When his criminal trial is over for the day, Donald J. Trump typically returns to the three stories of marble and gold at the top of Trump Tower, the skyscraper he built in the early 1980s and that cemented his public image as an architectural mastermind.
It’s a silver lining for Trump, who will be spending significant amounts of time in Manhattan for the first time since moving to Washington in 2017. He sits in a dingy downtown courtroom facing 34 felony charges and spending his days listening to former acquaintances describe him as a corrupt liar who has sullied the White House and may end up in prison.
But in the evenings, according to people who have spoken to him, he enjoys returning to the penthouse he moved into 40 years ago, a place he still considers his home — and a permanent reminder of the happiest times of his life.
It was a “greed is good” era, when Trump was promoting himself nationally as an industrial titan despite a relatively small, locally-focused real estate portfolio — he’d just built a glittering tower on Fifth Avenue, infuriated elites and demanded tax cuts from the city — and he constantly alludes to the era, referencing cultural touchstones of the 1980s like “60 Minutes,” Time magazine and celebrities like boxer Mike Tyson.
It was also the last time Trump’s beloved public image remained intact, only for it to quickly crumble. The decade ended with a months-long tabloid battle that forced New York to choose sides between Trump and his first wife, Ivana. At the same time, his image-obsessed Trump became the subject of one investigative report after another that revealed he had far less money than he appeared to have, that he relied on his father for help, and that he had nearly destroyed his empire.
In the ’80s, Trump was publicly battling whether he wanted to be accepted by the elites or throw stones at them, a struggle most visible in his decision to destroy the Art Deco frieze on the roof of a building he demolished to make way for Trump Tower.
But despite claims that New York City’s powerful men all sneered at him, Trump was accommodating, coddled and even embraced by some of them during the ’80s, when he was helped by his father’s connections in the corrupt Brooklyn political machine, cultivated relationships with publishing titans like SI Newhouse and enjoyed a stadium box set aside for Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
Mr. Trump had begun a budding and lasting relationship with one of New York City’s most powerful men, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose closeness made Mr. Trump feel safe and who never condoned the allegations against him, according to former Trump Organization employees.
“That’s absolutely true. It was definitely Trump’s golden age,” said Andrew Stein, who served as city council president in the 1980s and remains a Trump supporter, though he at one point suggested Trump should not run for a third term.
Even as a president, moving to a city and a world whose rules and laws were unfamiliar and uninteresting to him, and rejecting the establishment even before he arrived, few things seemed to please Trump more than when he charmed an audience at the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan.
The trial highlighted parts of Trump’s personality that became less visible in the decade following his fame with the ghostwritten 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” but which came to light in the 1990s. His penchant for revenge, his love of fixers as his defense lawyers, his obsession with being seen as a playboy and the business practices of what was essentially a family business were all repeatedly featured in the courtroom.
But these events also underscored the reality that the presidency was won by a man who had spent years crafting a fiction about himself in the press and on television. Suddenly, the power of the Oval Office, a vast government infrastructure, and the tens of millions of people who voted for him blurred any questions about what was real and what was fake about him.
Perhaps the era that formative years for Trump is best summed up by author Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which a wealthy investment banker commits a hit-and-run on a young black man in the Bronx amid rising racial tensions, only to end up on trial in the borough’s rundown criminal courthouse and devoured by the tabloids.
It was a building not unlike the one in which Mr. Trump sat nearly every day of the week for six weeks, with fluorescent lights illuminating the aging benches and the words “In God We Trust” hanging above Judge Juan M. Marchan’s head.
Trump was a fierce critic of his lawyers, and on some days he privately complained about the absence of his original fixer, mentor and lawyer, Roy M. Cohn. Like Trump, Cohn was born into privilege outside the district and was both condemned and embraced by those in power. Cohn, who hid his gay status and tried to ban homosexuals from the federal government, died in 1986. He had AIDS, but told people he had liver cancer.
The lawyer, who had ties to President Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and mobsters, introduced the Queens-raised Trump to a new world, teaching him to always deny wrongdoing, to attack his attackers and to find lawyers who would do anything for him.But by the early ’80s, as Trump himself began to gain respect, he seemed ready to distance himself from Cohn.
“All I can say is that he has been vicious to other people in order to protect me,” Trump told journalist Marie Brenner a few years before Cohn’s death. “He’s a genius. A bad lawyer, but a genius.”
Trump effectively fired Cohn, who had been prosecuted multiple times, when he fell ill. Afterward, despite his own criticism of his mentor, Trump praised him as an ideal for other lawyers to aspire to, including his new Washington associates.
During his presidency, Trump rarely spent time at Trump Tower; he usually spent weekends at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, or Bedminster, New Jersey. He said he avoided Manhattan because his motorcades would disrupt traffic. But Manhattan rejected him at the ballot box: When he went to vote on Election Day in 2016, residents laughed in his face, and one resident told him, “You’re going to lose!”
Then, in September 2019, after consulting with his tax advisors, Trump summarily rejected Manhattan and changed his residency to Florida. By the time he left office 14 days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, his efforts to appease anyone but himself were all but over.
This month, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Trump has sought to ravage the city he left in a bid to show he can still control a city that remains volatile in the wake of the pandemic.
On Thursday evening, he rallied several thousand people not in Manhattan but in the Bronx, a heavily black and Latino neighborhood where he studied at Fordham University for two years and where Cohn’s former law partner once served as Democratic Party chairman. He had suggested to donors at a Manhattan fundraiser a few days earlier that he might be hurt there, but when he got there he seemed very pleased.
He drew cheers as he criticized transgender girls and women who compete in girls’ sports, and he also attacked undocumented immigrants, who have become a growing source of controversy over their use of the city’s public services.
But the theme of his talk was the past: He spoke about the construction of Trump Tower, declaring, “No matter where I go, if I can build a skyscraper in Manhattan, I know I can do anything.”
He spoke at length for several minutes, recounting how he rebuilt the abandoned Wollman Rink in Central Park in 1986. It was a relatively small job, but he still attracted a lot of media attention. He detailed stolen copper pipes and wasted concrete, and said he found a way to turn the rink into something different.
“The biggest cost was the demolition,” Trump said of his work. “You have to tear it down and start again.”