Trump’s Political Reality Show: Will the Donald Really Run for President?

Sitting 26 stories above Fifth Avenue in the trophy room of a skyscraper he named for himself, boasting sweeping views of Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, which he once also owned, Donald Trump, 64, a golden mist of hair wafting perfectly across his forehead, holds up fresh evidence of his greatness. “This thing just came out,” Trump says, waving a 2012 Republican primary poll from the website Newsmax. “This is Trump.”

(See how to get Donald Trump’s signature hairstyle.)

He points to a bar graph showing the 57% of voters who support his unannounced campaign for President. Then he points below. “These are the people,” he says, referring to established politicians like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Haley Barbour, none of whom garner even 10%. “A little crazy, right?”

Trump doesn’t linger on the poll, since there is too much to brag about, like his new top-rated NBC reality show or all the money he has made with Asian investors. “I did very well with Chinese people,” he says. “Very well. Believe me.” And anyway, if you read the fine print, the poll doesn’t really mean much, having been culled from a self-selected group of Internet surfers who clicked banner ads displaying Trump’s face. But then, such details don’t bother the Donald, as he is known to his fans, or Mr. T, as some employees refer to him. In Trump’s gilded world of shiny surfaces, few dwell on what lies beneath.

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This is the thing to remember about Trump, who has been toying with the idea of a presidential-campaign announcement in late May. Fretting over the niggling details of reality didn’t get him where he is today — worth $2.7 billion, according to Forbes, with a hit reality show, a men’s clothing line at Macy’s, a string of best-selling business books, swanky country clubs, luxury hotels, Trump tea, Trump chocolate, Trump bottled water, mail-order Trump steaks, the Miss Universe pageant and foreign financiers who solicit the use of his name for new condos in Dubai or on the Black Sea or wherever money is blowing up the skyline with brazen luxury.

Unlike most developers who scraped Manhattan dirt, Trump didn’t make his fortune simply by building things with glass and steel. He sold story lines of living large: Trump, with the best, the tallest, the most, the biggest and the brightest. A decade before reality television, he offered himself as performance art, what Advertising Age calls the “human logo.” “The show is ‘Trump,'” he told Playboy in a 1990 interview. “And it is sold-out performances everywhere.” Without the “Trump,” after all, those steaks are just meat in the mail, and he is just another rich guy who thinks he can buy his way into the White House.

(See “Donald Trump 2012 Rising.”)

So now he gets down to the business at hand: the presidency of the world’s most powerful nation, a last frontier for a lifetime winner. “Nobody can do the job that I can do,” he says in his office, cluttered with awards, plaques and framed magazine covers — ubiquitous reminders of his own success. “I can make this country great again. This country is not great. This country is a laughingstock for the rest of the world.”

He has been repeating that sound bite for weeks, as if the nation were just another run-down co-op in need of redevelopment. But his play is not new. Back in 1987, Trump took out full-page ads in several newspapers, criticizing the political establishment, then run by Ronald Reagan, for its coddling of the OPEC countries and Japan. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians,” ran the copy, which stoked false rumors that he might throw his hat into the 1988 ring. About a decade later, he danced with the 2000 Reform Party ticket, releasing a book of policy proposals that included an embrace of single-payer health care and plans for a one-time 14.25% net-worth tax on all Americans worth more than $10 million. The revenue would pay off the national debt; primary residences, like those in upscale Trump properties, would be exempted.

This time around, Trump says he is more serious than ever before, even without a new policy book, and he has come out swinging, dominating the cable-news airwaves with a steady stream of head-turning alpha-dog ideas. President Trump, he says, would not have bombed Libya unless he were assured that the U.S. could keep Tripoli’s oil afterward. He would impose a 25% tariff on all Chinese imports unless China allowed its currency to appreciate faster against the dollar. He would make South Korea “pay us for protection” from North Korea, and he would threaten to withdraw military cover for OPEC members unless they brought the price of oil back down. “I made a lot of money with them,” he says of the Arabs in the Persian Gulf. America’s problems, in the Trump view, can be mostly solved by sending a tougher cookie into contract negotiations. “Obama would be a very terrible chess player,” he says, suggesting politics is little more than a pose. “He broadcasts all his moves.”

(See the men behind the dueling “Draft Donald Trump” websites.)

Of course, Trump’s biggest headlines come not from policy but from controversy. In recent weeks, he has revived the national sideshow over the veracity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which the state of Hawaii long ago confirmed to be in order. “We have a President who may not have been born in this country,” he says, before detecting skepticism from yet another Beltway reporter who has been down this road before. “I am a really smart guy. I was a great student at the best school,” the Wharton grad explains. “And I say that up front.

