Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

Donald Trump, his campaign and the Republican Party are reeling heading into Sunday night’s must-see debate against Hillary Clinton—a totally unprecedented moment in American political history. But what is historic in politics has been birthed by something utterly predictable in the personality of Trump. In his lascivious comments during a few foul-mouthed minutes on a bus, followed by a pair of combative, largely unrepentant “apologies,” the GOP nominee has presented since late Friday afternoon a concentrated collision of the characteristics that have defined his life and career. Addiction to publicity. Penchant for lechery. And an obstinate refusal to change tone or back down—even in the face of overwhelming pressure.

Most of the public recoiled at the graphic, profane way he described what sounded like sexual assault. “Grab them by the pussy,” “I don’t even wait”—but there are two other sentences in the leaked tape that are even more revealing because of how succinctly and completely they managed to entwine the most telling strands of his identity. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump said. “You can do anything.”


“Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” he said in his apology after midnight early Saturday morning. But to people who actually have spent time with Trump, the recording was the opposite of shocking. They saw and heard in that audio and video precisely the man they have come to know.

“That’s who he is,” Artie Nusbaum, one of the bosses at the construction company that built Trump Tower, told me Saturday afternoon.

“I’m not surprised,” said Barbara Res, a former vice president at the Trump Organization who worked for Trump over the course of three decades, from his Grand Hyatt project to Trump Tower to the renovation of the Plaza hotel.

Said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien: “He’s always been this guy.”

I’ve been reporting on Trump for more than a year, reading close to everything that’s ever been written about him, or by him (or his co-writers and ghostwriters), and sifting through transcripts of his hundreds of television interviews, as well as talking to people like Nusbaum, Res, O’Brien and dozens and dozens of others. And I’ve come to see the GOP nominee more than anything else as an entitled rich kid who grew old more than he grew up, who had a submissive mother and a stern, workaholic father whose idea of showing him affection was taking him to the office or a job site. And I think Trump has tried his whole life to address the lack of love he felt as a boy by attracting as much attention as he could as a man. “I don’t do it for the money,” he wrote in 1987 in The Art of the Deal—it’s the first sentence of his first book—and I believe him. He does it for the notoriety.

At the time of this taping, in the fall of 2005, Trump was 59 years old. He was newly married to his third wife, who was newly pregnant with his fifth child. He also was in his second year of being the star of The Apprentice, the hit reality show that for him was a resurrection—that had him riding as high as he ever had, higher even than his frenzied initial surge of fame in the ostentatious 1980s. His ratings were slipping—the first season of The Apprentice drew 20.7 million viewers per episode, and the second did 16.1, and it was a trend line that continued steadily from there—but the economy was booming, and his celebrity was surging. It still wasn’t enough. And so he was on a bus from Access Hollywood, a celebrity gossip show, taking him to make a cameo on a soap opera, Days of Our Lives, while a hot mic made a record of a private conversation that would alter the course of a presidential election.

Trump is an addict. Not of substances. He’s a teetotaler. And he has said he’s never done drugs. “But his drug is himself,” one of his former campaign advisers told me this weekend. He has put himself on display his entire adult life. He was never some mysterious titan of industry pulling hidden levers of power inside secluded mansions. He has always wanted to be seen, and seen and seen and seen, as a self-made man, which he is not. What he is, though, is a self-made character. “I am the creator of my own comic book,” he once wrote, “and I love living in it.”

“He loves publicity,” said the political aide. “He loves it.”

“He craves it,” Res said.

“He needs it,” said Wayne Barrett, who wrote the first major investigative profile of Trump, in 1979 in New York’s Village Voice and has been reporting on him ever since.

“Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively,” Trump wrote of the media in The Art of the Deal. “But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks.”

For all the publicity, though, that Trump has sought, gotten and endured over the past four decades, nothing compares to the volume and the intensity of the scrutiny he has received in his 16 months pursuing the presidency. The crowds and the votes have stoked his ego, and the hundreds of negative news stories that have been written about him from the moment of his announcement have in some sense vindicated his most deeply held belief about the value of sheer publicity as fuel.

This weekend, in talking to a collection of people who know Trump, I asked them all the same question: Given these past 48 hours, is he feeling any sense of shame?

“No,” Res said. “I think he’s feeling like the world is against him and that this is unfair. He’s not feeling ashamed. He’s feeling aggrieved.”

“I don’t think he has it in him,” O’Brien said.

“The only shame he has here,” a longtime former employee told me, “is that he wanted to fuck Nancy O’Dell and he didn’t succeed, and he had to admit he couldn’t fuck somebody he wanted to fuck.”

As Trump wrote in 2011, in his book Time to Get Tough, “I have learned that entertainment is a very simple business. You can be a horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get ratings, you are a king.”

