Original subtitles

- In the 1950s,

the Trumps are one of the wealthiest families in America.

[camera shutters clicking]

- He felt constricted by

his father's world of the outer boroughs.

- I worked in Brooklyn for my father.

I did very well.

But I always wanted to be in Manhattan.

- The 1973 lawsuit alleges

rampant discrimination on the part of

the Trump Organization.

[camera shutters clicking]

- Roy Cohn assures Donald that

they can do into this and wi; they don't.

They lose; they have to settle with the federal government.

- Donald Trump, through a complicated series

of absolute moxie maneuvers,

managed to get a huge tax break.

- People ask me, how is that you got

40 years of tax abatement?

And I'd always say, because I didn't ask for 50.

- Donald Trump is the consummate constant negotiator.

- My father, Fred Trump. - Right.

- Fred Trump was amazed that his little boy

had graduated to a premiere address in Manhattan.

- He was not yet 40 years old,

and he was a force to be reckoned with.

♪

[traffic honking]

- No.

- In many ways,

Donald Trump does see life in Darwinian terms.

It's survival of the fittest.

The world is made of winners and losers.

The winners achieve at a very high level,

and everyone else is a loser.

- You were saying about this lounge act?

- Oh. - Oh, yeah...

♪

- Hm.

♪

- Hm.

- The world really was made up of winners and losers,

and there was really nothing in between.

Losers deserve no respect.

[rousing western music]

♪

[suspenseful string music]

♪

- The great American dream

has always been to become a millionaire.

♪

For the people who have nothing,

do you think that's a reality today?

Excuse me-- I can hear all of you over there

and I can't concentrate, so

could all of you please disappear?

Thank you.

You're 34 years old.

Where did you get the incentive? - So--

- I mean, 34. It's so young, Donald.

- Well, I don't look at, really, in my case,

necessarily incentive.

I enjoy what I'm doing.

I really enjoy what I'm doing.

I look at it as being somewhat creative.

And I find this business to be show business, frankly.

You know, in terms of what we've done,

I'd like to make it a little bit showbizy.

'Cause I don't like show business that much.

I do like the real estate business.

But I like the concept of show business

as it relates--as it relates to the real estate business.

- Trump's skill from the very beginning

it's building "Trump," the brand,

building Trump, the man, as the centerpiece,

as the character that people in America

will aspire to be like.

They're driven by the name.

[soft dramatic music]

[machinery whirring]

♪

- When Donald built Trump Tower,

it was a monumental accomplishment,

because nothing had really been done like this before.

♪

- Since its opening in February,

it's become a major landmark.

- It was a tourist attraction.

There's no other residential building

that people walked down 5th Avenue to walk into.

And they want to see it.

They want to know what it's like.

They want to touch it and feel it.

- He realized his name is his power.

This is his brand.

He put it on there bigger and better than anybody did.

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

And guess what?

People walked away and said,

"That's Donald Trump's!"

- Donald Trump is a major dealmaker, a swashbuckler.

He takes chances that would make a less daring man shudde,

and he has made his money mainly

from Manhattan real estate.

- From the very beginning, Donald had

a natural understanding of how to build his brand.

♪

- He realized what Americans really loved was celebrity.

If you were a celebrity, everything was possible.

- And that's what you want-- Chanel.

- He watched commercials where you have

ballplayers and everyone else endorsing products.

- Beauty Mist pantyhose can make any legs

look like a million dollars.

- People buy them 'cause they're

associated with glamour.

And he decided if it can sell popular drink,

it could sell his real estate.

- From America's favorite coffee maker.

- So he wanted to become a celebrity as a developer.

- He knew that he wanted to be

famous and fabulous and terrific,

and he was gonna do whatever it took to get there.

Who do you turn to?

Everyone knows the most famous legal eagle,

my pal and yours, Roy Cohn.

- Good evening, Nikki. How are you?

- Roy was a tough guy,

and usually a trendsetter, and really

had his finger on the pulse of what was going on.

- He's a familiar figure in the best

restaurants and tailors and barbershops.

The rich and the powerful and famous

seek him out.

- Trump saw a powerful lawyer

who could open Manhattan to him,

who could open his magic Rolodex

and introduce him to everyone--

all of that people that young Donald Trump

coming in from Queens wanted to meet.

- What motivates Roy Cohn?

- Uh, I would say power motivates me.

Having power motivates me,

because by having power I am able to do things.

[jazzy music]

- His parties were the weirdest

kind of panoply of people.

The wealth, the power that was concentrated

in his living room...

Andy Warhol was in the corner,

and Norman Mailer would strut in.

Barbara Walters would stop in.

Mike Wallace came to a couple parties.

And then Donald Trump shows up.

♪

- When young Donald Trump would come into the room,

the energy around Roy would change.

He would say, "Donald is her. Donald is here,"

almost as if there was some sort of, uh, attraction.

[upbeat music]

- Once in a while he'll escort a model,

but New York's matchmakers have given up on him.

He's just not the marrying kind.

- Roy was a of time when,

in a certain part of New York, it was okay to be gay

so long as you weren't "out there" gay.

He was embarrassed about being gay,

and he needed that secret held from the public.

It would have ruined his macho image.

- Trump was keenly aware that, uh, Cohn was gay.

Uh, and to Trump, that was totally fine.

He never made any problem of that,

because he valued Cohn for his connections.

- This is a picture that hangs in my office

directly alongside one of the President and Mrs. Reagan,

two of my favorite people.

And the picture is of Donald and me,

in which he says, "Roy is my greatest friend."

He always has time

for little things, for friends.

He--he never forgets to make a phone call.

If he says he'll do something, you know it's done.

- Roy would fight for me to the death.

For me. - Right.

- Not everybody. - But not for everybody.

- Yeah. He was very loyal, amazing.

He would kill for a person that he really like.

- Ostensibly, Roy was just Trump's lawyer.

But he was so much more. He was a fixer.

He was a connector. He was a maker.

He was a mentor. He believed in Trump.

And Trump knew that Roy

could be a father figure, a teacher.

He was the one who introduced Trump to Manhattan.

- Fasten your jet-set seat belts!

It's "The Nikki Haskell Show" direct from New York.

Next stop for me:

the world-famous Studio 54.

[upbeat disco music]

It was the hottest club in town,

'cause you couldn't get in.

There were thousands of people

all the way around the block.

- One of the bouncers, maître d's

would walk down the line,

and he would actually select people

that were able to come in, you know?

He would look at you and say, "You can come.

You can't," so on and so forth.

- Roy was able to get Donald Trump

a pass so he didn't wait on line.

He got right into Studio 54.

Trump, who was chasing models at the time,

took great pleasure that Roy Cohn helped do that for him.

- Trump would go about getting himself noticed

by the photographers and the TV cameras

with whatever celebrity was there,

whether it was Madonna or one of the new models.

- Oh, there was women everywhere there.

I mean, there was rooms in there--

there was one section where you'd go in

an have sex in there, if you want.

Now, I never did that to be honest with you.

But it was-- it was a crazy place.

♪

- Donald believed that every woman loved him

and that women were drawn to him.

- You were such a straight arrow.

- Well, I wasn't straight in the sense that, uh,

you know, I would be wild in other ways.

But I was never a drinker...

- Like what? - I was never--

- What did you ever do that was wild?

- Well, I loved women.

[jazzy upbeat music]

- Donald Trump was never a man who

was dying to settle down.

He was a playboy about town.

- I think that Trump always felt that

being surrounded by beautiful women

was part of the aura he needed to develop.

He felt that a, uh, surround sound of blondes,

"tens," as he would call them, was essential for his look.

[pensive music]

- Mm.

- When I interviewed Ivana,

she told me about the chance encounter

that was going to change her life.

