Katherine Clarke and Will Parker are reporters for The Real Deal, a New York real estate magazine.

When you’re looking for advice on how to manage the world’s largest economy, why not get it from a fellow reality TV star?

That’s what Donald Trump has done. Some voters might know Howard Lorber, who’s a member of Trump’s economic advisory team, for his occasional appearances on “Million Dollar Listing New York,” the Bravo reality show that charts the careers and personal flailings of three top real estate brokers in New York. On the show, he appears as boss and mentor of two of the agents.


In actual reality, Lorber is a fellow New York real estate magnate who’s known Trump for 30 years and, like him, enjoys the highest of the high life. He lives at the tony Sherry Netherland building at the foot of Central Park and recently forked out more than $15 million for an additional apartment at 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan, the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere. He also owns homes in Southampton and on Fisher Island in Florida.

As of last Friday, Lorber is also a key figure in Trump’s campaign, one of the13 members of his new economic advisory team. When the group was announced, it immediately came under fire for a lack of diversity in gender and economic status: The team was all-male and mostly white and wealthy businessmen. In addition to real-estate titans, the appointees include several prominent hedge-fund managers and bankers. But the group also drew questions about just who these figures were. They weren’t drawn from the pool of well-known economic thinkers from previous GOP administrations whom typical candidates would tap for such a job. By many accounts, the most recognizable name on the list was John Paulson, the economist and hedge fund titan who made billions betting against U.S. subprime mortgages in the financial crisis of 2007. Paulson, a media-shy Wall Streeter, made $15 billion in 2007 alone by betting against the real estate market, a bet that led to what’s been widely been described at the greatest trade of all time. The list also includes Andy Beal, a fellow billionaire investor and another long-time Trump acquaintance who spends a lot of time playing professional poker.

“It’s typical if you’re going to build a coherent economic policy you need to have a wide group of economic advisers,” says Rob Scott of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “These people are generally economists who come out of the top 10 or 15 schools, or the leading think tanks. … He’s got a bunch of real estate guys and a poker player.”

To understand the people Trump has appointed and is getting his advice from, it’s helpful to start with the real-estate moguls who know him the best and, perhaps, have his ear the most. All of them have intersected with Trump in the real life business world—Trump at one point described Lorber as his best friend—and one is even the co-owner of several of Trump’s most-prized real estate assets.

Lorber is CEO of Vector Group, the parent of the Liggett Group, a tobacco company, and of New Valley, a real estate-focused investment firm that’s poured money into several of New York City’s most expensive condo projects and owns a majority stake in Douglas Elliman, one of the biggest real estate brokerages in the country. Like Trump, Lorber has a lot of friends in high places. He was one of a select few moneymen invited to celebrate Carl Icahn’s 80th birthday over dinner at Mastro’s Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan earlier this year. That group reportedly also included Apollo Global Management’s Leon Black and Jefferies CEO Rich Handler. Lorber took home $42.5 million in total pay in 2015, according to regulatory filings, making him the highest paid CEO in South Florida. He also heads the Nathan’s Famous hot dog chain. And like his famous advisee, he’s not shy about his wealth.

Also like Donald, Lorber likes to combine uber-ritzy living with a little slumming—especially when it comes to consuming fast food. “When I bought my Rolls-Royce, the first thing I did was go to a McDonald's drive thru," Lorber said at an industry event in March.

But in contrast to Trump—whose rich father gave him a big liftoff in real estate—Lorber says his self-made wealth doesn’t keep him from understanding the needs of the middle class. “Maybe if you’re born with it, it does,” he told The Real Deal. “If you’ve had to work for it like most of these guys, it helps you understand.”

In addition to Lorber, the real estate players include Thomas Barrack Jr. and Steven Roth. Here is a brief introduction to their world.

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Steven Roth may be one of the few people who can rival Donald Trump’s lifelong effort to build palatial structures not for the 1 percent—few of them have nearly enough money—but for the zero-point-1 percent. The vast quadruplex apartment at the tower Roth’s company is building at 220 Central Park South, a striking limestone tower under construction on Manhattan’s socalled Billionaires’ Row, is rumored to be selling for record-smashing $250 million, more than twice the previous record for a New York City home.

Roth is widely seen as one of the most powerful players on the New York City real estate circuit. His publicly traded company, Vornado Realty Trust, has a market cap of more than $20 billion. The Central Park tower is backed by upward of $950 million in loans from Bank of China. Roth is predicting it will bring in $3.1 billion in sales.

“Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South,” Trump said during his New York primary victory speech in April. “It’s a tremendous success. I said ‘Steve, congratulations on the building.’ He said: ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’”

He then pointed to Roth and said: “My man.”

By every metric, Vornado is a much larger player than the Trump Organization with one of the country's largest commercial real estate portfolios and more than 30 million square feet of commercial, retail and residential space in New York and elsewhere. Vornado pegs Roth’s compensation at $10.9 million a year, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings..

Known as one of New York real estate’s more coarse personalities, Roth shares Trump’s willingness to work the system to his advantage. Roth was sharply criticized for letting the site of an Alexander’s department store in midtown Manhattan, which eventually became Bloomberg’s HQ, sit vacant with no development for years. In 2010, Roth reportedly told a crowd at Columbia University’s architecture school that this dereliction had been completely intentional.

“Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way, that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped; the more help they would give us when the time came. … And they did.”

Roth’s comments about the New York site caught the ire of then-Mayor of Boston Tom Menino, who flipped at the suggestion that Roth would let a site stay in blighted condition with the intention of coercing the government to give him more incentives to build. At the time, Vornado held an empty lot in the Massachusetts capital, where it had demolished an existing department store building in 2008 and planned a 54-story skyscraper. Vornado let the site sit empty for five years before selling its stake in the project in 2013.

