A Chump on the Stump
LABASH, MATT
A Chump on the Stump Donald Trump pretends to run for President. BY MATT LABASH Los Angeles Of all the bizarre twists Campaign 2000 has taken, there is none so strange as the one that finds us...
...He does not shake our Purelcoated hands...
...Her name is like a song...
...Trump’s hair again...
...In profile, he looks like a distressed mallard...
...Hey Donald,” cracks Leno, “you brought your bookie...
...But no matter...
...Trump then vanishes into his limo, but the very molecular structure of the patio changes around us...
...That seems like a lot...
...It’s a virtuoso performance...
...Watch the paintings, fellas...
...Trump is not opposed to the nerf platitudes of self-help gurus...
...It’s the inner beauty, too...
...As he takes the podium, Trump’s entire entourage is present...
...Here’s hoping The Donald runs...
...Everything is fashioned from mahogany and teak...
...The crowd is nearly speaking in tongues...
...Conveys confidence without conceit...
...Melania has shed her Blahnik pumps and pads barefoot around the cabin like an exotic cat...
...Yes,” the man says...
...Trump, it seems, is a bit sensitive to the media perception of the Reform party, which falls somewhere between comic relief and sad joke...
...When somebody screws you, screw ’em back, but a lot harder...
...A few hours after the reception, a small group of reporters are off to The Ivy...
...It comes as a surprise, but teadrinkers may be the soccer moms of the 2000 election...
...We are shunted off to a lonely patio corner with an obstructed view...
...I think so, yeah,” responded The Donald, “I always have a shot...
...You piss 50 percent of the people off no matter what you say,” says Stone...
...But the lovelight momentarily flickers out in her eyes...
...Trump’s candor makes John McCain look Nixonian by comparison...
...We journalists are briefly permitted into the studio to watch the pre-show festivities...
...I tell him to picture his audience naked, and he seems to accept my counsel, wiggling his bushy brows as a female Robbins staffer walks by in a tank top that threatens her circulation...
...Robbins introduces Trump to a receptive crowd, and Trump enters to two stageside explosions that nearly ignite his hair...
...We walk through the Holocaust section, where there are re-creations of everything from the Warsaw Ghetto to Auschwitz...
...I haven’t bought off the rack since I was 17,” says Stone...
...As Trump cools his heels in the dressing room before the show, Leno pops in for a visit, and sees Stone in his Bugsy Siegel rig...
...Crystal bar glasses and decanters line the cabinets (though The Donald doesn’t drink), and priceless works of art hang throughout the cabin (the art, Trump says, is “off the record” for security reasons...
...Trump’s coif resembled an abandoned nest...
...Next to a lobby anteroom where Melania sits, Whoopie Goldberg waltzes by...
...In fact, he uses the word frequently—as an adjective, not a noun...
...Strange women strike up conversations with us from distant tables...
...Tonight Show staffers claim this is a pre-game tradition, but one suspects they invented it as an excuse to watch Melania gyrate...
...The Donald, Melania, and the media scrum follow Cooper through exhibits like the “Point of View Diner,” and a film montage depicting atrocities throughout the world...
...For the next six hours, we share locker-room banter that if transcribed could put an end to several careers...
...Trump picks the former, though Matty the Squid looks disappointed...
...The Ivy is one of those insider Hollywood restaurants where out-of-towners come to experience the epicenter of cool, though since we know about it, it’s likely on the verge of extinction...
...Having now seen Trump’s hair up close, I make no promises...
...It’s what The Donald would call a “class facility,” and he knows of what he speaks...
...But then, “when he could have her,” says Bolton, “he didn’t want her anymore...
...The Donald gazes intently, brow knitted, his lips fixed in puckered protrusion...
...Stone is referring to an article I wrote some months ago in which I charged that Mr...
...But today Trump offers a different kind of success recipe, one that sounds like a song-of-the-street beatitude uttered by Frank Sinatra and transcribed by Jilly Rizzo...
