Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working with Donald Trump Reveals About Him
Barbara A. Res
Graymalkin Media, LLC
Copyright © 2020 by Res Books LLC
“Tower of Lies” begins by reminding us what Donald Trump said about Barbara Res in his book “Art of the Deal,” words that would never make it out his mouth today.
“The person I hired to be my personal representative over-seeing the construction, Barbara Res, was the first woman ever put in charge of a skyscraper in New York. She was thirty-three at the time … half the size of most of these bruising guys, but she wasn’t afraid to tell them off when she had to, and she knew how to get things done.” — Donald Trump, “The Art of the Deal”
Unlike so many of those who have written about President Trump, Barbara Res tells a story that is far more personal than political. While Bob Woodward spoke to Donald Trump for about 30 hours on the phone; she worked for him, beside him for 18 years. She knew him in a way even his niece Mary Trump didn’t.
It’s why, in many ways, this is one of the most interesting portraits of Donald Trump.
Res shares her secret: “I have never been afraid of Donald, because I know who and what he is.” Because he couldn’t scare her into submission and silence, and because she indeed “knew how to get things done,” she survived and worked with him, and witnessed how Donald Trump changed over the years:
“I will always have mixed emotions about Donald. Even when he was at his worst in the early days, he was human and even sometimes humane. That version of him has been so thoroughly subsumed — by his yes-men, his ignorance and arrogance, his focus on appearances, his lies and cheating, his desire for credit and avoidance of blame, his disdain for (and manipulation of) the working people of this country, his denigration of anyone who isn’t a white Christian male, and his incessant need to attack. It is impossible even to glimpse any of the positive attributes of that earlier Donald. (Emphasis added.)
For so many Americans, it’s impossible to imagine that better, earlier Donald; and for many others, 70 million of them, in love with a mythical man, they won’t be able to trust or appreciate, let alone understand, Barbara Res’ disillusionment:
“After Trump was elected, I was devastated. I wrote an open letter — which the Huffington Post published — to the president-elect. In the letter I outlined how I thought he could become an excellent president and even win my support. I needed something positive to hold on to, to believe that maybe this could work after all. My heart held out hope, but my brain knew better.”
For those of you who don’t know anything about Barbara Res or why we should care about what she has to say, at 30 years old, Donald Trump hired her to supervise the construction of Trump Tower. A rarity in the male dominated construction industry, she was a highly skilled engineer employed by HRH Construction in New York City, working on complex projects like Mount Sinai Hospital, Irving Trust Bank and Citicorp Center.
Then HRH was hired as general contractor for the renovation of the Commodore Hotel, “which was to be Donald Trump’s big splash in Manhattan real estate. Partnering with the Hyatt Corporation, he had bought the aging building with help from loans from his father and generous tax abatements from the city. The young developer was going to rescue this forgotten treasure from obscurity and remake a historic part of New York City … [and] everything ran through him. He decided on all the planning, design, building, and furnishing. The vast renovation included covering the old brick building with bronze-colored aluminum and glass, while reimagining the inside with waterfalls, sculptures, and luxurious meeting spaces. And it was to be done the Trump way, which meant on a shoestring budget …”
Harkening back to the ways his father, Fred, dealt with his Brooklyn tenants, the project began with his need to get rid of the current tenants: “The Commodore was still occupied when Trump bought it, with residents who dated back to the single-room-occupancy (SRO) days. Donald’s people got rid of all of them, along with a handful of prostitutes, who came back later to service the construction workers. There were also retail stores that Trump had to force out. He did this through cutting services, intimidating, and (through his attack dog, Roy Cohn) threatening to sue. This was a regular pattern for Trump, as I would learn — behavior that grew more vicious in later years and would eventually extend to things outside real estate. He would wipe out what was there to put in what he wanted, something that could serve him financially or publicity-wise, and he didn’t care much how it got done.”
