THE FOLLOWING IS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES PRESENTED BY THE CONTENTLY FOUNDATION. CULLED FROM THE MANY BOOKS AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES WRITTEN ABOUT DONALD J. TRUMP, THIS SERIES AIMS TO REVEAL SOME OF THE INFLUENCES AND QUALITIES THAT FORM THE CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT.

Hurt is a former New York Times columnist
and Newsweek foreign correspondent who
spent three years researching and writing
“Lost Tycoon.” He interviewed more than
100 people for the book.
As Donald traverses the catwalk between the
master bedroom and his private bathroom, he
realizes, once again, that all this is not enough.
Ever since he was a little boy, his father, Fred C.
Trump, Sr., has been hammering the same lines
into his head: “You are a killer…You are a king…
You are a killer…You are a king…” Donald believers
he can’t be one without the other. As his father
has pointed out over and over again, most people
are weaklings. Only the strong survive. You have to
be a killer if you want to be a king. A case in point
was Donald’s late brother, Fred Trump, Jr., a
former airline pilot who ultimately drank himself to
death after being emotionally crucified for not
having joined the family real estate business.
“When somebody tries to push me around, when
they’re after my ass, I push back a hell of a lot
harder than I was pushed in the first place,” Donald
informed Playboy. “If somebody tries to push me
around, he’s going to pay a price.”
Donald is not impressed, however, with what he
sees in the looking glass. In a few weeks he is
slated to pose for a cover photograph for the
March 1990 issue of Playboy, in which his
interview with Glenn Plaskin will run. Donald will be
the first male to appear on the magazine’s cover in
nearly twenty years, a distinction certain to
enhance his carefully cultivated image as a
bussines-suited sex symbol. But Donald is so
embarrassed by the sorry state of his physique
that he wears undershorts and a T-shirt even when
he is in bed. Thanks to a died of junk foods and an
aversion to exercise, his waist, thighs, and buttocks
have swollen as thick and spongy as giant
doughnuts. And most disconcerting of all, as far as
he’s concerned, he is losing the hair on the crown
of his head.
Donald is determined to counteract the
encroachments of middle age at almost all costs.
In the past he tried to control his weight with
prescription diet pills supplied by a physician
whose office is just a few short blocks from Trump
Tower. But the diet pills, whose pharmacologic
activity is similar to that of amphetamines, made
the already frenetic Manhattan mogul a holy terror
both at home and at the office. Donald is now
mulling a new approach to weight control: having a
doctor remove his fat by means of liposuction. He
is also thinking about undergoing an even more
radical-sounding procedure called scalp reduction,
supplemented by a hair transplant, to cover his
bald spot.
“The worst thing a man can do is go bald,” he has
warned one of his is top executives. “Never let
yourself go bald.”

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