What I Learned When Trump Told a Weird Lie About My Ex-Boss

Dead men may tell no tales. But Donald Trump has no problem telling tales about dead men. In the past two months, Trump has repeatedly name-checked Bob Tisch, who died in 2005. The message is always the same.

“Bob Tisch of Loews, friend of mine, great guy. Wonderful man…” Trump said at a Sept. 24 Trump Tower press conference. “Bob Tisch used to tell me that he thinks San Francisco is the greatest city in the country. He passed away quite a while ago, but… San Francisco probably was.”

The first time I heard Trump mention Tisch’s love for San Francisco, I thought, “That’s weird.” The second time, I thought, “That’s wrong.” And the third time, I thought, “I should say something.”

See, I knew Bob Tisch. I worked for Bob Tisch. Bob Tisch did not think San Francisco was “the greatest city in the country.” Bob Tisch was Mr. New York.

The former Loews Corporation President and COO Preston Robert “Bob” Tisch was born and raised in Brooklyn. He later built an empire in hotels, cigarettes, watches, and insurance that boasted a market cap of over $17 billion in 2005, when Tisch died at the age of 79 in Manhattan.

For 19 years, Tisch chaired The NYC Convention & Visitors Bureau. He was a proud co-owner of the New York Giants (not the 49ers). With his brother Laurence Tisch, he endowed the Tisch School of the Arts and served as a Trustee of NYU (not SFU). He invented the power breakfast at the Loews-owned Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where he lived with his wife Joan. And it was at the Regency hotel in the early 1970s that Tisch met a group of businessmen, including real estate magnate Lew Rudin, to launch the Association for a Better New York. This organization was behind the iconic “I LOVE NEW YORK” campaign. It’s doubtful that Tisch lobbied in those meetings for “I LOVE SAN FRANCISCO.”

Mystified by Trump’s assertion, I reached out to Laurie Tisch, Bob’s daughter, and founder of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. Laurie’s website explains that her “philanthropy stems from her family’s legacy of giving in New York City” (not San Francisco). She serves on four NYC cultural boards, including Juilliard, Lincoln Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is a former co-chair. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Giants (still not the 49ers) and, for 42 years, has been a major supporter of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (not the Exploratorium) with a mission to serve all of NYC children and their families. Her current focus is spearheading the expansion of the Children’s Museum into a new location at 96th and Central Park West (not Nob Hill).

I asked Laurie for her reaction to Trump touting her father’s love for San Francisco.

“It was a great surprise to hear that,” she said. “Loews had a hotel in San Francisco for a relatively short time, but to the best of my knowledge, I never heard my father say anything like that.”

Laurie and I knew each other from when I worked for her father as an executive assistant in the mid-’80s. (We also share a loose familial connection.) At the time, the Loews office was located at 666 Fifth Avenue, a building later purchased by the Kushner Companies for a record-breaking price. It was a poor purchase and the Kushner family struggled to cover the debt until the Qataris helped bail them out while Jared Kushner served in the White House.

As an executive assistant, my tasks included answering phones, taking dictation, and typing up mostly thank-you notes. (Like Vice President Kamala Harris’s stint at McDonald’s, this job is not on my résumé.) In my six months there, I don’t recall Bob Tisch receiving any calls from Trump or writing any letters to him.

“Were they even friends?” I asked.

“They were collegial,” Laurie said. “Everybody liked my father.”

That was true. And, politically, Bob worked with both sides of the aisle. He served as Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Democratic National Conventions when it was held in New York City in 1976 and 1980. He also served as postmaster general in Ronald Reagan’s administration from 1986 to 1988.

“They wanted a businessman,” Laurie said, before joking, “Ronald Reagan would now be considered a lefty.”

Laurie’s political affiliation is clear. She co-chaired a Harris fundraiser in Sag Harbor this August. Earlier in the summer, Laurie’s brother and Loews hotel chain chief executive Jonathan Tisch hosted a Biden fundraiser in East Hampton. A third sibling, Hollywood producer Steve Tisch, has supported Democratic candidates in the past and in his capacity as co-owner of the Giants has been critical of Trump. In 2018, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “[Trump] has no understanding of why they take a knee or why they’re protesting.”

Although fabricating a quote from Bob Tisch is far from Trump’s greatest lapse, it nagged at me. I tried to figure out why Trump suddenly had the Tisch name on his mind and it led me to three theories:

• It’s football season and Bob Tisch was one of Trump’s connections to the sport. Name-dropping Tisch is Trump’s way of getting back at Taylor Swift, who has endorsed Harris for President.
• The Tisch family identifies as Jewish and Trump definitely has Jewish voters on his mind. Despite a virulent anti-immigration stance and hosting dinner parties with Holocaust deniers, Trump believes he is owed the support of Jewish Americans: 72 percent of Jewish Americans polled do not agree.
• Trump’s son Barron just started college at NYU, where the Tisch name is all over the place.

I asked Laurie if any of these seemed like plausible explanations to her.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she said.

When our phone conversation ended, I continued to ponder the question. Trump’s larger claim that today’s San Francisco was destroyed by Democrats makes no sense either. As comedian and author Guy Branum noted on social media, “Donald Trump keeps quoting this line about how Bob Tisch told him San Francisco was the best city in the world 15 years ago (while Kamala was DA) and now it’s terrible. I don’t think he’s put the math together.”

So why associate Bob Tisch with San Francisco? Why now?

And then I realized, there is no “why” with Trump. “Why” requires thought and Trump is simply thoughtless, in every sense of the word. Trump lies to puff himself up. And since Tisch was liked by everyone, he has become Trump’s convenient human shield du jour.

I also realized that if I had the chance to confront the candidate about this weird lie, Trump wouldn’t back down. He’d just shrug and say, “That’s what Bob told me.”

Trump will continue to brag about being friends with a man who died 19 years ago while insisting that Tisch left his heart in San Francisco. And if that lie confuses the legacy of that man, Trump clearly doesn’t care. Because the larger explanation of why Trump lies is actually quite simple.

Trump lies because if he didn’t, he would lose.