From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Los Angeles correspondent Jeanne McDowell caught up with Donald Trump in the winter of 1987. It was the weekend of the Preservation Ball in Palm Beach, Fla., and Trump, the subject of this week's Profile section, invited McDowell to fly there with him from New York aboard his recently acquired Boeing 727. Twenty months later McDowell was once again airborne with Trump, this time diving and rising around the Manhattan skyline in Trump's French Puma helicopter. If Trump is not a comfortable interview for those with queasy stomachs, neither is he an easy subject when it comes to probing the mysteries of what makes Donald run.

"Trump is a tough interview," says McDowell. "He is not, by his own admission, an introspective man. Contemplating the meaning of life is not his thing." What does Trump like to talk about? "His deals," says McDowell. "He's the quintessential salesman." Ever eager to show off what he owns, Trump escorted McDowell through his 118-room hideaway in Palm Beach, happily pointing out some of the valuables that he acquired when he purchased the 17.5-acre estate, furnishings and all, for a "bargain" $7 million in 1985. "Do you believe this?" he asked, brandishing a gold dinner plate. "I make great deals." Cross him, however, and the frisky golden retriever can begin to snarl.

Trump, the 21st person to be featured in TIME's Profile section, is the department's first cover subject. Since the section was introduced 14 months ago, TIME staffers have traveled to northern India to interview the Dalai Lama, to London to speak with hospice pioneer Cicely Saunders and to Cambridge, England, to explore the cosmos with physicist Stephen Hawking. "Since the magazine's founding, one of TIME's great strengths has been to give readers a very strong and multidimensional look at people," says executive editor Ronald Kriss. "Our aim is not just to chronicle what they say and do but to convey their strengths, their weaknesses, their idiosyncrasies."

So, get set to fly with "the Donald," as Trump's wife Ivana sometimes calls him. You may think you know Trump already, but this trip will show you a different side of a man who has come to embody the acquisitive '80s.