Why I used a Trump-like in my fiction novel -- The Phoenix Year

“Of course,” Von Kleise said. His voice was icy and without compassion, but also was without hate or anger. “Who doesn’t know of Master town and Master City: pleasure palaces for the rich and famous, all with your name alongside faux art and atrocious architecture?” He paused, taking a sip of water, then resumed speaking. His eyes zeroed in on Masters’ eyes, adding to the American’s nervousness. His calm compounded Master’s anger.
“You were driven by an overpowering self-love, an ego that was larger than even New York itself. What a soaring vision you had!  Did you give away any of your large fortune to worthy causes? No;.Rather you simply spent it on yachts, houses, aircraft, things, …not people. In fact, Masters, it was your success in making your name synonymous with wealth and power that made you and your lovely wife perfect candidates for what we had planned.”  

​I revised the Phoenix Year initially when it was redeveloped around mid-1990.  I wanted a man with an infinite ego who put his name on all his properties, who was a womanizer, and whose wives were fixtures of New York tabloid papers.  Part of the multi-factor plot was to collapse through over leveraging his real estate empire as one of the elements to send the stock markets of the world into terminal collapse so shares could be purchased at rock bottom, Depression-era prices, and gold would go to new highs.  

In my book Ben Masters is framed for murder and his wife and daughter carried off to Asia as hostages and sold off as sex slaves, while his partner overleverages his empire priming it for collapse.  But in my book he's a hero, freeing his wife from a Thai brothel only to lose her in Switzerland again.  In the end of the novel he climbs to the top of a major mountain in the Bernese Oberland to free her only to die at the end.  

I used him as a characterature of a self promoter, a man living on the name and the brand, but little did I ever expect him to run for President.  My Ben Masters was far more rational than the Donald Trump now running for President. 

As Heinrich Von Kleise the billionaire at the heart of the plot to remake Capitalism says to my character Ben Masters before he is shot:

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