- [chuckles]

- He very ostentatiously

volunteered to make sure they were seated

if they let him join them.

- [chuckles]

- Huh.

- [chuckles]

- He starts pursuing her on the phone,

sending her notes, flowers, letters,

and lots and lots of clippings about himself

and his nascent business career.

She's fairly impressed by this guy.

[tender music]

Ivana's a child in communist Czechoslovakia.

She was relatively deprived.

But her father sent her to

a skiing camp when she was 14 in Italy.

And that's what originally introduced her to

the luxuries of the west.

Beautiful jewelry and clothing,

perfumes, and luxury cars.

And that became a touchstone, I think, for her life

that has never changed.

♪

- When he asked her to marry him,

she said yes.

- Donald really wanted to marry Ivana.

Ivana had other choices,

and she chose Donald.

The wedding was lovely.

Ivana was a beautiful bride, very simple.

- Very soon after Donald and Ivana are married,

the children arrive.

- First one was a boy, which was fantastic.

The pressure was off.

The second one was a girl,

which is just adorable.

And the third one was a boy again,

so my job is done.

I said, "That's it. Shop is closed."

[indistinct chatter]

- Go ahead. Go ahead.

- Ooh. - Hello. Hello.

[indistinct chatter]

- Donald and Ivana were the golden couple.

And they were very much a part of what was going on.

[upbeat jazzy music]

- They were on the scene.

They were at every ball at The Met

or opening of the opera.

[indistinct talking] [camera shutters clicking]

You would actually see the two of them

in these kind of places which were the essential

Park Avenue "I've arrived" kind of evening out.

- Both Donald and Ivana were wedded

by this mutual ambition

to become even wealthier than

they already were and to become

part of the celebrity circuit in Manhattan.

- She was a reflection on him.

I mean, she was so beautiful.

She really, really was beautiful.

He liked hearing that.

[applause] - My wife and helper

and, uh, a lady of very good taste.

So, I, um, I'm very happy-- [crowd chuckles]

I'm very happy to have Ivana. [crowd aww's]

She keeps--she keeps me toned down a little bit.

- I think Donald,

to the extent that he can love anyone,

loves Ivana-- he certainly appeared to.

He respected her tremendously.

[somber piano music]

He gave her a position of some power,

because he thought that she could handle it

and he thought she was very smart.

- In many ways, Ivana was

a better businessperson than Donald,

because she knew the numbers.

[camera shutters clicking]

- Ivana was a very important--

more important than people realize--

a figure in Trump's rise.

[soft suspenseful music]

- Donald Trump, back in the day,

was a flirt, he was fun, he was like

almost all the developers in New York City.

They put up glass and mirrors and they are glass and mirrors.

- He was just part of the bloodstream

of New York society,

New York business, New York tabloids.

You just knew him.

- Boy, there's a lot of coverage tonight.

- I first encountered Donald Trump

in a very typical New York way.

It was my first job for "New York Newsday"

and I had written a column on Donald Trump.

And I said he looked like

he'd had a couple of extra sandwiches.

[laughs] He got so mad

that he had a-- a mutual friend

introduce us to prove that he wasn't fat.

[laughs]

I really was always very, very fond of him,

as a New York character.

- He works the tabloids from the start,

cultivates the gossip columnists,

makes himself useful to the reporters,

to tell them to cover events that he would be appearing a.

- You'd read about him on the front page

of the "New York Post" and the "New York Daily News"

sometimes the business section of "The New York Times."

He was a big deal.

- He was generating and grooming this image of himself

as a successful millionaire.

- You are seen at all the right parties.

You are on the covers of all the magazines.

Do you cultivate a high profile? - No, I don't.

For some reason, I mean, people call

and they want to do something.

If "Newsweek" calls and they say,

"Donald, we want to do a cover story,"

I guess you sort of have to go along with it.

And that happened. And other things happened.

And it's just something that happens, Jane.

I can't really tell you why. Maybe you can tell me.

- You are Mr. Make-It-Happen. - Well, it does happen.

- You make things happen in your life.

- Well, that's good. It's what I want to do.

♪

- He would call you up

and plant stories.

- I'll tell you what, Bernie, come in and see me.

Let's you and I talk, and then we'll see.

We'll go from that stage. Does that sound all right?

- We knew he was lying and calling everybody

with the same story to see who'd bite.

But once you got a real relationship with him,

he was very honorable about only calling you

[laughs] with his fake stories.

- The press actually loved him,

because what you discover with press:

they love access, right?

I mean, it's a hard thing

to write columns every day.

And the people that you, in the end, love

and give the most attention to if you're a gossip columnist

are the ones who give you the most access

and will let you in.

- A little wave at the press

as you, uh, sail off into the sunset?

- You're gonna like this one, I think.

- And they repay you with coverage.

- Did you get enough shots today, fellas?

- He became a media star.

- Looking this way, please? Thank you.

♪

- I think media and Donald Trump

were a perfect marriage.

Together, we created a baby,

and the baby was Donald Trump the character.

- We created a monster here.

- And he couldn't have done it on his own

and we couldn't have created that persona without him.

[soft dramatic music]

- The tabloids provided an element of glamour to him.

♪

It all added, in his mind,

up to the--the Trump brand.

- The press has really come because of

the kind of projects that I'm building.

If I do Trump Tower in New York, people love it,

and the press loves it, and people like reading about it.

- And, of course, the challenge to anyone

who's as ambitious as Donald Trump is

is keeping it going.

He has to look for more ways to define himself

as a winner and a success.

- Our first guest tonight on "Live at Five"

is a familiar face, he needs no introduction.

Billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump.

He has now written a book.

The name of the book is "The Art of the Deal,"

which you, uh, wrote with Tony Schwartz.

- When he told me he was doing a book,

I said, "Well, what's the book?"

And he said, "Well, it's my autobiography."

And I said, "If I were you, I'd--

I'd write a book called 'The Art of the Deal.'"

His instant response was,

"Yeah, I like that. Do you want to write it?"

- I don't run my business that way.

- Yeah. - See, the one problem I have

with this--off the record--

- Minutes into the very first interview,

he literally jumped out of his chair and said,

"I'm just sick of this."

- Okay, do you have enough now?

- It was clear that Trump was incredibly impatient

and had a very short attention span.

What dawned on me was

that there was another way to do the book.

♪

He lived on the phone.

I was writing about deals,

and deals were what he focused on

most of the time over the phone.

- Yes, uh, Mr. Riordan, please.

Donald Trump.

- If he wasn't making a deal,

he was talking to somebody in the media.

- Right, I know, and-- and I have it very much in mind.

When you want to get together?

- So I started coming in like a job.

I'd come in at 9:00 in the morning

and I'd stay till 5:00.

And I just listened.

- What do you think it's worth?

Unless you have an agreement,

you don't even have to go public on the [bleep] thing.

Push him hard on that, Lou.

Is that a low price?

Let's get the [bleep] thing--

let's get it done, okay?

You take care. So long.

- Because he didn't provide many details,

I started going out and interviewing

the people he was talking to.

Then I ran into a problem, which was

if I asked them about what happened in these deals,

it was not what Trump told me had happened in these deals.

It was quite different.

- It frankly happens to be good for them.

- It never reflected on him

in quite the winning way his description of

his role in the deal reflected on him.

It was during that period that I came up with the phrae

"truthful hyperbole."

It means essentially that what you're saying is false.

But the whole persona

that I was working to create for Trump,

to make him more winning that he actually was,

was to pass that kind of thing off

in a breezy, lighthearted way.

[upbeat music]

And it set him up to be a national celebrity.

- "Trump: The Art of the Deal." [applause]

You're a star, Mr. Trump, and you're a businessman.

