The Daily Beast Podcast - How Trump Learned to Lie and Twist Truth: Author

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Jonathan Mahler, author of 'The Gods of New York', joins Joanna Coles to explore Donald Trump’s tabloid-fueled rise in the 1980s. From his feud with the Koch brothers over Wollman Rink to the Marla Maples scandal in Aspen and his explosive Central Park Five ad, Mahler reveals how Trump mastered gossip and scandal to build a myth that would carry him into politics. They trace how Trump’s obsession with media attention turned Page Six into his personal stage. And they uncover how the tabloid era’s culture wars laid the foundation for Trump’s future in the White House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump recognized that he could use the tabloids to kind of elevate himself and to demonize his enemies and to polarize the city's kind of cultural and political life. I'm Joanna Coles and this is the Daily Beast podcast. Thank you for all your comments on our new spin-off podcast inside Trump's head. If you haven't subscribed for it yet, please do. It's where Michael Wolf and I go deep, deep into the strange crevices and the potholes. of Trump's head to explore what an earth he's going to do next. And today we have a special treat for you because we're going to be examining the primordial ooze from which Donald Trump emerged in the 1980s with the author Jonathan Marla, who's come up with this new book, The Gods of New York. Now, it's a little bit much to say that Donald Trump is a god, but don't let us forget

that gods can be vengeful, they can be vindictive, they can be peculiar. but they are powerful. So we're going to get into it with no time to waste. And don't forget, share this podcast with your friends. Leave us a comment on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast, where we cover this particular god of New York with extreme attention to detail. So Jonathan Muller is in the studio.

Congratulations on the gods of New York. Super exciting. And of course, one of those gods was Donald Trump. Please explain from whence he came. Yeah. There's sort of, I think, a kind of a conventional misunderstanding of where Trump came from. I think people think of The Apprentice as being the beginning of Donald Trump, the kind of origin story of Donald Trump.

The Apprentice, the Mark Burnett season. Exactly. Seasons, 12 seasons, whatever. Yes, any season. That he was kind of a product of reality TV. I would say no. He was a product of 1980s, New York. and in particular the tabloid culture of 1980s New York.

That is where Donald Trump learned to capture and hold the public attention. That is where he learned that publicity was power, that by capturing the public's attention, he could wield power. And that's where he learned that kind of the more outrageous he could be in the things he kind of said and did, the more confrontational, the sort of more effective it would be in terms of building his profile. Okay, so give us some specific example. And also, I think a lot of people don't understand who haven't worked in the media that so many people call in with stories about themselves.

I mean, in Britain, we lived through this with the royal family. Princess Diana in particular was constantly calling or her friends were calling with stories. Tell us about how Donald Trump managed his tabloid personality and his rise to fame. There was page six at the time. sort of a New York Post creation, was a new gossip column. Historically, gossip columns had always been written, you know, at least in the American tab, was by one person. You know, it was Walter Winchell's column. It was Liz Smith's column.

But page six was a different kind of thing. Page six was a team of young reporters who would literally stay out all night, going to every party they could, working every source they had, and basically just deliver this kind of juicy, gossipy, you know, kind of full-length column. that was almost like a novel of the life of the city, or at least a certain strata of the life of the city. And sort of part of what it did was anoint a new class of celebrities. So, you know, it wasn't just movie stars any longer.

Right. You know, movie stars and athletes. It was bankers, rich bankers. And it was, well, real estate developers. And Donald Trump, you know, a rising real estate developer at the time, recognized that page six was this kind of rising force in the kind of social and political culture of New York. And he took full advantage of it, kind of working, working sources there, calling in stories constantly, anonymously, of course.

It was always, yes, it was never. And I'm sure frantically denying the stories, too, when they came out. Yes, exactly, exactly. So, so he was, he was doing that. And the other thing he was doing was that he recognized that, you know, the tabloid, the kind of, the tabloid approach to the world is almost like a comic book, right? It's a world of the tabloid turns everything. into heroes and villains.

