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When Trump became president, he gave up flying on his Boeing 757-200, which he bought for a hundred million dollars in 2011. That plane boasts twenty-four-karat gold-plated seat belts and bathroom fittings, mohair couches, creamy calfskin seats, two bedrooms with gold silk sheets and pillows embroidered with the Trump family crest, and powerful Rolls-Royce turbofan engines. A one-hour flight costs $10,800 for fuel and maintenance.
As president, Trump traded up to Air Force One, which seats seventy people, compared with forty-three on what Trump called Trump Force One. Known by the Secret Service code name Angel, Air Force One got its name when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. Prior to that, the aircraft used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been known by Air Force designations. Because a flight controller mistook the president’s plane for a commercial one, the pilot suggested calling the plane the president was using Air Force One.
The current presidential plane is a Boeing 747-200B bubble top jumbo jet acquired in 1990 when George H. W. Bush was president. It has a range of 7,825 miles and a maximum cruising altitude of 45,100 feet. It cruises at 600 miles per hour but can achieve speeds of 701 miles per hour. In addition to two pilots, a navigator, and a flight engineer, the 231-foot-long plane has eighty-seven telephones.
While the average 747 has 485,000 feet of electrical wire, the presidential plane has 1.2 million feet, all shielded from the electromagnetic pulse that would be emitted during a nuclear blast. Near the front of the six-story-high plane, the president has an executive suite with a stateroom, dressing room, and bathroom with shower. The president also has a private office near the stateroom and a combination dining room and conference room. Toward the back are areas for the staff, Secret Service, guests, and the press. The cost of hourly operation is $142,380, not including flight crew salaries.
Under Federal Aviation Administration regulations, Air Force One takes precedence over all other aircraft. When approaching an airport, it bumps other planes that preceded it into the air space. Before it lands, Secret Service agents on the ground check the runway for explosives or objects such as stray tires. Generally, other aircraft may not land on the same runway for fifteen or twenty minutes before Air Force One lands.
Before buying his Boeing 757-200 from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, Trump owned a Boeing 727-100. Like the newer plane, it had gold-plated fixtures, including gold-plated seat belts. Trump’s pilot, Mike Donovan, had been an Eastern Airlines pilot for twenty-seven years. He flew the plane for Trump for fifteen years as his director of flight operations and chief pilot, piloting fifteen hundred round-trip flights with Trump. Each round trip between New York and Palm Beach cost $40,000 for fuel and maintenance.
A jovial redhead, Donovan considered Trump a good boss, someone who issued clear instructions, was considerate, and never tried to push him to fly hours beyond the maximum allowed by FAA regulations.
“Trump wanted to make sure that we were running a legal and safe operation,” Donovan tells me.
One morning, Donovan was flying Trump to Chicago, along with Ivanka; Michael Cohen, the Trump Organization’s executive vice president and special counsel; and Larry Glick, Trump’s executive vice president for development. Handing over control to his copilot, Donovan went back into the cabin to greet his passengers. At that point, Cohen came out of the lavatory looking ashen.
“What’s the matter, Mike?” Donovan asked.
Cohen showed his hands, palms up. They were blue. Cohen explained that he was sitting on a gold silk couch and opened his fountain pen. The ink splattered all over his hands and spread all over the couch.
“I could tell right away that the boss was very, very unhappy, very upset,” Donovan says. “He asked what I could do about it now. And I said there’s really nothing I could do. By that time, Michael Cohen thought he had lost his job.”
They continued to Midway International Airport. When the passengers had left the plane, Donovan asked a ramp attendant if he had any solution. The man took a look at the mess.
“Do you have any hair spray?” the attendant asked.
“We got all kinds of hair spray,” Donovan said.
Donovan went into Trump’s bedroom and snagged a can of Mink, Trump’s favorite. He also uses Aqua Net.
The ramp attendant sprayed the entire can of hair spray on the couch, telling Donovan to check it in an hour after it had set.
“About an hour later, we came back up, and sure enough, the ink was gone,” Donovan says.
When Trump returned to the plane, he was surprised not to see the giant ink blot.
“What happened?” he asked.
Donovan explained how Trump’s hair spray made the ink disappear.
“If that’s what it does to the couch, what is it doing to my hair?” Trump said.
Trump usually did not want to spend money on a flight attendant or fancy meals. He would often eat a deli sandwich on the plane. On the flight to Mar-a-Lago as part of my research for my book The Season, Trump kept walking back to the 727’s galley for another hard pretzel. Then he broke out the Pringles. He seemed to need constant refueling.
Now on Air Force One, Trump munches on Starburst candies—strawberry, cherry, orange, or lemon chewy candies made by Mars. He may also eat a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar, no almonds.
