Donald Trump’s Secret Shame About
New York City Haunts His Trial
April 17, 2024
By Elizabeth Spiers
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion
writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.
With
jury selection underway in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Lower Manhattan,
the former president’s chickens have finally come home to roost. It feels
uniquely appropriate that Mr. Trump will have to endure the scrutiny on his old
home turf. New York City residents have been subjected to his venality and
corruption for much longer than the rest of the country, and we’re familiar
with his antics — the threats, the lawsuits, the braggadocio, his general
ability to slip through the tiniest crack in the bureaucracy or legal system
just fast enough to avoid the consequences of his actions. He rose to fame
here, but was never truly accepted by the old money elites he admired. The rich
and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they
laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic. His inability to succeed
in New York in quite the way he wanted to drove much of the damage he did to
the country as a whole, and arguably his entire political career.
For
many of his admirers, Mr. Trump represents a certain kind of rich person whose
wealth and success are emblematic of the American dream, and on the campaign
trail, that was the story he told. That illusion was reinforced by “The
Apprentice,” a heavily scripted pseudo-competition in which Mr. Trump pretended
to fire people, something that in real life he generally has others do. He
likes having authority but not doing the hard work of leadership and prefers to
outsource the dirty work to underlings and lawyers.
It’s
harder for Mr. Trump to avoid the actual untelevised reality of who he is in
New York City, where he grew up the son of a wealthy Queens real estate
developer and used his inheritance less to grow the family business than to
grow his personal brand. His business dealings were murky, sometimes mob-connected and
riddled with high-profile failures and bankruptcies. Serious real estate investors did not regard him as a peer. Eventually,
banks began to refuse to lend him money. He was ruthlessly skewered by New York
publications, most famously by Spy magazine, which called him a “short-fingered
vulgarian.”
But he had a taste for being in the public eye —
constantly. Gossip columnists at his favored tabloids often received tips from Mr. Trump about
himself, even about his own sexual escapades, under the pseudonym John Barron. If you
want to get attention without paying for public relations consultants, another
good way to do it is to run for public office. Mr. Trump expressed interest in
the presidency starting in the late 1980s, took steps in that direction in 2000 and considered it again in 2012 before
being elected in 2016.
All of these qualities make Mr. Trump what the complexity scientist Peter Turchin refers to as an “elite aspirant.” It may seem absurd to refer to a rich guy who went to an Ivy League school and has been a public figure for a long time as an aspiring elite, but by Professor Turchin’s definition, Mr. Trump fits the term because he wanted forms of power he did not have. He had wealth, which is one of Professor Turchin’s four types of elite power, but precariously. He had neither the kind of influence that media figures who deal in persuasion have nor the raw political power that elected officials do. He admires dictators and people whose power is derived from violence (military figures, law enforcement) because he doesn’t have that, either.
If
you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the song goes, but Mr. Trump
couldn’t make it here — at least not the way he craved — despite being born
here and being one of the few people who could afford it.
So
it’s easy to understand why he bashes his hometown as a crime-ridden hellscape,
and why the Oval Office appealed. Washington offered him political power but
also something he may have wanted even more: the respect New York denied him.
No
physical space in New York City is more emblematic of Mr. Trump than his
flagship Trump Tower. It’s flashy, slightly out of place on Fifth Avenue, with
what seems like a general aesthetic philosophy that one can never have too much
gold plating. When he got permission to tear down the Bonwit Teller building,
which used to stand on that site, he promised to donate its Art Deco friezes to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He destroyed them instead. New York Magazine’s
Marie Brenner wrote at the time that the building’s approval “legitimized a pushy kid nobody
took seriously.”
The details of the criminal case getting underway in
Manhattan make it salacious (A porn star! Hush money!) and it would probably
have been a career-ending scandal for any other president, but against the
backdrop of Mr. Trump’s endless appearances in supermarket tabloids, it just
seems like par for the course. New Yorkers pride themselves on a certain kind
of skepticism that allows them to spot a con man, but Mr. Trump’s cons have
always been so out in the open that we may have underestimated his vindictiveness
and his capacity to do real harm.
There
were glimpses of it, though. It’s tough to identify the nadir of Mr. Trump’s
bad behavior in New York, but I believe it was in 1989, when he took out ads in major media outlets (including this one)
calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York State after five
Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. The
five men had their convictions vacated in 2002, but Mr. Trump still refuses,
out of malice or vanity, to apologize or acknowledge their innocence. When asked whether
he believes they should have been convicted, he still insists that they admitted their guilt.
One
of the men, Yusef Salaam, is now a member of the New York City Council. The day
Mr. Trump was arrested in April of 2023, Mr. Salaam wrote, in an ad mocked up
to look like Mr. Trump’s original, “I hope that you exercise your civil
liberties to the fullest, and that you get what the Exonerated Five did not get
— a presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”
And
that’s what he’s getting, at last.
In
many ways Mr. Trump’s success outside of New York is a function of a
characteristic he has that the city itself does not: an inferiority complex.
Even when confronted with evidence of his wrongdoing, he insists that he is a
victim, and now so are the people who vote for him. When he was indicted in Georgia,
he told his followers, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you —
and I’m just standing in their way.”
Mr.
Trump was successful in part because he projected his own anxieties onto the
people who were loyal to him. When pressuring the Georgia secretary of state,
Brad Raffensperger, to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election, he
said, “They’re going around playing you and laughing at you behind your back,
Brad, whether you know it or not, they’re laughing at you.” Mr. Trump both
fears and loathes being laughed at, and publicly seethed his way through the
White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 when, as expected, he was the butt of
some of the jokes. “He was pissed off like I’d never seen him before,” Chris Christie later said.
“Just beside himself with fury.” The evening confirmed Mr. Trump’s suspicions
that the elites were sneering at him and he wasn’t in on their jokes.
In this sense he’s a lot like Richard Nixon, who, as his former aide Tom Charles Huston said, understood “in his gut” when middle-class people “felt they were being put upon, because he felt he had been put upon.”
Mr. Trump also feels that he has been put upon, not just by
the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and the New York attorney
general, Letitia James, but by all of the New York City liberals who did not
take him seriously when he put on a faceful of makeup, donned a comically long
tie and climbed into the clown car bound for Washington. There is some relief
for New Yorkers who are witnessing the prospect of his comeuppance, though. The
rest of the country is seeing a side of Mr. Trump that New York City residents
have always been familiar with: the guy who’s angry that he hasn’t been
accepted in the elite circles he admires and is outraged that others have.