BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. So we have arrived at a familiar journalistic peg, the 100th day of a new White House. It’s not especially meaningful, unless we make it so. And we, the media, do. Thus, presidents do too. Donald Trump will tweet that it’s a ridiculous marker and then do all he can to ensure that we know his 100 days - were huge.
[CLIPS]:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t think that there is a presidential period of time in the first 100 days where anyone’s done nearly what we’ve been able to do.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: To see what we’ve accomplished in a very short period of time, the White House is running so, so great, so, so great.
[CROWD CHEERS]
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Achievement, I think, I give myself an A because I think I’ve done great things but –
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That is, aside from a travel ban shot down twice by judges across the nation, a failed attempt to change our healthcare system and dismal approval ratings. But as reporters, we get fixed on facts and underrate the power of the story the president tells to cement his base, which polls suggest still holds firm. When we talk about actual achievement, do we merely preach to the converted? That may be but it’s our job to soldier on, as does the president, who brings years of experience to the war over perception.
MICHAEL KRUSE: Lose, call it a win, move on quickly, this is something he has been doing his entire adult professional life.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Kruse, a senior staff writer for Politico, wrote this week about how Trump has long managed to succeed, without actually succeeding.
MICHAEL KRUSE: In the mid-‘80s, he failed as the owner of the United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals and, in fact, helped kill the United States Football League. As a owner of casinos, his companies have filed for bankruptcy five times over the course of 20 years. The house always wins in gambling, except when the house is owned by Donald Trump. Trump might win. He sucked a lot of money out of there, but his shareholders didn’t. His casinos never, ever turned a profit, which is pretty hard to do as a casino owner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: His airline?
MICHAEL KRUSE: He bought the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, renamed it, of course, the Trump Shuttle. It bled money for a couple of years and then it was no longer his airline, partly because he did everything but have to declare personal bankruptcy and was in all kinds of financial turmoil.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, let’s talk about the other things he's put his name on.
MICHAEL KRUSE: He has throughout, especially after the success of The Apprentice, tried to put his name on things and sell them: Trump Ice, the water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump World Magazine, Trump University, of course. which is probably the most well known because it's the most scammy of all of these things. All of these entrepreneurial initiatives on which he slapped his name came and went and, in some cases, very, very quickly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In all of these cases, no matter how unsuccessful, for Trump they were wins.
MICHAEL KRUSE: Yes, well, starting with the USFL, you know, the other owners and officials of teams all said, we lost, we’re dead. Donald Trump said, this is a moral victory, we expect an ongoing victory. The judge came back and said, no, it was a loss and I'm gonna uphold the ruling and I’m gonna pin specific blame on you, the owner of the New Jersey Generals. But no matter what has happened, no matter what the failures have been, he has always said, very explicitly, after going bankrupt, this is not a failure, this is a success.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A great example of this is Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, which he billed as the “eighth wonder of the world”?
MICHAEL KRUSE: The Trump Taj Mahal is really the big-ticket item that broke his back there in the early ‘90s. It was opulent and ostentatious. He took on an enormous amount of debt. He financed it with primarily junk bonds. It opened too early, on an April weekend in 1990, to start creating cash flow to service this suffocating debt, and it was a catastrophe. The machines didn't work, the staff wasn't ready, customers got so, so angry. [LAUGHS] Trump went on CNN with Larry King and made the case, with a straight face, that it was not a failure at all; it only looked that way because it was so successful.
[CLIP]:
DONALD TRUMP: Every table was taken, every seat was taken. Nobody’s ever seen it. On a Monday morning in the rain you couldn’t get into the casino. Every slot, every –
LARRY KING: So what, it blew out the slots, literally?
DONALD TRUMP: They blew apart. We had machines that couldn’t –
LARRY KING: It would be like too much what, use?
[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]
DONALD TRUMP: They were - they were virtually on fire.