It’s important to appreciate that Barbara Res is a builder. It’s also important to appreciate that building is a team sport: Great numbers of people, performing so many different critical jobs, are required to create something as complicated as a skyscraper. Managing these many tasks, coordinating these many different sets of skilled workers, requires patience and straight-forwardness. And it helps to treat these many workers with respect. These are traits not particularly associated with Donald Trump. In fact, on her very first day on the Grand Hyatt project, Barbara Res was warned by her boss, Irving Fischer, about him:
“Fischer wanted to make sure that Trump didn’t fight us over every penny trying to stay under that number. The truth, as I’d learn, was also the Trump way: a mix of the nefarious and the ignorant. Donald had no idea what he was getting into and he might try to screw us …”
Fischer handed her a thick contract: “‘Memorize it. Write down everything that happens on this job and make sure it is covered in the contract and that you have put in a price for it. Cover your ass. The son of a bitch’ — meaning Trump — ‘is going to sue us for sure.’ This was my introduction to Donald Trump: the guy who was going to sue his own contractor.”
The other thing to remember is that unlike politics where rhetoric so often overshadows reality, construction demands precision. Barbara Res, concerned only with turning a decaying Commodore Hotel into a new, highly functioning Grand Hyatt, quickly began to come up against the very real flaws of Donald Trump:
“Donald often behaved in a friendly manner with the tradesmen on the job, stopping to say hello, seeking praise on the building. But it didn’t take me long to learn what he really thought of his workers; he just knew enough to hide his contempt. Trump was well aware of the public relations benefit of being liked by ‘the common man,’ and he exploited it, a behavior he continues to this day …”
For four years we’ve watched as bravado replaced competence, how dedicated public servants were replaced by sycophants, and watched as Donald Trump talked a far better game than he played. Whether it was the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accord, his decision to quit the World Health Organization, to abandon our Kurdish allies, his inability to fully understand the science of pandemics, it was clear so many times he was in over his head. Barbara Res shows us this was just the same as it ever was:
“Donald. Trump didn’t know much about construction (he once said only a masochist could enjoy it) and even less about renovation. What he did know, which he had learned from his father, was how to run a real estate operation, building low- and mid-rise apartment complexes, collecting rent, and cultivating powerful politicians — the skills that had made Fred’s fortune. He also learned from his father how to cut corners, cheat contractors, and mistreat workers — skills that Donald would perfect …
“In his ignorance, Trump thought that by keeping as many of the existing elements in the building as possible, he could save a lot of money. But that’s not how renovation works. Selecting what can and should be saved takes thought, experience, and skill. Trying to save things that should be removed results in increasing the overall costs.
“The Commodore was a dilapidated hotel fitted with out-of-date equipment and piping, ductwork, and fittings that could not be reused in their current condition … Keeping the old equipment, and having to work and reroute around them, was a pain in the ass and cost a fortune. Despite Trump’s demands, we tried to avoid this because the end result would be rebuilt crap squeezed into spaces where maintenance would be extremely difficult. In the instances where we kept fans and other machinery, such as on the roof, it cost so much money to work around them that it would have been cheaper to just demolish everything …
“The Grand Hyatt construction work ended up costing more than twice the original budget, and I’d estimate around 30 percent of those cost overruns were directly related to Trump’s not knowing what he was doing. No one would explain that a complete gut of the building would have been cheaper and faster. The architects were afraid to challenge him, and the general contractor, HRH, mostly went along, spending its energy on making sure HRH got paid, one of the tasks for which I was responsible.”
It was when she was appointed to replace the incompetent mechanical super that Trump began to appreciate her. The mechanical super coordinates work done by the mechanical tradespeople like the electrician, steamfitter, plumber, sprinkler expert, etc. Seeing how well she performed for HRH, Trump later hired her.
Stop for a moment and think about how Donald Trump obliterated so many of the traditions and customs of our politics: the separation of powers, respect for those who fought and died for our country, ignoring the grudging acceptance of the role of the free press, a public appreciation of our allies, etc. Now take a second look at what Barbara Res has told us about the talents Trump the developer lacked: “Selecting what can and should be saved takes thought, experience, and skill.”