And Donald Trump recognized that this was, that he could use the tabloids to kind of elevate himself and to demonize his enemies and to, you know, kind of polarize the city, polarized, you know, polarize the city's kind of cultural and political life. So a great example of this is when the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, Trump has a kind of an ongoing feud with Koch because Koch won't give him a massive tax break and zoning waiver to build Trump Tower. Trump is outraged by this. I mean, he's applying for this zoning waiver literally under a city law that is supposed to enable

developers to rehabilitate housing in poor neighborhoods. Right. And so he applies that, of course, to Trump Tower, which is not. Fifth Avenue, prime real estate, which literally could not, yes, exactly. Literally could not be a more expensive piece of property. And Koch refuses to give him the break. So Trump takes him to court and vows revenge. So the way he kind of gets his revenge is the city is sort of struggling to rebuild

Woolman Rink in Central Park, this old kind of ice skating rink in Central Park. Something has gone wrong and it's kind of sitting unfinished. Trump kind of publicly humiliates and bullies Koch into giving, turning the job over to him. He does this through the tabloids. So he basically issues a challenge to Koch through the tabloids, bullies him into, gets the tabloids on his side so that they're literally writing editorials saying that Koch needs to do this. He needs to give control of Woolman Rink to Trump.

Then when Koch ultimately has to do it because he's backed into a corner, Trump literally like once a week has a press conference at Woman Rink to, you know, report on the progress and to further humiliate Ed Koch and the city. So clever. I mean, it's such a clever thing to do. And of course, you see it was a blueprint for what he's done to the rest of the world. Exactly. Yeah.

So really, I think the way to think about it is that, you know, what Trump does so well as a politician is build a storyline, right? So you can see it, you know, we're seeing it now with in Washington, D.C., which is just a, it's a, it's a, it's a narrative, right? It's a, it's a, and that, again, I think people imagine that as being a product of reality TV. Oh, well, he learned that on The Apprentice. Well, actually, no, this is where that idea first kind of takes root in Donald Trump's mind, this idea that you can, you can plant a seed like that, like, like this woman ring thing. And then you can just kind of run with it. And you can run out the string literally for months on end. I mean, he was just using the media to just kind of hammer away at Koch for months.

And it ultimately had a really damaging effect on conscious political career. But you see the kind of, at the time it was not, obviously, Trump wasn't thinking about this as a political maneuver. He was thinking about it as a kind of, you know, both financial maneuver and really a power grab. It was a way to use power. And now we see him do it. I mean, that's basically how his presidency operates. And the Warman Rink went on to be one of those iconic visuals. You think of it in home alone.

You think of it in movies. Of course, Trump was in home alone. But the popular culture around New York, it's such a powerful export. And the vision of Christmas, of people skating on the Woolman Rink, becomes something that people feel very affectionate towards. So it's good for Trump. Right, exactly. It's a good choice.

For his image, it's a good choice. So would he, I mean, I get the point that he would have press conferences. And again, you can't stop him giving a press conference, right? I mean, you think he gave more press conference. is in this second go round of his presidency, I think in the first week than Joe Biden did in the entirety of his presidency for obvious reasons. That's for another podcast. But I've always been told, and certainly I've experienced this, that I haven't experienced it

with Donald Trump, but I've experienced with other people where they call him with stories about themselves. And he famously did that to the New York Post, right? Oh, yeah. He would pretend to be. He was John Barron, was the, he had a fake spokesperson who he knew. named John Barron. And John Barron would call in stories. And then John Barron would take calls. So, for instance, when he was preparing to promote the art of the deal in 1988 and beginning

to promote it, you know, Roger Stone had, he and Roger Stone really had this idea that they could, that by suggesting that Trump might want to run for president, they could, you know, start to build interest in the art of the deal and start to build his image. So it was never Trump's intention to run for president at the time, but it was a way to generate publicity for the book and to, you know, to elevate Trump's profile. So, you know, so they would plant these rumors and then John Barron would, you know, would issue these kind of cute non-denial denials that, well, you know, he's, you know, he's not running for governor. I can tell you, he's definitely not running for mayor or for governor. The presidency, well, you know, we're not going to comment on that.

So, you know, it was all, like, quite literally done through a fictitious spokesperson. And it was an automatic headline. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Trump, not running for governor, won't rule out running for president. So did the art of the deal sort of get him to the next level? I mean, it's, your book is from 1986 to 1990s, very specific in its time period. The art of the deal came out bang in the middle of that.

Yeah, yeah. So the way I look at the art of the deal is Trump, it came out in 1988, and by then, Trump was a big tabloid celebrity in New York. He was a huge figure in New York. He had not transcended that celebrity. He had not become a national figure. And it was really the art of the deal that both took Trump national and cemented the mythology around him in the kind of public consciousness. That is the kind of the origin myth.

And myth is the right word because the book was largely fictitious. It was also not written by Donald Trump. He probably hasn't even read it. No. No, in fact, when it was delivered to him by the agent for his ghost writer, I mean, he, you know, he read through it and lightly marked it up with a red pen. I mean, that was. That's literally how he wrote his book. That is literally how he wrote.

Okay. The ghost writer did the whole thing. The ghost writer wrote it and delivered it to Trump and he lightly edited it. I mean, you know, that was it. And that is where that's where the kind of the myth of Donald Trump as the kind of dealmaker extraordinaire is born. So one of the things that ghostwriter does in Tony Schwartz and, you know, I interviewed him, you know, that length for the book is, you know, he basically took stories of took Donald Trump's failures and turned them into successes. I mean, that was, you know, he saw that as part of his job as as Donald Trump's ghostwriter. And so, so that book, which everyone read as being factually act.

accurate, as a memoir, as a true memoir, as a true story, was where the myth of Donald Trump as dealmaker is really born. So what is going on with his marriages at this time? Because you think Ivana Trump was also very much a tabloid cartoon. And along comes Marla Maples. So what is Trump's reputation at this time? Actually, I know that Jeffrey Epstein isn't in the book, but he's actually. actually beginning to tool around with Jeffrey Epstein at this point. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think

what happens is that, you know, Marla Maples just, you know, arrives in New York. This is, you know, this is also in 1988 right around the time of The Art of the Deal. And, you know, she's a, she's a young kind of aspiring model, you know, from, from Georgia. And she, you know, kind of really sets her sights on Donald Trump. And she has an agent, a talent manager who's kind of helping her, who has a kind of an indirect connection to Donald Trump. And she gets herself, and this is the story I tell in the book, I think it was the first time the story has ever been told. She gets, through her talent manager, gets an invitation to the reopening of the Rainbow Room. So the Rainbow Room, you know, for those who don't know it is, is, you know, one of the most kind of glamorous restaurants and bars in New York.

It's at the top of Rockefeller Center with these sweeping views of Manhattan. It's, you know, got these beautiful chandeliers. It was, you know, built in the 1920s. It had fallen into disrepair in the, in the 70s and the early 80s. It was kind of totally gut renovated, closed for years. It was reopening in 1988. Donald Trump and Ivana were, of course, going to be there. because he was a big-time New York celebrity, and it was filled, the opening was filled with New York celebrities.

But Marla Maples, this young, unknown aspiring model slash actress gets herself invited to this event. She sidles up to Donald Trump in the buffet line, and she slips her phone number in his pocket. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So that is the beginning of what will become. That seems a very Trumpy move. She's almost out-trumpting. It is. It's true. Yeah, yeah. And then what happens is over the course of the next, you know, almost two years, he has this ongoing affair with her, but he is, you know, working hard to keep it out of the media, even though, you know, a gossip reporter at the New York Post learns about it. And he, you know, he sort of agrees to not name, he puts Marlon Maples on page six, but he does not mention Donald. Trump by name. And Trump then begins kind of moving her around. He moves her around hotels,

friends' apartments. Then he moves her out to Atlantic City, and she's out in Atlantic City for a while. And more and more people are learning about this. Right. And then it eventually explodes when in Christmas of 1989, the Trumps are vacationing in Aspen as they do. And Trump puts up Marla Maples in Aspen as well in her own kind of penhouse apartment. And she confronts Ivana on the ski mountain. And it becomes this just spectacular kind of tabloid story. It just blows up in the tabloids for months. Is this where Marla Maples is quoted as saying that she has had the best.

That sex I ever had. Exactly. Thank you. Yes. Let's take a quick break for some messages. We're back talking about where Trump came from. I must go back and look at those stories. I mean, it's almost quaint as well to think that a newspaper could be captured by one story like that when you just think of the Niagara of content on social media now. Totally, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that I was just always struck

by when I was working on this book is just that how, I mean, it's almost a cliche to talk about how kind of fragmented our media has become. But it is amazing how powerful it was to have just, you know, a few tabloids that had the whole city's attention and that could just drive a single story, a drive a subject of conversation for an entire city and in many ways for an entire country. I mean, it wasn't like the Trump, you know, Trump by then was a national figure. This was an amazing, like, kind of scandalous affair. It was, you know, it was going to be a multi, multi, multi, multi million dollar divorce that was going to be, you know. So all of that was, you know, there was a famous Barbara Walter's interview that Marla Maples gave. I mean, it was all a national story, too.

And, you know, I think that, you know, we just, we no longer have that sort of media culture that keeps us all kind of focused on the same story. Although arguably Donald Trump is the one person that is able to keep focus on himself. I mean, more so than any other celebrity. So tell us also about the Central Park Five story, because that also. So it's recounted in your book. Yeah. So that's, I think, really Donald Trump's first, that's the moment that he kind of enters

the culture war. That's the moment that he becomes like an actual kind of political person. Until then, and just to briefly recap, what happens is a young woman is raped and beaten unconscious and nearly murdered in Central Park in the late spring of 1989. some suspects are very quickly rounded up. Five black, you know, or, like black and Hispanic kids from, from Harlem are rounded up, are immediately charged and are, you know, basically, you know, publicly convicted, you know, literally in a matter of, I mean, days, I mean, even hours. And so the city is, you know, at least part of the city is, like, really kind of calling for blood. And even as, Some people, particularly like a group of black leaders, are saying, like, hold on a second here. What's the evidence? Can we at least have a trial first?

You know, even David Dinkins, who was running for mayor at the time and was trying to prove that he was going to be tough on crime. But at the same time was like, wait, well, let's, you know, innocent until proven guilty here. But nevertheless, there's a real kind of sense of bloodlust in the city. Trump sees that. takes out a full-page ad in all of the daily papers, calling for these five kids to be executed. And it's both a kind of, you know, Trump playing into this desire for vengeance. And it's also a way for him to kind of criticize Koch, his old nemesis and his management of the city. But it's this kind of shocking.

People were sort of surprised, well, what is Donald Trump doing? kind of weighing in on like this, this, like on a kind of legal case like this, he's a, he's a businessman. Right. So it's the first kind of moment. And a couple of the tabloid columnists, Jimmy Breslin, for one, was, you know, was kind of appalled, couldn't believe that Trump was doing this. And but it, but it's sort of his first, the first moment that he kind of wades into, into the

culture war, wades into politics in a kind of meaningful and polarizing, very important. obviously, polarizing way. It's also, I mean, again, it's hard to remember quite how dramatic that crime was. I was living in London at the time, and I remember hearing about it, a woman who'd gone jogging in Central Park, which was supposed to be the most sacred of places. Exactly. And it was this astonishingly violent crime, too. So how did it all play out?

I mean, we know they weren't guilty, for which he's shown no remorse whatsoever. for accusing them falsely. Yeah. Yeah. No, they would all be... So there was no physical evidence. I mean, it's amazing. They were convicted without any physical evidence.

And they were later, I mean, many years later, exonerated. The city went back and reinvested the case. Reinvested the case. And look, another kind of culprit was, like the actual culprit, was found. I mean, it wasn't even like, well, it wasn't them. but the crime is still unsolved. It was, you know, it's very clearly another person who had committed some rapes before, even before the Central Park jogger. Right. But you're right. It was a, it was a, you know, it was a huge national story.

