What Donald Trump Learned From Don King

For more than three decades, the boxing promoter Don King and Donald J. Trump have shared an enduring friendship and some defining surface similarities: an unmissable hairdo and a self-regarding gumption that became a kind of superpower, a trail of beleaguered creditors and an unswerving conviction that more is more.

“Putting some gas in the tank,” Mr. King, 92, said recently at a South Florida casino bistro, presiding over a 4 p.m. lunch of New York strip steak, three eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, pancakes, grits, cranberry juice, coffee (“black like me”), with agave syrup and African hot sauce he brought from home.

His waiter asked if anything was missing. “Yeah,” Mr. King said, “we’re going to need more butter.”

As much as any figure has in Mr. Trump’s grand, rampaging public life, Mr. King modeled what Mr. Trump considered to be success for a Black man in America. For the former president, Mr. King was both ally and example — a half-generation older and an avatar of unrepentant excess and streetwise bravado in Mr. Trump’s 1980s heyday in New York.

If the famed promoter can appear airlifted from another era — when the boxing business was king, when Mr. King was the boxing business, when some scores were settled outside the ring and the legal system — this was the era when so much of Mr. Trump’s world seems to have congealed into a worldview.

“He was never an establishment guy and was proud of it,” Mr. Trump said in a statement sent by his presidential campaign, saluting Mr. King as “a champion and fighter like few others.” “He made money when others lost, and he’s done it for a long time. I rate him tops!”

In a 90-minute interview, Mr. King said that the two had learned much from each other, reinforcing their mutual professional instincts as they promoted fights under the banner of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos.

At their handshake-dealing peak, Mr. King and Mr. Trump made money together, overhyped together, weathered business litigation together.

“Donald Trump was a young man that wanted to be himself,” Mr. King said. “In business, the hyperbole goes to work because you know you ain’t breaking no law. You’re exaggerating. You know what I mean? You are promoting. You’re making it more exciting.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton has put it more succinctly.

“If Donald Trump had been born Black,” Mr. Sharpton has said, “he would have been Don King.”

Now, as some polls have shown Mr. Trump making modest but potentially significant inroads with Black voters — alarming Democrats as President Biden works to firm up his standing — Mr. King remains a stalwart supporter who understands the former president as few others can.

Dwelling little on Mr. Trump’s long history of race-baiting, Mr. King has blessed his transactional approach to politics and business as the earned wisdom of a fellow traveler whom Mr. King helped show the way.

Before Mr. Trump vowed to “make America great again,” Mr. King hollered “only in America!” at any camera within range.

Before Mr. Trump heard roof-rattling ovations at sold-out cage fights, endearing him to a hypermasculine segment of his base, he was ringside with Mr. King to watch Mike Tyson, who later accused Mr. King of defrauding him.

Before Mr. Trump was a felon who insisted that the system was rigged, Mr. King was, too.

“They treat Trump like a Black man,” said Mr. King, who served prison time more than half a century ago after stomping an associate to death over a debt, echoing some of Mr. Trump’s flailing conspiracy theories about his Manhattan hush money trial. “It’s guilty until proven innocent.”

Though slowed by age, Mr. King remains, like Mr. Trump, very much the person he was when they met, wearing a bedazzled denim jacket with his own face on it and paying his lunch bill from a thick wad of hundreds bound by rubber band.

With a home in Boca Raton, Fla., an office nearby and an assemblage of relatives and associates helping him keep up appearances, Mr. King has continued promoting fights in the area, anchored by often fading or second-tier boxers and his own straight-faced promises that each match is a spectacle without precedent.

“Excitement is in the air!” he said this month from his ringside spot at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Fla., midway through a medium-wattage but entertaining fight card sponsored by a printing company and two strip clubs. “A spectacular event!”

For boxing fans who encounter him, Mr. King is still a rolling attraction, whether scooting his walker across the casino floor or being pushed in his wheelchair by a grandson.

Approached by vigilant strangers who notice his crown-like poof — “Don King, what’s up, baby!” “Only in America!” — he poses with well-wishers who make playful fists for the camera but do not quite interact with him, proceeding as if they are standing next to a wax statue of the man.

