Brenner writes about Trump's economic condition at the time of his 44th birthday, which he celebrated with a party in Atlantic City:
Hundreds of casino employees had been told to be on the Boardwalk to greet him, since Manhattan boosters were in short supply. The day before, he had defaulted on $73 million owed to bondholders and bankers.
... Within days, the bankers agreed to give Trump $65 million to pay his bills. Much of his empire would probably have to be dismantled, but he would retain control. His personal allowance would now be $450,000 a month. “I can live with that,” Trump said. “ ...“This is a great victory. It’s a great agreement for everybody,” he said.
Not exactly. Trump’s bankers were said to be so upset at Trump’s balance sheet— he was reportedly over half a billion dollars in the hole—that they demanded he sign over his future trust inheritance to secure the new loans. Trump’s father, who had created him by helping him achieve his first deals, now seemed to be rescuing him again. “Total bullsh*t,” Trump told me. “I have been given five years by the banks. The banks would never have asked me for my future inheritance, and I would never have given it.”
The last incident in the article takes place at the federal courthouse the day Trump testified as a defendant in a civil case against him and his contractor for hiring undocumented Polish workers and paying them peanuts.
Along with his contractor, Trump had been accused of hiring scores of illegal Polish aliens to do the demolition work on the Trump Tower site. “The Polish brigade,” as they came to be called, had been astonishingly exploited on the job, earning four dollars an hour for work that usually paid five times that.
...Trump had said that he knew nothing about the demolitions, that his contractor had been “a disaster.” Yet one F.B.I. informant testified that he had warned Trump of the presence of the Polish brigade and had told him that if he didn’t get rid of them his casino license might not be granted.
Brenner muses:
I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump. ....Trump became more than a vulgarian. .... Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished.
Brenner ends the article quite presciently, with an account of her visit to the press room at the courthouse after his testimony (he had already gone.) Keep in mind this was published in Vanity Fair in September, 1990.
I wandered down to the pressroom on the fifth floor to hear about Trump’s testimony. The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. “Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullsh*t! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”
But read the whole thing. It covers his life, his family history, his marriages and children, with more than a few outrageous moments. For example, Brenner describes a dinner party Trump and Ivana attended a few months before their split. He kept telling all the guests he had been on Larry King Live that day. He had told King on the air King had bad breath.
He had been belligerent to King that night, and he wanted the guests to see him, perhaps to confirm his powers. “Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad—it really is,” he had told Larry King on national TV.
Then there's Ivana. Despite being described by her lawyer as having Stockholm syndrome from Donald, it's hard not to laugh at loud at this:
Soon after Trump Tower was completed, the Trumps took possession of their triplex. Ivana’s lawyers often talk about her love of the domestic arts and describe her homemade jams and jellies. Yet the kitchen of her city apartment, which she designed, is tiny, no more than a kitchenette, tiled with gold linoleum. “The children’s wing has a kitchen, and that is where the nanny cooks,” a friend said. The Trump living room has a beige onyx floor with holes carved out to fit the carpets. There is a waterfall cascading down a marble wall, an Italianate fountain, and the famous murals. Their bedroom had a glass wall filled with arrangements of silk flowers. After a time, Ivana tired of the décor. She called in a renowned decorator. “What can I do with this interior?” she reportedly asked him. “Absolutely nothing,” he said.
In 2015, Vanity Fair followed up with these 7 "takeaways" from Brenner's article.
More prescience: Richard Cohen's article in the Washington Post in 2011, iThe Comeback Huckster, about Trump's potential presidential bid, recalling Brenner's Vanity Fair article:
In 1990, Trump was mired in debt. Some of his important real estate ventures were under water and his marriage was coming apart. He was carrying on a very public extramarital affair with Marla Maples, whom he later married and still later divorced. The Vanity Fair article, punctiliously reported over a period of months by Marie Brenner, captured Trump in all his flamboyant egocentrism. He refers to himself often in the third person (”Trump says . . . Trump believes”).
He is bombastic, sometimes cruel, utterly domineering and not in the least bit fastidious about the truth. He exaggerates his exaggerations, which is an occupational failing in the real estate business, where every building is 100 percent rented and all basements are dry.
And yet, like Melville’s whale or Spielberg’s shark, he keeps coming, coming, coming. His TV show thrives. His real estate empire survives. In this city, I look out my hotel window as I write this column. Before me is a huge box of bling. The desert sun enflames the name at the top: “T-R-U-M-P” in bold gold letters. It spells BEWARE!
