At times, neither glitz nor flash could disguise financial reality. A story in the Times three months ago contained a reference to his past “brush with bankruptcy,” and Trump, though gratified that the Times gave him play on the front page, took umbrage at that phrase. He “never went bankrupt,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, nor did he “ever, at any time, come close.” Having triumphed over adversity, Trump assumes the prerogative to write history.

In fact, by 1990, he was not only at risk, he was, by any rational standard, hugely in the red. Excessively friendly bankers infected with the promiscuous optimism that made the eighties so memorable and so forgettable had financed Trump’s acquisitive impulses to the tune of three billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars. The personally guaranteed portion—almost a billion—represented the value of Trump’s good will, putative creditworthiness, and capacity for shame. A debt restructuring began in the spring of 1990 and continued for several years. In the process, six hundred or seven hundred or perhaps eight hundred million of his creditors’ dollars vaporized and drifted wherever lost money goes. In America, there is no such thing as a debtors’ prison, nor is there a tidy moral to this story.

Several of Trump’s trophies—the Plaza Hotel and all three Atlantic City casinos—were subjected to “prepackaged bankruptcy,” an efficiency maneuver that is less costly than the full-blown thing. Because the New Jersey Casino Control Act requires “financial stability” for a gaming license, it seems hard to avoid the inference that Trump’s Atlantic City holdings were in serious jeopardy. Nevertheless, “blip” is the alternative “b” word he prefers, as in “So the market, as you know, turns lousy and I have this blip.”

Trump began plotting his comeback before the rest of the world—or, perhaps, even he—fully grasped the direness of his situation. In April of 1990, he announced to the Wall Street Journal a plan to sell certain assets and become the “king of cash,” a stratagem that would supposedly set the stage for a shrewd campaign of bargain hunting. That same month, he drew down the final twenty-five million dollars of an unsecured hundred-million-dollar personal line of credit from Bankers Trust. Within seven weeks, he failed to deliver a forty-three-million-dollar payment due to bondholders of the Trump Castle Casino, and he also missed a thirty-million-dollar interest payment to one of the estimated hundred and fifty banks that were concerned about his well-being. An army of bankruptcy lawyers began camping out in various boardrooms.

Making the blip go away entailed, among other sacrifices, forfeiting management control of the Plaza and handing over the titles to the Trump Shuttle (the old Eastern Airlines Boston-New York-Washington route) and a twin-towered thirty-two-story condominium building near West Palm Beach, Florida. He also said goodbye to his two-hundred-and-eighty-two-foot yacht, the Trump Princess, and to his Boeing 727. Appraisers inventoried the contents of his Trump Tower homestead. Liens were attached to just about everything but his Brioni suits. Perhaps the ultimate indignity was having to agree to a personal spending cap of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month.

It would have been tactically wise, to say nothing of tactful, if, as Trump’s creditors wrote off large chunks of their portfolios, he could have curbed his breathtaking propensity for self-aggrandizement. The bravado diminished somewhat for a couple of years—largely because the press stopped paying attention—but by 1993 he was proclaiming, “This year has been the most successful year I’ve had in business.” Every year since, he’s issued the same news flash. A spate of Trump-comeback articles appeared in 1996, including several timed to coincide with his fiftieth birthday.

Then, last October, Trump came into possession of what a normal person would regard as real money. For a hundred and forty-two million dollars, he sold his half interest in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, on Forty-second Street, to the Pritzker family, of Chicago, his longtime, and long-estranged, partners in the property. Most of the proceeds weren’t his to keep, but he walked away with more than twenty-five million dollars. The chief significance of the Grand Hyatt sale was that it enabled Trump to extinguish the remnants of his once monstrous personally guaranteed debt. When Forbes published its annual list of the four hundred richest Americans, he sneaked on (three hundred and seventy-third position) with an estimated net worth of four hundred and fifty million. Trump, meanwhile, had compiled his own unaudited appraisal, one he was willing to share along with the amusing caveat “I’ve never shown this to a reporter before.” According to his calculations, he was actually worth two and a quarter billion dollars—Forbes had lowballed him by eighty per cent. Still, he had officially rejoined the plutocracy, his first appearance since the blip.

Jay Goldberg, who in addition to handling Trump’s matrimonial legal matters also represented him in the Grand Hyatt deal, told me that, after it closed, his client confessed that the novelty of being unencumbered had him lying awake nights. When I asked Trump about this, he said, “Leverage is an amazing phenomenon. I love leverage. Plus, I’ve never been a huge sleeper.” Trump doesn’t drink or smoke, claims he’s never even had a cup of coffee. He functions, evidently, according to inverse logic and metabolism. What most people would find unpleasantly stimulating—owing vastly more than you should to lenders who, figuratively, at least, can carve you into small pieces—somehow engenders in him a soothing narcotic effect. That, in any event, is the impression Trump seeks to convey, though the point is now moot. Bankers, typically not the most perspicacious species on earth, from time to time get religion, and there aren’t many who will soon be lining up to thrust fresh bazillions at him.

When I met with Trump for the first time, several months ago, he set out to acquaint me with facts that, to his consternation, had remained stubbornly hidden from the public. Several times, he uttered the phrase “off the record, but you can use it.” I understood the implication—I was his tool—but failed to see the purpose. “If you have me saying these things, even though they’re true, I sound like a schmuck,” he explained. How to account, then, for the bombast of the previous two decades? Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor in the Koch administration, once quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” In time, this bon mot became misattributed to Leona Helmsley, who was only too happy to claim authorship. Last fall, after Evander Holyfield upset Mike Tyson in a heavyweight title fight, Trump snookered the News into reporting that he’d collected twenty million bucks by betting a million on the underdog. This prompted the Post to make calls to some Las Vegas bookies, who confirmed—shockingly!—that nobody had been handling that kind of action or laying odds close to 20-1. Trump never blinked, just moved on to the next bright idea.

“I don’t think people know how big my business is,” Trump told me. “Somehow, they know Trump the celebrity. But I’m the biggest developer in New York. And I’m the biggest there is in the casino business. And that’s pretty good to be the biggest in both. So that’s a lot of stuff.” He talked about 40 Wall Street—“truly one of the most beautiful buildings in New York”—a seventy-two-story landmark that he was renovating. He said he owned the new Niketown store, tucked under Trump Tower; there was a deal to convert the Mayfair Hotel, at Sixty-fifth and Park, into “super-super-luxury apartments . . . but that’s like a small one.” He owned the land under the Ritz-Carlton, on Central Park South. (“That’s a little thing. Nobody knows that I own that. In that way, I’m not really understood.”) With CBS, he now owned the Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., and Miss Universe beauty pageants. He pointed to a stack of papers on his desk, closing documents for the Trump International Hotel & Tower. “Look at these contracts. I get these to sign every day. I’ve signed hundreds of these. Here’s a contract for two-point-two million dollars. It’s a building that isn’t even opened yet. It’s eighty-three per cent sold, and nobody even knows it’s there. For each contract, I need to sign twenty-two times, and if you think that’s easy . . . You know, all the buyers want my signature. I had someone else who works for me signing, and at the closings the buyers got angry. I told myself, ‘You know, these people are paying a million eight, a million seven, two million nine, four million one—for those kinds of numbers, I’ll sign the fucking contract.’ I understand. Fuck it. It’s just more work.”