"He pretty much gave in to whatever they asked for"

“He pretty much gave in to whatever they asked for,” said Res, who was a Trump Organization vice president at the time and involved with the efforts on the Upper West Side. “He was going broke. He really had nothing to bargain with. He caved. And he shouldn’t have—he should have tried. But he lost his nerve.”

She granted: “You know, it’s easy for me to sit here and judge, because it wasn’t my future—it wasn’t my potential bankruptcy. But he hedged his bets. He wasn’t going to take a chance on going bankrupt. I can understand. There was so much at stake for him.”

Looking back, 1990 represents a significant shift in Trump’s approach: There would be no more long-term, multiparty, Commodore-to-Grand Hyatt scenarios. Trump Tower would remain the apex of his deal-making acumen. There were still some good moves—his sale of his majority stake on the Upper West Side to Hong Kong businessmen in 1994 and his bargain-basement acquisition of 40 Wall Street in 1995 proved to be critical money-makers as he clawed his way out of the hole he had created—but Trump’s post-‘90 negotiations increasingly were for comparatively uncomplicated branding and licensing agreements, in which others did the harder legal work while he put his name on labels and made promotional appearances.“ Most of the deals that he did from that point forward,” Latz, the author of The Real Trump Deal, told me, “were relatively straightforward, simple, zero-sum deals.”