With those who do get him talking, Mr. King is disinclined to stop, seasoning an interview with allusions to Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare (“the Bard of Avon!”), Muhammad Ali (“the greatest of all time!”), Johnnie Cochran (“the glove didn’t fit!”), the O’Jays, Schopenhauer, himself — and volunteering rebuttals to his many critics through the years.

There is a line long attributed to Jack Newfield, Mr. King’s muckraking biographer: “Forget death and taxes. The only sure thing is that, win or lose, Don King is counting the money.”

Nonsense, Mr. King suggested.

“I never count money,” he explained. “If you can count your money, you ain’t got none.”

Mr. King and Mr. Trump have remained in contact, mostly visiting and reminiscing by phone.

Appraising each other recently, they covered strikingly similar ground: the art of transforming nominal losses into wins.

“I have seen him in the heat of battle, some really tough ones, and he always comes out on top,” Mr. Trump said in his statement. “Don understands the importance of never giving up.” (The former president once testified for Mr. King in a trial over disputed fight contracts.)

Mr. King said his respect for Mr. Trump deepened as his properties teetered in the 1990s.

“What really impressed me was when he started taking it on the chin,” Mr. King said. “He turned bankruptcy into a business.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign has highlighted Mr. King’s 2024 endorsement on social media with a video clip and a boxing glove emoji. Aides have also noted his long relationships with other Black sports figures of the 1980s and 1990s, including Mr. Tyson and Herschel Walker, the former football star who lost a Senate race in Georgia two years ago.

But Mr. Trump’s friendship with Mr. King has survived some past Republican efforts to create distance between them.

When Mr. Trump pushed for Mr. King to speak at his 2016 nominating convention, party officials said Republicans could not risk associating with someone once convicted of manslaughter.

Two months later, Mr. King found his way to a microphone on Mr. Trump’s behalf anyway, joining the candidate at a church in Ohio.

“We need Donald Trump,” Mr. King said then, “especially Black people.”

Recalling advice he had once given to Michael Jackson, Mr. King pledged that day to sanitize his anecdote to avoid saying “the N-word.” Fourteen seconds later, he said it.

“Ahhhhh,” Mr. Trump said warmly afterward, with a minor media hurricane underway. “There’s only one Don King.”

These days, the promoter allowed, being Don King is not entirely what it used to be.

At his restaurant table, he rubbed at a ring given to him by his wife, Henrietta, who died in 2010. “We still together,” he said.

Mr. Ali, whose career helped hypercharge Mr. King’s after the promoter left prison, died six years later. Mr. King lit up briefly as he recited the heavyweight’s “float like a butterfly” refrain from his seat. (In their zigzagging partnership, Mr. King also stood accused of shortchanging Mr. Ali on fight pay.)

But while his once-dominant sport has ceded the national foreground, Mr. King is still plainly drawn to its pageantry.

At a news conference before the recent fights, Mr. King played master of ceremonies in a Hard Rock ballroom for over an hour, beginning his remarks with a digression on Mr. Trump’s legal travails and grinning through a chaotic exchange between his headliners. (One fighter, Blair Cobbs, the eventual winner between the ropes, set off on extended bits with a hand puppet and two live birds; the other, Adrien Broner, appeared to threaten Mr. Cobbs with gun violence.)

When fight night came, Mr. King found himself in a more reflective mood, offering a guided tour of the pins on his jacket: one celebrating Mr. Ali’s 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, another of Lady Liberty, a third from the National Rifle Association.

He posed with a man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” hat that mocks Mr. Biden and nodded at some greetings shouted from nearby:

“The Don!”

“The living legend!”

When the top-billed fights began, Mr. King trudged up a small staircase with assistance and ducked under the ropes to enter the ring for the boxers’ arrivals, defying the predictions of a publicist (and, almost certainly, medical best practices for a semi-mobile nonagenarian) and delighting the crowd.

“Life is a fight,” Mr. King said softly, unprompted, settling back in his cushioned ringside rolling chair.

He was asked what round his was in. He cackled a little, then went quiet.

“You’ll know,” Mr. King said, “when the count comes.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.