...Here, on stage, Robbins dons a headset mike and dances like an epileptic to a mega-mix version of “Real Wild One...
...It seems a sensible question...
...We head to Arrowhead Pond arena, home of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks hockey team, which is filled with Tony Robbins seminarians who’ve spent hundreds of dollars to glean success secrets from celebrity guests like Larry King (marry eight times, ask softball questions...
...He’s looking me straight in the cravat...
...Unable to obtain a review copy less than a month before publication, I ask Leno to see it...
...Michael Bolton rises to his feet and starts sucking-up profusely to Adam Nagourney of the New York Times...
...Back in the green room, after the show begins, we munch melon wedges and finger sandwiches with singer Michael Bolton’s entourage...
...After about ten minutes, the Trump entourage, having already eaten, emerges from an inner sanctum where they’ve been chatting up Rod Stewart...
...How...
...Food tastes better...
...Of his competition, Pat Buchanan, he says, “he’s obviously been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler...
...Of a Yorba Linda resident seeking Trump’s advice about running for city council, Trump asks, “Are you a Reform candidate...
...trade representative...
...Your knot needs work,” he says...
...The media have come to explore the possible presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who has himself formed an exploratory committee, blanketed the talk shows, and threatened to spend $100 million to win not just the Reform party nomination, but “the whole megillah...
...Trump doesn’t like to share the spotlight...
...Backstage, Trump has a case of nerves, skittishly pacing and shaking his legs to the beat...
...he asked, convincingly pretending ignorance...
...That night, we follow Trump to a taping of the Jay Leno show in Burbank...
...I ask how The Donald expects to sustain support when he so frequently expresses obvious contempt for everyone but himself...
...Stone Matt Labash is a staff writer at THEWEEKLY STANDARD...
...The Donald would have time to do interviews, close a deal, and still take Melania shopping before his next engagement...
...From the Wiesenthal Center, we board Trump’s 727 at LAX for the 15-minute ride to Long Beach, where Trump will make $100,000 for 20 minutes’ work addressing 21,000 people at self-help guru Tony Robbins’s seminar...
...At the Long Beach Airport, we deplane and board a chartered bus, appropriately titled, “A Touch of Class...
...Evasive...
...On the other hand, at the Tony Robbins seminar, 21,000 people have just paid $270 apiece to derive wisdom from Billy Blanks, the founder of Tae-Bo...
...I have spent so much time talking to Trump’s aides over the past week that I feel qualified to speak not only for them, but like them...
...He rubs turpentine in the wounds of black-helicopter types, saying that he believes in the United Nations so strongly that “I’m building a 90-story building right next to it...
...In a word, the plane is classy...
...I would have loved to have had a shot to date her,” he told Stone Phillips, “because she was an absolutely wonderful woman...
...She’d make a class first lady...
...Wine flows freer...
...Trump has disagreed with, chided, and even insulted his constituency, and yet they mob him afterwards, won over by either his Merlot or his candor...
...Do you think you would have had a shot...
...It’s a dummy copy,” quips Leno, “[the book] hasn’t been written yet...
...We’re tired of being bull—ed by these moron politicians...
...It’s not exactly my values,” he says offstage...
...We have pizza,” she purrs...
...After the press conference, I try to talk about the speech with Stone, but his mind is on other things...
...Whoopi doesn’t either,” snaps a Goldberg lackey, “and she’s a real celebrity...
...Her skirt is short, her heels are high...
...There’s Roger Stone, his political consigliere, who is, as always, immaculately and ornately haberdashed in caf?-au-lait suede shoes and a gangster boldstripe suit...
...His name is Matt Calamari, so we immediately start calling him “Matty the Squid,” though not to his face...
...As Melania disappears into a back room to avoid getting pawed by the double-knits, Trump lunges into the throng, shaking hands—shaking hands!—and signing campaign literature...
...says they are smoking Pat Buchanan in polls of Reform party members, but have not polled the general election...
