My father met Donald Trump for the first time in the early 1990s, both well into his forties — my father a year older — and both emerging from practical financial ruin. The rebellious devotion to Trump's debt and his problems with borrowing money was well noted in the salmon pages of the time: in 1990, his eponymous company was sinking under the weight of the loans he had borrowed to maintain his casinos running, the Plaza hotel open and your airline's planes in the air. Money had a price. They had forced him to insure part of it, making it a personal guarantee of more than $ 800 million.
In the summer of that year, a sprawling
Vanity Fair
profile
painted an alarming portrait not only of the man's finances, but also of his state of mind. Separated from his wife, he had exchanged the family triplex for a small apartment on one of the lower floors of the Trump Tower. He spent hours in bed staring at the ceiling. He did not leave the building, neither to attend meetings nor to eat; He subsisted on hamburgers and fries that he ordered from a local restaurant. Like his debt, Trump's waist swelled and his long hair curled at the ends, unruly. And it wasn't just his looks. He had become strangely quiet. Ivana confided to her friends that she was worried. She had never seen him like this, and she wasn't sure she was going to get out of this one.
My father, like Trump, got through debt in the 1980s and ended the decade with an uncertain economic future. He was a doctor and had left cardiology research to open a private practice just as the hostage crisis began. When Reagan was in office, he had started to "mint money," as he liked to say. (His comical Punjabi accent always made him sound like he was referring to a relative of new money rather than the process of making it.) In 1983, with so much money that he didn't know what to do with it, my father attended a weekend real estate investment seminar at the Radisson Hotel in West Allis, Wisconsin.
On Sunday night, he had already made an offer for his first property, an advertisement that one of the teachers had "shared" with the participants at one of the meals: a gas station in Baraboo, just five blocks from the lot where the brothers Ringling set up their circus.
What did he want a gas station for was the perfectly reasonable question my mother asked him when she gave us the news the following week.
To celebrate, he made a pitcher of Rooh Afza lassi;
That rose-scented sorbet was my mother's favorite drink.
He shrugged in response and handed her a glass.
She was in no mood for lassi.
"What do you know about gas stations?"
She asked irritably.
"I don't need to know how they work."
It is a solid business.
There is cash flow.
-Cash Flow?
"Money, Fatima."
"And if it makes so much money, why do they sell it?"
Hey?
—Your reasons will have
"I don't expect you to understand."
I don't expect you to support me.
But in ten years, you will both remember this moment and you will see that I made a great investment.
You will see!
My father yelled.
You will see!
What we saw were the following “investments” in a shopping center in Janesville; another in Skokie, Illinois; a campsite outside Wausau and a trout farm near Fond du Lac. If they do not see any logic in the property portfolio, well, they are not the only ones. As it turned out, those random purchases were all made on the advice of the seminary professor, Chet, who had sold him the first. All were mortgaged, and each property functioned as a kind of collateral for the next in a strange configuration of shell companies that Chet had invented, and for which he would be charged after the S&L crisis. My father was lucky to avoid legal consequences. Oh, and yes, we did get to have our required copy of
The Art of Negotiation
Trump on the living room shelf, but that was a few years later.
My father has always been a mystery to me: the son of an imam for whom the only holy names — Harlan, Far Niente, Opus One — were those of his beloved California Cabernets;
that he revered Diana Ross and Sylvester Stallone and preferred the poker he learned here to the rung he had left behind in Pakistan;
a man of unpredictable appetites and impulses, very given to leaving a tip for the same amount of the bill (and sometimes a little more);
Unredeemed admirer of American courage who never stopped scolding me for my lack of it during adolescence: oh, if only he had been lucky enough to have been born here like me!
Not only would he never have been a doctor!
Maybe he would even have been happy!
It is true that I do not remember him as happy as in those years in the middle of the Reagan era when - with the promise of the infinitely easy money of the system - he would wake up every morning and admire in the mirror the reflection of a self-made businessman. . But the happiness was short-lived. The market crisis of '87 started a cascade of unfortunate "credit events" that, by the early 1990s, had reduced their income to less than nothing. I had just started my second year in college when he called to tell me that he was going to transfer the practice in order to avoid bankruptcy and that I would have to leave the university that semester unless I could get a student loan (which I did) .
It was my father's research on Brugada syndrome, a rare and often fatal arrhythmia, that led him to meet Donald Trump.
Although that reversal of luck did not succeed in reforming it completely, my father chastised for a while.
He regained his position as professor of clinical cardiology at the university and turned back to research, for which, despite his misgivings, he was undoubtedly talented.
