Chat Transcript: Gwenda Blair on The Trumps

Sept. 18, 2000 -- Most of us know the name Donald Trump, which has become synonymous with large buildings, flamboyant media stunts and ’80s excess. But few know of the family legacy that propelled him to stardom.

In her new book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire, author Gwenda Blair traces how “The Donald” drew on a family legacy of entrepreneurial know-how which stretched back to his grandfather Friedrich, and then went on to realize his own great insight—that being famous for being rich could make him even richer.

Blair joined us online today in a chat.

Moderator at 3:00pm ET

Welcome to the ABCNews.com chat with author Gwenda Blair. Let's begin.

Moderator at 3:00pm ET

What motivated you to write this book?

Gwenda Blair at 3:02pm ET

Everybody including me had heard about Donald Trump and the size of his ego. But given that it's a country full of people and their large egos, the fact that he has a particularly large ego did not seem to explain his success or why we had all heard of him. So I began to look for a framework to understand how he harnessed that ego and made it work for him. And the framework I thought was most informative was looking at his family and the background of his successful father and lo and behold, his successful grandfather.

Gwenda Blair at 3:04pm ET

This is a family that knew how to make the system work for them. Each man in his own period figured out what he could get away with, just how far he could push the envelope, and he did so. His grandfather came to the U.S. from Germany as a teenager, alone. Five years later, he was in the Northwest, running a restaurant that provided lonely prospectors with what they wanted, which was liquor and women. He figured out that the way to make money in mining was to mine the miners instead of digging in the ground himself.

Gwenda Blair at 3:05pm ET

Donald's father saw that the next frontier in the American economy was going to be the new deal and the federal government. He figured out how to mine that.

Moderator at 3:06pm ET

Your book shows how at particular moments in American history the Trumps were able to profit from circumstance. If any one of these events had not worked out is it possible that the Trump family legacy would have been stopped in its tracks?

Gwenda Blair at 3:08pm ET

I don't think that the Trumps' success depended on the accidents of history, except possibly for one accident and that was, that back in Germany in the 17th century, the original spelling of their name, which was Drumpf, shifted to Trump, which was an immense boost to later generations to America, because it allowed them to associate with the word trump: trump suit, trump card; it's a wonderful name. But otherwise I think they had remarkable energy and drive and a very sharp eye for the main chance. And they would have found that chance no matter what the circumstances around them.

Moderator at 3:08pm ET

What was the most interesting piece of information you unearthed about the Trump family?

Gwenda Blair at 3:10pm ET

When I found out this remarkable story that stretched from Germany to the Yukon and then back again to New York City, each thing I found out seemed utterly remarkable. I think that's true of any immigrant, actually. There's a million stories and they're all fascinating. But the kicker to this one was that it was associated with Donald Trump, the person above all, that we all felt we knew all about. And possibly too much about.

Gwenda Blair at 3:14pm ET

It was interesting right up to the end, when Donald hoisted his second presidential candidacy flag up the flagpole to see what would happen. He had already done this in 1987 when his first book came out. He went to New Hampshire, gave a speech, commissioned a poll, and when the book hit the best seller lists, withdrew his candidacy. In an exactly identical fashion in 1999, he commissioned a poll, made a lot of noise, just as another book by him was coming out. What a coincidence. I went to a book signing in the lobby of Trump Tower, at which he said, perhaps three sentences and began signing books.

And I was at the end of the line and asked how many books had been sold. The clerk said, "This is about 200." Pretty good for an hour and a half book signing. In the paper the next day, I read Donald's account of this event. He said, "850 had been sold and signed in an hour and a half." Which would have been not just remarkable, but herculean. But this is who he is. He exaggerates everything, even when what he's starting with is pretty good.

Moderator at 3:14pm ET

The Donald is the master of self-publicity. Was your motivation to counter some of Donald's own self-aggrandizement, and bring to light the real Donald Trump?

Gwenda Blair at 3:16pm ET

In writing the book, I was of course interested to find out what really happened in any number of incidences. His real estate deals in New York City, the building of Trump Tower, his casinos in Atlantic City, his acquisition of possibly the most extraordinary showpiece mansion in Palm Beach, Mar-A-Lago, and all the rest of the myths that make up this media legend.

Gwenda Blair at 3:17pm ET

But what I really wanted to know was how he used these legends, how he would start with point A exagerrated to point B, move on to point C. How he would, for example, when he built Trump Tower, then leak a report that Prince Charles and Princess Di were looking in to buying an apartment there, then refused to talk to reporters when they called to talk to him about that. The amount of press that ensued was extraordinary and extraordinarily helpful to him.

