37 minute read
The Making of Donald Trump
MAGGIE MAGGIE HABERMAN: HABERMAN: EXPLAINING EXPLAINING TRUMP TRUMP
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has chronicled Donald Trump’s life from his rise in New York City to the White House. She tells The Commonwealth Club what she learned. Excerpted from the October 18, 2022, program “Maggie Haberman: Politics, Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”
MAGGIE HABERMAN, Senior Political Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America
In Conversation with TIM MILLER, Writer-at-large, The Bulwark; Author, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell
TIM MILLER: I couldn’t be more excited to be here today to discuss my very old friend, Maggie Haberman—we’ve been friends for a long time. Maggie Haberman’s book is called Confidence Man, and I’m excited to talk with her about that. She’s coming [via Zoom on the stage screen] from New York, a little ill, a little under the weather. But thank you for sticking with us anyway.
Maggie’s reporting is the reason we know much of what we know about Donald Trump as president. She’s been dogged. She covered him for decades. We won’t say how many. And her coverage has been unparalleled. We want to talk tonight about Confidence Man, a little bit about the news, a little bit about the psychodrama that is our former president.
How in the hell did you write an 1,800 page book while also being the premiere reporter Donald Trump talked to? Talk to us about the process of that and what you hoped to get out of it. MAGGIE HABERMAN: First of all, thank you again, Tim. I’m so thrilled to be doing this with you. The book’s not 1,800 pages, for people who are getting scared out there. It will not break your floor or your tables. But it was a challenge in that I didn’t turn to this project in earnest until after the second impeachment trial and thought I was going to have more time.
But every time I thought that I was going to be able to start focusing on it, something happened. I didn’t anticipate really being able to work on it until after the election, with good reason, right? The election needed to be my focus. But then after that, we had the election-that-never-ended with Donald Trump, and we had this transition where he refused to acknowledge he lost and he did everything he could to try to stay in power. I was reporting daily, sometimes 18 hours a day. So it was a more condensed process than I would have liked. And then over the course of the last year, obviously the news with Donald Trump has not settled down.
So it was bumpy at times. I had a great help in the form of Sasha Issenberg, a wonderful California resident who was a freelance editor on the project, and another dear old friend who I actually met, I think around the same time I met you later. But it was it was tough and not something I would recommend. MILLER: I want to get at some of the curiosity people have about the—I don’t mean this to have a pejorative [implication]—a kind of a symbiotic relationship between reporter and politician, that that’s always the case and certainly the case with you and the subject. Politico [reporter] Michael Kruse did a great profile on you, and he called me to ask me what I thought. One of the questions that he had for me was, “Why do these people talk to Maggie at all? What is your opinion on that?” This did not get included in the story, but I answered why I talked to Maggie, which was Maggie sometimes knew more about my campaigns than I knew about them. And so I would talk to
get information from her.
What’s your answer? Obviously people like to do the psychodrama stuff about Trump, but I don’t think it’s that. What do you think is the real reason why they are participating with you? HABERMAN: A couple of reasons. I think one is he does have this fascination with The New York Times, and he is obsessed with the paper in a way that he just isn’t with any other news outlet. There’s an episode of “The Daily,” The New York Times podcast that ran on I think the very first day of February 2019, which is a conversation between Donald Trump and A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, that took place in the Oval Office, where Trump is literally saying, “I think I’m entitled to a good story from my paper.” If you want to know how Donald Trump actually feels about The New York Times, there’s your answer.
So that’s one thing. The other is I think that people around Trump—there are aspects of this in the campaigns that you and I dealt with each other on, this was just hyper-charged—everybody is suspicious of everybody else. Everybody is at war with everybody else, because that is the climate Donald Trump creates. Because of that, people get concerned that someone is spreading stuff about them or saying things that are untrue about them or maybe things that are true about them, and so I think that adds to people’s desire to talk.
