Trump Solo - The New Yorker

Trump Solo - The New Yorker

From 1997, and Donald Trump doesn't seem to have changed all that much (emphasis added):

"Trump's vaunted art of the deal has given way to the art of 'image ownership.' By appearing to exert control over assets that aren't necessarily his--at least not in ways that his pronouncements suggest--he exercises his real talent: using his name as a form of leverage....

"Of course, the 'comeback' Trump is much the same as the Trump of the eighties; there is no 'new' Trump, just as there was never a 'new' Nixon. Rather, all along there have been several Trumps: the hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit; the knowledgeable builder whose associates profess awe at his attention to detail; the narcissist whose self-absorption doesn't account for his dead-on ability to exploit other people's weaknesses; the perpetual seventeen-year-old who lives in a zero-sum world of winners and 'total losers,' loyal friends and 'complete scumbags'; the insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn't like what he reads, attacks the messengers as 'human garbage'; the chairman and largest stockholder of a billion-dollar public corporation who seems unable to resist heralding overly optimistic earnings projections, which then fail to materialize, thereby eroding the value of his investment--in sum, a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences.