After publishing "The Art of the Deal" in 1987, he got greedy...
1988: The Year Donald Lost His Mind
At the early peak of his success, he pulled the trigger on a manic series of deals that nearly brought him down.
By Michael Kruse
March 11, 2016
This was the beginning of a stretch of time that can be seen as peak Trump—at least until this unprecedented and Trump-centric presidential campaign. He had shrugged off his critics and risen to the top of a new field. He had never been hotter, or more famous, than he was at 41 years old, at the start of 1988.
But his response to his surging celebrity was a series of manic, ill-advised ventures. He cheated on his wife, the mother of his first three children. In business, he was acquisitive to the point of recklessness. He bought and sold chunks of stocks of companies he talked about taking over. He glitzed up his gaudy yacht, the yacht the banks would seize less than three years later. He used hundreds of millions of dollars of borrowed money to pay high prices for a hotel and an airline—and his lenders would take them, too. And he tussled for months with game-show magnate Merv Griffin for ownership of his third casino in Atlantic City, the most expensive, gargantuan one yet, the Trump Taj Mahal, which led quickly to the first of his four corporate bankruptcy filings.
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