In the first year at the White House, I was encountering a lot of people who had never met Donald Trump before because they were denizens of Washington and were— MILLER: Other reporters, or who— HABERMAN: No, [people] who worked in the White House. These were people who were populating this new West Wing who had never met Donald Trump until he came to D.C. or at some point shortly before that. They were kind of shocked at what they were watching. I won’t identify who or even the context, but one person texted me and said a lot of these people have a problem with the law or understanding the law. And it was pretty jarring. So I think there was a lot of processing going on, and I think that talking to reporters became a part of that process. MILLER: As you got into that White House, having dealt with him since 2011, you knew what you were getting into more than anybody in 2016. You certainly knew after impeachment, too, when you started this book, what you were getting into. Why are you doing this to yourself? HABERMAN: It’s my job. This is the life we have chosen, Tim. This is certainly the life I have chosen.
My job is to cover politics; my job is also to cover government. And my job is my obligation. My newspaper, which had not spent a ton of time imagining what the Donald Trump presidency might look like before Election Day 2016; I felt an obligation to see it through. . . .
There were plenty of moments before December 2001 when I was like, I’m eager to be moving on from the Rudy Giuliani mayoralty. You know, there were many moments during the Bloomberg campaign of that same year where I thought, well, this campaign will be over and we won’t be dealing with these people going forward. That obviously didn’t work out either. So some of this just comes with the territory.
But yeah, this has been a grind. It’s been a grind for every reporter covering it. MILLER: Especially after having spent time reading through all this, and there’s just so much, the thing that I liked so much is that it creates these through-lines from Donald Trump the performer as a real estate man, to Donald Trump the performer as the president.
That, I think, is what made it distinct from the slog of going through all of these other Trump-era books. I think [it] maybe made you look at things in new light, not stuff that you wouldn’t have known already about Donald Trump, but things that made you think about it.
There was one scene that was very early that I want to bring up, which is Trump standing on the sidewalk outside of Trump Tower, just wanting to be recognized; there was something about that scene I wish you’d talk about, because in a lot of ways it speaks to the pathologies that led us to where we are right now, where he still just wants to be recognized. HABERMAN: Yeah, I was a little surprised when I heard about this, and then I checked it out with some other people who knew him then, and they said this is something he would do. He would some mornings leave the Trump Tower residence, which is on 56th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He would turn right and he would go to Fifth Avenue and he would sort of creep closer to the entrance to Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. And he would peer into people’s faces to see if they recognized him. And this is pre-Art of the Deal. This is mid to early 1980s, when he’s becoming famous, but not hugely famous. Some people would recognize him and it would just be this kind of electric charge for
him to get recognized. There is no clearer motive that he had in running for president, then being celebrated and being famous.
He said to me in one of our interviews, in a moment of pretty surprising candor, he started telling this story about “before I did the presidency,” as if it was like a show. Then he was saying that he had been famous and rich, but he had all these friends who were rich but not famous, and they needed his help to get a table at a restaurant. He makes up one of his apocryphal stories about someone calling him for help; it’s identical to a story he’s been telling since 1984, he first told it to Lois Romano at The Washington Post. Then he says, “The question I get asked more often than any other is would I do it again.”
And I said, “What’s the answer?”
He said, “I think the answer is, Yeah, yes; because the way I look at it, I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.” I was really struck that he said it. In fairness, in a later interview, when I asked him what he liked about the presidency, he said getting things done, and he wanted a few accomplishments. But I think his earlier answer was the real one. MILLER: I want to stay in the past a little bit. But just because that’s so relevant to the big question right now, not that you have any secret knowledge of what Donald Trump is going to do going forward, but isn’t that just still the relevant item when assessing Trump the person about what drives him, and when trying to decide what is he going to do in the coming years, whether running for president or not?
Like, isn’t he still the guy that just wants to be recognized on the street corner? Doesn’t that make you think he’ll run again? HABERMAN: It does. I think that there is some id-like impulse that basically just continues to want to get back the most attention that he ever had and which he thinks was taken from him. I also think there’s another component, which is that he actually is acutely aware that he is facing significant legal threats right now from the Justice Department, and he thinks that if he announces for president that he won’t get indicted, which I think is not right. But I think that’s how he’s looking at it. So I think those two combined factors—because one thing, too, that I write about in the book, is how he tries to inoculate himself in investigations, not by doing things that would avoid prosecutors looking at him, but once they are, trying to head off trouble.