“I was thirty years old when Donald J. Trump hired me to head construction on the building that would define him, Trump Tower. Every payment, contract, hire, question, issue, and problem with the building went through me. When I started in 1980 as a vice president at the Trump Organization, I was one of only four executives. I reported to Trump and worked for him for eighteen years in similar capacities, making deals, talking to the press on his behalf, acquiring permits on development projects, representing him before agencies and legislative bodies, and managing litigation on his projects. Throughout my years with Trump, I was a close and trusted adviser, one of the few people whom Donald listened to.”
Res notes that there are those who worked longer with Donald Trump, or far more recently, but many of those have remained silent, concerned with their privacy, afraid of their former boss’ wrath, while she finally quit on her own, never received severance, and more importantly never signed a nondisclosure agreement — a rarity, she reminds us, for those who participated in Trumpworld.
Unlike many of those who later moved into Donald Trump’s orbit, Barbara Res played a continuing fundamental, critical role in the organization. Unlike many of them who quickly earned his wrath, Donald Trump realized how much he needed her. Meanwhile, she watched as reality was replaced with an ever-increasing Apprentice-like mythology. All the more reason to share her insights:
“As someone who knew Donald very well, I am familiar with what really happened, as opposed to the illusion he has worked so hard to create. Over time, I saw past the public persona and into the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that he carefully hid. Ironically, these things are now part of his brand.” (Emphasis added.)
And because she once cared about the man, she tries to maintain a balanced view: “In print, online, and on cable news, I’ve offered whatever insight that I can into the character of the man I worked with for eighteen years. I don’t believe what he says, but I also don’t go out there to mindlessly attack him, as many are paid to or love to do.”
There are so many who only know the Donald Trump of “when you’re a star, you can grab ’em,” the Muslim ban, separating children from the families, dissing John McCain and Gold Star families, but there was a Donald Trump before there was a President Trump and Barbara Res offers a unique perspective into how that transformation occurred and what she thinks it means:
“In the beginning Donald was glamorous and brash, even handsome. Sure, he was a showman, but he also had charm and moments of humanity, especially with some of us who worked closely with him. I saw him bully people below him and make idle threats, but what New York boss didn’t — especially in the construction world?”
Res continues: “The press is looking for any insight into the character of our forty-fifth president — a man adored by many, reviled by many more, perplexing to just about everyone. But I see the method behind it all. The man I knew so well and worked with for almost twenty years, who gave me a break in construction at a time when women were not given such breaks, my once narcissistic but ultimately human boss is now just a hate-filled and amoral person. And he has been this way for some time …”
Here are stories many of those who have come to despise the man may not even believe actually happened.
“Back when we were still in the Crown Building, in the wintertime, one of the women who worked in our office wore a beautiful dark brown mink coat, which we all admired. Around Christmas one year she told us she was selling it … Donald was not in the office at the time, and all the women in the office were trying on the coat, just for fun, and so I did as well. And while I was strutting down the corridor in the mink, Trump walked in. The minute he appeared, everyone quickly scurried back to their desks — except me.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. I was standing alone. “Myrna is selling her mink coat,” I said.
‘What do you think?’ He took a beat and looked at it. ‘Do you like it?’ ‘Sure,’ I said.
“He thought about it. ‘How much?’ he asked. ‘A thousand dollars.’ ‘Buy it,’ Donald said. ‘I’ll pay for it.’ And sure enough, he did. I wore that coat for years and loved it. Then I remodeled it into a shorter jacket I paired with jeans until everyone stopped wearing furs. Though I never wore it again, I still have the jacket squirreled away in a corner of my closet, not wanting to get rid of it. Maybe for sentimental reasons.
“In the old days Donald would have these moments of humanity, which stand out now because they seem so rare. He always welcomed visitors I brought to meet him: my father, my high school chemistry teacher, my cousin. He’d give them his time and attention, if briefly, and it meant a lot to them and me. Most touchingly, Donald actually came to the funeral home when my brother died …
“During the four years when I was in charge of construction for Trump Tower, I practically lived with him. I was in contact with him multiple times a day, either on the phone, on-site, or in his office … the office remained remarkably similar throughout the years; the only thing that changed was the number of framed awards and magazine covers of himself on the wall and the personally autographed sports memorabilia arranged on a table by the window. Again, things that reflected back onto his greatness.
“In those days there was a handful of people he trusted, including me. He was demanding and sometimes nasty, but I dealt with it. I was a woman in a ‘man’s world.’ And I put up with far worse than Donald’s occasional eruptions …”
You can learn an awful lot about people when you watch as they deal with others — whether they’re gracious and willing to listen and whether they’re respectful. This is what Barbara Res quickly learned about Donald Trump:
“On the Hyatt, Trump had only a staff of three. His representative, Ernie, was an older man who may have been a holdover from Fred’s team. He was a competent and knowledgeable guy, but Trump was merciless with him. If there was a change Trump had to pay for, he would blame Ernie or his assistant for not telling him, even though they almost always had. ‘Just call me directly,’ he’d tell Ralph, the architect. ‘Don’t talk to these jerks,’ he’d say, referring to his own people … Throughout the project, I observed Donald whack away at Ernie’s confidence, cutting him off in meetings, making him so hesitant to speak that he would hardly speak at all. Ernie became terrified of making a move on his own, which defeats the whole purpose of having an owner’s rep. These meetings were my first exposure to Donald’s way of exploiting people’s weaknesses. Like a dog who could sense fear, Trump looked for weakness; and if he caught a whiff of it, he would pounce …
“I would watch Trump closely at these meetings, and I could see he had a habit of intimidating people. Of course, he didn’t want to spend extra money, but he usually just sniffed out the weakest player so he could attack with impunity. He was more interested in the personalities, the dynamics at play, than the details of the work itself. Just as he attacked weak people, he was drawn to those who didn’t take shit. And I didn’t take any shit. He noticed how I freely spoke to people — below me, at my level, above me. To me, showing respect didn’t necessarily mean being quiet …”
Barbara Res tells us that, time and again, Donald Trump would criticize her for being too kind and caring: “‘There you go again, Barbara,’ Donald said. ‘That’s your problem: You care too much about being liked.’ If being a ‘killer,’ as his father had taught him, was the ultimate praise from Donald, then this was the ultimate criticism.
“‘You know what’s wrong with you, Barbara?’ Trump said to me close to the completion of Trump Tower. ‘You want people to like you.’”
“‘Yeah,’ I said to him, ‘I do. You know why? How the hell do you think we got this place opened in time?’”
“Through the years, we would have this argument many times. Trump Tower would never have been finished as quickly as it was if the workers had hated me. You cannot get that kind of dedication and sacrifice from people who don’t like and respect their leader. We had planned to have Trump Tower’s grand opening party on Valentine’s Day, 1983. Three days earlier, the building was not even close to being ready and we got hit with one of the worst snowstorms to ever hit New York. It seemed impossible, but we got it done.
“‘How did that happen, Donald?’ I asked. ‘You think it was magic? No, it was because people liked me and respected me.’ They were willing to work around the clock, make runs to New Jersey to buy carpeting, carry racks of clothing through the streets, do each other’s work without union shutdowns, stay in the city and work through the weekend. Everyone on the job pulled together. That’s how far ‘like’ goes on a job, but Trump never got it. He still doesn’t get it. He thinks it’s all about fear …”
Of course, Donald Trump’s habitual bullying and lack of respect prefigured what happened to an extraordinary list of the men and women who served in the Trump administration: from Priebus to Kelly to Mattis to Mulvaney to Nielsen to Bannon, Bolton and McMaster and on and on …
Barbara Res moved on after the completion of Trump Tower, then returned to the company three years later. It seemed clear to her that Donald had changed for the worse: “When we worked together on Trump Tower in the early 1980s, Donald and I both came to work early and walked to meetings together. Though he never treated anyone as an equal, there was a deference and basic respect in the way he communicated with many people … Now he was a different Donald. He didn’t make a move without a bodyguard. People recognized him on the street — though not as much as he claimed — and the attention went to his head.