And it's also part, you know, another reason why it had such resonance is that there was another crime just a couple of years earlier, also in Central Park, known, another huge tabloid story known as the Preppy murder. Yeah, I remember that story, too. Yeah. What's going on in New York? Why is it so crazy violent? Exactly. Another young woman who was, you know, this woman was actually, Jennifer Levin, was actually killed in Central Park, you know, by, as it turned out, by a guy who was, you know, she was,

you know, she was, you know, sort of her boyfriend. And so, you know, this, and it was the same prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who was the, from the district attorney's office who did both cases. So, so, you know, I think, you know, it. Part of the reason why the Central Park Jogger case had such kind of resonance was that there had been the preppy murder also in the park just a couple years earlier. So there was this sense that the city was kind of building towards something even more tragic. Right, right.

It's fascinating. And where was Rudy Giuliani in all this? Because obviously he emerges a few years later as New York's mayor. Yeah. But what's he doing at this point? As Donald Trump is laying the seeds for what becomes his. extraordinary political dominance. What is Rudy doing? Yeah. So Rudy is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. So basically,

he is the chief prosecutor, the chief federal prosecutor in New York. And he is, he is, it's really where Rudy, I mean, where we see Rudy kind of build his reputation for the first time. And he's a, you know, he sort of presents himself as this kind of morally righteous, you know, The prosecutor who could have been a priest, he had thought about going into the priesthood, he liked to say. Yeah. And then he, you know, he goes after the mob. He goes after a lot of kind of bold-faced names in New York, Leona Helmsley, Amelda Marcos. He goes after Koch and sort of city corruption.

And he's, you know, the office of the U.S. attorney in the Southern District, which is kind of a legendary position, has produced a lot of, you know, Supreme Court justice. justices, governors, et cetera. But it's always, there's an approach to the job, which is, you know, it's, you try to be understated. You don't, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, was sort of doing everything he could to bring as much attention to himself as possible. Interestingly, this is kind of a crazy thing to think about now. So Rudy then decides to run for mayor.

So he runs first in 1989 and loses, then he obviously goes on to become mayor four years later. But in 1989, he decides he's going to run for mayor. And Donald Trump wants to support him. Trump wants to, you know, as I've said, he has this ongoing feud with Koch. He wants to see Koch lose. So he gets behind Rudy. and then the Central Park 5 case happens, and Trump takes out that ad, and suddenly he becomes this, you know, very polarizing figure. Rudy is having a big fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel, and he's already put Donald Trump on the kind of fundraising committee.

It's too late for him to kick him off, but he's concerned that I don't want to be seen with Donald Trump. He's now this polarizing guy in the city. He called for the execution of these five black kids. You know, and so, so his, Rudy's press people kind of get together before the fundraiser and they say, well, we can't, you know, look, we can't kick Trump out, but we got to make sure that Rudy's doesn't get his picture taken with Donald Trump. Oh, how hilarious. Wow. Tiny little vignettes, which just drip, drip, drip up to where we are now. It's just fascinating to hear the roots of what we're seeing now writ large. I read that you decided to write the book because you covered the Trump campaign in 2016

and decided to go back and try and understand where he came from. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So I was assigned to the campaign in 2016 at the Times where I work. But I was not writing – I wasn't covering candidates. I was just sort of writing longer stories about kind of digging back into some of the candidates past. And because I had written a book about New York in the 1970s called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, I was kind of, I was sort of a journalist and a New York historian, I guess you could say.

And so I was kind of gravitated toward Trump in the 80s, and I wrote a piece about his, you know, relationship with Roy Cohn. I wrote a piece about the Justice Department's lawsuit against him and his father for refusing to rent apartments to black people. And I just kind of got interested in, I didn't want to write a book about Trump, but I got interested in that whole period of time, which, you know, was his crucible, but it also was just a crazy time in the life of New York City. And a kind of transformative time. It's when the city really kind of shifted. It's, you know, it's, access from the kind of working class to Wall Street and to sort of finance and real estate. And so really when it became the modern city, that kind of happened in the 1980s.

