Liberties; Trump Shrugged

Greed is good, again.

Gordon Gekko's ''Wall Street'' homily and Ayn Rand's paeans to selfishness are the manifestoes of our giddy materialism.

As a young capitalist in Ms. Rand's novel ''Atlas Shrugged'' explained: ''When I die, I hope to go to heaven. . . . So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all -- that I was a man who made money.''

Now it's not only Wall Street that is go-going; it's Main Street. Everybody wants to spin that wheel and make a mil -- on TV, on the Internet, on stocks and on the playing field.

Donald Trump is talking about ponying up $100 million to run for president. So, in this season of giving some and getting more, I asked the high-rolling plutocrat, spending the holiday weekend at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, for a soliloquy on the subject of greedisgood.com.

''It really is not very different than the 80's,'' Mr. Trump says. ''In the 80's, people had limos. Now they have all-terrain vehicles, which cost more than the limos.

''There was an anti-80's feeling for a while, everyone cutting back, but now the mood is 'Let's just do it!' I just got back from a golf course I built in Florida. It costs $300,000 to join. In the 80's, there was no such thing. Rich people are handing me checks like Godiva chocolates.

''Greed is not good. The line played well in a movie. But a lot of things play well in words -- like 'All men are created equal' -- that sound magnificent and beautiful, but that doesn't necessarily make them so. Greed is the bad part of success. And people have wanted to be successful from the beginning of time.

''My entire life, I've watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn't the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They're morons. There's a perception that voters like poverty. I don't like poverty. Usually, there's a reason for poverty. Do you want someone who gets to be president and that's literally the highest paying job he's ever had?

''You don't need money to get beautiful women. All my life, I've had friends who were successful and can't get a date, let alone a date with a beautiful woman. I have watched men worth hundreds of millions who have all the trappings -- a G-5 [Gulfstream jet], the Fifth Avenue apartment, the Palm Beach estate, and they cannot get a date. They're sitting at home watching television. They're brilliant all day long and at night, they don't have a clue.

''These people who eat people alive for a living, come 7 o'clock, they see a girl who's a solid 5 -- not supermodels, 10's -- and they look at her in awe, but they develop lockjaw.

''I fixed up a very well-known powerful, rich man with a very nice and very beautiful woman he'd been trying to meet for a year and a half. She called me the following day and said, 'Don't ever do that to me again,' and an hour later he called me and said, 'It was unbelievable. Could you call her and arrange a second date?'

''Ultimately, a woman can't make love to a G-5.

''People believe there's more glamour to being a very wealthy person, but there really is a lot of work. Once, a very rich guy calls me up and asks if I can get him reservations that night for Le Cirque. He can't get in. So I got him in, and he calls the next day and says: 'You got me the best table. But how do you deal with all that publicity?' Look, what's the point of being successful if nobody knows who you are?

''This dot-com nonsense? I think a lot of it will go away. Maybe it's all a mirage. It's pretty fragile. Every single I.P.O. coming out goes through the roof. I just don't see anything tangible. I like to see and feel and touch something -- bricks, mortar.

''A friend called me up the other day and talked about investing in a dot-com that sells lobsters. Internet lobsters. Where will this end? The next day he sent me a huge package of lobsters on ice. How low can you stoop?

''Bradley would be bad for the economy. He's a Marxist. As far as he's concerned, Communism is just fine.

''When the market goes down, we'll all be cleansed and brought back to reality. If I'm president, it won't happen for a long time. If I'm not, it will happen immediately.''