How Trump Learned to Lie and Twist Truth: Author

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonathan Mahler, author of 'The Gods of New York', joins Joanna Coles to explore Donald Trump’s tabloid-fueled rise in the 1980s. From his feud with the Koch brothers over Wollman Rink to the Marla Maples scandal in Aspen and his explosive Central Park Five ad, Mahler reveals how Trump mastered gossip and scandal to build a myth that would carry him into politics. They trace how Trump’s obsession with media attention turned Page Six into his personal stage. And they uncover how the tabloid era’s culture wars laid the foundation for Trump’s future in the White House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Donald Trump recognized that he could use the tabloids to kind of elevate himself and to demonize his enemies and to polarize the city's kind of cultural and political life.
0:12.6	I'm Joanna Coles and this is the Daily Beast podcast. Thank you for all your comments on our new spin-off podcast inside Trump's Head.
0:22.5	If you haven't subscribed for it yet, please do.
0:25.9	It's where Michael Wolf and I go deep, deep into the strange crevices and the potholes of Trump's head to explore what an earth he's going to do next.
0:36.3	And today we have a special treat for you because we're going to be examining the primordial
0:41.4	ooze from which Donald Trump emerged in the 1980s with the author Jonathan Marla,
0:48.7	who's come up with this new book, The Gods of New York.
0:51.3	Now, it's a little bit much to say that Donald Trump is a god,
0:54.7	but don't let us forget that gods can be vengeful, they can be vindictive, they can be
1:00.3	peculiar, but they are powerful. So we're going to get into it with no time to waste. And don't
1:06.0	forget, share this podcast with your friends. Leave us a comment on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe
1:11.9	to The Daily Beast, where we cover this particular god of New York with extreme attention
1:18.8	to detail. So Jonathan Mahler is in the studio. Congratulations on the gods of New York. Super exciting. And of course,
1:30.3	one of those gods was Donald Trump. Please explain from whence he came. Yeah. There's there's
1:37.3	sort of, I think, a kind of a conventional misunderstanding of where Trump came from. I think
1:42.6	people think of the apprentice as being the
1:45.3	beginning of Donald Trump, the kind of origin story of Donald Trump. The apprentice,
1:49.3	the Mark Burnett season. Exactly. Seasons. Twelve seasons. Take your pick. Yes. Any season.
1:55.2	That he was a kind of a product of reality TV. I would say no. He was a product of 1980s New York, and in particular, the
2:03.2	tabloid culture of 1980s New York. That is where Donald Trump learned to capture and hold the
2:08.8	public attention. That is where he learned that publicity was power, that by capturing the public's
2:14.1	attention, he could wield power. And that's where he learned that
	...

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