Donald Trump Really Doesn't Want Me to Tell You This, But...

By Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

13 December 15

spent a long, awkward weekend with Donald Trump in November 1996, an experience I feel confident neither of us would like to repeat.

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.

He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.

I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.

“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the time, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

Here's What You Need to Know About the New Paris Climate Agreement

By Ben Adler, Grist

13 December 15

he Paris Agreement to address climate change, adopted on Saturday, will be remembered as a big step forward and at the same time a frustrating set of compromises and omissions.

The COP21 conference brought every country to the table, they all accepted the science of climate change, and they agreed to work together to do something about it. But some proved more ambitious than others, and the rich countries didn’t come up with enough money to get the best deal possible.

The bottom line is that the agreement gets us far closer to containing climate change than we were two weeks ago, but still far short of where we need to go. In fact, we won’t even know for years what it will accomplish. How much the agreement reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and through that reduces warming, will depend on whether countries meet their targets for curbing emissions and deploying renewable energy and whether they ramp up their ambition in the years ahead. In terms of climate justice, there is even less to cheer. Rich countries like the U.S., Canada, and the European Union upped their pledges for climate finance slightly, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the hugely outsized share of the global carbon budget they have devoured.

Still, the Paris Agreement builds the architecture for greater progress in the next decade. Here is your guide to the basics of what the deal does, what it contains, and what it doesn’t:

So what does it do?

The Paris Agreement commits 196 countries to work together to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a stretch goal of keeping below 1.5 C. It also calls for stopping the rise of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.

Before the Paris conference began, each country submitted an action pledge, known as an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), laying out what it will do to curb emissions, increase renewable energy, and/or reduce deforestation. The pledges vary wildly. And there are two very, very big loopholes: The INDC commitments are voluntary, which means there is no penalty for failing to meet them. And even if they are met, they will not put the world on a path to less than 2 C of warming. Under the most optimistic assumptions, the INDCs still set us on a path to 2.7 to 3.5 C of warming. That’s why climate experts like Joe Romm of Think Progress say they are merely buying us more time to take real action. But that’s better than just heading straight off the cliff.

The good news is that the agreement includes a process for strengthening INDCs. In 2018, countries will take stock of their progress on meeting their pledges, and by 2020 they will have to produce new INDCs. They could simply restate the same goals, but the hope is that they will go further as the problem grows more urgent, the political movement for climate action becomes more powerful, and clean technology gets cheaper and more widespread. President Obama, who worked hard for success in Paris, argues that countries will find — as the U.S. has since he took office — that once you start down the path of expanding renewable energy, it’s easier than expected. That’s why the U.S. and its allies in the negotiations made this their top request.

The Paris Agreement is not a treaty, and countries’ INDCs are not binding. (The Obama administration made sure of this so it wouldn’t have to submit the deal to the U.S. Senate for approval.) Still, the deal contains some binding elements, such as requiring countries to participate in a system for measuring their progress on achieving their goals.

What made it into the deal?

• Everyone is involved. Previous agreements put all the responsibility for reducing emissions on rich countries. In the Paris Agreement, all 196 signatories agreed that every country must take action, while acknowledging that richer countries should start immediately and cut emissions more steeply, while poorer countries’ contributions will depend on their individual situations.

• A “ratchet mechanism.” This is the technical term for the agreement to submit new pledges by 2020. It’s the most important victory within the agreement, as many large developing nations, like India and Indonesia, were reluctant to agree to a system that would pressure them to up their ambition within the next decade. Most INDCs set goals through 2030, but if we don’t improve upon them, it will be impossible to stay below 1.5 C and almost impossible to stay below 2 C. The ratchet mechanism requires countries to return to the table in 2020 and spell out their plans for 2025 to 2030. This creates the opportunity for the world to potentially put itself on a course to stay below 2 C, but we won’t know the outcome until 2020 and beyond.

• Small increases in climate finance, including adaptation aid. It was clear from the first day of the conference, as heads of state spoke, that for many developing countries experiencing the effects of climate change, increased aid for adaptation was a top priority. Thus far, most climate finance has been for reducing emissions. And, overall, rich nations have fallen far short of the 2009 goal of providing $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020. Developed countries — the most generous being Germany, France, the U.K., and the European Union as a whole — made new pledges of several billion dollars each while in Paris. That mostly isn’t earmarked specifically for adaptation, but some of it is. And Secretary of State John Kerry, in an effort to give the negotiations a boost and show developing nations that the U.S. is listening to their concerns, announced on Wednesday that the U.S. would double its adaptation aid from $400 billion to $800 billion over five years. That may have helped get a final agreement, but it’s still a pittance in the context of the U.S. economy, its budget, and its massive historical climate debt.

