For three days Donald Trump sat seething in a New York courtroom as prosecutors set out to dismantle the aura he has constructed for more than 40 years, as a self-made master of the business world.
Nothing symbolized that image more powerfully than the building that the former president left each morning to travel across Manhattan to his fraud trial. From upstart property tycoon to reality TV star to president, Trump Tower has served as the backdrop to his greatest triumphs.
Now, if he fails to beat the fraud charges he is fighting at the New York State Supreme Court he could lose the skyscraper that made his name. The famed gold lettering outside, still a magnet for tourists and protesters, could be gone forever.
That prospect has enraged him. Outside the courtroom he called the judge, Arthur Engoron, “a disgrace”, and the woman trying to bring down his property empire, the New York attorney-general, Letitia James, “corrupt” and “a terrible person”.
“This is just a continuation of the witch hunt that started the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower [to announce his bid for the presidency in 2015],” he said. “And it’s a shame for our country.”
On October 4, he stormed out of court with another fusillade for the cameras and flew back to his home in Florida.
As he tries to take back the White House next year, Trump faces 91 felony charges in four criminal cases. He has been charged with violating the Espionage Act by refusing to hand over classified documents hidden at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and conspiracy to defraud the US in his attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, which climaxed in the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol.
Outside the courtroom he called the judge, Arthur Engoron, “a disgrace.”
If convicted, he could potentially die in jail. Yet none of those cases have appeared to cut Trump, 77, as deeply as the civil lawsuit brought by James, which alleges that the aura of wealth and business acumen that paved his way to the White House was built on a fraud.
“You always have to remember that he’s a deeply insecure man,” said Tim O’Brien, a journalist and author whose 2005 book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald first questioned Trump’s wealth. Trump sued him, but the case was dismissed.
“Money to him is a yardstick of his own sense of his self-worth … and how he measures himself against other people. Once you pierce the veil of exaggerations and mythology and lies about what he really owns and what he really has, he takes it as an attack on his very essence.”
Trump said as much in his deposition to James earlier this year. “So many things I did for this city and now I have to come and justify myself to you,” he lamented.
James alleged that over a decade that included his four years in the White House, Trump and his company falsely inflated his wealth by more than $2 billion to secure favorable deals from banks and insurers. In a summary judgment before the trial began, Engoron found Trump guilty of fraud. He ordered the dissolution of his companies in New York State and stripped him of control over some of his flagship New York properties. If the ruling is upheld on appeal, the former president could lose control of Trump Tower itself.
His lavish quarters in the building are central to the case. In financial statements, Trump and his associates tripled the square footage of the penthouse and overvalued the property by up to $200 million. Comparing Trump’s triplex with that of a Saudi prince on the Upper West Side, his staff decided that the former president’s would fetch a far higher price because of his “celebrity”.
Engoron said in his ruling: “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real-estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”
Trump Tower is pivotal to Trump’s origin story. When it opened in 1983, the sawtooth glass tower on Fifth Avenue was hailed as a new Manhattan landmark that announced the young developer to the world.
“It was an amazing success. It intersected with New York coming out of the slump of the 1970s, and reasserting itself as a cosmopolitan, sexy dynamic location,” said O’Brien. “Trump Tower was seen as emblematic of that revival.”
It was also the first project Trump pulled off without the support of his father. Fred Trump made his fortune building middle-class housing in Brooklyn and Queens. Despite moving the family business into the gleaming heart of Manhattan, however, a gnawing insecurity remained. “Not many sons have been able to escape their fathers,” Trump told The New York Times in 1983.
If convicted, he could potentially die in jail.
The early success haunted Trump. Biographers said he was obsessed with Orson Welles, who struggled to match his first film, Citizen Kane. “Trump talks about that stuff all the time,” O’Brien said. “Until he got into the White House, he remained someone whose success had been when he was much younger.”
Trump Tower also established him as a master of publicity and misinformation: before the opening, Trump spread an absurd rumor that Prince Charles and Diana would be moving in. Buckingham Palace flatly denied it, but the story made headlines in the US and fueled interest in the building. Trump later admitted in his best-selling book The Art of the Deal that the rumor was “the one that most helped Trump Tower”.
