The
Donald Trump Conversation: Politics' "Dark Heart" Is Having the Best
Time Anyone's Ever Had
By Michael Wolff
At home in Beverly Hills, the candidate talks Murdoch, what he's
reading, how he'll redo electoral math and Ari Emanuel's offer to script his
convention.
The long day is
ending for Donald Trump with a pint of vanilla Haagen-Dazs ice cream. We're
settling in for a late-night chat at his Beverly Hills house, a
10,400-square-foot Colonial mansion directly across from the Beverly Hills
Hotel. He's here for the final presidential primary, a California coronation of
sorts, after rallies in Orange County (where violence broke out and seven
people were arrested). He is, as he has been for much of our conversation — and
perhaps much of the last year — marveling at his own campaign. "You looked
outside before, you see what's going on," he boasts about the police
surrounding his house, and the Secret Service detail cramming his garage and
snaking around the pool at the center of the front drive. And he's just
returned from a big donor fundraiser in Brentwood for the Republican Party at
the home of Tom Barrack, the investor and former Miramax co-owner. "There
had to be over a thousand policeman. They had a neighborhood roped off, four or
five blocks away from this beautiful house. Machine guns all over the
place."
One thing to understand
about Trump is that, rather unexpectedly, he's neither angry nor combative. He
may be the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate
in modern life, and yet, in person he's almost soothing. His extreme
self-satisfaction rubs off. He's a New Yorker who actually might be more at
home in California (in fact, he says he usually comes to his home here — two
buildings on Rodeo Drive — only once a year). Life is sunny. Trump is an
optimist — at least about himself. He's in easy and relaxed form campaigning
here in these final days before the June 7 California primary, even with
Hillary Clinton's biggest backers and a city that is about half Latino
surrounding him.
Earlier in the day,
I'd met with Trump at a taping of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! at
the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he was the single guest
for the evening (musicians The Weeknd and Belly canceled upon learning of his
appearance). "Have you ever seen anything like this?" he asked. He
meant this, the Trump phenomenon. Circumventing any chance that I might dampen
the sentiment, he quickly answered his own question: "No one ever
has."
His son-in-law, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, married to
his daughter Ivanka and also a real estate scion — but clearly a more modest
and tempered fellow, a wisp next to his beefsteak father-in-law — offered that
they may have reached 100 percent name recognition. In other words, Trump could
be the most famous man in the world right now. "I may be," says
Trump, almost philosophically, and referencing the many people who have told
him they've never seen anything like this. "Bill O'Reilly said in his
lifetime this is the greatest phenomenon he's ever seen."
That notion is what's
at the center of this improbable campaign, its own brilliant success. It's its
main subject — the one you can't argue with. You can argue about issues, but
you can't argue with success. Hence, to Trump, you're really foolish to argue
with the Trump campaign. "I've spent $50 million of my own money to go through
the primaries. Other people spent $230 million and they came in last. You know
what I'm saying?" And this provides him the reason to talk endlessly and
repetitively about the phenomenon of the campaign. That phenomenon is, of
course, Trump himself, about whom Trump spends a lot of time talking in the
third person.
You can try, but it's
hard to resist this admiration for himself. The certainty of it, the enthusiasm
for it and the lack of not just doubt, but of any negativity. It's all upbeat
and positive. The dark, scary, virulent heart of American politics is having
the best time anyone has ever had. Read the Rest of Article at Hollywood Reporter
