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.