“Whereas he once hired only the best at what they did, now he was bringing some people in who were not of the highest caliber. They were simply yes-men … His regard for himself had increased exponentially, as had his contempt for women. His sexism never extended to me, but it did to many others — including his wife Ivana, whom he would publicly belittle — and I came to see that I was the exception rather than the rule. His running commentary about women’s bodies, faces, and interest in him became a regular conversation topic, even in business settings. This was a new Trump and also a new Trump Organization, more spread out (he would buy an airline, a helicopter, a yacht, and a football team, and had launched his Atlantic City empire, among other things) with more glitz, money, egos, and fancy parties, and a different work ethic …”
Res tells us that even though he lived in Trump Tower he didn’t make it downstairs to the office until eleven in the morning. Then she witnessed his affair with Marla Maples and the humiliation of Ivana: “his face was on the cover of tabloids all over the country and his name was on many people’s lips. The constant attention further cemented this version of Donald. He got to see himself reflected in the public’s eye, and though much of the attention was negative, he liked that people were talking about him. So he began to seek out the attention more and more, chasing it like an addiction. I could see how his behavior was destructive to others, to his own interests, to himself.
“I watched him nurture his worst tendencies — his intolerance, his abusiveness, his dishonesty, his self-aggrandizement — and I watched as those who might speak up to him fell by the wayside. The yes-men, the inattentiveness, the taking people for granted, all became more common, while the lying and cheating accelerated. Not only did he get away with it, but he saw it as the reason for his success, so he kept doing it.”
At several points Donald Trump fantasized about running for president, convinced he could do the job better than anyone else. When Res analyzed her experience building with Trump and contemplated that improbable reality, she became convinced the presidency required skills he didn’t possess:
“When I put more thought into it, of course, I realized this would never work. A U.S. president has to know how the government works, commit to following the Constitution, and be willing to stand as its preeminent defender. He has to put the people’s needs and interests before his own. His schedule is packed and dictated by others, and there is no money to be made on the job (or back then, we couldn’t conceive that someone would try). The chief executive of the country is restrained by a million little civic norms and day-to-day functions that would drive Donald up the wall. He had been his own boss forever, didn’t have to report to anyone, and regularly took time off to play golf or watch TV while leaving others to run things, which at the time seemed impossible for a president to do. No, forget it, I realized, Trump couldn’t handle that. I joined the others, laughing at how preposterous it was to picture our boss in the Oval Office. That was 1987 …
“So toward the end of Obama’s presidency, in 2015, when Donald announced he would run for the Republican nomination, I assumed it was a stunt. As he grandiosely descended the escalators in the Trump Tower atrium that I helped build, it certainly had the look and feel of one.
“I’m also sure Donald didn’t think he would win. He just wanted to prove to the world how smart and successful he was, maybe use the platform to bring attention to himself and feed his ego, which is always his endgame. But Trump’s race-baiting found an audience, the Republican Party revealed itself to be spineless and fell into line behind him, and other factors helped get him elected. Among these were his own name recognition, FBI Director James Comey’s focus on meaningless emails, and Russian interference on Trump’s behalf. It made the unthinkable a reality. So here we are.
“I admit that I first gave Trump a chance, hoping that maybe the awesome responsibility of the presidency would change him. I wondered (privately and publicly) if the positive attributes I had seen would return once Donald was put in charge of 320 million people and the most powerful country on Earth. Maybe the quest for money, clout, and attention that motivated him would diminish and some larger sense of duty would arise.
As I write this in the fall of 2020, with a global pandemic still raging and with an unprepared president instigating chaos, spreading misinformation, and sowing division, I realize how deluded I was. The presidency didn’t change him; he changed it. He didn’t rise to the office; he brought it down to his level.” (Emphasis added.)