[END CLIP]
MICHAEL KRUSE: It was barely more than a year before the Taj Mahal filed Chapter 11.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You quote a line from his 2007 book, Think Big, that you are what you think you are. Oftentimes, perception is more important than fact. You’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve worked with Trump, biographers, PR folks, political operatives. I wonder whether they think this is a strategy or just the way that Trump is.
MICHAEL KRUSE: I think it’s both. I think it's a strategy but it's been a strategy for so long that it's become reflexive. I don't think he thinks about it in a conscious way, at this point, and I'm saying this because of my conversations with the Trump experts, if you will, that I have talked to for, at this point, years, trying to understand how he operates and what's important to him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this surely is important to him. Any American who’s watched him on television knows this. He isn’t nonchalant about his success. He’s intense. Whether or not it has to do with the Electoral College win or his business successes in the past, he is selling the idea of the success so hard you have to wonder whether or not he really does believe it.
MICHAEL KRUSE: In another forum in a different book, he has said, if people don't associate my name with the word “success” I’ve got a real problem. So, number one on the list of objectives for Donald Trump every morning he wakes up is to continue his lifelong effort to convince the people he has to convince that he is a success. It is his most singular skill. It’s not the deal-making prowess, it's not the accumulation of real estate, it is the brazen willingness to call himself a success, to define himself that way so intently that it becomes a truth or an accepted truth to a certain amount of people and, hopefully, [LAUGHS] for him, enough people. [LAUGHS] The biggest data point here on the question of whether this has worked for Donald Trump is he got himself elected president.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Hannah Arendt once said, you can't outrun reality forever. Ultimately, it’s going to catch up with you. This isn't a business that you can file bankruptcy for and walk away from or sell to someone else. Do you really think that he can get out of this with a belief of his success intact?
MICHAEL KRUSE: We’ll see. I think it's worth pointing out that if he doesn't get reelected in November 2020, it will be the first time this hasn't worked for him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think you build a good case in your piece that it could work. The one thing that I think argues strongly against it is that, yes, thanks to the Electoral College, he is in office but he didn't win a plurality. And even though his own particular constituency may be secure, there are some people who have never bought Trump and certainly aren't gonna buy him now.
MICHAEL KRUSE: You know, what he has working for him at this point that he never has in the past is that he's the president; there's a certain authority. And so, when the president says to you, wherever you live, trying to keep up with your bills and watch your kids, when the president says, I have succeeded, I think some people will continue to believe him, in spite of the objective evidence. Will enough people? It remains to be seen. But Donald Trump is going to continue to try because he has to.
I think the larger question is if those people's lives don't get measurably better over the next few years, how could they possibly vote for him again? But it's not impossible that they would make that decision, especially if they're being helped along by the president himself describing his actions as successes, even if they're not.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He can continue to frame everything he does as a success because anyone who says otherwise, namely the media, are lying, producing fake news.
MICHAEL KRUSE: The more the press calls him out on these sorts of statements that don't match up to reality, the more he gains acceptance with a certain portion of the population.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If pointing out Trump's failures simply supports his contention that the press are all engaged in a big conspiracy against him, how are the media supposed to cover him?
MICHAEL KRUSE: The answer is sort of inherently dispiriting and unsatisfactory. I mean, we are right now in this high-stakes battle between what's true and what's not and what's real and what's not, and unreality has one hell of an advocate in the Oval Office.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You quote a guy named Eric Dezenhall, who’s an expert in crisis and damage control, and he wrote to you in an email that the great lesson of Trump's career is that what goes around does not come around, not even a little.
MICHAEL KRUSE: Eric Dezenhall goes on to say that Trump's main mission is to vex the political and media elite and that essentially this is a mandate to entertain. And, if he's right, if what he was elected to do for a portion of the population - who knows what that number is or will be - but if that is what a portion of the population is expecting him to do, mission accomplished, right?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael, thank you very much.
MICHAEL KRUSE: Thanks so much for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico. His article is called “How Trump Succeeds Without Succeeding.”
