Trump also boasted about ogling Miss Universe contestants during the events. “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he told Stern. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes.” Over the years, when asked about his management of the pageants, he has often replied with some version of the quip “The bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher and the ratings went up.” The part about ratings isn’t true. As the book “Trump Revealed,” by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, noted, when Trump bought Miss Universe the viewership in the United States had declined from around thirty-five million in 1984 to twelve million in 1997. The numbers kept falling during Trump’s ownership, and the American audience for the 2013 pageant consisted of fewer than four million. Still, Trump recognized that the pageant was a useful vehicle for expanding his reach overseas, and no country so consistently kindled his ambitions as Russia.
Trump’s interest in the country goes back to the days of the Soviet Union. His first book, “The Art of the Deal,” published in 1987, begins with an account of a typical day in his life, including a phone call with an acquaintance who conducted a lot of business with the Soviet Union. “I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government,” Trump wrote. “They have asked me to go to Moscow in July.” Later that year, he did go to Moscow and what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), but his plans to build there never came to fruition.
Trump returned to Moscow in each of the following decades, hoping to add one of his eponymous towers to the city’s skyline. His regular visits have led some to speculate that Trump had a kind of obsession with the country, but he looked for deals all over the world, and he returned to Russia because that’s where the money was. A longtime adviser to Trump told me, “It’s a major metropolitan city, and around the years of 2000, give or take, with the privatization, there was a lot of money in Moscow.”
The atmosphere of post-Soviet Russia also seemed to suit Trump. He travelled to the city again in November, 1996, during the raucous “Wild East” days following the collapse of Communism and the Soviet system. His arrival in Moscow came after a plunge in his financial fortunes. (His 1995 tax return, published in part by the Times in 2016, showed losses of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars.) He had lost the trust of American banks and was forced to search for credit and business opportunities abroad. In a news conference shortly after his arrival in Moscow, he said that he planned to invest two hundred and fifty million dollars to build a pair of luxury apartment towers in the city, one to be called Trump International and the other Trump Tower. In addition, he said that he was looking into renovating and running two famous hotels from the Soviet era. As Trump said in a Mark Singer profile in The New Yorker, published a few months later, “We’re looking at the Moskva Hotel. We’re also looking at the Rossiya. That’s a very big project; I think it’s the largest hotel in the world. And we’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayor’s people.”
Thread abonnieren
