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million dollars for land-purchase and development expenses. In the years that followed, he trotted out several elephantine proposals, diverse and invariably overly dense residential and commercial mixtures. “Zoning for me is a life process,” Trump told me. “Zoning is something I have done and ultimately always get because people appreciate what I’m asking for and they know it’s going to be the highest quality.” In fact, the consensus among the West Side neighbors who studied Trump’s designs was that they did not appreciate what he was asking for. An exotically banal hundred-and-fifty-story phallus—“The World’s Tallest Building”—provided the centerpiece of his most vilified scheme.
    The oddest passage in this byzantine history began in the late eighties, when an assortment of high-minded civic groups united to oppose Trump, enlisted their own architects, and drafted a greatly scaled-back alternative plan. The civic groups hoped to persuade Chase Manhattan, which held Trump’s mortgage, to help them entice a developer who could wrest the property from their nemesis. To their dismay, and sheepish amazement, they discovered that one developer was willing to pursue their design: Trump. Over time, the so-called civic alternative has become, in the public mind, thanks to Trump’s drumbeating,
his
proposal; he has appropriated conceptual ownership.
    Three years ago, a syndicate of Asian investors, led by Henry Cheng, of Hong Kong’s New World Development Company, assumed the task of arranging construction financing. This transaction altered Trump’s involvement to a glorified form of sweat equity; for a fee paid by the investment syndicate, Trump Organization staff people would collaborate with a team from New World, monitoring the construction already under way and working on designs, zoning, and planning for the phases to come. Only when New World has recovered its investment, plus interest, will Trump begin to see any real profit—twenty-five years, at least, after he first cast his covetous eye at the Penn Central rail yards. According to Trump’s unaudited net-worth statement, which identifies Riverside South as “Trump Boulevard,” he “owns 30–50% of the project, depending on performance.” This “ownership,” however, is a potential profit share rather than actual equity. Six hundred million dollars is the value Trump imputes to this highly provisional asset.
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    Of course, the “comeback” Trump is much the same as the Trump of the ’80s; there is no “new” Trump, just as there was never a “new” Nixon. Rather, all along there have been several Trumps: the hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit; the knowledgeable builder whose associates profess awe at his attention to detail; the narcissist whose self-absorption doesn’t account for his dead-on ability to exploit other people’s weaknesses; the perpetual seventeen-year-old *1 who lives in a zero-sum world of winners and “total losers,” loyal friends and “complete scumbags”; the insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn’t like what he reads, attacks the messengers as “human garbage”; the chairman and largest stockholder of a billion-dollar public corporation who seems unable to resist heralding overly optimistic earnings projections, which then fail to materialize, thereby eroding the value of his investment—in sum, a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences.
    Trump’s most caustic detractors in New York real-estate circles disparage him as “a casino operator in New Jersey,” as if to say, “He’s not really even one of us.” Such derision is rooted in resentment that his rescue from oblivion—his strategy for remaining the marketable real-estate commodity “Trump”—hinged upon his ability to pump cash out of Atlantic City. The Trump image is nowhere more concentrated than in