowingly engage in an illegal action
or you're with somebody who's performing an illegal action.
You're just as guilty if you're willfully blind.
That doesn't mean you just don't happen to know.
It means you have actively structured your organization
to stop yourself from finding out.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Donald Trump.
Step right up, folks.
Here's the answer to your problems. Sensational new discovery, ISM.
ISM will cure any ailment to the body politic.
What truly scares me and makes me think we have a problem
that will last much, much longer than the Trump presidency,
is that this whole thing has worked.
Maybe it's just 35%, but that a significant and crucial part
of the American people so fundamentally misunderstand
the most basic principles of ethics, and morality and business practices.
And that to me is really scary
'cause what choices are they gonna keep making again and again?
The best way to think of his thought about the presidential campaign
was it was a great con. It was a great grift.
This was all part of the 45-year
showbiz project called the Trump Organization.
The con man is a storied figure in American life.
The snake oil salesman who visits a small town
and convinces the yokels to buy a magic potion.
Father Coughlin, in the 1930s,
who inveighed over a new medium called radio to foster anti-Semitism.
Joe McCarthy, in the 1950s, who used a new medium called television
to foment a scare about Communist infiltration.
Donald Trump, in the year 2017, who used social media
to foment the fear of the other
and to destabilize people's faith in bipartisan public policy making.
The con man is a fixture of American life and con man is short for confidence man.
He is someone who preys upon people's confidence in them
to deliver on their dreams, to deliver on their needs,
knowing full well that they have
neither the ability or the intent to deliver on any of that.
♪ We're gonna make it, me and you ♪
♪ I know just what to do ♪
♪ We'll take the scars And the ditches too ♪
♪ There ain't nobody rich like me ♪
♪ They say trouble should be my name ♪
♪ I get by just the same ♪
♪ When they're gone, lost again ♪
♪ Oh, there ain't nobody rich like me ♪
♪ There are winners, there are losers ♪
♪ Rivers paved with gold ♪
♪ Come here, I'll tell you ♪
♪ Oh, Lord, I've been told ♪
♪ I've seen sights you can't believe ♪
♪ Then again Say money don't grow on trees ♪
♪ I ain't so funny When I'm counting money ♪
♪ And there ain't nobody rich like me ♪
♪ Ain't nobody rich like me ♪
♪ There ain't nobody rich like me ♪