David Brooks of The New York Times thinks that Donald Trump is an “anti-elitist,” more at home with immigrants and the lower middle class than with the superrich. Mayor Bloomberg, coupling mild criticism of Trump with praise, calls him a “New York icon.” Must be a different Donald Trump.
To native New Yorkers, he is more like a burr under the skin that has been irritating us for years. I well remember hearing about Donald, the neighborhood hellion, when I was growing up in Queens. By the time he was a teenager, Trump, now 64, was already known as a troublemaker who raced through our quiet streets in his flashy car.
My family lived on the frayed edges of a wealthy neighborhood that, within a few blocks, shifted from small red brick apartment buildings to mansion-like private homes. Young Trump, scion of a successful real estate developer, lived with his family in one of the leafier sections, when he wasn’t away at the military academy his parents hoped would tame him.
“Stay away from that snot-nosed kid,” my normally genteel mother would warn me after yet another encounter with the teenaged Trump and his car on Midland Parkway or Union Turnpike. I usually obeyed my mother, but once I became a city reporter, avoiding Trump would be as futile as avoiding the wails of sirens in midtown, especially when he and Mayor Ed Koch were feuding.
In the 1980s, the Koch administration botched an essential overhaul of the Wollman Rink in Central Park. City officials made some bad calls, but much of the blame had to go to government regulations — especially a wasteful state statute, the Wicks Law, that forces local governments to solicit bids from multiple contractors for most construction jobs, instead of hiring one general contractor.
In 1986, Trump declared that he could fix the famous ice skating rink. He did. As a private entrepreneur, he avoided Wicks, could move fast with the contractor of his choice and got the skating rink rebuilt ahead of time and under budget.
Can-do businessman to the rescue, right? Good for him and good for the city, right? Yes…but.
He got the job done, but his Wollman success was also the stuff of a carefully crafted, self promotional legend. Involved, as there often is with Trump, was a bit of (forgive the pun) trompe l’oeil.
Most think he paid for the rink’s nearly $3 million overhaul. Nope. He offered to, initially — but for a price. Trump wanted to operate the rink and its restaurant. Always an angle. City Hall declined, wary of a long-term relationship with Trump and unwilling to grant a potentially lucrative concession without competitive bidding. So instead Trump did the renovation at the city’s expense.
You’d think he would accept the public’s gratitude and leave it at that – but no. He had the gall to try to get his name on the landmark. Both Koch and Henry Stern, his Parks Commissioner at the time, say today that Trump urged them to rename Wollman for him. “He said, ‘You owe it to me,'” Stern told me.
Koch actually did contemplate giving into his nemesis, he explained to me last week, though he had balked at letting Trump finance the project in exchange for getting the concession. Said Koch: “We had so little money in those days I thought to myself, ‘Okay yes, we’ll let him put his name on the rink if he waives the $3 million reimbursement.’ He, thank God, wouldn’t do it.” (During the initial negotiations with the city, when Koch said that he feared Trump wanted to re-brand Wollman, Trump denied any such aspiration.)
Well, though Wollman is still the official name, it is overshadowed by another. The Trump Organization runs the place, so conspicuous TRUMP banners encircle the rink and decorate the Zambonis. After submitting the winning proposal to — irony alert! — Koch and Stern’s Parks Department, Trump’s company ran Wollman from 1987 to 1995, was outbid on the next round, and won the concession again in 2001. The current contract goes through 2021.
Not even our schools escaped the Trump ego. In 1997 he was Principal for a Day — then the centerpiece of a program run by PENCIL, a nonprofit group that encourages business people and others to develop relationships with city schools. Those relationships are now extensive, but years ago, participants spent a day at a school or, in Trump’s case, 21/2 hours. He caused quite a stir at P.S. 70 in The Bronx, The Times reported:
“‘First of all, who likes Nike sneakers?’ he asked 300 assembled fifth graders. ‘If everybody puts their name on a piece of paper right now, I will pick 15 people and I’ll take you to the new Nike store that I just opened at Trump Tower.'”
The students were thrilled at the promise of visiting what Trump called “the inner city called 57th and Fifth,” the account continued, though Andres Rodriguez, 11, seemed less than enchanted:
“‘Why,’ asked Andres, whose father is dead and whose mother cannot work because of a bad leg, ‘did you offer us sneakers if you could give us scholarships?'”
So that, America, is the Donald Trump his neighbors know: arrogant, brash and gleefully insulting.
He never had the guts to run for mayor himself, but called Koch, elected to City Hall three times, “a moron.” He ridiculed Richard Ravitch, a respected elder statesman credited with saving the subway system, as “extremely weak, ineffective and a poor negotiator.” He accused former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley of being “as phony as a $20 Rolex.” And on and on.
A skilled demagogue, as he demonstrated with the “birther” obscenity, Trump took out full-page advertisements in four New York newspapers in 1989, calling for the return of the death penalty, shortly after five teenagers were accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park. He wanted everyone involved in the crime “to be afraid,” he said.
Their convictions, based on confessions they claimed were coerced, were vacated in 2002, after another man confessed to the crimes. Trump refused to apologize.
That’s because he is ruled by ego, not reason. The country saw ample evidence of that again last week when — desperate to spin President Obama‘s release of his long-form birth certificate to his own benefit — Trump acted as though subjecting the President of the United States to a demeaning harangue over absolutely nothing qualified him for a Nobel Prize. Again unapologetic, he moved on to a bizarre attack on Obama’s intelligence.
A brand, not a candidate, Trump is having a fine time promoting his name. But run for President? Don’t count on it. In fact, if he stretches out the publicity-driven tease much longer, watch him collapse under the searing scrutiny that comes, eventually, to all real candidates.
News organizations are finally taking baby steps at treating him like a candidate instead of a celebrity. Imagine if he releases his tax returns, as he said he would if Obama released his birth records. How much does he really want the pubic to know about his business dealings, his financial failures as well as his successes, his marriages, his family
Thin-skinned, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated he has no tolerance for standard journalistic questioning, and has the unfortunate (for him) habit of reducing serious issues to cartoons, as he did when he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would get oil prices down by telling OPEC, “Fellas, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore… You’ve had your fun. Your fun is over.”
The longer he “runs,” the better people will get to know him, and his alleged popularity will evaporate, if it hasn’t begun to already. The rest of America is wising up to what New York already knows: that there is nothing worse than a snot-nosed kid all grown up.
Purnick, former metro editor and columnist at the New York Times, is author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.”
