Five hours of taped interviews used for a biography of Donald Trump by reporter Michael D'Antonio show the GOP nominee as fixated on his celebrity – and fearful of losing it, according to The New York Times.
The Times, which posted clips Tuesday – and is using them in its podcast "The Run-Up" – says the interviews also reveal that Trump can't imagine being a loser.
"I never had a failure, because I always turned a failure into a success," Trump says in one of the interviews with D'Antonio's, whose book, "The Truth About Trump," came out last May.
D'Antonio gave transcripts of the interviews to Hillary Clinton's campaign this year, but never heard back from her staff, the Times reported. He handed over original audio and transcripts to the Times over the past few weeks, the newspaper reported.
Trump called the recordings "pretty old and pretty boring stuff. Hope people enjoy it," the Times reported.
According to the Times, the tapes show that Trump:
- Considered Arsenio Hall as forgotten and ungrateful for his time on "The Celebrity Apprentice," which he won in 2012.
"Dead as a doornail," Trump said of Hall. "Dead as dog meat. Couldn't
get on television. They wouldn't even take his phone call."
- Was scornful of an unnamed bank president who got drunk at the swanky Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York and had to be carried out.
"And I never looked at him the same way after that," Trump says on the tape, adding: I'll never forget that in front of a room of the most important people, we had to carry him out of the room. And so things like that had an impact on me.
- Doesn't tolerate being made a fool of, according to ex-wife Ivana Trump, who recalled a Colorado vacation on which she didn't warn her then-boyfriend about what a good skier she was.
"So he goes and stops, and he says, 'Come on, baby. Come on, baby'," she said of Trump skiing down a hill before her. "I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. ... He could not take it. He could not take it."
"I was a very rebellious kind of person. I don't like to talk about it, actually. But I was a very rebellious person and very set in my ways," he says on the tape. "I loved to fight. I always loved to fight. … all kinds of fights, physical ... Any kind of fight, I loved it…"
"And I said, 'I love it,'" he recalls in the interview about seeing his name in a newspaper the first time, when he was a high school baseball player.
" I loved it. It was the first time I was ever in a newspaper. I was a young kid, right? I was probably a sophomore in high school. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I thought it was amazing. … It felt good."
"Well, most people aren't in print, though," he added when the interviewer suggested anybody would be excited by seeing their name in print. "Don't forget. How many people are in print? Nobody's in print."
When he was a businessman, Trump even hired a service to compile all the media mentions of him, the Times reported.
"It's always been that way," he said, recalling the feeling of walking into a giant room and watching as the crowd surrounded him, adding it never unnerved him. "I think what would unnerve me is if it didn't happen."