- I'm telling you that the turning point

in Donald's life was when he wrote "The Art of the Deal."

Then everything fell into place.

♪

- This was the calling card that would get him attention

on national television.

- If I can help people to make deals, that's great.

But if I can help people not to

make deals that shouldn't be doing it...

- Mm-hmm. - Maybe that's just as good.

Every time I come onto your show,

I sell a lot of books, so I don't--

- We're making you famous.

- You're making me famous? - No, I--

- It would actually put him in the hands

of millions of readers

who absorbed this message

of success and doing what it takes to win

at all costs.

- You think he's a good businessman?

- Mm-hmm.

[cheers and applause]

- Here Donald has all these successful projects going.

He's the toast of the town.

But he had his eyes set on

another level of acceptance.

♪

- My name's Jonathan Greenberg.

I was tapped to start the Forbes 400,

which is a list of the richest Americans.

[soft dramatic music]

The first year of the Forbes 400,

we listed Donald Trump as, like, 350th on the list,

only for $100 million.

He wanted to be at the very top of the list.

And it literally hurt him

that there were people who were worth more money

on the list and that everyone was gonna know it.

♪

I'm there at my desk.

And the--the, uh, receptionist at "Forbes" called me.

"Jonathan, Roy Cohn on the phone."

He said, "I understand you're doing this list

"of, uh, rich people.

"And Donny's asked me to give you a call

'cause it seems like you don't have the right information."

- Mm-hmm.

- And so in the second year of the Forbes 400,

I upped his net worth to $200 million.

♪

And then in May of 1984,

I was doing the Forbes 400 once again.

I received a call from John Barron,

the vice president of finance for the Trump Organization.

- Mm-hmm.

- Many years later,

I had 60 boxes of folders and tapes

that I had shipped back

from New York to California when I moved.

And I start looking through it,

and I see the tape.

And it's like, "John Barron, VP of finance."

I never even remembered that I interviewed John Barro.

And I said, "I've gotta listen to this tape."

- I realized that I had been conned.

John Barron was Donald Trump, and I never knew it.

What really shocked me was

how calculated and deliberate the deception was.

There's so much exaggeration

that you don't know

which are the lies and which are true.

And, in fact, what's interesting about

his acting as John Barron "off the record,"

he feels that he could speak candidly

about he really feels about his father.

♪

♪

- It's hard to know what the real building blocks

of that craving for attention,

that craving for respect, where that comes from.

We know that his father was extremely tough on him.

He said to Donald over and over,

"You need to go out there and succeed

"like no one else has before.

You can't just be a regular guy."

And so he was tremendously driven by his father.

- I think that just the right amount

of insecurity can make a drive

that can take you all the way through life.

And in the case of Trump,

I think it was a huge driving force to him,

made him want to be bigger, brasher, richer.

More press, more bylines, more beautiful wives.

It always was about more.

- What I found out was that

in 1982, Donald Trump's real net worth

was well under the $100 million that I thought he was worth.

♪

- Donald Trump knew

you could lie and bluster and bluff

and mow over people,

and it would all get you what you wanted.

And Trump learned that from Roy.

- Donald Trump convinced me that

he owned of his father's real estate in Queens.

- Not only did he not own over 90%

of his father's real estate in Queens,

but he'd used the Forbes 400

to inflate net worth to the banks.

- Why didn't "Forbes,"

a preeminent business publication discover this?

Well, you're dealing with private organizations.

So he can make claims

that he owns this and he owns that,

and it's very hard to verify.

So for many years,

they had to go with whatever Donald told them.

- Anybody inside a bank

that sees who's in the top Forbes 400

would want to try to associate the bank

with people on that list,

because they would be deemed to be

the most marketable and the most credit worthy.

- Without getting on the Forbes 400,

Donald Trump would not have been able to borrow

that money that he borrowed to build his business empire.

♪

That was the beginning of his brand.

♪

- Trump, at this point, is embarking on

a massive spending spree that he can't really finance

with money from his own wallet.

He is being financed by banks.

And the banks are giving him loans

almost in a willing suspension of disbelief.

- In 1985, he bought Mar-a-Lago,

a 118-room mansion in Palm Beach.

- He bought the venerable Eastern Shuttle.

Of course, he named it "Trump."

The price? $365 million cash.

- Wonder what he's gonna buy next, I don't know.

- The most publicity he has ever gotten, however..

- [screams] - All right!

- Was from his sudden decisin to buy a football team.

- Every time you turned around, he bought something else

that was icon of stupendous wealth.

What he was really doing was building this Trump brand

into something that could roll its way over anything.

- Anything else you want to buy, as you look out there?

Any good properties that we can see?

- I'd really like to buy everything

if that were possible.

- [laughs] I'll bet you would.

♪

[air horns blaring]

[stirring music]

♪

- Thank you very much.

- I was assigned to handle

New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut

for the Reagan campaign of 1980.

- We'll restore hope and we'll welcome them

into a great national crusade to make America great again.

[cheers and applause]

- Roger Stone, he was part of a group

with Lee Atwater and Paul Manafort.

♪

They were young. They were aggressive.

They were ambitious.

They were very tough,

and they didn't shy away from

politics as a blood sport.

It was war, and they were determined to win it.

- I was invited to a dinner party.

And Roy, he was at the party.

And I introduced myself, and

I made my pitch for Reagan

and why I thought he could win.

Roy looked out the window for a little bit.

He returned to me, he said,

"What you need is Donald Trump."

♪

- Roy had a way of spotting political talent.

Roy looked at Trump and saw something,

someone who could arise in American politics.

[pensive music]

- Where do you see his future?

- If ever there were a man in America

who thought big, it's Donald.

I think New York is just a small part.

I think he looks at the whole United States.

And I think that cities and peoples who

have read about him in

national magazines and all of that

are someday-- not too far distant future--

are gonna find him right at their doorstep.

[rousing music]

- Welcome to "The Eleventh Hour."

You've taken a posture as

more than just a developer,

more than just a guy making money.

- I've been watching this country

systematically being ripped off

by Japan and West Germany and so many others.

They're laughing at us.

They think we are the biggest fools,

the dumbest people in the world.

[brooding music]

- By the late 1980s, it's impossible to separate

Trump's political ambition

from his personal ambition.

They really are one in the same.

- Well, I'm a proud American.

I mean, I have a great feeling for this country, Larry.

I love this country. I think it's a great country.

- Donald Trump is a political figure

as advertising man.

- That's why the country's losing

billions and hundreds of billions of dollars

today, because of a mistake in the tax law.

- He is a great sloganeer.

- We have countries out there

that are our so-called allies.

And I use the word "so-called"

because they're a disaster for this country.

- He is great at presenting

a small sound bite that is going to provoke emotion.

- We're gonna have a war through weakness,

because this country is acting so weak

toward Iran, it's pathetic.

- Before 1988, I first suggested to Donald Trump,

"Why don't you make a major speech

and see what the coverage is like?"

Well, he liked that idea.

I arranged for him to speak in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

- Trump had attracted over 900 people,

more than three times the audience

that turned out for Senator Robert Dole.

- It's the first time I saw

the phenomenon of Donald Trump

within the context of a political milieu.

He has charisma.

He has a certain command presence.

And it's not just that he's tall and broad-shouldered

and handsome, but there's a self-confidence about him

that is very attractive.

It was electric.

He was on fire.

People wanted to know,

"Does this mean you're running for president?"

[crowd cheering]

- Live from the Louisiana Superdome,

"The Republicans in New Orleans."

- The Republican convention in 1988

was held in New Orleans.

It was only at the very last minute

that Donald said,

"You know, I think I'll go to the convention."