In fact, after three years in academia, he was back at the forefront of his field of study and taking the stage to receive awards;
They even gave him a medal for his recent research on a little-known disease called Brugada syndrome.
It was my father's research on Brugada syndrome, a rare and often fatal arrhythmia, that led him to meet Donald Trump. In 1993, Trump was still in trouble. He had turned to his brothers and borrowed money from the family trust to pay the bills. (He would do it again a year later.) He was forced to dispense with his yacht, his airline, and his stock in the Plaza hotel. The bankers who watched the recovery of his values assigned him a strict monthly payment. And the press did not give him a break: his lover, Marla Maples, was pregnant again, and his ex-wife, very given to talking to journalists, was destroying him in the court of public opinion.
In short, he was having a hard time.
So it came as no surprise to either Trump himself or his doctors that he began to notice heart palpitations.
In Trump's own words to my father, he first noticed the alarming sensation while playing golf on an unusually warm morning in Palm Beach;
something strange in the chest, like the beating on a distant drum;
then he felt faint.
When he sat in the golf cart to rest, the pounding was closer and louder.
His heart beat in his chest as if he were inside an empty drum.
He knew something was wrong.
Had to go home
A few days after the pounding on the golf course, Trump was dining at the Breakers, then Palm Beach's premier luxury resort.
He hated the Breakers - or so my father remembers explaining to him in detail during his first consultation - but he had to go to dinner because he was meeting a person from City Hall who, Trump believed, knew he hated the Breakers and probably had reserved table there on purpose.
Trump's request to convert Mar-a-Lago into a private club was still pending, and he needed all the support from the Palm Beach City Council that he could get.
So it had to be at Breakers, even though he said the food was disgusting and overpriced.
"See when my club opens."
We're going to bury the Breakers.
He ordered a flamed ribs.
"Always well done, Doc. Because I don't know cooking and I don't know how dirty it is."
Nor who cooks what.
Who touches the food.
The only way to be sure, be it meat, fish, whatever, is to ask for it well done.
Unless it's in my kitchen, and look, we'll have a great restaurant in Mar-a-Lago, the best, but ... I'll order it well done there too.
I think it's better this way ...
As soon as the food was served, Trump said he began to feel very weak.
He got up and excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he was surprised to see how pale he was.
He felt the same thing again as on the golf course: his heart was beating in his chest as if it were inside an empty drum.
He knew something was wrong.
He had to go home.
Donald Trump's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.MARCO BELLO / Reuters
Mar-a-Lago was close — less than three miles — but as soon as the car pulled out of the parking lot, it began to feel worse. When they entered Ocean Boulevard, he asked the driver to stop the car, and that's it. The next thing he remembered was lying on the sidewalk listening to the waves. The chauffeur would later tell him that he fell face down from the car in the back. The man picked it up, turned it over, and saw that Trump's eyes were rolling. He couldn't find a pulse in either his wrist or neck, nor did he feel any throbbing in his chest. The chauffeur shook him hard and then, as abruptly as he had passed out, Trump came to himself. His face recovered its color; the veins in his forehead began to throb. Dazed, he got out of the car and lay down on the sidewalk by the beach.
Medical tests in the days and weeks that followed pointed to a heart problem, but Trump's heart was healthy.
Medical tests in the days and weeks that followed pointed to a heart problem, but Trump's heart was healthy and his coronary arteries clear of blockages.
Another round of testing resulted in a bunch of ECG strips showing an occasional pattern that the Palm Beach specialist had never seen.
It had an outline vaguely resembling a shark's fin.
Although it was 1993, most cardiologists did not know that this is the form that Brugada syndrome usually presents.
The results of the EKG were sent to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where a cardiologist referred them to my father in Milwaukee. Considered the leading investigator of Brugada syndrome in the United States - and the second in the world after the Brugada brothers, who had discovered the syndrome in their laboratories in Belgium - my father was used to receiving electrocardiograms and patients from the whole country, and later also the Far East. In fact, Trump wasn't even the first famous person whose case had come to him. The year before, my father had flown first class to Brunei, where he had examined the Sultan himself in a laboratory equipped according to his instructions the moment he had set foot in Bandar Seri Begawan.
Pedestrians pass in 2004 in front of a poster of the Donald Trump program The Apprentice, hanging from the Trump Tower, of his property, in New York. Bebeto Matthews / AP
Although Trump was no monarch - at least not yet - he was not taking a plane to Milwaukee, either.
So my father flew - first class again - to Newark, where Trump's helicopter was waiting for him.
He landed on a helipad on the Hudson River;
There he was picked up by a car that took him to Mount Sinai Hospital.
They took him to a consultation prepared to perform certain tests and my father waited there for his patient.
