Americas First Real Estate Presidency
The White House has been home to lawyers, generals, professors and career politicians, but never a real estate sharpie like Donald Trump. For more than five decades, intellectuals like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. have been warning us about the perils of the imperial presidency—the unrestrained expansion of presidential power beyond its proscribed constitutional limits. What they should have been bird-dogging was the advent of the real estate presidency.
If you’re wondering what’s behind Trump's transition antics over the past few weeks—exaggerating the sticker cost of Air Force One, rolling the dice on an official phone call with Taiwan, sweet talking/shaking down Carrier to keep its factory in the United States—look no further than the real estate mind-set, which defines the way Trump thinks and acts. As a real estate guy, he always craved risk, preaching its virtues in his 2007 book Trump 101: The Way to Success. “Frequently, the risk will be well worth the gamble, but sometimes it will be more than you can afford,” he wrote. How true! His appetite for risk—and his impulsiveness—led him to assume loans for casinos and hotels in the 1990s and the 2000s that proved too dear. When he couldn’t cover the loans, he was forced the make several trips to bankruptcy court to save his skin. Similarly, as president-elect, Trump has already rolled big. Last week, he shook up relations with China with a daring—or stupid, depending on your point of view—phone conversation with the president of Taiwan. His entire presidential run demonstrated his attraction to risk, as he called other candidates cruel names, operated with only a skeletal staff, and defied calls by the pros to run more ads and build campaign operations.
Then there’s Trump’s unique relationship with the truth, which earned him a chart-busting 59 four-Pinocchio ratings from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler during the campaign. That’s a whole lot of big, fat lies in a very short period; but by developer standards, it’s a modest haul. Developers, to remain solvent, must crumple reality in a manner that keeps their clients, contractors, suppliers, partners and bankers content. It’s a business in which lying is not a sin but a virtue. After all, the clients, contractors and suppliers are all lying to the developer, too. These lies aren’t white lies in real estate land, they're green, situational truths spoken in the pursuit of dollars. Trump’s business training clearly gave him a grounding in lying that has served him well in politics. He brazenly said on more than a dozen occasions during the campaign that he had never said things that he was on record saying. Lying worked so well for him that we can expect a surplus of Pinocchios and Pants-on-Fire ratings from the press when his lies emanate from the Oval Office. “Serious voter fraud in Virginia,” he lied on Twitter two weeks ago, giving us a preview.
Not all real estate lies are lies. Many are mere exaggerations, as when a landlord hypes a property’s sun-drenched patio that upon inspection turns out to be a grimy air shaft. Through his career, Trump has exaggerated the way other people breathe. A 2007 deposition in a court case caught him exaggerating 30 times—“needless, highly specific, easy to disprove” overstatements, the Washington Post reported last summer. And this was when he was under oath! The hyperbole continued through the campaign, as Politico and other outlets recorded. He said his IQ is among the highest. In 1986, Trump explained the fungibility of truth that govern his real estate philosophy: “When I build something for somebody, I always add $50 million or $60 million onto the price. My guys come in, they say it’s going to cost $75 million. I say it’s going to cost $125 million, and I build it for $100 million. Basically, I did a lousy job. But they think I did a great job.” As president-elect these techniques are already infecting his governance, tweeting this week the cancellation of Boeing’s new Air Force One project because costs were exceeding $4 billion. The real number is closer to $1.65 billion. Then followed a Twitter boast in which he took credit for a $50 billion Japanese investment in the U.S.—in reality, the deal was not new, reported the Washington Post.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/donald-trump-real-estate-presidency-214504
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