And so I think both things are in keeping with the theme. MILLER: That was something that was one of the light bulb moments for me reading through it, just because it was the part of Trump’s background that I didn’t really know as well, as intimately, just the way that he navigated through the prosecutors in New York . . ., trying carrots and sticks, like trying to determine what type of leverage he had. This does seem a piece of that. And probably how he’s looking at the federal investigation. So talk more about how he dealt with some specific examples from that time. HABERMAN: How he dealt with prosecutors was something that I started exploring well before we knew about this documents investigation, which I think is actually the one that presents the greatest threat to him. Certainly these January 6 investigations were going on. But he collects people. He has always collected people. Roy Cohn, his mentor and lawyer, was also somebody who collected people.
But in Trump’s case, he developed these relationships after he first gets investigated in the 1970s by a Brooklyn federal prosecutor who by sheer coincidence, also performed my wedding ceremony. And I did not know that until I started researching this book, because he later became a chief judge in Brooklyn. But at the time, he conducted a six-month investigation very quietly, based off of reporting by Wayne Barrett, who was the muckraking journalist who really paved the way for all of us who have covered Trump and done investigations on Trump, and it didn’t go anywhere.
It was a weak witness. Trump starts bragging to people about surviving this and complaining about what he had endured, but he had met with investigators without a lawyer present and had basically just convinced them of his innocence. This became a template for how he would deal with trouble going forward. He soon a few years later befriends Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan D.A., whose jurisdiction was Trump’s area in Manhattan. Morgenthau represented a certain type of elite power. So I think that was part of what the appeal was. The part of it was that Trump considered it very useful to have a relationship with the district attorney. And the district attorney was perfectly fine having this kind of relationship with Trump. He visited Trump at Mar a Lago. You know, he got invited aboard Trump’s yacht.
Trump held a fundraiser for him in 2005. All things that were pretty surprising to me to discover. Trump similarly tried to cultivate Rudy Giuliani, who was the Manhattan federal prosecutor. You see that over time. Fast forward to 2017 when Trump is being investigated by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and Trump’s immediate instinct is “I want to go talk to Mueller.” His lawyers have to tell him like, “No, you’re not walking across the street to go talk to Robert Mueller and leave the White House.” But his belief is that it can all be some kind of backroom deal. MILLER: Going back about the Trump origin story, I don’t know if I get it exactly right from memory, but there’s a press conference and it’s how he’s dealing with the press, and he says that he’s there, but maybe he wasn’t actually there as a young man. And there’s a builder that had done a project and he says that the builder doesn’t get enough credit at the press conference. The politicians get all the credit. And then he writes about it and about how it was a rainy day. And you [re-
searched it and it] was actually a sunny day and the guy did get credit.
But talk about that and what he learned from that sort of tabloid-era time about those kind of press. HABERMAN: It’s interesting. So that story is something that Trump . . . tells this New York Times reporter in 1980, about how in 1964, when he was 18, his father took him to the Verrazano Bridge dedication ceremony, which was this massive project linking Brooklyn to Staten Island. It had been delayed for decades. Robert Moses, the featured man in The Powerbroker by Robert Caro, who was just this sort of avatar of raw power and real estate and developing power in New York, is the M.C.; and in Trump’s telling, “the rain was pouring down for hours, this poor bridge designer is standing off in the corner and no one’s paying any attention to him, and he came all the way over here to develop this bridge for us. And that’s when I realized you can’t become anyone’s sucker.” And not being a sucker or a loser is a big thing for Trump.
When I was going over this sort of foundational moment in Trump’s own telling with a colleague, the colleague said, “Check the weather that day.” I checked and it was sunny, and I checked this ceremony and Robert Moses extolled all praise on this guy. He just in what appeared to be a slip, forgot to mention his name, although other people mentioned his name later on. And in Trump’s mind, it seemed like not having your name said was some massive insult and that nobody could have done something like that by accident. It had to be intentional. It hurt him, and the comments went unchecked for many, many years, but with reason, because who would get stuff like that wrong?