But Trump never came.
That night, in the Plaza Hotel room reserved for him, the phone on the bedside table rang just as my father was falling asleep.
It was Donald.
What follows is my version of their conversation, written in light of my father's memory of Trump's diligence first and foremost:
"No one can tell me how to pronounce it, doctor."
-I'm not surprised.
"How do you pronounce it?"
—Ak-tar .— “Ak”, as in “activity”.
-That's OK.
"But that's not how you pronounce it, is it?"
Where it is?
Where they are?
-From Pakistan.
-Pakistan...
—And there we pronounce the surname differently
"I have a facility."
I can say it well.
"We say Akh-tar."
"My father uttered the guttural consonant kh that I hadn't heard any white American pronounce well."
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line.
"Wow, it does seem difficult."
I don't know about me, doctor.
"Ak-tar is fine, Mr. Trump."
They laughed.
"Very good, okay."
Ak-tar then.
And you call me Do-nald.
Please.
Trump then proceeded to apologize for missing his appointment.
Disarmed by his proximity, my father made no objection.
Trump asked if the room was big enough.
This is New York.
It's hard to feel like you have enough space.
But I asked them to reserve a good room for him.
Likes?
We remodeled these rooms when I bought that ...
"Mr. Trump ...
"The hotel is a work of art, doctor."
The Mona Lisa.
That is what it is.
"Mr. Trump ...
"Call me Donald, please ..."
"Excuse me, Donald, but I didn't come to New York to sleep in a nice hotel."
I have come to help you.
I don't think you understand how serious your heart problem could be.
If you have Brugada, I am not exaggerating if I say you are a time bomb with legs.
He could die tomorrow.
'There was a silence.
My father continued, “I am flattered to receive such wonderful treatment, Donald.
Really.
But I have just returned from Brunei, where I have treated the Sultan.
He's a king, and he was on time for his date.
Because he understood that if this was not dealt with, he could die the next day.
"All right, doctor," Trump said impassively, after a brief pause.
I will be there.
What time?
-At eight o'clock.
"I'm sorry I didn't go today."
I'm so sorry, doctor.
It has been a lack of respect on my part.
I've wasted your time.
So sorry.
Really.
"It's okay, Donald."
-Forgive me?
My father laughed.
-.
Okay that's fine.
He laughs, ”Trump said.
I'm sorry about today, but I'll be there tomorrow.
First thing in the morning.
Promised.
Act of support of Donald Trump employees in Miami during the 2016 campaign.Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
At the beginning of the 2016 election campaign, when the exhaustive analysis of Trump's personality and style was underway - and speculation about his real possibilities - something that was repeated a lot was that Trump did not know how to apologize. With every lie and bad decision he made, he told himself over and over that the guy seemed incapable of asking for forgiveness, even when it would have served him well. Admitting you were wrong implies showing weakness, and that apparently went against not only his entrepreneurial instincts, but also his principles. What I've always inferred from every
The Apprentice
firings
I've seen has been an unmistakable disregard for weakness. Systematically, to the rival who was the
punching ball
In the dialectical battles against Trump they ended up putting him on Fifth Avenue, abandoned, and they took him - in a black limousine - away from the Olympic suite next to Trump Tower where the other aspirants drank champagne and celebrated the wise choice of the Mr. Trump;
systematically, that opponent was the most likely to share the blame, the most likely to admit that a team failure was probably just that, the failure of a team and not a single individual.
Trump's bewilderment at that level of sanity was strange to me.
Was it possible that he believed that blaming someone else was a legitimate business strategy?
In his on-screen role, Trump's bewilderment at this level of sanity and camaraderie was strange to me. Was it really possible that he believed that blaming someone else to save the ballot was a legitimate business strategy? Of course, we now know that it was much more than that, something more like the highest good of the Trumpian worldview. It is very likely that he played a role that night with my father on the phone, as well as the next morning, when he arrived for the medical examination on time and with two cups of coffee and a little white gift box containing a pin on which he said "
Love life!
"Which I hoped my father would accept as an apology. My father never forgot that gesture.
Think about it: it only took a trinket that Trump probably took without paying from the Trump Tower gift shop for my father, years later, whenever they said that the guy did not know how to apologize, justify it.
"Oh, if they knew him," he said every time the commentators brought up the subject on television.
And he was also referring to the pin. “If they knew him, they wouldn't say these things.
They would know that they are not right ”.
Translation by Elia Maqueda.
Ayad Akhtar
is an American writer of Pakistani origin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play 'Disgraced'.
His new book, 'Elegías a la patria' (Roca Editorial), is published this Thursday.
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