Despite the restrictions, Donald continued spending cash he didn’t have, including $250,000 for Marla’s engagement ring and $10 million to Ivana as part of their divorce settlement. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he couldn’t spend whatever he wanted no matter what the circumstances. The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.

In a way, you can’t really blame Donald. In Atlantic City, he had become unmoored from his need for his father’s approval or permission. He no longer needed to talk himself up; his exaggerated assessment of himself was simultaneously fueled and validated by banks that were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at him and a media that lavished him with attention and unwarranted praise. The two combined rendered him blind to how dire his situation was. My grandfather’s myths about Donald were now being reinforced by the world at large.

Regardless of who was disseminating them, however, they were still myths. Donald was, in essence, still Fred’s construct. Now he belonged to the banks and the media. He was both enabled by and dependent upon them, just as he had been upon Fred. He had a streak of superficial charm, even charisma, that sucked certain people in. When his ability to charm hit a wall, he deployed another “business strategy”: throwing tantrums during which he threatened to bankrupt or otherwise ruin anybody who failed to let him have what he wanted. Either way, he won.

Donald was successful because he was a success. That was a premise that ignored one fundamental reality: he had not achieved and could not achieve what he was being credited with. Despite that, his ego, now unleashed, had to be fed continually, not just by his family but by all who encountered it.

New York’s elite would never accept him as anything but the court jester from Queens, but they also validated his pretensions and grandiose self-image by inviting him to their parties and allowing him to frequent their haunts (such as Le Club). The more New Yorkers wanted spectacle, the more willing the media were to provide it—even at the expense of more important and substantive stories. Why bore them with hard-to-follow articles about his convoluted bank transactions? The distractions and sleights of hand benefited Donald enormously while giving him exactly what he wanted: the ongoing adulation of media that focused on his salacious divorce and alleged sexual prowess. If the media could deny reality, so could he.

By some miracle, I had gotten into Tufts University after boarding school, and despite dropping out the second semester of my freshman year, I graduated in 1989. A year later, just before my grandfather’s modest purchase of $3.15 million worth of casino chips, I entered the graduate program in English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

Two months after the semester started, my apartment was burgled. All of my electronics, including my typewriter, which was essential for school, were taken. When I called Irwin to see if I could get an advance on my allowance, he refused. My grandfather thought I should get a job, he told me.

The next time I visited my grandmother at the House, I explained the situation to her, and she offered to write me a check. “It’s okay, Gam. I only have to wait a couple of weeks.”

“Mary,” she said, “never reject a gift of money.” She wrote me the check, and I was able to buy a typewriter later that week.

I soon got an angry call from Irwin. “Did you ask your grandmother for money?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I told her I got robbed, and she helped me out.”

While going through the canceled checks of all of his personal and business accounts, as well as my grandmother’s, as he did at the end of every month, my grandfather had discovered the check my grandmother had written to me, and he was furious.

“You need to be careful,” Irwin warned me. “Your grandfather often speaks of disowning you.”

I got another call from Irwin a few weeks later. My grandfather was angry with me again, this time because he didn’t like the signature with which I endorsed my checks.

“Irwin, you’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not. He hates the fact that it’s illegible.”

“It’s a signature.”

He paused and softened his tone. “Change it. Mary, you’ve got to play the game. Your grandfather thinks you’re being selfish, and there may be nothing left by the time you turn thirty.” But I never understood what he meant by “the game”—it was my family, not a bureaucracy.

“I don’t see what I’m doing wrong. I’m getting a master’s degree at an Ivy League university.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“Does Donald know about this?”

“Yes.”

“He’s my trustee. What does he have to say?”

“Donald?” Irwin laughed dismissively. “Nothing.”

My grandfather hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but he’d been struggling with dementia for a while by then, so I didn’t take the threats too seriously. I did, however, change my signature.

Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect. Although I had all of the material things I needed—and luxuries such as private schools and summer camp—there was a purposely built-in idea of uncertainty that any of it would last. By the same token, there was the sometimes dispiriting and sometimes devastating sense that nothing any of us did really mattered or, worse, that we didn’t matter—only Donald did.

Trump Management, which Donald often referred to as a “two-bit operation,” was doing fairly well. Fred paid himself more than $109 million between 1988 and 1993 and had tens of millions more in the bank. The Trump Organization, the company Donald ostensibly ran, was, however, in increasingly serious trouble.

Reduced to a monthly allowance—that a family of four could have lived on comfortably for ten years but still an allowance—and shut out by the banks, which finally refused to lend him more money, Donald fully believed that whatever was happening to him was the result of the economy, the poor treatment he received from the banks, and bad luck.

Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook. Even with the untold millions of dollars Fred spent, he couldn’t prevent Donald’s failures, but he could certainly find a scapegoat, just as he had always done when his missteps and poor judgment caught up with him, as when he blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Donald knew that taking responsibility for your failures, which obviously meant acknowledging failure, was not something Fred admired; he’d seen where it had gotten Freddy.

It’s very possible that back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fred didn’t know just how deep Donald’s ineptitude ran. Acknowledging weakness of any kind in the son on whom he had staked the future of his empire and for whom he had sacrificed Freddy would have been nearly impossible. It was much easier to convince himself that Donald’s talents were wasted in the backwater of Brooklyn; he simply needed a bigger pond in which to make a splash.

As the Commodore Hotel slowly transformed into the Grand Hyatt, Fred was so blinded by the success with which Donald manipulated and debased every part of the process in order to get his way that he seemed to forget how vital his own connections, knowledge, and skills were; neither the Hyatt nor Trump Tower would have seen the light of day without them. Even Fred’s head must have been turned by all of the attention Donald generated for two projects that, if developed by anybody else, would have been considered fairly commonplace occurrences in Manhattan.