Until Trump’s father, Fred, became too frail to travel, Trump included both his parents as well as his siblings on weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago. When Fred could no longer travel, “Once everybody was on the airplane, they’d bring his father out, and he’d come up into the airplane, and they’d sit there for twenty-five minutes or so just to include everybody,” Donovan says. “It meant so much to his father and his mother.”
Trump displays black-and-white photos of both parents on the table behind his desk chair in the Oval Office.
As with Air Force One, Mar-a-Lago, and the White House itself, Trump uses his golf courses to help forge personal relationships and woo those he needs to his side. Trump owns almost two dozen golf courses all over the world, from Bali in Indonesia to Turnberry in Scotland. Each has an expansive pool surrounded by lush landscaping. When in the New York area, he stays at the golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, rather than the one in Westchester, New York, because Melania prefers the accommodations at Bedminster, located on six hundred acres forty minutes from Manhattan.
Depending on where they are located, insiders say, “I’m going to Trump,” meaning the closest one of his golf clubs or hotels, such as Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Contrary to the caricatures, Trump routinely promotes blacks and Hispanics at his clubs. Trump promoted Kenneth Baloyi, an African-American waiter at Mar-a-Lago, to sommelier, then to food and beverage director at Mar-a-Lago, then to director of membership and marketing at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York.
It was at the previous incarnation of that golf club that Trump met Dan Scavino, who became the head of Trump’s social media operation during the campaign and now directs it at the White House. Scavino was in high school and took a job cleaning golf clubs at what was then Briar Hall Country Club, which Trump bought at foreclosure and turned into his Westchester golf club. Trump pulled into the parking lot in a stretch limousine, and Scavino, age sixteen, was chosen to be the mogul’s caddy.
Wait until the kids at school hear about this on Monday, Scavino thought to himself.
“I was star-struck,” he told Westchester magazine. “I remember his first gratuity. It was two bills—two hundred-dollar bills. I said, ‘I am never spending this money.’ I still have both bills.”
In 2004, Scavino started working as assistant manager at Trump National Golf Club. He was promoted to executive vice president and general manager in 2008.
During work hours, Trump will dictate tweets for Scavino or other staffers to transcribe and send from the president’s account, Trump’s way of bypassing the mainstream media. Scavino occasionally politely raises objections to Trump’s tweets, and Trump listens to him. But when Trump retreats to his private quarters for the evening, for better or worse, it’s just Trump and his phone.
Even though Senator Rand Paul kept voting against bills Trump was pushing, until Paul sustained broken ribs after a vicious attack by a neighbor, Trump repeatedly played golf with the junior senator from Kentucky. Eventually, Paul supported Trump’s health-care bill.
During one presidential primary debate, Trump called Paul a “spoiled brat.” He also went after his physical appearance at a debate when he said: “I never attacked him on his look and believe me there’s plenty of subject matter there.”
But Trump drove the golf cart as the two played at Trump National Golf Club, his eight-hundred-acre club at Lowes Island in Potomac Falls, Virginia. Paul’s senior aide Sergio Gor came with them, and Trump sometimes invited Mike Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Including the motorcade between the White House and the club, breakfast and lunch at the club, and eighteen holes of golf, the day usually lasted eight to nine hours.
“The president never loses, didn’t you know?” Paul quipped to reporters when asked after golfing with him how the president had done. “The president and his partner beat myself and my partner by three holes. He’s a little better golfer than I am, admittedly, but we had a good time.”
Paul brought copies of The Art of the Deal with him to a meeting with the House Freedom Caucus and urged members to brush up on Trump’s tactics. “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it,” Trump wrote. “That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.” The Republican senator also brought a poster with a quote from a chapter on how to “use your leverage.”
Playing golf with Paul is “a strategy, because Trump knows that eventually, it’s going to pay off,” Priebus says. “People keep telling him, well, don’t waste your time. I think his negotiation is very long term. People always say he’s just transactional. He is transactional, but he also thinks long term.”
As a golfer, Trump has a two or three handicap, meaning he is in the top echelon of club golfers, says Trump’s friend Gary Giulietti, who belongs to both Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach. On the golf course, “He’s a tiger. He wants to win. He wants to win on the golf course. He wants to win in business. He wants to win for the country. I’ve never met anybody like him. He’s about as tough a competitor as there is no matter what.”
The golf cart paths at the Westchester club had just been repaved when Trump noticed track marks on the new pavement from a snow removal machine.
“Trump went crazy on the club manager,” Giulietti recalls. “A few hours later, he is with the guy, putting his arm around him, telling him how much he appreciates his effort.”
“I hope you understand that what I was trying to do is educate you, because now that I have to repave, I can’t just repave this little piece,” Trump told him. “I’ve got to make it all match, all for an innocent mistake.”
Giulietti then saw Trump give the manager two one-hundred-dollar bills.