Trump is a man who considered the breakup of his first marriage and the frenzied national news coverage of his affair with Marla Maples and his divorce from the mother of his first three children a boon for business, a boost for his personal brand. “It’s hotter now, I guess you’d have to say, than it’s ever been before—and it’s been hot before,” he said at the time. Ditto for his corporate bankruptcies and his litany of business failures. “If I get my name in the paper, if people pay attention, that’s what matters,” he once explained. “To me, that means it’s a success.”

In 2007, during an interview in Trump Tower, he was asked an unusual question. A British journalist wanted to know: Would he even still exist without the sustenance of the spotlight?

Trump paused to think—but not for long.

“No,” he said.

“There are people who are successful,” he continued, “but nobody knows who they are, and I say: What’s the purpose? Everybody knows who I am.”

His long road to the hot mic on the gossip bus—at least for people with reason or inclination to pay sufficient attention—is littered with snippets of self-assessment and even unwitting introspection. His record of public pronouncements is remarkably inconsistent, but prominent among the few exceptions to the general rule of his brazen, say-anything posture are the almost never-ending list of things he’s said over the years about celebrity and sex. On those topics—well before Friday’s breaking news—he has never wavered.

“You know, it doesn’t really matter” what reporters write, he said in 1991, “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”

Women, he said in 1992. “You have to treat ’em like shit.”

In these dizzying past couple of days, as the name Trump has appeared in articles about not only his sinking political prospects but about sexism, misogyny and rape culture, I have taken from the shelves in my office my marked-up copies of his many books pitched as how-to and self-help and reread portions that jump from the page even more now, here in the aftermath of “I moved on her,” “I moved on her very heavily,” “I moved on her like a bitch,” and “I did try and fuck her.” “Like a magnet.” “I don’t even wait.”

There’s hardly a book Trump has put out—and I have 17 of them—that doesn’t include passages or even entire chapters on women. On dating. On marriage. On the absolute importance of prenuptial agreements—“the only love letters,” as Barrett once put it, that Trump has ever written.

“I grew up in a very normal family,” Trump said in 1997 in The Art of the Comeback. “I was always of the opinion that aggression, sex drive, and everything that goes along with it was on the man’s part of the table, not the woman’s.”

He described a dinner party at which he was seated next to “a lady of great social pedigree and wealth,” “one of the biggest of the big,” who came on to him, he said, touching his knee, touching his leg, “petting me in all different ways.”

“This is not infrequent,” he wrote. “It happens all the time.”

He told another story about a woman, “also socially prominent, who was getting married,” who saw him on Fifth Avenue and climbed into his limousine, “wanting to get screwed.”

He noted in 2004 in How to Get Rich that “all of the women on The Apprentice” flirted with him. “That’s to be expected,” he said.

“The women I have dated over the years could have any man they want; they are the top models and most beautiful women in the world,” he wrote in 2007 in Think Big. “I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have. I don’t know what it is but women have always liked it. … Beautiful, famous, successful, married—I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names … The one thing I have learned with women over the years—they want it (sex!) more than we do.”

I returned to the 1993 Trump biography by Harry Hurt III, Lost Tycoon, in which Trump’s lawyers demanded that a statement from Ivana Trump be pasted to the page inside the front cover.

“During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” it said.

“I wish to say that on one occasion during 1989,” it continued, “Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited toward me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.

“Any contrary conclusion would be an incorrect and most unfortunate interpretation of my statement,” it added, “which I do not want to be interpreted in a speculative fashion and I do not want the press or media to misconstrue any of the facts set forth above. All I wish is for this matter to be put to rest.”

Since then, though, Trump himself has said what he’s said, written what he’s written, and done what he’s done—including regularly verbally leering at his own daughter, all but inviting other men to do the same. He has called her “an amazing beauty,” “a heartbreaker in every way” and “voluptuous.” “She’s got the best body,” he once told shock jock Howard Stern.

“Can I say this? A piece of ass,” Stern said.

“Yeah,” Trump said.

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” Trump once said on TV. “If I weren’t happily married,” he said last fall, “and, you know, her father …”

After all these years, all the tasteless and scurrilous things he has said and written, the only real surprise for the people who have watched him closely is that he actually uttered an even half-hearted apology.

In his original statement on Friday afternoon, he dismissed his comments on the bus as “locker-room banter” and as an 11-year-old conversation the public wasn’t meant to hear, shifting quickly in a second sentence to Bill Clinton, who “has said far worse to me on the golf course.” The last part felt like a tack-on: “I apologize if anyone was offended.”

“I was surprised,” a former political operative of his told me, “that he was willing to show that type of contrition.”

Then came the second attempt, a slightly longer, video version of more of the same—tepid remorse and a Roy Cohn-like counterpunch in the form of a fast change of subject to the husband of his opponent, all of which led to a series of angry tweets, about how he “WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE,” about how the leaders of the party he represents who have condemned him are “self-righteous hypocrites,” and about Juanita Broaddrick, who allegedly was raped by Bill Clinton, a preview of the potential viciousness of a presidential debate the likes of which this country has never seen.