But it became clear just how little of what he says about himself can be relied on. MILLER: You lived in tabloid culture, you were a tabloid [reporter]. I don’t mean that in pejorative, but you worked for the tabloids as a reporter.
Now you’ve gone back to doing some research [and to] refresh your memory of how it covered Trump—this is how the monster was created, right? A lot of it was driven by this desire to see his name mentioned. What are the lessons that you took from the mistakes of the media-Trump relationship during that era? HABERMAN: I’ll answer by talking about a scene from one of my favorite journalism movies, which is Shattered Glass, in which at the very end, the character who is playing I think Chuck Lane, the editor at The New Republic, is explaining to a colleague, Chloe Sevigny, that they have let this fabricator, Stephen Glass, just write these stories. He says something like, “[He] fed us fiction after fiction, and we let him because we found him entertaining.”
I was thinking about that the other day in the context of what I think is a significant criticism of the media that covered him in the ’70s, ’80s ’90s, when he was myth-making about himself and describing himself as this titan of industry commensurate with major tycoons in New York City. He just was not either, in real estate or on Wall Street, but he became synonymous with wealth nationally, not just in New York City. He became this sort of ubiquitous brand. That was a failure, because people were just reprinting what he was saying often without checking. People told me later that it was pretty known that he lied a lot or said things that weren’t true a lot. But the media’s tendency is to give a benefit of the doubt and assume that somebody might be telling the truth or could be telling the truth.
He got that far after it was clear that he was saying things that weren’t true. Part of the reason is because people found him entertaining. And that’s why I kept thinking about that Shattered Glass line. For a long time, he was treated like a harmless sideshow. It really should have been clear in the 1980s in New York City, particularly the late 1980s, when he’s taking out full-page advertisements in New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for teenagers who had been arrested in a brutal case, an attack on a woman, a jogger in Central Park, whose convictions were later overturned and their confessions were deemed coerced. And he’s taking out a full-page ad saying, bring back the death penalty, bring back our police. These things add up. MILLER: What was it that allowed him to reach that level in this relationship with the media and the tabloids and what was his unique insight? HABERMAN: I think that he recognized, at least with The New York Post in particular, that he was able to turn himself into a commodity. There just became this symbiotic relationship with the paper in a way that he didn’t have with another paper, but that he did have with some television reporters. There’s these clips of Rona Barrett interviewing him in 1980 where he actually says, “You know, maybe I’ll run for president.” Barbara Walters interviewed him a bunch, several other people did as well. He made for good copy. He made for watchable television. And he was aware that this was the case. He was aware that people who were perceived as rich were generally not as accessible as he was. And he used that to his advantage. MILLER: There was a follow up that is related to an earlier question from the audience that I think is a good question to ask. You went back and looked at how he dealt with all the prosecutors, all the investigations into him, financial and otherwise from the ’80s going forward. Fast forward to now and think about the investigations. Is he the type of person that would ever accept some sort of plea bargain to evade punishment by the government? People sometimes talk about these fanciful deals. Maybe Biden tells them that, “Hey, I’ll pardon you if you just don’t run.” Do you see anything like that as plausible? HABERMAN: I think anything is plausible with him. No, I really do. I think that you can’t ever assume that he will not do something if he finds a corner of self interest in it. And I don’t think he wants to be indicted. Now, I know that some of his al-
lies were talking during the transition—this is pre-January 6, 2021—were talking about whether there was a possibility of negotiating some kind of a global settlement for him. It went nowhere. So I think it would take his back being more visibly against the wall than it is now for that to happen. MILLER: It’s hard to imagine that the Roy Cohn in Donald Trump is going to want to cut a deal, especially given the leverage that he’s got. HABERMAN: It’s funny that you say that. Roy Cohn always said “Fight like hell and don’t back down”; except the first case that Roy Cohn represents Trump in is this housing discrimination lawsuit against Trump and his father in their company. And they said, “Well, yeah, have you— MILLER: —tried— HABERMAN: Because after several stunts and feints in court the judge gets irritated, it became clear this wasn’t going anywhere. So Trump’s whole “I never settle” is always the case except for when he does. MILLER: Another element of Trump that I want to ask you about, that to me is like his his superpower, is his shamelessness. But he has this shamelessness that it’s hard to imitate. On the other hand, he has a sensitivity to him, too, a little bit like one of my favorite little anecdotes I think in the prologue in the book, about Trump winning the presidency. That wasn’t my favorite part because of that—that was a dark memory. But it was what happened after, where he said, “You tell Maggie that nobody took my Twitter away.” Like, he had just become the leader of the free world, and yet he was still wrapped around the axle over the fact that you had written a story about how somebody had taken his Twitter away from him in the final weeks of the campaign.
