I’m reading chapter four of Maggie Haberman’s new biography (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America) of Donald Trump. It is called “Blind to the Beautiful Mosaic.” Apparently, Trump was largely blind to the beauty of diversity.
Haberman writes:
* Up to that point in his life [1986], Trump had had few meaningful interactions with New Yorkers of color. When he was a child, in the decades after World War II, the city’s segregated neighborhoods were cauldrons of bigotry and resentment, cleaved off into “us” versus “them.” His childhood home in Jamaica Estates was just a seven-minute drive from Hollis, Queens, which had primarily been settled by Black residents since after the Korean War, but the two may as well have been many miles apart. The borough was on its way to becoming one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places on earth, but Trump never appeared to value the unique multiculturalism of his surroundings.
Black people were not known to be part of Fred Trump’s circle of influence…* Donald himself spoke favorably about Black people who succeeded in entertainment or sports. But he would recount that Roy Cohn had advised him to hope for a Black judge, with the implication being that they could be manipulated, and associates recalled Trump musing about having Black judges preside over his cases. He told associates that one of his security guards disliked Black people and was aggressive when they got too close to Trump. (Trump called both statements false.) And he continued throughout his life to identify ethnic groups with the article “the,” as in a 2011 radio interview in which he declared, “I have a great relationship with the Blacks.” Over my years of reporting in New York City, Trump was the only political figure other than another Queens-born politician, Andrew Cuomo, I ever heard publicly use that specific phrase. It reflected not just a minimizing, reductive view but a transactional one: ethnic and racial groups were simply discrete units to be won over as allies in elections, or in real estate or zoning battles.
Trump publicly demonstrated little interest in the civil rights movement, though his college years coincided with one of the most intense and geographically widespread moments for race relations in our country’s history.* Trump experienced that racial tumult at a remove. When Tony Gliedman arrived at the Trump Organization in 1986, he insisted on bringing along his assistant at the city’s housing agency, a young Jamaican immigrant named Jacqueline Williams. At the time, Trump was known to invoke stereotypes of Black people, such as laziness. Trump’s assistant, Norma Foerderer, initially expressed anxiety at the suggestion of hiring Williams. Foerderer told Gliedman that they’d never had a Black person working on the executive floor, a comment that was later shared with Williams. Foerderer requested that Williams interview with her before she could join the staff. “Wow,” Foerderer exclaimed when they met. “You’re beautiful anyway, so you’ll fit right in.”
* Trump’s most sustained encounters with Black people came as he pushed beyond real estate and into the sports business.
* The new proximity to Black athletes, celebrities, and political figures did little to change how Trump talked with people about race. Trump had seemed a largely oblivious bystander to so many of the social and cultural revolutions that defined the young-adult years of many of his peers. But as new opportunities pushed Trump beyond the lily-white milieu of his adolescence, his social ambitions pulled him from the facade of traditionalist domesticity that Fred Trump had erected in Jamaica Estates, and toward a world where sex seemed to be at the forefront of everything.
* They [former employees] also recalled Trump mocking gay men, or men who were seen as weak, with the words “queer” or “faggot.” If someone gay was of use to Trump personally or for a business purpose, Trump appeared open to the person, but it did not exempt them from private scorn. In front of one openly gay executive, Trump was nothing but pleasant and accepting, even taking him and his husband for Florida weekend getaways on his private jet and calling the executive’s husband for advice on orthodontia for Trump’s children. Behind the executive’s back, however, a former Trump Organization consultant named Alan Marcus said, Trump belittled him as a “queer” and bragged that he paid the executive less than he would have to otherwise because of it, a claim about compensation that appeared to be untrue.
The homophobia that had existed throughout the country for decades intensified around the AIDS virus. The New York Times carried its first, brief report of a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals , as the headline put it, in July 1981. The mysterious condition, which became known as AIDS, had what was at first an uncertain transmission but was identified as circulated through sexual contact and drug use. Yet for years polls showed Americans casting judgment on people who got infected. New York City became an epicenter of the disease. Ed Koch, who never married and whose sexuality was a source of speculation over his time in office—posters that cropped up during Koch’s gubernatorial race against Mario Cuomo in 1982 read vote for cuomo, not the homo —was widely seen as late in trying to mobilize public awareness of the virus. A city’s carefree attitude toward sex quickly turned dark, curtailing the greatest excesses of the club scene where Trump had once enjoyed being visible.
A country that was slow to react moved to action as the disease suddenly began impacting celebrities and heterosexuals. President Ronald Reagan made his first public reference to AIDS in 1985, years after it became an epidemic, and by which time panic about the virus was everywhere. Trump was plainly terrified of the disease, which seemed to elevate his fear of germs and illness to an almost pathological level. He told one friend after another that he wore two condoms to protect himself, and he announced publicly that he would require prospective dates to take an AIDS test. “It’s one way to be careful. There are a lot of ways,” he told an interviewer. “I’m saying, take all of those ways and double them, because you will need them.”