Fred had known all along what games Donald was playing, because he’d taught Donald how to play them. Working the refs, lying, cheating—as far as Fred was concerned, those were all legitimate business tactics. The most effective game for both father and son was the shell game. While Fred kept churning out projects and solidifying his status as a “postwar master builder,” he was fattening his wallet with taxpayer money by skimming off the top and allegedly committing so much tax fraud that four of his children would continue to benefit from it for decades. While the rubes focused on the salacious details Donald kept generating for the tabloids, he was building a reputation for success based on bad loans, bad investments, and worse judgment. The difference between the two, however, is that despite his dishonesty and lack of integrity, Fred actually ran a solid, income-generating business, while Donald had only his ability to spin and his father’s money to prop up an illusion.

Once Donald moved into Atlantic City, there was no longer any denying that he wasn’t just ill-suited to the day-to-day grind of running a few dozen middle-class rental properties in the outer boroughs, he was ill-suited to running any kind of business at all—even one that ostensibly played to his strengths of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement and his taste for glitz.

When Fred bragged about Donald’s brilliance and claimed that his son’s success had far outpaced his own, he must have known that not a word of it was true; he was too smart and too good at arithmetic to think otherwise: the numbers simply didn’t add up. But the fact that Fred continued to prop Donald up despite the wisdom of continuing to do so suggests that something else was going on.

Because Fred did deny the reality on the ground in Atlantic City. He had already shown himself impervious to facts that didn’t fit his narrative, so he blamed the banks and the economy and the casino industry just as vociferously as his son did. Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.

There was still plenty of publicity to turn Fred’s head, and thanks to the banks that father and son maligned, the extraordinary financial reversal didn’t put a dent in Donald’s lifestyle. Finally, there was the slow-rolling toll that his as-yet-undiagnosed Alzheimer’s was beginning to take on his executive functioning. Already susceptible to believing the best of his worst son, it became easier over time for him to confuse the hype about Donald with reality.

As usual, the lesson Donald learned was the one that supported his preexisting assumption: no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be okay. Knowing ahead of time that you’re going to be bailed out if you fail renders the narrative leading up to that moment meaningless. Claim that a failure is a tremendous victory, and the shameless grandiosity will retroactively make it so. That guaranteed that Donald would never change, even if he were capable of changing, because he simply didn’t need to. It also guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.

As the bankruptcies and embarrassments mounted, Donald was confronted for the first time with the limits of his ability to talk or threaten his way out of a problem. Always adept at finding an escape hatch, he seems to have come up with a plan to betray his father and steal vast sums of money from his siblings. He secretly approached two of my grandfather’s longest-serving employees, Irwin Durben, his lawyer, and Jack Mitnick, his accountant, and enlisted them to draft a codicil to my grandfather’s will that would put Donald in complete control of Fred’s estate, including the empire and all its holdings, after he died. Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert would effectively be at Donald’s financial mercy, dependent on his approval for the smallest transaction.

As Gam later told Maryanne, when Irwin and Jack went to the House to have Fred sign the codicil, they presented the document as if it had been Fred’s idea all along. My grandfather, who was having one of his more lucid days, sensed that something was not right, although he couldn’t say exactly what. He angrily refused to sign. After Irwin and Jack left, Fred conveyed his concerns to his wife. My grandmother immediately called her oldest child to explain what had happened as best she could. In short, she said, “it simply didn’t pass the smell test.”

Maryanne, with her background as a prosecutor, had limited knowledge of trusts and estates. She asked her husband, John Barry, a well-known and respected attorney in New Jersey, to recommend someone who could help, and he asked one of his colleagues to look into the situation. It didn’t take long for Donald’s scheme to be uncovered. As a result, my grandfather’s entire will was rewritten, replacing one he had written in 1984, and Maryanne, Donald, and Robert were all named as executors. In addition, a new standard was put into place: whatever Fred gave Donald, he would have to give an equal amount to each of the other three children.

Maryanne would say years later, “We would have been penniless. Elizabeth would have been begging on a street corner. We would have had to beg Donald if we wanted a cup of coffee.” It was “sheer luck” that they had stopped the scheme. Yet the siblings still got together every holiday as though nothing had happened.

Donald’s attempt to wrest control of Fred’s estate away from him was the logical outcome of Fred’s leading his son to believe that he was the only person who mattered. Donald had been given more of everything; he had been invested in; elevated to the detriment of Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert (and even his mother) and at the expense of Freddy. In Donald’s mind, the success and reputation of the entire family rested on his shoulders. Given that, it makes sense in the end that he would feel he deserved not just more than his fair share but everything.

I was standing at the window of my studio apartment looking at the rush-hour traffic clogging the 59th Street Bridge when Donald called me from his plane, not a usual occurrence.

“The dean of students at Tufts sent me a letter you wrote.”

“Really? Why?”

It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. One of my professors had been up for tenure, and before I graduated, I had written a letter in support of him. That had been four years earlier, and I’d forgotten all about it.

“The letter was to show me how great you thought Tufts was. It was a fund-raising thing.”

“I’m sorry. That was rude of him.”

“No, it’s a fantastic letter.”

The point of the conversation was eluding me. Then Donald said, apropos of nothing as far as I could tell, “Do you want to write my next book? The publisher wants me to get started, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for you. It’ll be fun.”

“That sounds incredible,” I said. And it did. I heard the plane engine rev in the background and remembered where he was. “Where are you going, anyway?”

“Heading back from Vegas. Call Rhona tomorrow.” Rhona Graff was his executive assistant at the Trump Organization.

“I will. Thanks, Donald.”