Trump, a man who once sued the Bloomberg administration in New York for half a billion dollars over allegedly unfair tax assessments and who got a settlement worth $97 million for his efforts, may be an admirer of the Rothian approach to government as well as business partners. In a boast about getting his way with banks, Trump wrote in the 1997 book Think Big: Make it Happen in Business and Life, “I actually told one bank, ‘I told you, you shouldn’t have loaned me that money. I told you that goddamn deal was no good.’”

Roth and Trump first crossed paths in the 1980s, when each bought a stake in the Alexander’s department store chain and planned the redevelopment of its flagship store on 59th Street in Manhattan, a plan that fell through definitively once Trump’s finances headed south at the onset of the 1990s and his shares in Alexander’s were turned over to CitiBank. Roth took over the project.

Vornado is also a partner of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in various New York properties such as 666 Fifth Avenue. Most notably, Vornado was instrumental in getting the once over-leveraged building back on track after Kushner came close to losing it in 2012. Kushner paid a record $1.8 billion for it in 2007.

Roth’s wife, Daryl Roth, is a Broadway producer and has won 10 Tony Awards. In 2009, the couple bought Bernie Madoff’s beach house in Montauk, New York, for $9.41 million.

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And then there is Thomas Barrack, a tanned Californian whom those who watched the GOP convention in July will remember from his occasionally jarring introduction of Trump on the final night. ("I feel like the anchovy in Ivanka's Caesar salad," Barrack said, before describing his friend Donald as having the “discipline of an animal in the jungle.”)

Barrack is CEO of the Los Angeles-based, private-equity concern Colony Capital, which has significant property holdings nationwide and has invested more than $60 billion over the past three decades, mostly concentrated in real estate, mainly troubled and delinquent loans, including assets like Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara. A real estate investment trust co-chaired by Barrack, Colony Starwood Homes, owns more than 30,000 single-family homes across the country.

At Neverland, Barrack agreed to bail out Michael Jackson from his dire financial situation—the King of Pop was about to be foreclosed on—by paying off a $23.9 million note on the property, but only if Jackson worked on a comeback tour. After Jackson died, Barrack renovated the property and put it on the market for $100 million.

Even in his personal life, Barrack doesn’t shy away from bold deal making. He listed his sprawling, neoclassical mansion in Santa Monica for $46.5 million this week, nearly twice the $24.5 million he paid just two years ago.

Barrack, a major donor to the Trump Victory election fund, got to know Trump when he sold the Plaza Hotel to him in the late 1980s. Trump eventually lost control of the iconic hotel as part of a restructuring of some $900 million of his personal debt.

In a July interview, Barrack said Hillary Clinton was “phenomenally qualified” and called her ground game “unbelievable,” but said he supports Trump because he’s seen firsthand his skills as a negotiator, businessman and friend. Still, Barrack indicated that on some policy issues pertinent to his industry, neither candidate was likely to disturb what is already a favorable situation.



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Ultimately, the question is what kind of advice are these guys giving Trump—and how good is it?

At first glance, Trump’s announcement Monday in his big economic speech in Detroit that he wants to end the “carried interest” tax loophole would be devastating to some of his friends and his team, especially hedge-fund managers like Paulson. But in truth, Trump’s additional proposal to slash so-called pass-through income for family corporations to 15 percent would give the Roths and Lorbers a huge boost.

In a July interview, Barrack pooh-poohed the idea that public policy is going to change his or his fellow real estate titans’ lives much. “The general tax policy for real estate in general is pretty good the way that it is, and either candidate is probably not going to dramatically impact that,” he said, pointing out that many of the incentives for real estate operators have more to do with local, not federal, concerns. “So, I think it really comes down to who’s going to do a better job at stimulating growth and incentives for entrepreneurs to build businesses so that there’s more demand and supply and real estate developers can build things. Otherwise, it’s a pretty boring business.”

Steven Roth declined to comment for this article, but Lorber has talked a lot about his views. He has said that Trump’s proposals to cut taxes for all Americans will benefit the housing market and the economy at large.

“We all know why we need tax decreases and these will be the biggest tax decreases since the Reagan era. We need it to get the country going again. That’s pretty obvious,” he told CNBC on Tuesday of his reasons for supporting Trump. “With lower rates, you have more spendable income. People are going to buy more houses and that spurs the economy into a much better growth pattern.”

He also indicated that he’s with Trump—the old Trump, that is, from the late ’90s—on abortion. “I don’t agree with everything” the Republicans stand for, Lorber told The Real Deal. “I believe in a woman’s right to choose, I surely have no problem with gay and lesbian marriages. Everyone should do what they’re comfortable doing.” By contrast, Trump controversially said that women should be punished for having abortions, though he later recanted.

As for the preponderance of wealthy white men and the lack of females on Trump’s committee, Lorber told CNBC: “I think he should always pick the best people. That doesn’t imply that there aren’t women that are well qualified. One of the people he goes to for advice all the time is [his daughter] Ivanka. He doesn’t have a problem asking women for advice.”

Barrack, in the July interview, said in the end he’s voting for the man, not the businessman, in Trump. “You don’t have to be the smartest, you don’t have to be the most clever, you don’t have to know a lot about policy—you have 10,000 policy wonks that you can hire. You need to be able to lead. And this is a guy who’s had a beginning, a middle and an end in everything he’s done in life, and he’s reliable,” Barrack said.

As for whether Trump will actually heed the advice of his chosen consiglieri, the jury is still out. “I’ve always found that you can tell Donald anything—say anything to him—he’s going to listen,” Lorber told CNBC. “That doesn’t always mean he will agree and do it.”