This seems to be a person that does have some vulnerability, right? So how do you square that? HABERMAN: I write in the prologue that he has both over time had the thickest skin and thinnest skin of anyone I’ve ever covered. He really [can] slough off stories and coverage that would flatten other people. In some cases, he revels in really prurient coverage that would disturb other people. But then if it gets down to something that he considers a personal insecurity, to your point, he gets very upset.
One was he’s very, very, very sensitive to the idea that anyone is controlling him or puppeteering him. So the idea that his Twitter feed had been taken away from him spoke to that; he didn’t like [it]. It was totally true. We wrote about it in this story the Sunday before the election in a story that leaned way too hard into the idea that he was going to lose. I would like to have that one back in retrospect, but there was a lot of really good reporting in it; because in fairness, most of the people working for him thought he was going to lose, too. But they did get him to take Twitter off his phone and they had staff tweeting, which actually really helped him in those final two weeks.
But he hated the idea that anybody knew that it meant that he was being controlled. So at 11 p.m. on election night, when my colleague calls him to get a comment about him clearly about to win, he says, “Thank you, thank you. Great honor. Great honor. You tell Maggie that nobody took my Twitter away.” And it was really quite striking. It might have been a little earlier than 11, but it was late.
There was another moment that I write about where he saw me on television. He saw me on Charlie Rose in 2017, which he only saw because he was apparently flipping channels during a commercial on
Lou Dobbs. And he saw me saying that he watches a lot of television; I think I put a number to it, as either 4 to 5 [hours a day]. He was enraged for like two days. He was talking about this and he kept going on and on, attacking me to various random Oval Office visitors. This got back to me. So he’s sensitive on that one, because he thinks it speaks to the idea that people think he’s not that intelligent. And that’s an area of concern for him. MILLER: This is the fundamental question that I have then about the difference between the thin skin and the thick skin. When we get to the seriousness of the moment that we’re in right now, people are laughing at him and do think he’s stupid about the fact that he continues to advance a preposterous lie about the fact that he won the election. They do think that he’s pathetic. They do think that he’s a baby; they do think a lot of bad things about him. Why does it still a little stick out there? How can a person not crack? How can he not show an inch of self-reflection on the fact that he’s carrying this ridiculous lie on two years hence? HABERMAN: I would frame it slightly differently. I don’t think that his lies about the election are prompting people to call him stupid. Some are obviously calling him a baby over it. I think mostly people are calling him dangerous over it. And I think that this gets to your point about self-image, a question about self-image.
I don’t think he minds people thinking that he is saying something that’s dangerous, because there’s two portraits of him that he can tolerate. One is total adoration and flattery; and the other is that he’s a totally competent, strong man. This book is neither one of those, as you know, because you’ve read it. But he would rather people think that he is menacing and a little scary or more than a little scary, than think that he’s weak.
And so that’s how he doesn’t crack. MILLER: The other element of the book that I liked is just the way that you helped explain and categorize, like the moves that Trump has. Right. You see echoes of all the stuff, from the moves that he had when he got backed into a corner in the ’80s all the way through the Reform Party, all the way through now, the present.