So I kind of discovered that it was like a really interesting lens to see the city's kind of evolution through. And it's a bit like a nonfiction version of, I was thinking of that there's been so much, or there been so many good novels written about that time. I mean, Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McAnonnie, Tom Wolves, the bonfire of the vanities. This feels a little bit like a nonfiction vanity. Yes, that is. Bonfire of the vanities. Exactly.

That is like how I often will characterize it as the nonfiction bonfire of the vanities. Which is irresistible. I couldn't put that book down. When Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I was actually on safari in Africa. I was being driven around and there were all these incredible animals, and all I did was have my nose, my nose in that book. also the movie Wall Street, too, which was, again, the books that were huge, well, books and movies, culture, are hugely important for setting a new version of New York in the global imagination. Exactly. And that's, that's, I mean, Wall Street, yes, another very good example. And of course, the sort of the famous kind of greed is good, Gordon Gecko, you know, borrowed from Ivan Boski. it's yeah that is that is the kind of the birth of of like the modern wall street of the

you know and this and that is where that's that's you know and trump in many ways really sort of still embodies that he is the personification of 1980s excess and and wealth which is so crazy because he's also paradoxically somehow fashioned himself into the voice of those who were left out and the disaffected and it's sort of like what a crazy political magic trick that you can be both the great symbol of 1980s, 1980s. I mean, he still looks like that, like the oversized suit, the long tie. He's walked straight out of a movie about the 1980s. Let's take a quick break for some messages.

We're back talking about where Trump came from. Let's shoot forward 30 years, 40 years. We're now on the precipice of another marriage. campaign this November in New York. And to, I think, a lot of people surprised, Zoran Mamdani has leapt to the front of the pack, elbowing what people assumed would be the natural choice for the Democratic Party, Andrew Cuomo, former governor, out of the way. How do you explain that? Because in the book, and when you've been talking about the book, you've said that he's now the natural extension of all this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you can just connect the dots pretty

directly between 1980s New York and and Mom Dani's campaign. His entire campaign is built around the affordability crisis in New York. That is what he is about, that the city has become unaffordable to too many people. And the roots of that unaffordability crisis are in 1980s, New York. What happened here in New York in 1980, in the 1980s was that the old working class city that was this kind of booming middle-class metropolis after World War II. Automation had kind of hollowed out the economy. All the factories had closed down or moved out of the city. There was nothing here in the 1970s. There was no economy in New York. Then all of a sudden, in the 1980s, this whole new economy springs

to life. And it is an economy that is not built around the working class, is not built around good, steady jobs for kind of middle-class New Yorkers. It is built around Wall Street and finance and real estate and all of the kind of adjacent, you know, what are known as kind of knowledge industries. And then what happens over the subsequent years is that much of that class gets kind of richer and richer while, you know, the part of the city that was kind of left out from the beginning. So either the kind of the non-college educated New Yorkers or increasingly the college-educated New Yorkers who just don't happen to work in finance or in real estate. are finding themselves unable to afford the city. And that just gets kind of worse and worse. And I think a good, you know, an important moment along the way is, of course, when Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire, refers to the city in 2003, in 2003 product.

New York has become a luxury product. And that's what Mamdani is responding to. The fact that New York has become a luxury product that has become unaffordable to too many people. So to me, his rise was both surprising because he did. did, as you say, come completely out of nowhere. But once it began, you could see exactly why. I mean, it makes perfect sense, right? That, you know, this is a backlash against the direction that the city has been evolving in for decades now. And his command of social media is very similar to Donald Trump and then Rudy Giuliani's command of the tabloid press. That's where he's come from.