- Thanks, Ken One foreign policy...

I was a floor reporter for NBC.

And one of the things, as a floor reported, you do is

that you just circle the floor, looking to see who's there.

And I'm walking around, and suddenly I see Donald Trump.

Well, lord knows, he's interesting.

You have flirted with the idea of politics.

Now you're here at your first national convention.

Does that get you interested in possibly making the plunge?

- Now you have to tell me something.

Who told you I flirted? - Well--

- I didn't know that I flirted. - Well--

And what surprises me

is how little things have changed.

His immediate instinct is to joust with you,

to push back, to question your assumptions.

But you have said that if you ran for president, you'd win.

- I think I'd have a very good chance.

I mean, I like to win.

When I do something, I like to win.

I like to--I like do well,

and I think I'd probably would have a pretty good chance.

- And that's part of the fascination

of Donald Trump.

For more than a quarter of a century,

he's been one of the greatest shows on Earth.

You don't know what's he's gonna do next,

or you don't know what's gonna happen to him next,

and you can't stop watching.

♪

- Roy called me.

He said, "They want to do another

interview of me at '60 Minutes.'"

I said, "Don't do it, Roy.

"You're making a big mistake.

Nothing good's happening for you now."

Everyone was going after him.

There's nothing good happening.

- Controversy has surrounded this man.

Today at 58 he's still the combative lawyer

fighting two of the greatest battles of his life.

- I saw him at a couple events,

and he just looked sickly, he looked thin.

- [coughs]

- And the rumor was that he has AIDS.

- Were those reports true? - No.

Categorically, no, I do not.

- Do you have AIDS? - No. No.

That's easy to answer.

all: ♪ Happy birthday to you

- You have to make a very special wish.

[applause]

- I went to his birthday party in 1986.

- People came to pay their respects.

Norman Mailer,

Helen Gurley Brown, Lee Iacocca.

Also present, Cohn's constant companion

Peter Fraser.

- And Trump walked in.

Trump toasted him.

Everybody said how wonderful Roy was.

Roy made this whole thing about, you know,

we'll see you next year.

We're gonna have more to celebrate next year.

There was a sense that there was not gonna be a next year.

[dramatic music]

- When Roy was sick, that's when they went after him.

They don't go after him when he was healthy.

It just shows you how vicious the world is.

- Your license to practice law,

there's been an effort made to take it away from you,

uh, on the grounds that you committed fraud.

- The establishment bar hates my guts,

because I'm unconventional, I'm an iconoclast.

I call things the way I see them.

The charges are total, flat nonsense.

- Did you see him when he was really sick?

- I never really did.

And he didn't want people to see him.

Uh, I never really saw him when he was sick.

[somber music]

- During that time, when Cohn was nearing his death,

Trump pulled away completely,

cut off connections, didn't talk to him,

didn't visit with him.

- Roy Cohn was too ill to deliver for him.

And he's-- Donald's a transactional guy.

- There's a long pattern in Donald Trump's life

of essentially washing people who are not successful

out of his life.

What Trump will often do

is say, "Well, I never really knew that person."

♪

- What did you see in Roy

that his critics didn't see?

- Well, Roy was one of my lawyers.

He wasn't my law-- he was one of my lawyers.

♪

- What have these last few months been like for you?

- I think the most unusual experience

that a human being can endure, Mike,

it's been a living death.

I lived my funeral.

I saw who was at my funeral, who wasn't at my funeral.

- Roy Cohn, uh, died

feeling very bitter towards Donald Trump.

♪

- Trump did show up to the funeral.

But he stood in the back, never took a seat,

never said anything, and then left early.

- You feel like that Roy-- - Well, it's--

- You stuck by Roy Cohn-- - I do...

- And that's--you showed your stripes by doing that.

- Well, I don't think I showed my stripes.

I think--you see, I'm so loyal to people.

And maybe I'm loyal to a fault.

But I'm so loyal to people that when somebody's

slightly disloyal to me, I look upon it

as a great act of horror.

♪

- After Roy died,

the IRS seized almost any-- everything he had.

But the one thing that his companion Peter Fraser gt

was a box that Trump had given Roy toward the end

as a gift for all his years of service.

And it was a pair of diamond-studded cuff links.

And Peter went to get these cuff links appraise.

And the appraiser said, "These are total fakes.

They're worth nothing."

So that was Donald Trump's parting gift to Roy.

Nothing.

♪

[stirring music]

- It's almost hard to imagine

someone being as voracious as Donald Trump was

in the 1980s.

He went from a success at the Grand Hyatt,

an even bigger success with Trump Tower,

writing a book, "The Art of the Deal"...

- Good luck, everybody! [indistinct chatter]

- And after all that,

he was going to embark on his riskiest gamble yet.

[fireworks popping]

[tape rewinds] [pleasant music]

- Not so many years ago,

this eastern seashore city

with its spectacular skyline

was an obscure little fishing village.

Today, Atlantic City stands preeminent

among the great resorts of the world.

- In the early days, Atlantic City

was the queen of resorts.

My parents used to take me there for the whole summer.

During the day, people would go to the beach.

And at night, people would dress in jackets and ties

and they'd sit on their rolling chairs,

and it was a wonderful kind of display.

[somber music]

But things started to really go downhill

in the '70s.

- People weren't coming there.

There was a lot of dilapidated housing.

It just didn't have the allure that it had

in previous decades.

There was a lot of debate in New Jersey about

what are we gonna do?

It Atlantic City gonna fall into the sea?

And they ultimately came up with an idea

of legalizing gambling.

[upbeat music]

- This casino is now open.

- What was once a quiet seaside resort

isn't that way anymore.

- Atlantic City has turned from a dying town

into a lively gambling mecca.

- Atlantic City's gambling casinos

are raking in the money at a near record clip.

- Various casino companies and developers

started putting up casinos along the boardwalk.

- I'm ready to lose it in two minutes.

I always lose, but I love it.

- I said, "Donald, all your interests and connections

"and money are in New York.

Why are you going to Atlantic City?"

And he gave me the exact same answer

that Willie Sutton, the great bank robber,

answered when they asked him why did he rob banks.

And he said, "That's where the money is."

- Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

I'd like to welcome you to Atlantic City.

- The New Jersey voters have approved

legalized gambling for Atlantic City.

Very few people doubt that open gambling

will bring a lot of money to Atlantic City.

The real question is, who will get most of it?

- In the 1980s, in Atlantic City,

Trump in quick succession opens two casinos there:

Trump Plaza and Trump Castle.

- Okay, now is the time, folks! Go ahead.

- Yay! - Yeah!

- Beautiful. [applause]

- Since he's never run a casino

and didn't know anything about running a casino,

he needed an operator.

- Can you give us your full name and your title again?

- Stephen Hyde-- Stephen Frank Hyde,

if you want the full name-- Stephen Hyde,

President, Trump Plaza.

- Donald hired Steve Hyde

to come in and be his guy at the Trump Plaza.

And Donald's wife, Ivana, was running the Castle.

- She helicopters down to Atlantic City

four days a week from New York

to oversee Trump Castle.

Recently, Ivana Trump has been

coming in neck-and-neck and ahead of the competition.

- It was very clear back then

that there was an unbelievable level of trust

that he had in Ivana.

She was a meticulous operator.

- You just don't want to be there and do the job;

you want to be the best at it.

- She kept the facility beautiful

in the style that Donald wanted.

Donald was not involved in the day-to-day operation.

He would make his weekly trips,

and he would bounce from Steve's office to my office.

The biggest challenge was

managing his personality and his mood swings.

You could get him for 5 to 10 minutes of his attention

and then that was it.

But he did have a flamboyance

that I thought was very well-suited

to the gambling industry.

