In the opening pages of his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump muses on the power of threats.
Trump hears about Annabel Hill, an elderly Georgia woman. Her husband committed suicide, hoping the life insurance payout would help keep the family farm.
It wasn’t enough money, and a few prominent people were trying to raise funds to pay the bills so she could keep the farm. Trump got wind of this, and got on the phone to a banker at the bank that held Hill’s mortgage. It was too late, the farm was set for auction.
“I said to the guy,” Trump writes, “‘If you do foreclosure I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.’”
The threats worked.
“Sometimes it pays to get a little wild,” Trump writes in the book, which was first published in 1987.
Sometimes it pays to get a little wild
Trump: The Art of the Deal
The Art of the Deal, which Trump has said is his second-favourite book after the Bible, was a New York Times bestseller for almost a year.
It’s a memoir-cum-business-manual, and gives remarkable insight into Trump’s character and how he makes his deals.
The authorship, for the record, has been disputed, as have some the details contained within. Timothy L. O’Brien, who wrote a 2005 biography of Trump, described The Art of the Deal as a “nonfiction work of fiction.” It’s more a project of building the Trump myth than an honest memoir or business manual, critics allege.
As for the authorship, ghostwriter Tony Schwartz and publisher Howard Kaminsky both said Trump did practically none of the writing. Trump has claimed he wrote the whole thing.
With Trump currently threatening punishing tariffs in negotiations with Canada, and even suggesting this nation become the 51st state, National Post read through an old copy of The Art of the Deal to gain some insight into Trump’s negotiation tactics. Here’s what Trump said almost 40 years ago about how he goes about doing business.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Start high, end low
The general proposition on how to haggle works something like this: The seller starts high, the buyer starts low. You wind up somewhere in the middle.
Trump prefers the opposite.
“I first looked at Mar-a-Lago while vacationing in Palm Beach in 1982. Almost immediately, I put in a bid of $15 million, and it was promptly rejected,” Trump writes.
He notes that over the next couple years, several other offers were made — many of them higher than $15 million, he claims — but were rejected.
“Each time that happened, I put in another bid, but always at a lower sum than before,” Trump writes.
Eventually, in 1885, he says the foundation that owned Mar-a-Lago accepted his cash offer of $5 million, plus $3 million for the furniture. (There’s more to the story than that, the New Yorker has reported, involving the purchase of a nearby strip of beach, although it’s not mentioned in The Art of the Deal.)
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Keep your options open
This is a repeated theme in the book. Right at the beginning, Trump says, “I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”
“I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first. In addition, once I’ve made a deal, I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work, because anything can happen, even to the best-laid plans,” he writes.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Hold a position of strength
This theme takes a few different forms. In one section of the book, Trump writes about a man he has hired as a property manager at his Swifton Village apartment complex in Cincinnati. Irving, as Trump names him, is a con man, a “fabulous man,” Trump writes, who’s “one of the greatest bullshit artists I’ve met.”
Irving, Trump concludes, is probably stealing from Trump. But he’s just too good at his job. There’s a distinct sense of admiration in Trump’s writing as he recounts the story of how Irving once stole $80 from coworkers who had raised money to buy flowers for a funeral. “Irving was a classic,” Trump writes.
But the crucial anecdote comes when Irving, out collecting rents, flirts heavily with a woman and curses in front of her daughter, only to have the husband — “this huge guy, a monster, maybe 240 pounds” — storm into the office to confront Irving. Irving goes ballistic: “I’ll kill you. I’ll destroy you. These hands are lethal weapons, they’re registered with the police department,” he says, according to Trump.
You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens
Trump: The Art of the Deal
The man leaves and Trump says he learned a valuable lesson: “You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.”
Elsewhere, Trump writes that the “worst thing” you can do is seem desperate.
“That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without,” Trump writes.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Listen to your gut
Throughout the book, Trump says he has very little time for critics or consultancies or pollsters.
“I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms,” he says.
This has to do with what Trump believes he has: the instinct for a good deal.
“I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes. I don’t say that egotistically. It’s not about being brilliant. It does take a certain intelligence, but mostly it’s about instincts,” he writes.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Wear them down
In detailing his move into the Manhattan real-estate market, Trump says he won his push to build a convention centre with patience.
“In the end, we won by wearing everyone else down. We never gave up, and the opposition slowly began to melt away,” Trump says.
In another instance, involving Trump Tower, Trump credits his relentlessness in getting a deal made.
“I was relentless, even in the face of the total lack of encouragement, because much more often than you’d think, sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure,” he writes.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — Luck
Trump attributes at least some of his good fortune to not just his own genius, but also a degree of luck.
For example, when it came to the development of what was, in the 1970s, the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street, New York’s troubles were to Trump’s advantage. At the time, New York was in dire economic and financial straits.
“The funny thing is that the city’s desperate circumstances became my biggest weapon,” he writes. “I could argue that I was the only developer around who would even consider buying a loser hotel in a decaying neighborhood in a dying city.”
In the case of the Trump Tower, Trump had to convince the building’s owner to sell. He phoned up the company’s new chief executive, who was trying to stave off bankruptcy, and aimed to hammer out a deal. The new executive, John Hanigan, agreed to meet. “It just shows you that sometimes making a deal comes down to timing,” writes Trump.
There’s more to the story than that, but Trump clearly acknowledges that luck and timing matter.
Trump: The Art of the Deal — When all else fails, fight
When he arrived in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, Trump had some competition bidding on development sites.
“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” he writes. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”
Elsewhere, he talks about how temperamentally, he is down to brawl. In an anecdote about the fight to buy a hotel in Atlantic City, he says, “If I went down, it would have been kicking and screaming.”
“That’s just my makeup. I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky,” he writes.
This was on display in his fight with the rent-controlled tenants of Central Park South. He wanted them evicted, many refused to leave. Trump had the telephone removed from the atrium, which he says tenants were using to phone friends in “St. Moritz.” He had high-wattage bulbs removed from hallways, had the doormen ditch their uniforms and, ultimately, tried to move homeless New Yorkers into the building.
“The only people bullies push around are the ones they know they can beat. Confront a strong, competent person, and he’ll fight back harder than ever. Confront a bully, and in most cases he’ll fold like a deck of cards,” he writes elsewhere.
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