J. Morris of IA from giant.net at 3:18pm ET

Which is more important to Trump, the bottom line or his reputation?

Gwenda Blair at 3:20pm ET

They're intimately linked. What his feat was was grasping that if he could become famous for being rich, that can make him more rich. That making himself into a brand was what he figured out. He wasn't the first person to figure it out, but he was relatively early on the curve to get it. The future was going to belong to branding. If he could get his name to represent luxury, he could then attach that name to any number of things. And he started with a field, namely real estate, which wasn't branded, where people didn't think in those terms, and managed to achieve a position where if the name Trump was put on a piece of real estate from a condo to a casino, it was worth more. People paid more to buy an apartment or lose their money at the gambling tables.

Moderator at 3:21pm ET

His father shunned publicity, so what was it that led Donald to live his life in the center of photographers' lenses?

Gwenda Blair at 3:24pm ET

Fred Trump, Donald's father, employed public relations, but it was in the service of selling the middle income apartments that he built by the thousands and the modest bungalows that he also built all over Brooklyn. He used publicity to promote his products and to compete and to publicize what he referred to as an "edge." Usually something very modest like an extra closet, a mirror in the hallway, a little garage under the front porch.

Donald went with this idea of publicity, but raised it to a completely different order of magnitude and grasped that with a kind of media and the dissemination of information that was possible in the last part of the 20th century, as opposed to mid-century, when his father was active, what he had to do was not only publicize his buildings, but publicize himself as a celebrity. That meant bringing his personal life into the spotlight at every possible occasion.

Moderator at 3:25pm ET

Fred Trump built ordinary houses for ordinary people in Brooklyn. How has Donald Trump's empire transformed the New York skyline?

Gwenda Blair at 3:27pm ET

When Fred Trump built in Brooklyn, government housing subsidies were available on a large scale, and he was able to make a fortune basically from being a competent and efficient builder who knew how to use political connections and how to cut every corner he could and get away with. Those subsidies were no longer available when Donald started out.

Gwenda Blair at 3:28pm ET

So instead of building modest garden-brick apartments, which incidentally, Donald did try to build at the very beginning of his career but couldn't get government help, he went for the other end of the spectrum, big, shiny, glitzy, and he did so at a time when New York City was in a real slump. It was the mid-70's and early-80's and he made an enormous impression.

Moderator at 3:30pm ET

Donald paid just $2,811 out-of-pocket for the $20 million Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. How did Donald manage to put together deals with so little of his own capital at stake?

Gwenda Blair at 3:32pm ET

When Donald bought Mar-a-Lago, which was originally on the market for $20 million, he ended up paying $2800 out of his own pocket. The rest was a mortgage. What was even more remarkable about this is that he managed to have it recorded so that it appeared he had paid cash for the whole thing, and this was typical of many moves he made where he took great care to give the appearance of having significantly more resources than he did, to have paid significantly more than he did, or have profited significantly more than he did.

Gwenda Blair at 3:33pm ET

In terms of Mar-a-Lago, he paid $8 million, which by coincidence, is what it cost the original builder 60 years earlier and he was able to get it at that price because it was an enormous white elephant, something that the old guard in Palm Beach couldn't afford, and most newcomers found preposterous with its 118 rooms including 58 bedrooms.

Moderator at 3:34pm ET

Peter Capell asks why people wasting their time discussing Donald Trump. Surely, Donald is rich because he started off rich, and his "learning to get richer" is a facile accomplishment.

Gwenda Blair at 3:35pm ET

Donald Trump did indeed start out being rich. So have many other people. What's interesting about Donald is that he took the methods that his father had honed, which were pushing everything to the limit and using every bit of connection you can cobble together, especially political, and updated it to the current era, where being a celebrity and being famous for being rich would be an enormously important strategy.

Moderator at 3:36pm ET

Donald is reportedly planing to join with an American Indian tribe to open the world's largest casino on the West Side of Manhattan. Is he relentless in his pursuit of power and riches? What do you think Donald Trump's next move will be?

Gwenda Blair at 3:39pm ET

Donald is very skillful at triangulation - offsetting one group against another group. That's an important skill for an entrepreneur. Recently he announced that if the government approved an Indian casino in upstate New York, he would continue negotiations, which he says are already underway, with Indian tribes to open a casino on a parcel of land he owns on the west side of Manhattan. About several weeks later, he announced that he was in negotiations with Columbia University to locate some of its operations on the same parcel of land.