- A fight of this magnitude

could only be brought together by

guys like Donald Trump,

who has the daring, the flair,

the look, and the cash to make it happen.

[scattered laughter]

- Thank you, Mr. Trump.

- Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Trump.

[dramatic music]

- Tyson versus Spinks.

Once and for all.

- We were competing for the first time with Las Vegas.

They dominated boxing.

They got all the publicity for boxing.

That's the kind of attention and the glamour

that Donald Trump wanted.

- Here we are! Trump.

- Well, the atmosphere the night of the big fight

was electric,

because now the celebrities

are coming in.

- I'm a very big fight fan,

especially if they're not hitting me.

- Every news station from all over the country's there.

Donald Trump's reputation and his reach, so to speak,

went up dramatically as a result of the fights,

because that would have never come to Atlantic City

came to Atlantic City for these events.

- Looks like an exciting evening.

- Oh, it--it is going to be a biggie.

[crowd cheering]

[dramatic music]

- And we're just about ready to go.

The opening bell...

♪

Tyson attacks immediately.

- At the moment this fight happens in the late 1980s,

you are probably at peak Trump.

His dream of Hollywood-style celebrity's been fulfilled.

- The right hand lands on the head of Mike Spinks.

- He's being celebrated on magazine covers

as the new wunderkind of

American business and American real estate...

- Vicious shots to the body.

- A deal maker...

- He leads with the right hand. Down he goes!

I don't think he'll get up from this.

♪

- Donald Trump in the late 1980s was it.

- It's seven and eight. It's all over!

- He believed that he was infallible.

- A dramatic first-round knockout!

- He believed that he could do magic with money.

And he believed that nothing could get in his way.

- Unbelievable fight!

- But there's always this

missing piece of gratificatin with him.

And I think it's because he needs the next fix.

[waves crashing]

[crowd applauding]

- Bye-bye!

- Good luck. - Oh, thank you.

- Ivana, how do you feel?

- I feel--I feel great.

- Ivana is regarded as

a very successful hotelier in Atlantic City.

The Trump Castle becomes one of the best hotels down there.

- How do you feel about all these people

here to say goodbye to you?

- I think it's fantastic.

I think it's a great honor

to me and to whole Trump Organization.

- The greatest toy that I could give Ivana

would be to put her at the Plaza Hotel.

- Donald moved Ivana

from this job that she was doing very well

at the Trump Castle,

and put her in charge of the Plaza Hotel,

which would base her in New York.

♪

He needed the coast to be clear.

♪

- You know, I had been told that

Donald was cheating on Ivana.

And never even entered my mind

that that could possibly be true.

And she was so trusting of Donald

and so into the fact that

they were working together

that I don't think it ever crossed her mind.

- No matter what you get, there's never enough.

And I think that that is the epitome of Donald,

that he can never be satisfied.

♪

- Oh, there's no question

that it was a secret,

but it was not a very well-kept secret in Atlantic City.

I mean, let's face it, when the room service guy

goes up to deliver dinner for two,

[laughs] you know--

Donald Trump is one of the people,

you know, the secret doesn't last long.

[chuckles]

No guy likes talking about affairs, by the way.

- [laughs] - I just want to tell you.

♪

- I really liked Marla.

She was absolutely charming.

Very low-key, sweet, little Georgia girl.

I found her delightful.

- And she also was very, very beautiful,

and she was a lot younger than Ivana.

- She was engaging, and she smiled.

It was very rare to see a smile from Ivana.

Ivana's a tough woman.

And there was nothing tough about Marla Maples.

- Trump was strictly business.

The only time we had any personal stuff

was when he was, uh, going out with Marla Maples

and slipping around-- he was still married to Ivana.

And I was, as they say, the beard.

♪

- We called it "the beard"

so that it would look like this individual

was with Marla, and not Donald.

Donald used a lot of us that way.

We wound up comping all of her services

and stays and food, whatever it might be.

- He asked me if I would mind taking out Marla Maples,

and so he sent a limo.

I picked her up and we went to dinner.

I loved the fact that when we went into the restaurant,

all the women looked at her like they would want her

chopped up into little pieces and all the pieces burned.

And we had a great dinner.

We went out to the limo, drove a couple of blocks.

Another limo pulled up and she got out,

and there was Donald in the other car.

I went home to my wife.

- I did one of the first interviews with Marla.

She said, "The thing is,

"you can't help who you fall in love with,

and I really fell in love with this man."

She was a very, very honest, lovely woman

who didn't realize what she was getting into.

[music broods]

[pensive music]

- Donald Trump believed

that if he had three casinos in Atlantic City,

he would be able to drive

some of these other casinos out of business

and dominate the city.

- So he gets his hands on a third casino hotel.

- The Taj Mahal was a half-finished casino

in Atlantic City,

with three acres of gaming space--

basically the equivalent of

two other casinos in town combined.

- Halfway through constructin they ran out of financing,

and the property went dormant.

- It was not only the biggest but the most expensive

casino in the world.

- There was an extraordinary amount of work

that needed to be done.

So it wasn't a $100 million fix.

This was gonna be

a billion-dollar project for Donald Trump.

- In November 1988, Donald Trump

purchased the Taj Mahal project.

And here we are today, requesting that this commission

issue a casino license and operations certificate

to Donald J. Trump's Taj Mahal.

- When Donald bought the Taj Mahal,

the Casino Control Commission was really interested

in where the money was coming from

and whether he had the money

to really make this a viable operation.

- And so Donald said,

the bankers were waiting in line to write him a check.

He actually believed that.

- All those in favor?

Motion carries unanimously.

- The investigators had a lot of concerns.

But they did approve it.

- Trump was a major employer in New Jersey.

So the Casino Control Commission

have a powerful incentive not to create problems

for a major local employer,

no matter what damage might be caused

by their financial practices.

- It's gonna be tremendously successful.

It's gonna be great for Atlantic City.

It's gonna be great for everybody.

Good luck, everybody. Thank you for being here.

[indistinct talking]

- By the end of the '80s, we're starting into a recession.

- For the third straight day,

a selling avalanche hit Wall Street.

- The Dow Jones index had gone down by over 100 points.

- The banks weren't waiting in line to lend him the money.

He had to go out

and use junk bond financing to do the deal.

The difference between the junk bond financing

and a conventional loan

is really the cost of borrowing the money.

He had to go out and borrow $675 million

at an interest rate of 14%,

which was just unheard of.

- So from the very first moment that you open,

to make ends meet for this casino,

he had to reap $1.3 million a day--

a day!

- This was something no other casino in Atlantic City

or Las Vegas had ever done.

♪

- Once the Taj Mahal became Donald Trump's property,

Steve Hyde was now in charge of all three properties.

And I became the president at Trump Plaza.

Donald had a great deal of respect for Steve's knowledg.

And I think Donald also realized that

Steve wasn't gonna be competition for headlines.

He was kind of shy.

So it was a very good fit.

And it appeared that

Donald actually listened to Steve Hyde.

[rotors whirring]

- 10-foot high letters are put in place

42 stories above what will be

the world's largest casino.

The $1 billion Taj Mahal

is expected to open next spring.

- The Taj was a massive project,

and Trump needed to get it open as quickly as possible,

because the longer it took hm to develop the Taj,

the less able he was to pay down the debt he incurred

to build it in the first place.

♪

[suspenseful music]

- Well, on October 10th, 1989

we had a press conference scheduled in New York City

for Vinny Pazienza,

Héctor "Macho" Camacho boxing match.

It was scheduled on a date that I was on vacation.

Steve and Mark were still gonna go up.

I had asked Jon Benanav to go up in my place.

- When you work for Trump,

you know you're working for the best.

