New Trump bio is perfectly timed
Donald Trump deserves a fantastic biography, a huge biography, the best biography ever. Just ask him.
What he'll have to settle for instead, at least at the moment, is Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. In it, journalist Michael D'Antonio has written a carefully reported and fair-minded account of what he calls "the long and hyperactive life" of the real-estate mogul-turned-reality TV star who now leads the Republican presidential field.
Which is a development that has startled everyone in the political world except, possibly, Trump, who on Monday announced that he's writing his own, so-far untitled book outlining his campaign views. It's due Oct. 27 from Threshold Editions.
Never Enough paints a portrait of a bombastic and boastful man who acknowledges he hasn't really changed since he was a kid who got into so many scrapes, physical and otherwise, that his parents shipped him off to military school. "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same," Trump told the author during more than 10 hours of interviews. (Plans for more interviews were canceled when one of Trump's ex-wives, Marla Maples, apparently relayed word that the author had dared to talk to author Harry Hurt III, who was on his long list of enemies.)
Of course, Trump hasn't exactly lived an unexamined life up to now. His website lists 16 books he has authored or co-authored, from the best-selling The Art of the Deal to the more obscure The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received. He's been the topic and target of books and magazine investigations. D'Antonio, a former reporter at Newsday (where I also once worked), hasn't broken dramatic new disclosures. But he has pulled together Trump's story, subjected it to some fact-checking and dissected a string of business deals that display his drive to win, his thirst for money, his willingness to push boundaries and his apparently endless quest for publicity.
Now, with the benefit of exquisite political timing, Trump has managed to tap a deep and angry thread of political discontent among Republican voters who question President Obama's leadership and legitimacy and are fed up with GOP leaders who have failed to shake things up enough. Trump is type-cast in the role of disrupter.
D'Antonio is the beneficiary of some exquisite timing as well, with publication of the book pushed up from next year to take advantage of Trump's time in the political spotlight. No one can be entirely sure whether it will prove to be fleeting or if he can sustain his position in the center of the political debate.
The author tries to put Trump in the context of his times, from the positive thinking of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale of Marble Collegiate Church, where Trump's family worshiped, to social scientists studying the narcissism of the late 20th century. He notes that Trump was born in 1946, the forward edge of the emerging baby boom generation. He prospered during the booming "greed is good" 1980s, gained greater fame as host of TV's The Apprentice and now brags about the size of his social-media network.
"Indeed, for all of his excesses, Donald Trump is a man perfectly adapted to his time," D'Antonio writes. He calls him "merely one of us, writ large."
Susan Page is Washington Bureau chief of Paste BN.
Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success
By Michael D'Antonio
Thomas Dunne Books
3.5 stars out of four, 389 pp.