Let’s just talk about that a little bit. What are the go-to Trump moves? And then from a journalist [perspective], how you try to parry with those? HABERMAN: I list a bunch of them in the book. But just off the top of my head, it’s a quick lie. It’s the shifting of blame. It’s the backbiting with one aide about another. It’s the indecision and indecisiveness masked by a compensatory lunge. And we got to see all of this play out in the White House years.
The backbiting with aides was just constant and dominated everything. The indecisiveness we got to see over and over and over again. I would argue he was actually really indecisive about what route he wanted to take to try to subvert the election results in 2020, including asking the valet who brings the Diet Coke what he thought he should do, and that was, to me, kind of a jarring moment.
But then once all the other options are gone, he really he does lunge to January 6, the quick lie we see over and over again. I saw that in one of my interviews with him. I [told] him our understanding was he had been watching television on January 6 during the riot; and he immediately said he hadn’t been, “No, I was in meetings. I rarely had the TV on.” It was just like the immediate reaction. MILLER: How do you as a reporter deal with such an inscrutable person [as an interview subject]? How did you think about “What am I going to ask him?” HABERMAN: It’s a good question. They offered interviews to almost every single book author, including Michael Wolff, who wrote the most damning initial book portrait of that White House; . . . it was not a positive portrayal. It just tells you about Trump’s willingness to engage with reporters.
So initially when they offered this, I was sort of like, I don’t really know what I’m going to get out of this. So I wanted to ask a bunch of questions about his past, because he’s the only person who can answer those. I didn’t want to listen to a bunch of filibustering about January 6—and actually, I got a fair amount out of it, which is throughout the book. Then I asked for two follow-up interviews. There were moments that I let him talk [at length]. And then there were moments where I challenged him real-time, where he at one point was suggesting that it was Mark Milley’s idea for them to walk to St. John’s Church across Lafayette Park on May 20, when he was holding the Bible up.
I interrupted him and I said . . . it was ridiculous. He said, “Well, just say it was equal.” So some of it you’re just deciding moment to moment. Those later questions that you’re referring to, which are in the book, were a bunch of additional fact checks that I got reporting on later and that I needed to come back and give him a chance answer. In some cases, he was the only person who could answer. In one case, he appeared to confirm, for instance, that he had sent money to the family of a convicted felon who had helped him on one of his earliest building projects, which has been a great mystery in New York City politics for a long time. So that was interesting.
He called almost every other question “fake news,” “fantasy question.” “Fantasy question” was [used] over and over and over again, you know, not true, etc.
Sunday, March 12 Arrive in Las Vegas
Arrive in Las Vegas independently, and gather at 5:00 p.m. at the Hyatt Place hotel for a welcome drink, introductions, and a trip orientation on the park. Dinner will follow near the hotel. Hyatt Place Las Vegas (D) Monday, March 13
Ash Meadows & Death Valley
En route to Death Valley we visit Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. We stop at the visitor center to learn of the plight of the pupfish and explore the Crystal Spring boardwalk. Arrive Death Valley in time to enjoy the park’s visitor center. Enjoy a welcome dinner tonight. Oasis at Death Vally (B,L,D) Tuesday, March 14
Dante’s View, Salt Creek & Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes
Experience Dante’s View, located at 5,475 feet, and take in a stunning panorama of all 11,049 feet of Telescope Peak. Learn about the creation of the park’s many alluvial fans, the product of millions of years of sporadic yet constant erosion. Later visit Salt Creek and learn about the amazing pupfish, endemic to Death Valley and uniquely adapted to survive in the desert’s harsh environment. End the day with the chance to walk among the picturesque sand dunes. After dinner enjoy the chance of some stargazing and see firsthand why Death Valley is an officially recognized “Gold Tier” Dark Sky Park. Oasis at Death Vally (B,L,D) Wednesday, March 15
Zabriske Point, Titus Canyon & Ubehebe Crater
