How Many Trumpf Fans Believe He Wrote Any Of "His" Books? Meet The Crook Who Thinks He Can Buy The GOP Convention

Mark Bowden hung out with the then-50 year old Herr Trumpf in 1996, on assignment for Playboy and just wrote about the awkward experience for Vanity Fair. "Trump," he wrote, "struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?" Well... probably people who have relatives who immerse themselves in Fox News and Hate Talk Radio could have predicted it. That, after all, is Trumpf's base. "He has no coherent political philosophy," Bowden continued, "so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force."

I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to [Marla] Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders-- “Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate-- “The best! The best! She’s a genius!”-- who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him-- and it was never clear how to avoid doing so-- you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box-- a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside-- which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped-- red-faced and fuming-- to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.

“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through-- can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the time, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

Ron Paul hasn't done much for his son's spectacularly failed presidential campaign but yesterday he was warning fellow Republicans that if the outlandish Trumpf wins the GOP nomination, "the Republican Party would be severed in two pieces." He did say that "Hillary, when it comes to taxes, is just a little bit worse." He didn't address the prospect of a Bernie Sanders candidacy. And he seems to have predicted that if Trumpf is the official GOP candidate, a more mainstream conservative will run as an "independent." Referring to McConnell and other Republican power-mongers, he said that "If they can’t push [Trump] out, somebody else will run, somebody else will enter.

Earlier Robert Costa and Tom Hamburger were speculating for Washington Post readers that the Establishment hopes to beat Trumpf through a partially brokered convention, which McConnell is hysterically trying to cover-up. 20 of the Grand Old Men of the GOP met secretly Monday at the Source, an upscale Asian fusion restaurant, where they could be sure none of the Tortilla Flats crowd would be eavesdropping, for an anti-Trumpf dinner convened by RNC Chair Reince Priebus.

Several longtime power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight, in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative, the people said.

Because of the sensitivity of the topic-- and wary of saying something that, if leaked, would provoke Trump to bolt the party and mount an independent bid-- Priebus and McConnell were mostly quiet during the back and forth. They did not signal support an overt anti-Trump effort.

But near the end, McConnell and Priebus did acknowledge to the group that a deadlocked convention is indeed something the party should prepare for, both institutionally at the RNC and politically at all levels in the coming months.

Upon leaving, several attendees said they would soon share with one another memos about delegate allocation in each state as well as research about the 1976 convention, the last time the GOP gathered without a clear nominee.

...Attendees included Ward Baker, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Rob Simms, his counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee; Ron Kaufman, an RNC committeeman and Mitt Romney confidant; and pollster Linda DiVall. Whit Ayres, an adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Vin Weber, an ally of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also were there, among others.

Trumpf told Costa he can win a brokered convention because of "the deal-making." He's made it perfectly clear that all the politicians are for sale-- and that he's a buyer. Meanwhile, as you can see just above, rapidly fading Republican hopeful Dr. Ben doesn't like brokered conventions. That's the letter he issued this morning. Someone opened it, read it and passed it along. He's since said he'll leave the GOP if they try a brokered convention. And Sunday, Fox will air a Chris Wallace interview with Herr Trumpf in which the New York bully rubs the faces of the GOP establishment in shit, telling them that they're "kidding themselves" if they think he'll allow a brokered convention to steal the nomination from him. "I say, folks, you know, I’m sorry I did this to you, but you’ve got to get used to it. It’s one of those little problems in life. I’m going to win. ... You know, I’m not one of these other guys that goes down. I don’t go down. I go up."