Trump says his apartment reaches up to the 68th floor, even though the building isn’t that high. City records say it’s 10 floors shorter. Much of the explanation is a magic trick downstairs, where Trump skipped the 6th through 13th floors.
What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show
Why such a harsh judgment? Because in Mr. Trump’s eyes, Mr. Hall had suffered the most grievous form of public humiliation: His celebrity had waned. His star had dimmed.
.. The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.
In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.
“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”
.. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said when Mr. D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
.. Who does he look up to? “I don’t have heroes,” Mr. Trump said.
Does he examine history to better understand the present? “I don’t like talking about the past,” he said, later adding, “It’s all about the present and the future.”
.. Who earns his respect? “For the most part,” he said, “you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
.. But he always seems to return, in one form or another, to the theme of humiliation.
.. He reserves special scorn for people who embarrass themselves in front of their peers.
.. When people lose face, Mr. Trump’s reaction is swift and unforgiving.
And when Mr. Trump feels he has been made a fool of, his response can be volcanic. Ivana Trump told Mr. D’Antonio about a Colorado ski vacation she took with Mr. Trump soon after they began dating. The future Mrs. Trump had not told her boyfriend that she was an accomplished skier. As she recalls it, Mr. Trump went down the hill first and waited for her at the bottom:
IVANA TRUMP: So he goes and stops, and he says, “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.” I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. … He could not take it. He could not take it.
.. But it was not enough for Mr. Trump to become an object of media fascination. He took pleasure in knowing that such coverage was denied to almost everybody else.
.. By the time he was an established businessman, Mr. Trump hired a service to compile the swelling number of references to him in the media, which he then reviewed. “There are thousands of them a day,” he told Mr. D’Antonio. “Thousands, thousands a day.”
.. Ultimately, Mr. Trump fears — more than anything else — being ignored, overlooked or irrelevant.
That’s how he saw Arsenio Hall in the 2000s, as forgotten and ungrateful for his time on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television competition, which Mr. Hall won in 2012.
.. But he quickly retreats from the moment, declining Mr. D’Antonio’s invitation to further explain how the song makes him feel about himself, saying he might not like what he discovers.
Facebook co-founder drops unprecedented cash to stop Trump
A new Democratic megadonor emerges from nowhere and Democrats worry he won’t stay engaged.
the party’s leading finance operatives struggled to control their excitement at the prospect of finally having an answer to Republicans’ Sheldon Adelson in the shape of a Silicon Valley titan like the ones Democrats have been chasing after for well over a decade.
.. So now, grateful but puzzled Democrats in Washington and Silicon Valley are wondering, does Moskovitz’s move herald the dawning of the new age of tech money that they’ve been pursuing? Or is his unparalleled cash infusion a non-replicable, one-off response to Donald Trump?
Trump misrepresents Democratic oversampling as “Voter Suppression”
At both rallies, Trump also referenced — and wrongly interpreted —another item in the news, an email, publicized by WikiLeaks, in which a Democratic operative asked the campaign’s internal pollster to over-sample Democrats in a survey so to provide more useful feedback about how to better target minority voters.
“WikiLeaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique, and that’s happening to me all the time,” Trump said in St. Augustine even though the email wasn’t sent by Podesta and offered no correlation to current polling of the presidential race.
Podesta did not write anything in the 2008 email chain Trump referenced, in which Tom Matzzie wrote that he would like “Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February” to “maximize what we get out of our media polling.” (If Podesta replied, his response is not included in the emails published by WikiLeaks.)
According to Pew Research Center, oversampling is sometimes used to ensure that there are enough members of a particular subgroup within a population to reduce the margin of error. That nuance, however, was neglected by Trump as he argued — falsely — that the email somehow offered evidence that professional pollsters are biased against him and oversampling Democrats.
“When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading,” Trump claimed. “But you see these polls, where they’re polling Democrats — ‘How’s Trump doing? Oh, he’s down’ — they’re polling Democrats.”
“In an email, Podesta says that he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling,” Trump stated incorrectly. “It’s called voter suppression because people will say, ‘Oh, gee, Trump’s down.’ Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning.”
To many of his supporters, however, the word of Trump, however fungible it may be, holds more sway than any media attempt to correct it.
.. For more than a year, the former reality TV star has sought to inoculate himself against the media’s fact-checking and the political establishment’s pointed criticism with claims that both entities are inherently corrupt