To the irritation of his chief architect, Der Scutt, Trump marketed the building as 68 stories high, when in fact it was just 58. Norman Brosterman, who worked as an assistant model maker on Trump Tower, said the team would receive instructions to “make it all gold”. When Trump viewed the architects’ model of Trump Tower and the surrounding neighborhood, he noted that the General Motors Building, a few blocks away, was taller than his own.
He asked whether his building could be made taller. When told by his architects that it could not, he then requested that the GM Building be made smaller. Der Scutt, bewildered, offered the future president a ruler and Trump drew a line along the side of the GM model.
“We unscrewed the GM Building from the model, laid it on the table and sawed off the top third of the building. Then we put it back,” Brosterman said. “Trump said, ‘Great, that’s good.’ And then he walked out.”
Charles and Diana never arrived, but the array of stars who bought into Trump Tower was a cross section of celebrity in the 1980s and 1990s. Residents included Steven Spielberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bruce Willis, Liberace and Michael Jackson.
An array of crooks followed. The Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier bought a $2.5 million condominium when he was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986 and fled with much of his country’s wealth. Several of Trump’s tenants down the years have been convicted of white-collar crime.
Within a decade of that early rush of acclaim, however, Trump was bankrupt. Pleading with his creditors, biographers say he was desperate to hang onto three key assets. “He begged them to let him keep his jet, Mar-a-Lago and his condo at Trump Tower,” O’Brien said.
Trump and the building came roaring back with the success of The Apprentice in 2004. The reality show revived the Trump brand and the image he wished to project, of a man of destiny and power, with Trump Tower as the backdrop and co-star to this career second act. Infamously, however, the show was shot on studio mock-ups of the Trump Organization boardroom and apartments, because the building’s real commercial space was too shabby.
To the irritation of his chief architect, Der Scutt, Trump marketed the building as 68 stories high, when in fact it was just 58.
The former president has done little to refurbish Trump Tower in the four decades since it opened. Today it remains a time warp to the early 1980s, its glamour faded and worn. The fashion boutiques that once graced the lower floors have gone, replaced by shops selling Make America Great Again hats, plastic figurines of the former president, Trump playing cards, soap and T-shirts featuring his criminal mug shot.
The 45 Wine and Whiskey bar, roped off and darkened, boasts more than a dozen photos of the former president and framed trinkets, including a folded American flag with a note of gratitude from the US military, and copies of his four State of the Union speeches.
Staff say the building is quiet when Trump is not in residence, 50 floors above. Security staff are relaxed, discussing the week’s Powerball lottery winners. Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” echoes through the marble halls.
A steady stream of tourists trickles into the marble atrium, pausing for selfies beneath the famous Trump Tower lettering above the entrance on Fifth Avenue. Most are foreign visitors. “We’re just curious,” said Miguel from Madrid, as his wife browsed the Trump-branded merchandise. He gestured around him: “I mean, it’s ridiculous.”
Only a few had heard that Trump might lose control of the building.
“It’s clearly a political witch hunt,” said Jay from Connecticut, who was showing his family around and claimed to know the Trumps “a little” before Trump won the presidency. “A Democratic judge, a Democratic A-G. To the average hardworking American it looks like a stitch-up.”
Trump’s questionable legal strategy of attacking Engoron, James and their staff led to him being slapped with a gag order by the judge. Unchecked by his legal team, the former president appeared to incriminate himself further in a final salvo before he left New York, insisting that “my financial documents are valued much less than my actual value, which nobody even knows”.
He added: “The financial documents that I gave to the bank are much less than my actual net worth. They can’t be fraudulent because I gave them lower numbers.”
The former president received a sliver of hope last Friday, when an appeals court placed a temporary stay on Engoron’s order to break up his New York businesses immediately, but Trump’s request to halt the trial was dismissed.
He knows what will happen to his cherished properties if they go into receivership. Other developers will pounce on a fire sale of his assets with the same ruthlessness he showed when he seized the plot for Trump Tower, demolishing Bonwit Teller, a declining Fifth Avenue department store famed for its Art Deco beauty.
“They’ll be sold off at fire-sale prices,” O’Brien said. “This is the most brutal, competitive real-estate market in America. No one is going to pay top dollar for a building just because Donald Trump used to own it.”
Hugh Tomlinson is a Washington, D.C.–based reporter for The Times of London
