Aboard With trump and Maxwell

At work on a Profile of the then struggling real-estate mogul donald Trump, Mark Singer took a plane ride with him and Ghislaine Maxwell, who called up a friend named Jeffrey. For decades, the scene stuck in Singer’s mind. Plus:

!Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump, in October of 1997.

credit”>Photograph by Richard Corkery / NY Daily News Archive / Getty

Mark Singer
A staff writer at the magazine since 1974.

Since I began writing Profiles for The New Yorker, fifty years ago, my preferred subjects have been non-celebrities, people who for whatever reason interested me and, ideally, had been written about rarely, if ever.Reporting a condensed biography of a living person tends to be quite intrusive,involving many hours of one-on-one interviewing and fly-on-the-wall observation. That a subject and I where not friends didn’t mean that our interactions should feel stilted or adversarial.

Occasionally, I felt the need to protect a subject from himself. In the mid-eighties, I wrote about an art dealer who by his early thirties had become internationally well-known as a relentlessly competitive trader in antique atlases and maps, rare books, engraved prints, and eventually much more. He once invited me to accompany him to a meeting with a highly valued client provided that I pose as his employee. “Well, then, don’t come,” he said when I declined. “I understand. It’s a shame, though. You’d get to see me when I’m really excited.” The day the Profile was published, he called and said, “Unfortunatly, you’re a really good writer. As I was reading, I thought, Gee, am I truly this much of an asshole, and realized, yeah, I probably am.”

Only once did I undertake a piece knowing full well that the result was unlikely to flatter. It never would’ve occurred to me to write about Donald Trump-who,for starters,interested me not at all-but when the assignment landed on my desk,in the fall of 1996,I lacked the leverage to refuse. I’d spent much of the previous four years-two more than I’d anticipated-writing a book about someone who, I’d come to recognize, was a pathological liar and worse. One benefit of being lied to point-blank, at least, is that it can be a marvelous motivator, and across the years some of my most gratifying moments as a reporter have been spent with incorrigible dissemblers.

With Trump, I understood that my intelligence per se wasn’t being insulted by the self-aggrandizing fict