“A lot of people are saying it’s a bad issue for me. I don’t think so,” Trump continues. “The polls are showing 55% of the Republicans agree with me.” Dwelling on the birth certificate is not the only way he has been playing to the Republican base. He has backed away from supporting a single-payer system, and he wants to repeal Obama’s health care reforms. He has abandoned his net-worth tax and promises he won’t raise any taxes. He opposes gay marriage because it doesn’t “feel right” and recently became pro-life, he says, after a close friend decided not to pursue an abortion of his unborn child.

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See “Taking On Obama in 2012 — Tougher than You Think.”

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump went even further with his Manchurian Candidate critique of Obama. “The people who went to school with him, they don’t even know him. They never saw him,” Trump said, a claim belied by dozens of interviews that have been conducted with the President’s childhood classmates and teachers. Trump even argues that the 1960s radical Bill Ayers secretly wrote Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. No less than Glenn Beck, the reigning king of political paranoia, thinks Trump has gone too far. “I could walk around the streets of New York without pants, and I could get attention,” Beck recently said of Trump’s wilder claims. “But that’s not going to help me.”

Maybe not, but it may not hurt Trump much either. There are signs he is striking a chord in the relative vacuum of the 2012 Republican campaign. Two recent national polls by different news organizations both found Trump favored first or second among Republican primary voters. In New Hampshire, according to Public Policy Polling, Trump garners 21%, second behind Romney, with 27%. And so Trump has continued to work his levers behind the scenes.

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“NBC wants to renew me for three seasons,” Trump explains. “I’ve told them, I’m sorry. At this moment, I can’t think about that because I have a big decision to make.” He has been chatting up the new head of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, and speaking regularly to Christopher Ruddy, the proprietor of Newsmax and a force in conservative circles, who happens to be a member of Trump’s opulent Palm Beach, Fla., club Mar-a-Lago. Trump has also been reconnoitering with Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who lives in a Trump building in Manhattan. There are plans in the works for a sit-down with pro-life leaders. “He can win,” claims Conway, bucking the nearly unanimous view among the Beltway elite, explaining that “2012 is an aspiration election. When you think aspiration and upward mobility, you think Donald Trump.”

Though he has been playing to Republicans, Trump has also been careful to stoke the fires of an independent candidacy if a GOP bid does not work out. He might even have centrist appeal, says Roger Stone, a controversial GOP operative who once worked on behalf of the Trump-branded Atlantic City casinos, which have filed repeatedly for bankruptcy in recent years. He says Trump’s name has always played best among core Democratic voting groups. “He’s a working-class hero,” argues Stone, who is no longer employed by Trump but is soliciting contributions for the cause at DraftTrump2012.com. “Blacks and Hispanics and lower-class whites like his lifestyle.”

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s senior executives, Michael Cohen, has been leading another Trump 2012 charge, booking interviews and appearances for Trump and financing a website called ShouldTrumpRun.com. Cohen works closely with Stewart Rahr, a billionaire philanthropist known in the society pages as Stewie Rah Rah, the No. 1 King of All Fun, who once handed out a business card that looked like a $1 billion bill, emblazoned with a picture of Rahr, Trump and former President Bill Clinton on a golf outing. “I believe the country needs leadership,” says Rahr, who also lives in a Trump building, belongs to Trump’s country clubs and has promised to spend whatever he legally can to elect him. “Every other third-world country, outside country is marching all over us,” he explains.

(See a Q&A with the Donald.)

A few weeks back, Cohen and Rahr planned to fly to Iowa to meet the state GOP chairman to discuss a Trump speaking event in June. Not wanting to fly commercial, Rahr asked Trump if he could borrow the Trump 727 for the trip and pay the tab. Then, at the last minute, Rahr had to jet to New Orleans to meet with an actor about a movie deal, leaving Cohen to fly alone to Des Moines on a plane that can carry more than 100 people. “You know, it’s not easy walking around a 727 by yourself,” Cohen says, kidding.

This is Trump’s world, one that is simply more garish than the world of politics. “I look very much forward to showing my financials, because they are huge,” Trump says of the disclosures he would make if he launched a campaign. “Far bigger than anyone knows. Far bigger than anyone would understand.” Like so much of what he says, it is hard to know how much he means it and how much is just Trump, extending the sold-out show.

But could Trump actually corral Washington? Does he even know how many members there are in the House of Representatives? “Well, I don’t want to answer your questions because this isn’t a history class,” he shoots back, adding that of course he knows the answer. “You could get some stiff that knows every one of those answers but is incapable of governing.” Well, then can he give us any assurance that he is really serious about this campaign? That he is not just pulling the country along for another prime-time joyride? “You have no assurance,” he says. “I am just telling you I hate what is happening to the country.”

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Then the interview ends. The tape recorder is switched off, and Trump follows the reporter to the elevator with a framed picture fetched by one of his employees. It is a 1989 cover of TIME with a photo of Trump holding up the ace of diamonds. “No 15 minutes for Trump,” he says as the doors slide open, boasting — and blustering — to the very end.

See the 2011 TIME 100 poll.

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