'Cause I think it's human nature,

when people say, "Where do you work?"

when you're working for the number-one place,

there's a lot of pride behind that.

♪

[music broods]

[sirens wailing]

[helicopter rotors whirring]

- I woke up that morning. My wife came in.

There was a look on her face that I'd never seen

and she said, "It's Steve, Mark, and Jon,

the helicopter they were on."

She told me that it had crashed, and that they had died.

[inhales shakily]

[tender music]

[sighs]

[indistinct talking]

The day those three guys died

was the toughest day of my life.

I had never felt a greater sense of loss.

♪

Uh.

You know, I guess they call it "survivor's guilt."

I particularly felt it with Jon,

'cause I had asked him to go.

Shortly after that, I got a phone call from Donal.

We had this disbelief conversation.

Can't believe this happened.

♪

It was shock.

At Steve Hyde's funeral,

he paused an extensive amount of time

looking at Steve's picture,

and I do think he cried.

This impacted him.

He was deeply hurt for the friendship,

but he was also deeply concerned about the business.

♪

- The question now is

what will their shocking deaths mean

to the big Taj project?

♪

- The three Trump executives who died

were the pinnacle of the casino industry,

and their loss is being felt in Atlantic City.

- The void was clear at the top of the organization.

And how we filled that void

was he brought his brother Robert.

He was going to shepherd

the Taj Mahal through its opening.

♪

- At one point I asked Robert

why it took him so long to join.

He was in his 40s.

And he said, "Alan, if you had a brother like Donald Trump,

would you be so anxious to work with him?"

♪

- Donald Trump was facing a very perilous moment.

He wasn't experienced in running casinos.

And at the time he was having an affair with Marla Maples.

[ambient music]

- There was a fear from a business standpoint

that if and when this affair was gonna blow u,

where would it blow?

I certainly didn't want it to blow up

at a press conference

or any kind of public thing that we were doing.

And quite frankly, I said, thank God for Aspen.

♪

- It was the winter of 1989,

and the family went down to Aspen as normal,

except he had arranged for Marla to fly down

for the same exact week that he would be there

with his children and wife and in-laws.

- Splitting his time between the two of them somehow,

but they're both in the same small community.

♪

- There was one place

where everyone stopped for lunch called Bonnie's.

- Marla, Ivana, and the children are there.

- I was talking to this girlfriend of mine

who was in Aspen.

She goes, "Oh, my God, you're not

gonna believe what's happening."

This woman has confronted Ivana

and pushed her and said, "I want your husband."

And the two of them are having a fight

and Ivana's crying.

- Ivana wanted to go back to New York right away.

She didn't want to be there.

She didn't want to be there with Marla.

She was embarrassed.

- Ivana was totally devoted to their marriage,

to their business, and to their life together.

So she was devastated.

- I was in the Plaza Hotel at the time,

and I went to see Ivana.

And I didn't even get out my sentence,

when she's-- she burst into tears.

I just--I was taken aback.

I--I felt terrible for her.

[traffic honks]

- They didn't separate initially.

They still went about business as usual.

- Trump had bigger things to worry about.

The biggest casino he was ever going to oversee

was about to open in Atlantic City.

And it was so larded with debt

that it was uncertain whether or not

that could be a success.

- In 1990, as the date is coming,

"The Wall Street Journal" wrote a report.

"What About the Taj Mahal?"

And in it, they quoted

a very well-known and respected casino analyst

by the name of Marvin Roffman.

- My job was to go out

and evaluate situations

to see if they're good investments

or risky investments.

I was quoted in the article as saying that

the Taj would open to record-breaking business

but when the cold came, it wouldn't make it.

Donald Trump sent a fax to the CEO of our company.

He wanted a public apology

or an immediate dismissal,

or he would institute a major lawsuit against the firm.

My boss came to me and said,

"We're going to call Donald Trump on the telephone."

♪

And Trump said, "Marvin,

the first thing you're gonna do is

"call 'The Wall Street Journal.'

"And you're going to tell them that

"that son-of-a-biscuit reporter misquoted you.

"And then you're going to write me a paper

"stating that the Taj Mahal is

gonna be the greatest success ever."

I told my boss that I can't write a paper like this.

There's no way in the world

that they're going to be able to make their interest payment.

So I went back to my office.

And shortly thereafter, my boss brings the letter.

And he said, "Can you live with this?"

It said, "Dear Mr. Trump, I apologize

"for my comments, and when this property opens,

I'm sure it's gonna be a big success" and all this stuff.

I was under incredible stress,

because I really liked my job.

And I had been there 17 years.

So I signed the letter.

I didn't sleep that night.

The very next morning,

I came into the office

and I wrote a letter and I said,

"Dear Donald, the letter that was sent to yu

"was never written by me.

"And I would direct that you not use this letter

for any purpose whatsoever."

I sent the letter out,

and they immediately fired me.

[Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra"]

- One step beyond your wildest imagination.

A billion-dollar dream come true.

Donald J. Trump's Taj Mahal,

the eighth wonder of the world.

[camera shutters clicking]

[upbeat music]

- Here's America's foremost entrepreneur,

Mr. Donald Trump!

[cheers and applause]

♪

[electrical crackling noise]

♪

- Master.

I am here at your service.

This was an opportunity you had long awaited.

[electrical cracking noises]

Open Sesame!

[fireworks popping]

♪

- There was a huge crowd for the opening.

[camera shutters clicking]

People wanted to see what this was like.

It had gotten a lot of attention in the press.

- It was opening day in Atlantic City...

- Donald Trump's billion-dollar Taj Mahal casino

opens its door.

- Good luck, everybody.

Hope you're beating me. Good luck.

♪

- On the outside, it all looked great.

There really was an enormous turnout for this opening.

- Good luck.

- But behind the scenes, things were not going well.

[uneasy music]

- At one point, I was in the back area,

and there was a--a door on the other side of a hallwa.

I said, "I'm curious what's in there."

And I got blank stares, and nobody knew.

And we opened up the steel doors.

And it was full of coin they didn't

even know that was in there.

$2 million that nobody knew even existed.

[laughs] It was that bad.

- July was a poor month in Atlantic City overall,

despite the opening of the lavish Taj Mahal in the spring.

- We're now fully into a recession.

People thought that desperate people

will still go gambling,

but, in fact, revenues were down

at all the casinos.

It turned out that Marvin was absolutely on the mark

with everything that he said.

- I thought it was an easy call.

How all these people got enticed into this,

this is something I cannot understand.

- Donald's debts are piling up.

He was having trouble paying all of his bills.

- Of course, Donald, you kno, he had to blame somebody.

He wasn't gonna step up and say,

"Oh, I borrowed money at 14%."

- Nine months later,

in an interview in "The New York Times,"

Trump attacked the three dead men,

blaming many of his financial problems in Atlantic City

on their mismanagement.

- I said, "Donald, you can't do this.

"First off, it's not true.

"But second, you're blaming people who died.

Quite frankly, they died working for you."

♪

And ultimately this is what caused the breakup

between myself and Donald Trump.

♪

- By 1990, Donald is in trouble on every front.

- And it was this moment in his personal life where

everything falls apart.

♪

- When Donald and Ivana returned

from Aspen to New York,

there was a period of a month and a half or so,

where Ivana was just in shock.

Her whole world had just exploded.

And finally, she filed for divorce.

- Here comes the war of the Trumps.

Ivana and the Donald are calling it quits.

- This was the tabloid sex scandal

of the 1990s.

- It was on the front page of the papers for 28 days.

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

I never saw anything like it in my life.

- Ivana was leaking to the "New York Daily News,"

and Trump was leaking to the "New York Post."

It was a divorce in the tabloids.

