HASH MASTER:

Mere months into Trump's time as the owner of an airline--the purchase was finalized that June--Nobles already had concerns. Trump had overpaid with more than $400 million of borrowed money, he seemed most interested in cosmetic touches like the size of the "T" on the tails of the planes, and the debt service quickly became crippling. Once, Trump suggested cutting costs by flying with two pilots, not three, and Nobles had to tell him that would be illegal.

Trump's appetite was greater than his ability to manage what he had acquired. Last week on the phone, as Trump passed the one-month mark in the White House and prepared for tonight's speech before a joint session of Congress, Nobles told me that what he sees now is what he saw then. "His behavior to date," he said, "is consistent with the behavior I saw 30 years ago." [...]

"I don't think there's anything of scale that he's had his hands on that he hasn't made a hash of," biographer Tim O'Brien said in an interview last week.

"Ramping up," fellow biographer Gwenda Blair added, her tone dry, "is something he's maybe not so good at."

"When we worked together," Nobles said, "he had three c[*****]s in Atlantic City and he had the shuttle, and all four companies had their own operating systems, and I went to him and said, 'Why don't we combine these things?' And he said, 'No. I want those guys competing against each other. I think it will make all of them stronger.' Any normal businessman I know would have said, 'Let's take advantage of the economies of scale here.' He didn't think like that."

And as the '80s flipped to the '90s, the consequences of Trump's unorthodox decisions were clear. "All those businesses are gone, of course," Nobles said, "because they weren't as successful as they could have been--and should have been." [...]

"He's not a great manager," O'Brien said. "He's a performance artist pretending to be a great manager."

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