Michael Kranish > Quotes

“Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government’s legs, hire Roy Cohn,” Ken Auletta wrote. “He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America. He is not a very nice man.” Trump served as a supporting witness in the piece. “When people know that Roy is involved, they’d rather not get involved in the lawsuits and everything else that’s involved,” Trump said. Cohn “was never two-faced. You could count on him to go to bat for you,” which was exactly what Trump wanted Cohn to do in the racial-bias case. Cohn”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“On New Year’s Eve of 1976, Trump proposed to Ivana, later presenting her with a three-carat Tiffany diamond ring. But before there could be a wedding, less than a year after they met, there was the prenup—ultimately, as many as four or five contracts. The negotiations between Trump and Ivana—Roy Cohn urged Donald to begin married life with codified financial arrangements—followed a pattern that came to define Trumpism: boasts of wealth and influence, a highly public airing of grievances, and dramatic battles staged in gossip columns and courtrooms. The marriage would start—and later explode—to the accompaniment of lawyers.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Trump was actively involved in the pageants. After Miss Universe Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan, gained considerable weight in 1996, Trump publicly excoriated her. He staged a photo op to show Machado exercising at a Manhattan gym. In front of about eighty reporters and photographers, Trump said, “When you win a beauty pageant, people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.” Machado called the photo op an ambush designed to humiliate her. “He had his triumphant entry,” she recalled, “and I got to feel like a hamster on a wheel for an hour. I was his first Miss Universe when he just bought the company. Unfortunately, this also meant that I experienced, firsthand, his rage and racism and all the misogyny a person can demonstrate.” Trump wrote years later that he did what he did to protect her from being fired: “God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains fifty pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her.” Trump”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“The editors who wanted more than anything else to figure out how much of Trump’s campaign manner was shtick and how much was real venom emerged thinking that they had seen the genuine Trump—a man certain of his views, hugely confident in his abilities, not terribly well informed, quick to take offense, and authentically perplexed by suspicions that he had motives other than making America great again. A”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Trump liked what he heard—not just about the case, but the whole “go to hell” philosophy. From that moment, he adopted the Cohn playbook: when attacked, counterattack with overwhelming force. One of the most influential relationships in Trump’s life was now under way.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Goldberg, the attorney who was often by Trump’s side during those years, said many of his client’s much-ballyhooed associations with famous women and top models were mere moments, staged for the cameras. “Give him a Hershey bar and let him watch television,” Goldberg said. “I only remember him finishing the day [by] going home, not necessarily with a woman but with a bag of candy. . . . He planned his next project, read the blueprints, met with the lawyers, never raising his voice, never showing off, never nasty to anybody in the office, a gentleman. . . . I never heard him speak romantically about a woman. I mean, I heard him speak romantically about his work.” Kate”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“It seemed that Trump couldn’t spend fast enough. In 1988, he had paid $365 million to buy airplanes and routes from Eastern Airlines, which he turned into a Northeastern shuttle service. And he shelled out $407 million for the Plaza Hotel, the iconic château-style building across from Manhattan’s Central Park. In both cases, he borrowed most of the money, and analysts said he overpaid. The purchases loaded him up with debt at the same time he was ramping up his gambling empire by the boardwalk, and both moves would come to haunt him. To”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza—black guys counting my money!” Trump said, according to O’Donnell’s memoir, Trumped! “I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else. . . . Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is; I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Now Trump just needed somebody to help run it. He consulted friends, colleagues, experts. His choice shocked nearly everyone: he picked his wife, Ivana. She, like Donald, had no experience running a casino. But she did have a sense of style, albeit an expensive sense, and she did have Donald’s trust, at least at the start. He called her “a natural manager.” Some of Trump’s friends later wondered whether he put her there so he could have affairs with women in Manhattan, or to get her away from his construction projects in New York.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“The concrete for Trump Tower came from S&A Concrete, then owned by the heads of two New York crime families: “Fat” Tony Salerno, of the Genovese family, and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, of the Gambinos (Castellano was assassinated in 1985 outside Sparks Steak House on Manhattan’s East Side in a Mafia hit organized by the mobster John Gotti).”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“TRUMP EVENTUALLY REALIZED THAT he needed executives with a strong background in running casinos. He scouted the competition and picked Stephen Hyde, a devout Mormon with a large family. The Church of Latter-day Saints opposed gambling, but the casino industry employed many Mormons in key positions, in part because executives believed the faithful wouldn’t be tempted to bet. Hyde was soft-spoken, unflappable, and widely considered one of the nation’s savviest gaming executives, having most recently worked for Trump’s competitor Steve Wynn. Trump, who once wrote, “I can be a screamer,” would occasionally humiliate Hyde by cursing him out in front of other executives. Yet Trump recognized Hyde’s capabilities and entrusted him with a business potentially worth billions of dollars. Hyde was, Trump wrote, “a very sharp guy and highly competitive, but most of all, he had a sense of how to manage to the bottom line.” Trump throughout his career would rely on small circles of advisers, and Hyde became one of Trump’s most trusted associates at the time. That meant some other senior executives felt shut out, unable to convey their concerns to Trump without going through the tight inner circle. Hyde was at the top of that chain of command. Hyde”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Trump became a regular at the club and later recounted seeing “things happening there that to this day I have never seen again. I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room. Stuff that couldn’t happen today because of problems of death.” On”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Even now, running for the most powerful position on the planet, a job that relies almost entirely on the power to persuade those around you, a job heavy on running a team and winning loyalty, even now Donald J. Trump said he made most of his decisions by himself, consulting no one: “I understand life,” he said. “And I understand how life works. I’m the Lone Ranger.” He”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Many rich men don’t allow their wives to come to their office. Many women don’t know what their husbands do.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Founded in 1889 by a Civil War veteran in what had been a summer resort hotel, the academy modeled its strict code of conduct and turreted academic building after West Point, located five miles south along the Hudson. About 450 students were enrolled, all of them white except for a couple of dozen Latin Americans. The school did not admit blacks until Donald’s senior year. Women would not arrive for another decade. The military academy was a place where, as the school’s slogan put it, the boys were “set apart for excellence”; the idea was to inject discipline and direction into boys who arrived on campus unformed and untamed. That involved breaking them down to build them up.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Whether his students were the sons of plumbers or millionaires, Dobias did not care. They would follow his orders, no questions or whining tolerated. Donald was no exception.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“At his father’s Avenue Z office, Donald was itching to break away from building basic housing for middle-class, outer-borough families. When Fred Trump did branch out beyond Brooklyn, it was to buy cheap plots from desperate sellers in California, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia. Donald wanted something bigger.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“He is the antithesis of the gregarious pol with a highball in one hand and a cigar in his mouth, offering a colorful dose of political lore under a dim bar light.”
― Michael Kranish, The Real Romney

