Conrad Black - Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other

PRAISE FOR

Donald J. Trump

A PRESIDENT LIKE NO OTHER

Is there anything new to say of the most written-about man alive? Yes. Conrad Black is a political observer, an historian, and a businessman whos done business with Donald Trump (he sold him a building), and was one of the first to take his campaign seriously. Black understands the 45th president not only in the context of his pre-political life and family but in the great sweep of American history. This is an admiring but undeluded biography whose every page has either a shrewd new insight or revealing detail, and often both. Its also beautifully written, with both a droll wit its subject will surely appreciate and an understanding of the visceral connection between Trump and the millions of Americans who felt abandoned by both parties. A great and knowing read, and a biography that has the size of its subject.

Mark Steyn, bestselling author of America Alone, After America, and The Undocumented Mark Steyn

This hard-hitting, well-written, and admirably objective book, written by a remarkably talented historian who moreover knows his subject well, will inform all subsequent serious biographies of Donald J. Trump. There is ammunition galore here both for those who love the president and those who loathe him.

Andrew Roberts, bestselling author of Napoleon the Great and Churchill: Walking with Destiny

Most readers, like myself, have never met either Conrad Black nor Donald J. Trump. But after reading this engaging biography, those of any political persuasion would wish to do both.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, from his Foreword

An unremittingly honest yet admiring account of Donald J. Trump. Incandescent intelligence and uplifting prose and vocabulary escort the reader on Trumps journey from hard-charging businessman to equally robust president. Deeply informative about things not well known or not reported, the book is a luminous account of our fascinating and always interesting chief.

William Bennett, bestselling author and former United States Secretary of Education

Conrad Blacks new book on Donald Trump is a brilliant analysis of the remarkable talents and unusual foibles that brought Trump to the presidency of the United States. Black knows Mr. Trump andwith his uncommon knowledge of American historyis able to place him in a fascinating context. Readers will be delighted with Blacks skills as a writerhis scholarship, sense of humor, and irony are on prominent display. A must-read at this seminal juncture in American history.

The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada

Copyright 2018 by Conrad Black

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To the presidents of the United States whom it has

been my privilege to know and admire: Lyndon B. Johnson,

Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan,

George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and Donald J. Trump.

CONTENTS

C onrad Blacks erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and they say gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trumps earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Blacks aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trumps methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the pastin the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Blacks unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trumps rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.

As he guides the reader through Trumps various land deals, casino crashes, name merchandising, risky hotel gambits, and golf course developments, Black offers unusual insight into how Trump, or for that matter anyone else, could survive such a rollercoaster of catastrophe and great fortune. While most of Trumps rivals share his same carnivorous ethos, very few succeeded as did Trump.

What made Trump different from his competitors? Likely, his cunning, his almost Thucydidean reading of human nature, and his sixth sense about timing and salesmanship. In Plutarchian fashion, Black focuses on Trumps physicality, especially his boundless energy and his impatience with nuance and self-doubt (desperate cunning, unflagging determination, unshakeable self-confidence, ruthless Darwinian instincts of survival, and a sublime assurance that celebrity will heal all wounds). Of course, the media and politicians were not ready for the naked applicability of these traits to the White House. But, as Black notes, the proverbial people after decades of misgovernance wereas if to let loose Trump on their country as both avenger and deliverer.

How many times did critics recoil in shock at Trumps coarse epithets such as Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, Lying Ted Cruz, and Crooked Hillaryonly to note that such appellations kept reverberating in their critics heads, both appropriate and humorous if often cruelly so? Whose careerist agendas fared better after provoking the counter-punching Trump? For Black, Trump became president because he outworked and outhustled his competitors, because he saw that most seasoned politicians were split-the-difference 51 percent hedgersand that the country by 2016 desperately wanted some sort of Samson to tear down the pillars of a complacent if not corrupt establishment, even if they and their deliverer might sometimes be injured in the rubble.