"Over Her Dead Body."

"Gimme the Plaza!"

"Best Sex I've Ever Had."

This is the best one: "Ivana Better Deal."

- It had sex. It had beauty.

It had bazillions of bucks.

And it had a disgruntled ex-wife.

And it had an innocent new girlfriend.

It had everything you would-- sex, love, and rock 'n' roll.

Well, no rock 'n' roll, but-- [laughs]

- The guy who penned "The Art of the Deal"

has been less than artful with this personal deal.

His first concern has been telling the world

that the wife he put in charge of the Plaza

was in charge in name only.

- He began to denigrate Ivana and her performance,

saying that she wasn't doing a good job,

that he was gonna get rid of her.

- I felt terrible for her.

I mean, I knew he was

giving her a hard time because I saw it.

So I could imagine what it must have been like at home

if I saw what he was like on the job.

She was wearing out. She was not looking good.

And it was--it was very tough, very tough on her.

- He would make the most extraordinarily

horrible comments about the mother of his children.

Barbara Walters took him to task on the air about it.

- The author Marie Brenner quotes you as saying to her,

"When a man leaves a woman,

"especially when it was perceived that

"he has left for a piece of ass, a good one,

"there are 50% of the population

who will love the woman who was left."

- I do remember saying that.

I don't remember having used those words, it's possible.

But I believe that if a man leaves a woman

for almost any reason,

that that particular person, the man,

is going to be at a major disadvantage

in terms of the public eye.

There's no question about it.

- I felt so sorry for Ivana.

And don't forget, the kids were young,

but they weren't that young,

so they knew what was going on.

Donnie Jr. was so upset

he didn't speak to him for two years.

- It's hard to make the case that Donald was right

in this situation.

[crowd clamoring] - Is it true about...

- Do you wish we'd all go away?

- Absolutely.

♪

- Ivana was quite a popular figure around town.

She was a mother.

And she was kind of--

clearly been shamed by another woman.

- And because of her integrity,

the way she handled Donald,

the way that she handled the children,

she became so well-respected.

- Fred and his wife were very saddened and disturbed

about the dissolution of Trump's marriage.

- He really liked Ivana,

and he loved his grandchildren.

- A new kind of aura developed around Trump,

of being a very disreputable guy, really,

a short of a shabby guy

who cheated on his wife

and who had incurred a lot of debt.

- For Donald Trump, there's nothing worse

than being a laughingstock.

It's something that has always brought out

the most aggressive aspects of his personality.

♪

Every morning, he was given

a folder full of the clippings from the newspapers

about him, any mention of him.

And he raged at any negative coverage,

or any criticism that he got.

- He became very, very aggressive towards journalists

he felt had not given him the right coverage.

♪

Then gradually, things got out of control.

[upbeat music]

- One day, the executive producer

came to me and said, "We've got an interview with Donald Trump."

You became very public

very clearly by your own design.

- I don't know if it was by my own design.

- You mean the publicity?

- I do developments,

which get a lot of publicity.

I mean, if Trump-- - Oh, come on.

- I mean this. - Uh-huh?

- There's no reason to expose yourself to millions of people.

There's no-- - But you know why you do it?

- Why? Tell me. - You love the publicity.

- Oh, I hate the publicity. - Oh, come on!

Get out of here. - No, I'm telling you.

I hate the publicity. - Oh, please!

- I hate it.

- Gradually, he began to lose control

of his own narrative,

which made him very, very angry.

- He was so thin-skinned

that he couldn't take it.

- I don't think it was fun for him anymore.

And I think it drove him very dark.

♪

- In 1991, I decided that

it was time to kind of do the very reported piece

on--on what was really going on in the Trump empire.

We assigned Marie Brenner to it.

It was very explosive, because not only

did she talk about his business reverses

in a very candid way, but she also described

the whole kind of fakery of the Trump world.

♪

We had his brother Robert quoted saying,

"Donald was the kid at the birthday party who threw cake."

He always wanted the attention. He didn't care how he got it.

He was the one trashing everybody else

if he didn't get what he wanted.

Trump was very angry

and felt that he'd been sort of betrayed.

So about five or six months later,

Marie Brenner was attending a benefit.

- I think it was a black-tie dinner.

She sitting there with the strapless--

backless--you know, her back.

- She suddenly felt something sort of down her back,

something sort of cold and wet.

- And she turns, and she sees Donald Trump

walking away with an empty glass in his hand.

He had poured wine down her back

as a way of getting even for the piece she wrote about him.

[laughs] And it was just unbelievable.

- Normally when a reporter writes a story,

if the source or the subject disagrees with it,

there is a civil discourse.

In my case, a glass of wine was poured down my back.

♪

- Seems just yesterday the big news magazines

were running cover stories about

his astonishing financial success.

The headlines are screaming, "Death of a Legend"

and calling him "the has-been of high finance"

See, Donald is short of cash.

- By 1990, Trump's entire empire

was, quote, "in severe financial distress."

- Donald's financial troubles

became so massive,

ultimately that Fred had to help bail him out.

Nobody ever bailed out Fred Trump

in the way that he bailed out his own son.

- Even Donald's father has helped out.

A $3 million purchase of chips

in one of his son's casinos

went toward paying interest to bondholders.

- His father sent a lawyer

down to Atlantic City to buy

a couple million dollars worth of chips

to give him some cash in order to meet his obligations.

♪

- Trump is going down to the wire

with empire in danger of toppling.

He has to come up with millions of dollars

by tomorrow, or an uncontrollable chain of events

could be set in motion.

[somber music]

- He was facing a midnight deadline

to make payments.

The midnight deadline came and went.

♪

And all of the lawyers

representing the companies and banks,

they were all gathered at the bankruptcy lawyers' office

in Manhattan.

♪

Trump is at home in Trump Tower,

and he gets a call summoning him

at the meeting in the middle of the night.

And he gets in the limo and rushes over.

And this is it.

I mean, this is potentially the end of the Trump empire.

♪

- If he failed, he would be given over to the bank,

including properties that Fred had developed.

So Trump was staring at destroying

not only his own legacy

but his father's legacy as well.

[brooding music]

- In what could be his final roll of the dice,

the Donald met late into the night with creditors

who want to shut down his Taj Mahal casino

and get their money back.

- He was frightened.

He was terrified of losing everything he had acquired.

♪

A signal moment was when a bank told him

that unless he made good on the payments on his yacht,

they were going to take the yacht away from him.

Trump decided, "Okay.

Let's just tell them they can have the yacht."

And the bank came back to them and said,

"Well, wait a minute. We don't want to own a yacht.

We really don't want to deal with this."

And that's when a light went off in Trump's head.

He realized that he was too big to fail.

♪

- Trump's biggest creditors

have come up with a temporary agreement.

- He's been put on a personal allowance.

He'll have to scrape by

on $450,000 a month.

♪

- He's put on an allowance.

And most of his biggest toys are taken away from him:

the airline, the Plaza Hotel,

all except Mar-a-Lago and his triplex in Trump Tower.

- As for today's events, Donald Trump says

he made a great deal, a fantastic deal,

that his empire is intact and he's running it.

♪

- During the course of that summer,

it was Trump's 44th birthday.

He announced a big bash for himself

in Atlantic City.

- How's the morale these days

with all the news about the financial problems?

- It's what the newspapers are doing to us.

And we've got to turn that around.

You know, who doesn't bounce a check?

You know, everyone has a little financials problems

every now and then.

[cheers and applause]

- Happy birthday, Donald.

- At the time of his birthday party,

he must know he has no hope of making a success.

He's telling the public there's no doubt it will be successful.

♪

- The Taj Mahal

set a record, an all-time record.

Nobody wants to write about it.

