From a December 4, 1984, profile on Trump in the Washington Post:

"To his detractors, Trump is classic nouveau riche, a media cultivator with an oversized ego. But to his admirers, he is a paragon of energetic brilliance and the catalyst who brought back city living.

"And so, Donald Trump knows he can always get his table with the following simple statement: 'I'm Donald Trump.' Trump Tower. Trump Plaza. Estimated net worth: $400 million."

From a December 15, 1987, profile on Trump also in the Washington Post:

"He professes to dislike talking about himself, but one wall of his 26th-floor Trump Tower office displays Trump cover stories from the likes of Business Week, Fortune, and the New York Times Magazine, each in a gold frame. His recent Newsweek cover has not yet been mounted.

"Trump boasted as recently as 1984 that he garners plenty of attention without a publicist, although in fact he has retained a New York publication relations firm for a dozen years.

"Trump concedes he has a 'thin skin' about negative press. He wrote a nasty letter to the New York Times' architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, and filed a $500 million libel suit against a critic for the Chicago Tribune..."

Right from his rise to fame during the 1980s, the press painted him as an arrogant and/or self-absorbed millionaire focused on making more money, as this February 21, 1989, AP article that ran in the Hartford Courant lays out fairly succintly. Probably the biggest national story around Trump during that decade was his connection with NFL rival the USFL. Trump owned one of the teams, and was one of the league's leading public faces, but it dissolved in 1985 after three unsuccessful seasons.

The story that really made Donald Trump into a household name or, at the very least, tabloid fodder, was his high-profile divorce from his first wife Ivana. The story broke in February 1990 and went on for many months. The New York Post is noted for putting Trump on the cover numerous times while the story unfolded. The money involved was huge, and it had the added intrigue of the divorce involving an affair. The "other woman", Marla Maples, also became a household name. She eventually became Trump's second wife.

It was during his 1990 divorce that Saturday Night Live first lampooned Trump.

In 1991 and 1992, Trump was again in the news when a couple of casinos in Atlantic City that he had a stake in went bankrupt.

As of 1997, that was largely his public persona. He was a pompous New York millionaire who cheated on his wife with Marla Maples, and had been involved in the bankruptcy of the USFL and a couple of Atlantic City casinos.

Yet, from that aforementioned December 4, 1984 Washington Post story on him by Lois Romano, his ambition was already noted at that early stage:

"He is the brassy 38-year-old developer who, with his wife Ivana, has built the hottest properties in New York...He is the master of grand plans, now hoping to build the 'greatest hotel in the world' along with the world's 'tallest' building in New York City, and perhaps one day fulfilling his fantasy of becoming the U.S. negotiator on nuclear arms limitation talks with the Soviets."

Though that wasn't something written about much. His political ambitions didn't really become much of a public topic until after 1997.