Wake just before dawn and transfer to Zabriskie Point to watch as the sunlight slowly illuminates the surrounding mountains. After breakfast, explore the Titus Canyon narrows and hike among the stratifications of rock marking millions of years of geological history. The opening of the canyon affords the best chance to see a chuckwalla in its natural habitat. These sizable lizards have evolved to inflate their bodies to wedge themselves in the cracks in the rock they live in to deter predators. Marvel at Ubehebe Crater, site of a massive volcanic explosion leaving a pit in the earth over 500 feet deep and a halfmile across. If you feel up to it, enjoy the experience of walking the 2-mile loop around the rim of the crater. Oasis at Death Vally (B,L) Thursday, March 16
Golden Canyon & Artist’s Palette
After breakfast, hike through the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon toward the Red Cathedral with the option to continue for a longer hike through Gower Gulch. Enjoy a free afternoon.This evening enjoy the sunset at Artist’s Palette before our farewell dinner. Oasis at Death Vally (B,D) Friday, March 17
Devil’s Golf Course, Badwater, Shoreline Butte, Ashford Mill & Las Vegas
As we make our way out of the Park we make several stops. Visit Devils’ Golf Course to admire the rugged salt formations, and Badwater Salt Flats which at 282 feet below sea level, this salt flat is the lowest place in North America and the eighth lowest place on Earth. The dramatic depth is enhanced by the backdrop of the Panamint Range rising over 11,000 feet. Stop at Shoreline Butte, so called as the horizontal lines in its rock face testify to erosion of the waters of prehistoric Lake Manly that filled Death Valley tens of thousands of years ago. Stop at Ashford Mill ruins, a historic site where gold ore was processed a hundred years ago. Learn about the mill and search for spring wildflowers. Enjoy a picnic before heading back to Las Vegas arriving by 4:00 p.m. Please book your return flights for 6:00 pm or later. (B,L)
Average temperatures during this time range from 53-80°. Our transportation around the park is by vans. Travelers should be in active good health to participate in this trip. Though walks are not too strenuous, they are over uneven terrain and may require the use of hands and feet to climb over obstructions. Our longest hike is about 2 miles, with approximately 500 feet in elevation gain. Almost all walks are “out and back” so participants can go as far as they like, and then wait for the group to return. For those who would like more active hiking, we can help arrange that during your free time.
The Oasis at Death Valley Ranch
The Oasis Resort is situated in a lush oasis surrounded by the vast and arid desert of Death Valley National Park, California. The resort has two properties – the Ranch and the Inn. We have reserved deluxe rooms at the Ranch, which has been welcoming guests since 1933. The property has a gift shop, saloon, a spring-fed swimming pool, tennis courts, a children’s playground, and the National Park Service Visitor’s Center is just a stone’s throw away. One mile away is the 4-diamond Inn. Upgrades to the Inn are available.
Tour Leader & Guide, Fred Ackerman
The son of a National Park Ranger, Fred was born and raised in National Parks and spent much of his childhood exploring the great outdoors. A graduate of MIT, he has traveled in six continents, and lived and worked in four of them. After working some years in a promising management consulting career, Fred decided to follow his passion for travel and outdoor adventure. He entered the adventure travel industry over 20 years ago to design and lead trips throughout the US, Europe and Latin America. In 2002 he founded his own tour company.
Death Valley has a special significance to him having been born when his family lived there and having spent the first two years of his life in park service housing at Furnace Creek (the former name of the Oasis at Death Valley). The park is also the first place he brought guests after starting Black Sheep Adventures. This trip has been carefully crafted by him with almost 20 years of guiding experience in the region. Fred is eager to share the beauty of this unique natural desert landscape and the stories of its quirky human history with you. Dates: March 12-17, 2023 Group Size: Minimum 8, maximum 16 (not including staff) Cost: $3,695 per person, double occupancy; $4,510, single occupancy.
We are staying in deluxe rooms at the Oasis at Death Valley Ranch. If you would like to upgrade to the Inn, the charges are: $4,435 per person, double occupancy; $5,990 single occupancy. Included: 1 night at the Hyatt Place, Las Vegas; 4 nights at the Oasis at Death Valley Ranch; daily breakfast (5) at the hotels, 4 lunches and 4 dinners; welcome and farewell dinners with beer and wine; round-trip transfers from Las Vegas Airport to Death Valley National Park; tours, entrances, and events as specified in the itinerary; mini-bus transportation for all excursions; gratuities for guides, drivers, hotel and restaurant staff; services of a professional Tour Manager and Guide; Club host to assist you throughout the program (with a minimum of 15 travelers); the camaraderie of the Club’s travelers.