They want to write the negatives, not the positives.

And that's okay.

Over the years, I've surprised a lot of people.

The biggest surprise is yet to come.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

- The restructuring of Donald Trump's debts

only delayed the inevitable.

- In 1991,

within less than a year, the Taj would go bankrupt.

The Castle and the Plaza

both also go into bankruptcy protection.

There's an operating bankruptcy

that Trump took advantage of,

which allowed him to keep the doors of the casinos open

while he worked out the debt.

♪

[soft dramatic music]

- At last, they are Mr. and Mrs. Trump,

who came down the long staircase

of the Plaza Hotel this evening

after tying the knot in front of about 1,000 guests.

♪

- Donald's marriage to Marla

took place at the Plaza Hotel,

which he owned at the time.

[laughs] I guess he got a good deal on the catering.

I don't know.

♪

It was an over-the-top extravaganza.

- I think it's an exciting event.

I am, uh, certainly never near anything that reeks of society.

- It's kind of a royal wedding in New York, isn't it?

- It was lovely. She looked beautiful.

It was just a big, giant party.

♪

- He's now on his second marriage.

But he's still got financial problems.

- There were certainly plenty of developers at that time

who basically went into bankruptcy

and were left with nothing.

Trump was very close to joining that club

of great wealthy people who had lost everything.

♪

- What he and his bankers come up with

is the idea of creating a public company.

[traffic honking]

[distant crowd applauding]

- Donald Trump is gambling

investors want to bet on him again.

- We're really happy. This is a very exciting day.

- When a company becomes public,

you're offering investors

a stake in your company in return for their cash.

- For those interested in following the stock,

Trump made it characteristically easy.

It trades under the symbol of DJT: Donald J. Trump.

- The shares opened at $14 a share.

It grows to $32 a share.

People believed in Donald.

That had confidence that Donald could be

the catalyst for success.

- Going public can be like hitting the jackpot.

The drawer of the cash register opens,

and suddenly there's a lot more cash

you can grab and put to uses.

- He created a public company

to buy the junk assets,

in other words, to buy the Trump casinos.

- This allowed Trump to get out from beneath

the weight of a lot of debt that

he otherwise would have had to repay himself personally.

- Trump's not left holding the bag

because he's already sold this public company

his overleveraged junky assets for more than it's worth,

cashed out of some stock.

So when the stock goes down and goes bust,

individual investors who bought stock

in his public company in Atlantic City

just completely lost their shirt.

- Things went so poorly that the share price went

from about $35 to 17¢.

This is an extraordinary failure.

♪

- How do you feel as a bond owner?

- Uh, pretty bad. I--pretty bad about it.

It's un--it's unbelievable.

With his name and everything,

I thought I had a good investment.

♪

- That was, in effect,

the most profitable idea Trump ever had,

because he put himself into deals

in which he could not really lose money.

He could only make money.

- To have one business failure after another

and still walk away with millions,

uh, it's extraordinarily rare.

- The upside will take care of itself.

It's the downside you have to take care of.

Ben Hogan, uh, the golfer, he said,

"It's not about who hits the most good shots.

It's about who hits the best bad shots."

Meaning, it's the guy who hits the bad shots that work

that win.

[soft dramatic music]

- The winner in Donald Trump's

Atlantic City empire was Donald Trump.

The stockholders were losers,

and also the vendors that were

unpaid for the work that they did.

- It is a private meeting

to find out how we're going to collect our money.

- How much money is to be collected?

- For us, $1.2 million.

- And for all the contractors? - I don't know that figure.

It's in excess of $60 million. I don't know the exact figure.

By contract, it was for

glass and glazing, storefronts, mirrors...

- What they were looking for

was a grand piano with a computer built in

that would play by itself.

I talked to my lawyer and I said, "You know,

"we have about $100,000 involved in this.

Do I need to put a lean on the property?"

He laughed at me and he said,

"You're doing business with Donald Trump.

He has lots of money."

The 90 days came and I still hadn't been paid.

So I gave them a call. "Oh, we--we'll take care of it.

"We got a few other bills to take care of.

And, you know, don't worry about it."

- We had to lay off a substantial amount of men.

We wound up using our credit lines

to pay our suppliers.

- Finally got a letter from the Taj Mahal.

So he said, you can accept 70% on the dollar,

or you can wait till the casino makes enough money on its own

to pay it in full,

or you can put us into bankruptcy

and get maybe 10¢ on the dollar.

- A lot of the small contractors went under.

[uneasy music]

- From Trump's viewpoint,

it was all about his survival.

If that meant that certain people were shortchanged,

that was okay with Trump, because he won.

- I was in a room with a group of people.

And a friend was saying--

and they were talking about me--

"Well, Trump didn't do so wel in Atlantic City."

And the other guy said, Trump made

a [bleep] fortune there-- are you cra--

Pulled the money out, he brought property

all over the [bleep] world.

And you're saying he didn't make money?

Then he bankrupted it three times,

and every time he bankrupt-- in fact,

people are amazed because we bankrupted,

it came back more, more, more,

'cause I know how to use the system.

♪

[pensive music]

♪

- Marla was someone who didn't fit in Donald's world.

As a result, she was

almost an in-between figure in his

life, and they were not married for very long.

When they divorced, she too

was the victim of a prenuptial agreement

that made life a little hardr than it should have been

for the divorced wife of

a man who claimed to be a billionaire.

- He's always gonna be fine, he's just got a way.

[both laugh]

- His marriage to Marla Maples was ending.

He had gone through bankruptcies.

His father, Fred Trump, had been sick for many years.

It was one of the lowest moments of his life.

[somber piano music]

♪

- Donald and his father

had a tough relationship through the years.

Fred Trump was often dismissive of Donald's ventures,

especially early on.

He thought that he was

taking on way more than he could chew.

He was very critical of Donad for going into debt,

didn't like the whole idea of building an empire

based on debt.

And yet in later years,

Fred Trump showed considerable pride

in what his son had achieved.

- You can't overestimate the impact that

Fred Trump has had on

the life and imagination of his son Donald.

Donald grew up intimidated by his father,

enamored of his father,

deeply respectful of his father.

♪

One of the only photographs

that travels with Trump from New York to Washington

is a black-and-white photo of Fred Trump.

♪

Fred Trump looms very, very large

in Donald Trump's history.

[dramatic music]

- At the time that his father died,

Donald was no longer able to borrow money from banks

to put up a project.

♪

- His divorce from Marla,

his failures in other businesses,

he was not the fair-haired by that he had been

when he was building Trump Tower.

He was in a steady decline,

maybe $4 or $5 billion of corporate debt.

The myth was broken.

Newspapers were now going after him,

instead of just doing press releases on him.

Oh, it was very bad.

♪

- His casinos had failed.

He'd gone into bankruptcy.

At that point, he was fading into

just another New York developer that nobody cared about.

♪

- Who will be "The Apprentice"?

- It was the American dream on TV.

- You're fired. You're fired.

You're fired.

- He's now gonna try to trade on

a new version of his character,

which is that he's a survivor.

- I think you'll like it.

- Before you knew it, it was Trump soap,

and it was Trump this and it was Trump that.

Live like Trump, be like Trump,

make a comeback like Trump.

[crowd exclaims]

- WrestleMania was a crucial stepping stone

on Donald Trump's path to the Oval Office.

- Donald Trump's gone through five bankruptcies.

- He's certainly persona non grata

in New York and the United States,

so where does he go?

- Donald Trump wasn't gonna do nuance.

- Our current president came out of nowhere.

- No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter

to rest than the Donald.

[laughter]

♪

- Donald Trump wants to win at everything he does.

- Politics will never be the same.

- There has been nothing like this before.

♪