Why Trump’s Political Biographers Remain Fixated on His Era as Real Estate King of New York

It began with a phone call straight to the man. “It was an audacious call,” the young reporter would write. These days, such calls proliferate, Donald Trump’s number passed round the Washington press corps, short interviews topping news cycles an hour apiece.But this was then. The call didn’t concern war with Iran, or tariffs, or any political issue. It didn’t concern DC. It was August 1994, the call was from one New York number to another, and the reporter was working on a story about Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, “the most famous newlyweds in the world,” honeymooning at Trump Tower. “Sure enough,” Jonathan Karl would write, “I got a quick call back. Donald Trump was on the line, telling me to come over.”Mr. Karl hustled. Mr. Trump talked. The New York Post had its scoop. By the time Mr. Karl described the episode in “Front Row at the Trump Show,” 26 years later, he was ABC News White House correspondent and Mr. Trump was president, reportage on his rise to power streaming onto the shelves. Six years on, Mr. Trump is a year into his second term and the stream has long been in flood, Mr. Karl the author of four such books of his own. I’ve read them and most of the others. I think that if you want to understand the president, your first reads should not concern Mr. Trump in Washington. They should cover Mr. Trump in New York.For 30 years, “The Trump Show” played in, and to, New York, primetime all the time. For another 10, via “The Apprentice,” a Manhattan fairytale, the world watched too. The performance evolved, but not much. The sell first, the truth second. All of Mr. Trump’s instincts and motivations — outer borough resentment, old-fashioned racial politics, a hustler’s eye for a chance, a real-estate man’s eye for bathroom marble — were perfected in New York. Bar an escape to Philadelphia for college (read Mary Trump, his apostate niece, on how he might’ve got there and more) he was in New York a lifetime. He was nearly 70 when he flew south. New Yorkers do that. They don’t change.Maggie Haberman knows Mr. Trump and New York. Now at the New York Times, she made her bones at the Post. Her book on Mr. Trump, “Confidence Man” (2022), is an epic. In 1857, Herman Melville, also made by New York, published his final novel, “The Confidence Man: A Masquerade.” Ms. Haberman knows Trump’s masquerade, his Page Six confidence tricks. She knows about contracts for concrete.She’s worth quoting: “The New York from which Trump emerged was its own morass of corruption and dysfunction, stretching from seats of executive power to portions of the media to the industry in which his family found its wealth…the world of New York developers was … rife with backbiting and financial knife fighting … but Trump nonetheless stood out to the journalists covering him as particularly brazen.”There are deeper cuts. Wayne Barrett wrote a book, “The Deals and the Downfall” (1991), later updated to cover Mr. Trump’s run to DC. Barrett’s shoe-leather reporting is available in a collection: “Without Compromise” (2020). In 1979, the Village Voice published a two-part profile: “Like Father, Like Son and Donald Trump Cuts the Cards.” It’s all there: Mr. Trump’s relationship with his dad, developer Fred Trump, his first moves in 1970s Manhattan, his rise in the 1980s. Of that, “Paper of Wreckage” (2024), Frank DiGiacomo and Susan Mulcahy’s magnificent oral history of the Post, teems with car-crash detail.Others were watching. Recently, former UK defence minister Sir Ben Wallace told a podcast: “There’s an amazing book called “Trumped!” written in 1991 by one of his casino bosses from Atlantic City,” John R O’Donnell. “It’s one of the best reads you can read, because it’s not … a sort of kiss-and-tell, ‘I knew the president.’ And in there, right in the middle of it, is Mr. Trump’s obsession with wearing a suit … It goes way back, right? If we’d had good quality advice to people like [Volodymyr] Zelensky, we would have known that those are the sort of things that touch him off.”So much for Ukraine. Amid the chaotic war with Iran, a contemporary review of “Trumped!” rings loud: “Trump emerges as a cocksure boor who pays precious little attention to detail and pins the blame for his own misjudgments on subordinates. While he seems surprisingly dumb when it comes to weighing a deal’s downside risks against its potential rewards, he apparently suffers from near-terminal overconfidence.”Mr. Trump knew the darker sides of New York. Jonathan Mahler’s “The Gods of New York” (2025) recreates the stage and the shadows. Eric Dezenhall’s “Wiseguys and the White House” (2025) has more on those contracts for concrete.Naturally, books about the President as politician include staffers’ memoirs. HR McMaster is notably measured, Jared Kushner and Bill Barr notably long. Again, the gaze strays back to New York. Michael Cohen was Mr. Trump’s fixer. He ended up in jail, came out embittered. I always recommend Cohen’s first book about Mr. Trump, “Disloyal” (2020). Its caveats are obvious but it’s authentically New York: funny, gutsy, alarming. Michael Cohen AP Photo/Seth WenigCohen lost out when Mr. Trump went to DC. A key book on that shift is “Devil’s Bargain” (2017), by Joshua Green. Understand how Mr. Trump met Steve Bannon, understand what came after. Of reporters’ books about Mr. Trump in the capital, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, then of the Washington Post, might’ve written the best, their first of two,”A Very Stable Genius” (2020). Less stately than Bob Woodward’s quartet, less garish than Michael Wolff’s, but like both it absorbs.Still, the tale is pulled back to New York. Ms. Haberman signed for a second book, with Times colleague Jonathan Swan and “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” will be published in June. Mr. Trump’s reportedly worried, especially over Ms. Haberman the Manhattan cool kid he just can’t kick. The book will surely cover the long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the foreign entanglements and the use of presidential power during his second presidency President Trump claims persecution. Many New Yorkers, repudiation. I did dread having to read “Apprentice in Wonderland,” Ramin Satoodeh’s 2024 account of how an NBC reality show prepared the ground for Mr. Trump’s political plunge. But a couple years on, with Mr. Trump back in power, the book has much to offer.Debra Messing. Joan MarcusIf Ms. Haberman and Mr. Karl know their subject because they know the reality of his New York life, Mr. Satoodeh knows its unreality, the version on TV. The book’s subhead refers to the Brit behind “The Apprentice” as well as to Lewis Carroll: “How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass”. At the time, I extracted a headline for the website I was then working for about Mr. Trump having a crush on the actress Debra Messing. It was fluff, pulled from a book about fluff. But fluff isn’t always just fluff. Sometimes it causes a fire in the dryer. Mr. Trump’s New York years were his celebrity years, long before “The Apprentice.” Presidential chroniclers still search for material that could finish him off. Given all the previous scandals, it’s hard to know what will. But our collective fascination with such tales, the American societal addiction to the Mr. Trump of New York and Page Six, says a lot about where we are now.

Why Trump’s Political Biographers Remain Fixated on His Era as Real Estate King of New York

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