...I protest to Stone, who, like any Trump devotee, tries to make a deal...
...Though he will ultimately decide on running for president after “going by my gut,” he says his internal “polling has been amazing...
...Throughout the trip, Trump keeps saying things like “Good job, Rabbi” and “Great location,” as if he is assessing one of his Atlantic City properties...
...In a VIP tent after his performance, Trump faces a select group of tortellini-eating businessmen who’ve paid additional sums to ask questions of the celebrities...
...Lotsa luck,” Trump replies...
...By his reckoning, Trump needs “only” 35-40 percent of the vote in a three-way election...
...Pretty incredible, right...
...Thus, everything associated with him is classy, even unauthorized biographies, like The Really, Really Classy Donald Trump Quiz Book...
...She’s a beauty, and it’s not just here,” he says, pointing to his face...
...he and first wife, Ivana, were married by Mr...
...Seeing us in the corner, Trump walks over and says to Bolton, in a voice loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, “Watch out for these guys, they rule the world...
...The next day, we rise at dawn to follow Trump to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, which bills itself, in Trumpian fashion, as a “world-class human rights laboratory...
...At the end of the tour, I approach Roger Stone, who is wearing “Nixon Is the One” cufflinks, to ask if Trump will make news...
...We are, thanks to the Donald, what Matty the Squid might call “made men...
...Politics, however, is about compromise...
...He distills his political philosophy into a very simple formula: “In business and in life, people want to hear straight talk...
...Commandment Three: “Always have a prenup...
...he asks...
...Someone brings him a copy...
...The revenue the book generates, he says, will pay for his “airplane fuel to go back and forth from California...
...It’s not his way...
...he asks, “Fantastic guy...
...As his presidential campaign seems to suggest, Trump is most attracted to things he can’t have...
...I catch up with Trump in his kitchenette as he tears into a bag of Lay’s potato chips...
...There is Trump’s bodyguard, all muscle and menace...
...Ever the charmer, Trump chooses his interrogators by identifying their salient physical characteristics: “the bald guy in the suit” or “the beautiful woman in the semi-blouse...
...Holding up a picture of himself, he asks, “Isn’t he handsome...
...Trump tells us that he will be forgoing individual interviews because of the crush of media present...
...Middle managers are instructed to knead each other’s necks...
...Has she made billions of dollars...
...We have the ultra-right and a Communist, you can have that party,” Trump says...
...He will not tell us the name of his pollster...
...Where does she come from...
...Robbins is embarrassed...
...I’m a person first,” she says in her Slovenian accent, “and then I have a great career...
...What a pro...
...We’re gonna have to work on it...
...Likewise, he is “running the biggest real estate empire in the world” and he’s “very competent and very rich,” though “I don’t want to toot my own horn...
...The in-flight movie choice is Midnight Express or The Godfather...
...Donald Trump,” deadpans another reporter...
...Nor will he tell us the names of the economists he consulted for his debt-reduction plan, which calls for a one-time 14.5 percent tax on the entire net worth of the richest Americans (and Trump calls Bill Bradley a socialist...
...Do you know Nelson Peltz...
...When asked whether, as first lady, she would have a pet initiative like Barbara Bush’s literacy or Betty Ford’s alcoholism, she responds, “Yes, I love children...
...It’s okay for guys to rub guys...
...Though Leno mercilessly rags Trump, alleging at one point that he caught a sexually transmitted disease—from himself, Trump has the audience eating from his antiseptic palm...
...At the Portland, Oregon, Marriott, about 100 people assembled to hear the views of several crackpot prospects, while a microphone stand repeatedly toppled over, one candidate’s name was misspelled, and Buchanan’s speech was overshadowed by a Native American dance ceremony in the neighboring ballroom...
...Melania...
...Of the women of the Clinton scandal, he says, “You have some beauties in that deal...
...Wisely, Perlow does not persist...
...Bolton bores us with earnest accounts of how he’s campaigning for Hillary Clinton...
