 "What drives Donald Trump? Fear of losing status, tapes show")
By any measure, Arsenio Hall was a Hollywood success: He had starred in popular films, packed houses as a stand-up comic and hosted a hit late-night television show bearing his name.
Donald J Trump saw it differently by the mid-2000s. In his eyes, Hall was nothing.
“Dead as a doornail,” was his assessment of Hall in a previously unreleased interview from two years ago. “Dead as dog meat.” Why such a harsh judgment? Because in Trump’s eyes, Hall had suffered the most grievous form of public humiliation: His celebrity had waned. His star had dimmed.
It was, in short, Trump’s worst nightmare. “Couldn’t get on television,” Trump said with disgust. “They wouldn’t even take his phone call.”
The intense ambitions and undisciplined behaviours of Trump have confounded even those close to him, especially as his presidential campaign comes to a tumultuous end, and he confronts the possibility of the most stinging defeat of his life. But in the more than five hours of conversations — the last extensive biographical interviews Trump granted before running for president — a powerful driving force emerges: his deep-seated fear of public embarrassment.
The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.
In the interviews, Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.
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“I never had a failure,” Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”
The interviews were conducted in 2014 by Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who later wrote a biography of Trump called “The Truth About Trump.”
D’Antonio now disapproves of Trump’s candidacy and gave transcripts of the interviews to Hillary Clinton’s campaign this year. After a brief meeting with a few Clinton aides, he said, he never heard back from Clinton’s staff.
Over the past few weeks, D’Antonio gave The New York Times access to the original audio as well as transcripts of his interviews with Trump, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, and his three oldest children. The Times is using them as the basis for this article and a two-part episode of its election podcast, “The Run-Up.”
Trump, in a statement on Monday night, called the recordings “Pretty old and pretty boring stuff. Hope people enjoy it.”
In the interviews, which occurred in Trump’s office and apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan, he is by turns animated and bored, boastful and stubborn when prodded toward soul-searching. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said when D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyse myself because I might not like what I see.”
Despite his reluctance, Trump reveals himself over and over, in the stories he tells, in his wide-ranging answers to questions and at times in casual, seemingly throwaway lines.
Who does he look up to? “I don’t have heroes,” Trump said. © 2016 The New York Times News Service