“Trump, tenants said, tried to force them out by annoying them. He proposed to move homeless people into at least ten vacant apartments; the city declined the generous offer. Maintenance workers ignored leaky faucets and broken appliances and covered up windows of empty apartments with ratty tinfoil. A tenants’ group accused Trump of harassment, but he denied all. “Let me tell you something about the rich,” he said. “They have a very low threshold for pain.” After”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Presposterous, Ifshin thought. There’s always a negotiation. And then it dawned on Ifshin that he had been used. Donald, he said, this was your way of getting an informal appraisal, to see if someone would bite, and for how much. Trump denied it, but Ifshin pushed back: This was just a ruse to see what the buildings might be worth in the marketplace, and now Trump knew, at least $90 million. You owe me a commission for getting you an informal appraisal from my buyer, Ifshin said. You owe me $10,000. Trump looked at him like he was insane, but said he’d pay him back with a favor in the future. That never happened. Ifshin never dealt with Trump again and Trump didn’t sell the buildings. “He wasn’t upfront,” Ifshin said. “He sort of hid his intentions. And that’s the part that bothered me—very clever but not straight.” Trump, Ifshin concluded, was someone who was unreliable, didn’t care about long-term relationships, and burned through people. Trump”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Sherman Cohen, a tough negotiator in the Manhattan properties market, expressed interest and Ifshin set up a meeting in Trump’s office. Before taking a seat at Trump’s conference table, Cohen lit up a cigarette. But when he reached for the ashtray in the middle of the table, it would not budge. Donald, Cohen said, do you have this thing screwed down? This conference table comes from my hotel, the Barbizon, Trump said, and we screwed down all the ashtrays because people were stealing them as souvenirs. Trump’s self-satisfied grin suggested he was just protecting his investment.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“One Trump tenant disturbed by the de facto segregation was the Oklahoman Woodrow Wilson Guthrie—or Woody, as the folksinger was known. He had moved to New York City in 1940, the same year he wrote one of the nation’s most revered ballads, “This Land Is Your Land.” Ten years later, he had moved to Beach Haven, the Trump complex a few blocks from the Coney Island beachfront. Guthrie later wrote a number of verses that suggested Fred Trump was responsible for steering blacks away from the property: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts / When he drawed / That color line / Here at his / Eighteen hundred family project.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“They did not get together after the story. Barrett’s article—published in two parts in 1979—was the first to reveal the prominent role that Fred Trump’s political connections and campaign contributions, along with legally questionable favors granted by government and bankruptcy-court officials, played in Donald’s meteoric rise. Trump’s response to the story was, compared to the media wars that would develop in the years to come, tame. He stopped taking Barrett’s calls, criticized him to other reporters.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Separately, Trump said, “I’m the least racist person that you’ve ever interviewed.”)”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“The teacher, Charles Walker, who died in 2015, never told anyone in his family about a student’s striking him. Yet Walker’s contempt for Donald was clear. “He was a pain,” Walker once said. “There are certain kids that need attention all the time. He was one of those.” Just before his death, as he lay in bed in a hospice, Walker heard reports that Trump was considering a run for the presidency. “When that kid was ten,” Walker told family members, “even then he was a little shit.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed

“Dobias taught his players the line famously attributed to legendary Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi: “I taught them that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing,” Dobias said. “Donald picked right up on this. He would tell his teammates, ‘We’re out here for a purpose. To win.’ He always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Freddy left the business and went to work as a pilot with Trans World Airlines. At age twenty-three, he married a stewardess, and the couple had two children, Fred and Mary. Freddy seemed far happier than he had been under his father; Donald, however, couldn’t help but pick on Freddy’s run-of-the-mill ambitions, asking him, “What’s the difference between what you do and driving a bus?”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“As a senior, Donald drew notice for bringing women to campus and showing them around. “They were beautiful, gorgeous women, dressed out of Saks Fifth Avenue,” said classmate George White. Trump was never shy about judging a girl’s appearance, pronouncing one of White’s visitors a “dog.”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony said in 1896. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”
― Michael Kranish, The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero

“When Cohn boasted that he had spent much of his life under indictment, Trump asked whether Cohn had really done what was alleged. “What the hell do you think?” Cohn responded with a smile. Trump said he “never really knew” what that meant, but he liked Cohn’s toughness and loyalty. Cohn”
― Michael Kranish, Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President