...Trump gives a modified version of the statement in the museum atrium, praising the center but omitting the Buchanan references...
...Another woman asks how she can create capital “when all I have is my knowledge and training...
...One of Trump’s loudest applause lines, which works everywhere he goes, is “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I’ve never had a cup of coffee...
...By the end of the Q&A, however, he’s again fitted Buchanan in brownshirt and jackboots...
...I ask her if she’d support a Trump candidacy...
...I ask...
...Melania is getting used to this sort of cynicism, and she is not easy pickings for interrogators...
...But he strikes pay dirt when he tells us how, after Trump once broke up with former wife Marla Maples, Bolton began dating her...
...Trump’s fellow Tonight Show guest, Michael Bolton, sits at the next table, temporarily unaware of our existence...
...Is that what you want...
...Standing on the panoramic rooftop next to the classy pool, reporters anticipate Trump’s arrival for a press conference...
...He passes the book, but it will not open...
...After the Pre-nup Commandment, I watch Melania...
...She is supremely uncomfortable and refuses to comply, darting back to her seat, which is a piano wire’s width away from Matty the Squid’s...
...As the adventure ends, Trump repeatedly taunts reporters, wondering how we’ll ever go back to covering Al Gore and flying coach...
...Though some hecklers ding him for dumping on other Reformers, Trump tears into Pat Buchanan and his new ally, the radical Lenora Fulani...
...Trump thinks a moment, then says, “Meet a wealthy guy...
...he asks...
...Trump says he’ll read it, but leaves it on the podium when the Q&A session ends...
...Who wants to take up the plane...
...When one gentleman asks Trump if he’ll support the party platform, Trump says, “Nobody knows what the platform is...
...Robbins exclaims...
...But we are quickly on to more important things, like how Stone is able to achieve a perfect double-dimple below his tie knot...
...It made Trump so jealous that he took her back...
...Still curious about the Wiesenthal tour, which one could categorize as pretty cynical political theater, I ask if Donald Trump is good for the Jews...
...The California crowd is stylish by Reform standards, but there are still a fair number of doubleknit suits and visible nosehairs...
...Good answer: Decisive...
...You wouldn’t think so...
...Could that many Americans possibly want Donald Trump to be their president...
...What does he stand for...
...asks Stone, handing me a press release in which Trump will again denounce Buchanan...
...But mostly, he is concerned about my newly double-dimpled tie...
...Most important, there is Melania Knauss, Trump’s 26-year-old supermodel girlfriend, who is four years removed from her native Slovenia...
...She had an amazing body, but a schoolmarm’s face...
...L’Ermitage is a magnet for studio junkets and celebrities convalescing after rhinoplasty...
...He serves them goat cheese on black olive ciabatta and good Merlot, not the boxed Zinfandel they are accustomed to...
...With Trump off-limits until that evening, Stone sets up a media availability with Melania...
...Not now,” he says, crunching into a chip, “I gotta think about my f—in’ speech...
...While waiting, we help ourselves to the Purel hand-sanitizers that Trump aides have kindly set out in a fishbowl...
...BY MATT LABASH Los Angeles Of all the bizarre twists Campaign 2000 has taken, there is none so strange as the one that finds us on the rooftop of L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills...
...But he quickly settles into boys-club gregariousness, punching reporters in the arm, talking about hot supermodels, and fielding compliments about Melania...
...Tony Robbins, remember, was once invited to Camp David to give success advice to President Clinton...
...When asked if she is creeped out by Trump’s germ phobia, she says, “You know, there are a lot of germs from colds and flu, and nobody is really talking about this...
...Trump quickly wraps up the press conference, promising us more later, and disappears with Melania and the Squid...
...So instead of conducting the press conference by the shaded pool, the Trump press conference moves to a sun-scorched section of the terrace, making The Donald squint even more than usual...
...So I approach the Goldberg camp, informing no one in particular, “Mr...
...As we walk through the museum, he and Melania occasionally lock fingers, while Trump tries to impress the Rabbi by dropping the names of Jewish friends...