If I were Donald Trump, I might talk about casinos, which is very unlikely, in fact, somewhat akin to the chance of snowballs in hell, when what I was really trying to do was goose Columbia to buy this parcel, which by the way, has an enormously complicated zoning history and would have to get new approvals. Columbia is a very powerful and reputable presence in New York City. The casino industry is not. This leveraging of once force against the other is vintage Donald.

Gwenda Blair at 3:41pm ET

As to whether his pursuit of power and success is relentless - of course! Absolutely. That's what it's all about. In the world he operates in, you're only as good as your last deal. This is somebody who always gravitates to the most powerful person in the room, the biggest competitor, who and doesn't want to come in second, no matter what the contest might be.

Moderator at 3:41pm ET

There has been some debate surrounding details in the book on Donald Trump's relationship with his ex-wife Ivana. Donald has publicly denied the claims - any comments?

Gwenda Blair at 3:42pm ET

I think Donald had to make amends publicly. Anyone who reads what he has said in the press might want to take note that he has never said, the book is wrong. Only that it is nonsense and ridiculous, but not wrong.

Larry Iseli at 3:43pm ET

Is there one thing that the layman can do to get this type of success

Gwenda Blair at 3:47pm ET

For a lay person to have this kind of success, the first answer would be have a rich father or mother who hands on the secrets of their success. But perhaps even more important, it's having the ability to see what the competitive advantage might be in a situation and what the potential customer really wants. For Donald's father, customers really did want another closet and another mirror in the bathroom. For Donald, his potential customers in Trump Tower, for example, wanted people to know that they had a lot of money and wanted people to know they could buy very expensive real estate.

When Donald heard that Museum Tower, another building put up at the same time, decided not to charge as much as Trump Tower for its units, people who worked for Donald thought that he would be upset that his prices were the highest in town. He was thrilled. Or, in any case, said that he was thrilled, because this meant that people who lived there would be boasting and flaunting how much they had paid. He thought that the people who were going to buy there didn't have any desire to hide their affluence and that there were enough people who didn't think discretion was the greatest virtue. He knew who his customers were.

Moderator at 3:47pm ET

The book is very detailed, especially when it comes to the lives of Friedrich and Fred - how long did it take to research and write it?

Gwenda Blair at 3:49pm ET

From start to finish, it took me a dozen years. When I started out, I intended to do a book only about Donald. But I felt that he was such a polarizing figure, I really needed to step back and develop a larger framework. I chose his family. The result was instead of finding out about one person and one generation, I had to research three people and three generations, and it turned out, Germany, the Yukon and New York City.

Moderator at 3:51pm ET

Is there a place for someone like Donald Trump in today's business world?

Gwenda Blair at 3:53pm ET

Donald is a funny kind of hybrid. Because he's in real estate, he's obviously involved with the bricks. This is a bricks and clicks world we live in now. He's not involved in clicks at all. He told me that he doesn't like computers other than to keep up a database of customers at his casinos, he doesn't seem to be involved in e-commerce to any large extent. But, he did get the message about the importance of brands, and that is a very contemporary idea. People are so time crunched, that every marketing expert on the planet says that people will not have the option to do anything in the future but reach for a brand they've already heard of. If Donald is able to take this established brand and put it on something besides real estate, he'll have it made.

Gwenda Blair at 3:54pm ET

Meanwhile, real estate is still very valuable and will continue to provide him with a significant income.

Moderator at 3:55pm ET

We're nearly out of time, Gwenda. Do you have any closing thoughts?

Gwenda Blair at 3:57pm ET

One of the things that perhaps surprised me most in working on this book was to grasp just how hard Donald, his father and his grandfather actually work. Whether what they have done is a contribution is another question. But the sheer effort involved is mind-boggling, as is true, I think, of almost everyone who achieves extraordinary success. It's easy to write him off as the son of a rich guy, but that kind of misses the point. These people never stop. They're always busy building up favors, selling things, calling in favors; nothing is ever done without some calculus of where it will get them in the future.

Gwenda Blair at 3:59pm ET

And to step back even further, this is the kind of relentlessness toward the main chance that makes capitalism work. Whether it should or not, again, is a different question. Whether there's some other way of being that would be better is another question. What we do know is that this one works and Donald is as American as apple pie. He's part of the same brand of people, the same kind of people, that built the country. He did not spring out of the 1980's or 1990's. If he didn't exist, or someone like him didn't exist, capitalism would have invented him. The same goes for his father and grandfather. That was really a shock for me to learn.

Moderator at 3:59pm ET

I'm sorry, but we're out of time. Thanks so much to our guest, Gwenda Blair, and to all of you for your great questions.