Apart from the always-shrewd insights she has to offer about our soon-to-be ex-president, she has much to say about the personal challenges she faced as a competent woman in the almost completely male-dominant world of construction: “I’d get harassed anytime the doors closed on the elevator, asked out during lunch by men who knew I was married, accused of sleeping with the boss to get my position, and forced to listen to open discussions about my body. I can’t say I was ever able to entirely look the other way — it was too painful — but, in my own way, I got used to it.
“When I first started in construction, I was called every variation of ‘bitch,’ ‘ballbuster,’ ‘man-hater,’ ‘dyke,’ and ‘cunt.’ Each job was the very essence of a hostile work environment, but in the 1970s you’d have been laughed off a site for suggesting something like that … Knowing that complaining would get me nowhere — or worse, just reinforce what the men already thought about women’s backbones — I internalized a lot of the abuse. It took many years for me to realize that none of it was my fault, that I had done nothing to bring it upon myself. To this day I speak to women, primarily in the construction industry, about how to navigate the kind of sexism that was rampant way back when and still exists today.”
And so there is much to learn here about the misuse of power and, in the case of Donald Trump, how often the toxic cocktail of arrogance and disrespect proves to be self-defeating. Time and again Donald Trump turned those he needed against him, and allowed his inflated sense of his own capacities to sabotage the very work he was doing.
And with the election of Kamala Harris, our first female vice president of color, this is the perfect time to acknowledge the accomplishments of Barbara Res, who transcended rampant bias to win the respect of her workers and to build Donald Trump’s Tower.
There’s a reason Barbara Res calls her book “Tower of Lies.”
“For a short time, Donald did manage to make Trump Tower the most important building in the world. It was on the cover of Paris Vogue, was featured in countless U.S. and European newspapers and magazines, and immediately became a tourist attraction.”
But Barbara Res knows the truth about the building and the builder:
“Though Donald claims it’s a sixty-eight-story building, Trump Tower is fifty-eight stories tall … 664 feet tall. He called the five retail floors and the basement ‘concourses’ and relabeled the first office floor, which was actually the sixth floor, the fourteenth.”
Eighteen years of working with Donald Trump taught her about the great gap between fact and fiction. Donald Trump used Trump Tower as the backdrop for his presidential campaign, the trip down the escalator with Melania he refers to so very often. But that too, as we learn, was just another mythological moment:
“The Trump Tower atrium wasn’t really filled with an adoring crowd that June 2015 day he announced his run for the presidency. Trump hired a company that took out a casting notice and paid actors fifty bucks to be there and act excited. It’s a big atrium, sure, but in a city of 8 million people, they couldn’t find enough people who wanted to be there? The choreographed escalator entrance, the rapturous crowd, it was all for show. It laid the groundwork for what his campaign and eventually his presidency would become. From day one, he would try to present a fake reality, claiming he had a bigger crowd at his inauguration than President Obama, though the pictures said otherwise. He sells the myth, not the reality.”
There is no end to the lies that Donald Trump has told the world; so many more than the Washington Post imagined when it first decided to award Pinocchios for each mistruth. But for Barbara Res the engineer and builder, one stands out — the reality that, despite his claims, Donald Trump doesn’t build:
“Trump is a licenser, not a developer anymore, and according to one investigation into his finances, ‘he doesn’t own nearly 40 percent of the 62 buildings that bear his name.’ He puts his name on other people’s work, charges them to use it, and takes a cut from what they earn. But he knows that’s not as impressive sounding, so he tells a different story …”
Seventy-four million of us have had enough of Donald Trump. He offered us his bluster, his self-absorption, his contempt, his meanness behind an orange mask. He betrayed our idea of America, our desire to believe we were a special people, a welcoming nation. At this time so many of us don’t really care what becomes of him. We never knew the man Barbara Res knew:
“Trump Tower made Donald a celebrity. It was the big bang that led to everything else, his first real taste of publicity and fame, and he absolutely became obsessed with it. I honestly believe it was the beginning of the end of the person I once knew. But I still mourn that man, the one who had his moments.”
“Tower of Lies” has much to teach us.