...Stone immediately swoops in for spin, assuring us that the polling, which Trump seemed suspiciously vague about, is concerned with issues, not the horse race...
...He’ll get us access, “but you’ll refrain from making fun of Mr...
...asked Phillips...
...A Leno staffer says we will not be permitted into Trump’s dressing room after the show...
...The crowd is ecstatic...
...Leno stops by, holding a copy of Trump’s upcoming campaign manifesto...
...Besides, he repeats several times in the same conversation, he’s already had three number-one bestsellers...
...In Trump’s dressing room after the show, five reporters and a 60 Minutes camera crew are chatting with The Donald...
...Trump asserts to skeptical reporters that his flirtation with the presidency isn’t just a publicity drive for his book...
...Warm-up comic Bob Perlow plies the crowd with stale jokes and show tunes...
...After the event, Stone enters our bus: “I’m here, who needs to be spun...
...As Trump takes the podium, Melania stands at his side, her Piaget watch refracting light as she shifts restlessly on her sinewy, tanned stilts...
...The hotel’s suites run up to $3,800 per night, so demanding guests can expect amenities like personalized cell phones and 88-inch pool towels...
...Wisely, he decides to go off the record for the rest of the flight, so we “can relax and have fun...
...Her legs are so long that her torso seems an afterthought...
...Twenty yards away, a television crew sets up for an interview with actress Whoopi Goldberg...
...I ask her if she considers herself a supermodel, or just a really swell model...
...There are only ten of us, and three of us are from German television...
...What debate...
...Just two months after the death of Princess Di, for example, he expressed profound sadness to Dateline...
...Trump says he was asked to come here, though Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the center tells us Trump made the request...
...He casts aspersions on the WTO and the U.S...
...Positive Thinking himself, Norman Vincent Peale...
...Then, spotting Melania in the audience, he insists she come up to the stage, where she is asked to dance seductively while throwing souvenir t-shirts into the audience...
...Before boarding the plane with reporters for a return ride back to Manhattan (the hottest city with the biggest developer), Trump is still discussing the Robbins “love fest” in colorful terms: “Did you see that one woman...
...A week before this California swing, I asked a Trump aide why Trump wouldn’t be attending this debate...
...This seems an odd claim, in light of Trump’s “whole megillah” strategy...
...The Donald thinks shaking hands is “barbaric” and unhygienic...
...Holding court in his suite, Trump answers Reformer concerns...
...He looks my way, beaming...
...Commandment One: “People tend to be very vicious, as the boxers say, ‘Keep the left up.’” Commandment Two: “Get even...
...she asks...
...Stone comes out and stands next to me...
...Classy...
...Whatever: It’s a natural photo-op for Trump, who may wind up running against a man who’s having “a love affair with Adolf Hitler...
...It takes a while to learn,” he says...
...The Trump camp tries unsuccessfully to get the Goldberg camp to relocate...
...With all these mangy journalists in tow, Trump has several mild panic attacks: “Don’t put the glass on the table...
...Textbook: When in doubt, invoke children...
...Trump invites us back to L’Ermitage for a reception with about 100 Reform party activists who pack The Donald’s cavernous Governor’s Suite, two floors below the Presidential Suite...
...It’s this little program on television . . . so don’t worry about embarrassing ourselves with questions...
...Not only is Trump, in his own demure phraseology, “the biggest developer in the hottest city in the world,” but his very pores emit class...
...Stone insists I remove my tie, and as we document his every move, he puts on a double-dimple clinic...
...He is concerned for Melania’s well-being...
...No good,” he says, shaking his head disapprovingly...
...Yes,” he says immediately...
...he asks, allowing reporters to sit in the cockpit...
...Trump takes questions from the audience, warning, “the camera is 60 Minutes, don’t worry about them...
...She forces a smile...
...This was reinforced yet again when eight Reform party presidential “candidates,” including Pat Buchanan, met on December 3 for a debate...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 14