Exactly. So there's that similarity, which is. really important to highlight. And then the other similarity that's important to highlight is that, you know, in the same way that Trump and, you know, Bernie Sanders, for that matter, spoke to a kind of somehow, spoke to a kind of a disaffected, you know, voiceless population. That is what Mom Dani's doing as well. I mean, obviously he's delivering a very different message. But it's this, but, but in a sense, it's also, you know, a sort of a, the system is rigged against you message. And politics as celebrity. I mean, to me, he seems like a political creator. I'm dying to interview him. We've asked him, and hopefully we'll interview him next month. But what he's been so skilled at doing,

like Donald Trump, is communicating his message. Totally. And then... Not he can deliver as different, but he's a brilliant communicator. Exactly. And it's amazing to watch all the kind of money flowing into the Adams campaign and the Cuomo campaign. And it's, it's like the Trump situation, right? Where it's just with, with Kamala, where it's, you know, there's all the money flooding into the Democratic Party. And it's like, it kind of doesn't matter. Right, because they're trying to maintain the status quo. Yeah, yeah.

And Momdani has, like, he's kind of won the city over or enough of the city already. So you feel like people are just kind of setting their money on fire at this point. But, yeah. So if you're a gambling man, shoot forward to November, who do you think wins the race? Oh, I think Bondani does for sure. I mean, I just think he's, I mean, I may live to regret making that. prediction. But I just feel like, you know, barring some kind of unimaginable scandal, it just seems like he's got enough support already. And I just, every attempt to kind of take

him down seems to just backfire. So, yeah. If you were to predict what happens to Donald Trump at this point, knowing what you know, and having watched his ups and downs over the years, where do you think this goes for Donald Trump? Oh my gosh, that is so hard because it's, you know, I think I think everyone felt. I mean, I certainly felt that it was kind of over in 2020 for him. And obviously, I couldn't have been more wrong. New Yorkers are resilient, right? That's one of the characteristics of being a New Yorker.

Yes. And yet another skill, I would say, that he learned. in 1980s, New York that he has put to great effect, is that he is, I mean, shameless is the word for it. He is not, and he has used that shamelessness as a kind of armor. So he is, I think one way to think about it is like, if you act bulletproof, you are bulletproof in a way, right? So I feel like he just, you know, he, this, like, he just keeps going. So even, you know, even when he was engulfed. Also a New Yorker.

Exactly. Just keep going. Yes. Just keep going. Exactly. Just survive. You know, just keep going. So, yeah.

So it's, you know, obviously you can't, certainly can't bet against them. You certainly can't bet against him. Jonathan, thank you very much. And I hope you come back and talk to us again about sort of your observations of New Yorkers and this strange crucible that bore forth these very strange people. who just remain huge figures in our lives. Remain huge figures. And also added to the mystique and the allure and the glamour and the glamour and the violence and the kind of energy of New York.

I mean, it's still when people come here, they still think of it as the most energetic place. And of course, there are more energetic places. You know, you think of Beijing, you know, Seoul. There are all sorts of cities that rival New York. And yet New York has also just commanded that cultural imagination in a way that it's, very hard to think of any other city that has done. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's, that's right. The sort of the myth of New York, the allure of New York, it's, you know, the city that never sleeps, the city where you go to make it, as Tom Wolfe once wrote, you know, it's, it's

just indoors. Well, and as Frank Sinatra sang. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much. I love that discussion. It's very hard to think of a character other than Donald Trump, who has managed to stand astride the entire media environment, the changing media environment for the last 50 years. I can't think that Trump has a parallel. He's done it through the tabloids, through television, and now through digital, through X, and of course his own truth social,

although, as Michael Wolf is always saying, it's a social media platform of one. But what a fascinating book. And then a prediction, there you have it. If you're living in New York, Jonathan thinks that Soran Mamdani is going to, win his streets ahead of anybody else. Don't forget to subscribe to the Daily Beast for up to the minute information on what the hell is going on out there. Don't forget to subscribe to Inside

Trump's Head as well as this podcast and please share it with your friends. And we're independent media. We really are. So we appreciate your support and we love your comments. And we will see you on Tuesday with Inside Trump's Head. And don't forget, as our first lady would have us, Be Beast. And please join me in thanking our producers, Devin Rodgerino, and Anna von Erson, and our editor, Jesse Milwood. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

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