Not Included: Air transportation to and from Las Vegas, Nevada; meals and beverages other than those specified as included; optional excursions and other activities done independently; trip cancellation/interruption and baggage insurance; personal items such as e-mail, telephone and fax calls, souvenirs, laundry and gratuities for non-group services.
(415) 597-6720
travel@commonwealthclub.org
Reservation Form March 12-17, 2023
Phone: (415) 597-6720
NAME 1
NAME 2
ADDRESS
HOME PHONE CITY/STATE/ZIP
CELL PHONE
E-MAIL ADDRESS
SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY:
If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate: I plan to share accommodations with
OR I wish to have single accommodations OR I’d like to know about possible roommates. I am a smoker / nonsmoker (circle one).
PAYMENT:
Here is my deposit of $ ($500 per person) for place(s).
Please upgrade me/us to the Inn.
Enclosed is my check (make payable to Black Sheep Adventures, Inc.) OR
Charge my deposit to my Visa MasterCard AMEX Discover
CARD #
AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE
I/We have read and agree to the terms and conditions for this program EXP. DATE SECURITY CODE
DATE
SIGNATURE
We require membership to The Commonwealth Club to travel with us. Please check one of the following options: I am a current member of The Commonwealth Club. Please renew my membership with the credit card information provided here. I will visit commonwealthclub.org/membership to sign up for a membership.
PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM ALONG WITH YOUR DEPOSIT TO:
Commonwealth Club Travel, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 You may also fax the form to 415.597.6729
Terms & Conditions
ELIGIBILITY:
We require membership to the Commonwealth Club to travel with us. People who live outside of the Bay Area may purchase a national membership. To learn about membership types and to purchase a membership, visit commonwealthclub.org/membership or call (415) 597-6720. DEPOSIT & PAYMENTS: To make a reservation, a deposit of $500 per person is required by check or credit card. Please mail your check (payable to “Black Sheep Adventures, Inc”) or charge instructions, with your completed reservation form to the address on the reservation form. You may also fax in your reservation form or call our office or call (415) 597-6720. Final payment is due no later than December 12, 2019.
CANCELLATIONS AND REFUNDS:
Your deposit and payments are refundable, less the following cancel fees:
THE COMMONWEALTH | December 2022/January 202336 • 91+ days prior to trip start date, deposit refundable • 61-90 days prior to trip start, $500 deposit • 0-60 days prior to trip start, No refund We recommend trip-cancellation insurance; applications will be sent to you. Tour can also be canceled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor Black Sheep Adventures accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour.
MEDICAL INFORMATION:
Participation in this program requires that you be in good health. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Vaccination for COVID-19 is required.
RESPONSIBILITY:
The Commonwealth Club of California and our ground operators and suppliers act only as agents for the travelers with respect to transportation and arrangements, and exercise every care possible in doing so. However, we can assume no liability for injury, damage, loss, accident, delay or irregularity in connection with the service of any automobile, motorcoach, or any other conveyance used in carrying out this program or for the acts or defaults of any company or person engaged in conveying the passenger or in carrying out the arrangements of the program. We cannot accept any responsibility for losses or additional expenses due to delay or changes in air or other services, sickness, weather, strike, war, quarantine, force majeure or other causes beyond our control. All such losses or expenses will have to be borne by the passenger as tour rates provide arrangements only for the time stated. We reserve the right to make such alterations to this published itinerary as may be deemed necessary. The right is reserved to cancel any program prior to departure in which case the entire payment will be refunded without further obligation on our part. No refund will be made for an unused portion of any tour unless arrangements are made in sufficient time to avoid penalties. The Commonwealth Club of California accepts no liability for any carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket in connection with the tour. CST: 2096889-40