• Richer developing countries have started contributing to climate finance. Under the original U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a specific set of developed nations — those who were rich in 1992, when it was first negotiated — were given the general responsibility of paying for climate change mitigation and everyone else was exempted. But some countries left out, like China, Singapore, and South Korea, have enjoyed dramatic economic growth since then. Others, such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, are fabulously wealthy and the worst carbon emitters per capita. Meanwhile, we’ve seen economic collapse and a consequent drop in emissions in former Soviet states in Eastern Europe. It’s silly to say they must pay but richer countries in the Middle East and Asia shouldn’t. At COP21, richer developing nations, in particular China, refused to accept formal responsibility to contribute, but they agreed to do it on a voluntary basis. In fact, China committed $3.1 billion to climate finance between now and 2020, slightly more than the U.S.’s commitment of $3 billion.

• Loss and damage, sort of. When developed countries pledged in 2009 to come up with $100 billion annually in climate finance by 2020, they had two purposes in mind: reducing and preventing emissions, and preparing for the effects of existing and inevitable warming. But as the devastating effects of rising seas and extreme weather have become more visible, developing countries have demanded a third form of assistance: “loss and damage.” They and their allies in global aid and environmental organizations pushed hard in Paris for a separate section of the agreement dealing with loss and damage. They got one, but it did not put rich countries on the hook for past or future climate change-related destruction in poorer countries. In fact, it explicitly states the opposite, saying, “the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.” (The liability argument would be that countries that have grown rich from burning fossil fuels are legally responsible for the effects of climate change.) Instead it merely directs a task force to “develop recommendations for integrated approaches to avert, minimize and address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change.”

• Ambitious abstract goals. As the Copenhagen Accord did in 2009, the Paris Agreement includes the goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees C. But at the behest of the most vulnerable countries, such as the small island states, it also goes further, calling for efforts to stay below 1.5 C. It even requests that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produce a report on how we could stay below 1.5 C. But this is all merely theoretical at this point, since the INDCs aren’t substantial enough to meet either of those goals.

What got left out of the deal?

• Keep it in the ground. The movement to stop fossil fuel extraction has grown dramatically recently, especially in the U.S. It is transforming climate politics, and yet it was not reflected in any way in the Paris Agreement. The U.N. approach has been to get countries to offer cuts in emissions and increases in renewable energy deployment, energy efficiency, or carbon sinks, but it has never called for restraining fossil fuel development. It would be satisfied by a country deploying carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to remove the carbon it emits by burning fossil fuels. But environmental, social justice, and human rights activists would not call that adequate (even if CCS technology were widely available and affordable, which it isn’t). Fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and combustion have a host of negative environmental, human rights, and public health impacts aside from  climate change. Perhaps next time activists will persuade countries to include limits on domestic fossil fuel extraction in their INDCs. They certainly will try. But the odds will be stacked against them. “Keep it in the ground” is the rallying cry of some of the least powerful people in the world, like indigenous communities. On the other side are fossil fuel corporations with more money than God. Then again, if divestment campaigns — which got some big new pledges in Paris last week — continue to spread, fossil fuel companies might not be quite so powerful five years from now.

• Indigenous rights. A close cousin to “keep it in the ground” language would be language protecting the rights of communities, in particular indigenous communities, from the effects of fossil fuel extraction. Indigenous activists from all over the world came to Paris to advocate for that, but were unsuccessful. Indigenous rights are mentioned in the preamble, but left out entirely of the operational text.

• Sufficiently ambitious national targets. It’s no surprise that INDCs were weak, since countries announced them long before negotiators arrived in Paris. There had been hope that some countries would strengthen their INDCs as part of negotiations. In particular, there were developing countries that had offered a “conditional” track of higher ambition in exchange for more climate finance. But rich countries didn’t pony up enough money to spur any developing countries onto a faster track to a clean energy economy. Virtually no rich countries are giving anywhere near enough to meet their historical obligations, but the U.S. comes in for particular blame. It is giving less, relative to the size of its economy, than less populous countries such as Canada and many European nations. And congressional Republicans are trying to prevent payment of even the minimal amount of funding the U.S. has pledged.

• Decarbonization. The Paris Agreement calls for the world to “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” In other words, sometime between 2050 and 2100, we should have net-zero carbon emissions. That’s not the same thing as no carbon emissions. It means that we could still be emitting carbon, but that would be balanced by removing carbon from the atmosphere through carbon sinks like forests or through CCS or other yet-to-be-developed technologies. This is theoretically consistent with a 2 C goal, but more hardcore climate hawks wanted a goal of a carbon-free economy by 2050. In other words, they want an end to fossil fuel use entirely, as quickly as possible. But countries that are completely economically reliant on oil or gas extraction would not agree to this language — for example, Saudi Arabia, which was frequently tagged as the most obstructive country at the talks. And countries with powerful fossil fuel corporations wouldn’t get on board with such language either.

For activists all over the world, the Paris Agreement shows there is still hope for maintaining a livable climate, but there’s a lot more work to be done pushing world governments to meet the challenge.