30 NEWSWEEK.COM OCTOBER 18, 2019
repeatedly lied over the years about the value of a variety of his prop-
erties. The counterattack on O’Brien was entirely counterproductive.
Trump honed his ignore, deny and attack modus operandi
during his long business career. As his real estate and casino busi-
nesses weakened in the first part of the 90s under a huge debt
load, Trump was slow to respond to the deterioration, according
to associates at the time. “He needed to find ways to pay down debt
and he just didn’t do it quickly enough,” rival casino owner Steve
Wynn later said. Trump’s auditors finally wrote that the “overlever-
aging of this organization, particularly of non-casino hotel assets,
has created a crisis atmosphere.” That
finally got his attention.
Trump would enter bitter negotia-
tions with his creditors, forcing them
to take just a fraction of what the or-
ganization owed them. All the while,
though, he publicly denied that his
company was encountering significant
financial problems, still insisting he
was worth close to a billion dollars—a
ludicrous assertion at the time.
As president, Trump hasn’t had the
luxury of simply ignoring the crises
surrounding him. Disregarding the
Mueller probe was not an option. He
publicly attacked the investigation as a
“witch hunt” and a “hoax,” but behind the scenes at the White House
he went along with his lawyer’s counsel to give Mueller everything
requested in terms of documents and testimony. And the White
House was careful to let Mueller’s people know that the president’s
rhetoric “was just politics, and they understood that,” says former
Trump attorney John Dowd. In the end, Mueller’s report said: “The
investigation did not establish that members of the Trump cam-
paign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Now, with the disclosure that he asked his Ukrainian counterpart
for dirt on Biden and his son Hunter—who served on the board of
a Kiev-based gas company that paid him $50,000 a month while
his father was vice president—Trump is in denial mode. Because
he believes the transcript of the call didn’t prove that he was with-
holding aid, including defense funds, from Kiev unless he got what
he wanted, Trump is denying there anything was untoward. “It was
a beautiful phone call,” he told reporters at the U.N. last month.
In the same news conference, he telegraphed his next line of
attack against his political enemies. When asked by a reporter
why it’s okay for an American president to ask a foreign counter-
part for dirt on a political opponent, and how he would have felt
if Barack Obama had done the same to him, Trump responded:
“Well, that’s what he did, when you think about it.”
This was a reference to the ongoing Justice Department investi-Fighting Doesn’t Mean Winning
trump will now try to take the fight to his enemies. but
when he fights, as his confidantes know well, he doesn’t always win.
That was true throughout his business career. In 2009, to take but one
example, he sued New York Times journalist Tim O’Brien for defama-
tion for writing that Trump’s net worth was somewhere between $150
million to $250 million—not the billions that Trump had claimed.
A New Jersey court threw out the case for lack of evidence. And in
a deposition taken by O’Brien’s attorney, former federal prosecutor
Mary Jo White, who would go on to chair the Securities and Exchange
Commission under President Obama, Trump admitted that he had
LEARNING THE GAME
Trump (opposite, with
Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and Treasury’s
Steven Mnuchin) on the
defense at a recent press
conference. In the 90s,
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