Among straight New Yorkers, fear of AIDS also increased speculation about sexual orientation—musing about who might be gay and who wasn’t, including about Koch—that was often homophobic in its effect. Trump was far from alone among prominent men in New York City experiencing some level of that panic, but for him, the anxiety was pronounced. He called reporters to inquire if people with whom he had just met might be gay, worried simply because they had just exchanged a handshake.* In the world of New York’s broader racial politics, Trump was extreme, but not so completely out of sync with other whites—both the white ethnic working class of his native Queens and the elite of his adopted Upper East Side, who were perhaps less overt about expressing their prejudices—as to stand out glaringly in day-to-day conversations. Koch’s relationships with some Black leaders were famously contentious, beginning with the closure of a hospital in Harlem and right into his final reelection campaign; he made controversial statements and then complained that Black leaders and voters reacted to them. “It’s been my impression there is a lot of anti-Semitism amongst substantial numbers of black leaders—not all,” Koch said during his 1985 reelection campaign, sparking a furious reaction.
* Over time, the calcified racial politics of New York City began to loosen, transformed by demographic and cultural change, but Trump’s own views did not seem to. As he built his Manhattan real estate empire, the “Fear City” moniker that public-sector union leaders had used to pressure City Hall a decade earlier had come to describe a city where crime rates had stayed historically high for ten years. There were nearly 2,000 murders in 1980 and 1981, and violent crime reports overall exceeded 180,000 both years. By the mid-1980s, New York was plagued by the crack cocaine epidemic. In the city, street crime exploded as users of the drug robbed people to pay for the next cheap hit. Tensions over crime and policing provoked a series of racial conflagrations with a uniquely New York character.
* Police, Trump said, needed to be let loose. “Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s. We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this City.” The primary target of Trump’s ire was Koch, who had instructed citizens not to carry “hate and rancor” in their hearts. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” the ad continued. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence. Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good. He sat with a handful of reporters to underscore his message that hate could be a uniting force for the city. “You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally,” he said. “I want society to hate them.”
The case increased Trump’s visibility as a commentator on topics well outside his area of business expertise. On CNN’s Larry King Live , he spoke about what he characterized as the weakness of policing tactics, a subject that did not at all relate to the specifics of the Central Park Jogger case. (On air, Trump scooted back from King and said he found the host’s breath to be unbearable.) “The problem we have is we don’t have any protection for the policeman,” Trump said. “The problem with our society is that the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights, unbelievable rights, and I say it has to stop.”
Trump was hardly the lone voice furious about the crime, or even the lone voice demanding swift justice. (Some white liberals, living in a terrified city that had seen record crime increases over more than a decade, agreed with Trump’s general sentiment more than they would be comfortable admitting publicly.) But none called for brutality in response quite as Trump did.* The same year as the Central Park assault, Trump appeared on an NBC News special focused on race relations, along with other guests including the filmmaker Spike Lee, poet Maya Angelou, home-entertaining celebrity Martha Stewart, and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. The guests were asked to speak about affirmative-action policies and their impact on economic opportunity in the United States. “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” said Trump, whose father’s connections and money shaped nearly every aspect of his career. “And, I think, sometimes a Black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that but in actuality today, currently, it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a great. I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”
* From the outset, it was clear that he would incorporate racial paranoia into his public persona and his views of civic life. The first time I saw Trump after he left office, in an interview for this book, I asked him how he thought racial politics in New York were different than in the rest of the country. “I think they’re more severe,” he replied. When I asked in what way, he said only, “I don’t know why. I think it’s more severe. I think it’s a tougher game.” He added, “Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of.”
That was the lens through which Trump seemed to view the entire country, if not the world: tribal conflict was inevitable. One day in the 1990s, Alan Marcus brought up a news item he had just seen about the changing demographics of the United States, projecting that nonwhites would one day be the majority population, intentionally trying to get a rise out of Trump by raising a subject he knew would needle him.
That won’t happen, Trump said. First, he insisted, there would be a revolution. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said.* A year after he was released from prison in March 1995, Tyson moved into a new mansion in Farmington, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of Hartford. When Sharpton arrived for a party there, he followed a winding staircase to a terrace overlooking the pool, where he found Don King chatting with Trump. The topic of their discussion: Tyson’s white neighbors were petitioning to get him out of the community, and they were speculating about how much money Tyson could demand from them if he obliged by moving out.
“When Trump got elected, that’s what occurred to me: if Donald Trump had been born Black, he would have been Don King,” Sharpton said. “Because both of them—everything was transactional.”
From chapter eight:
On and off over roughly two years he had dated another beautiful model nearly two decades his junior. Kara Young was seen by his employees as fun, interesting, and down to earth. She was also the daughter of a Black mother and white father. “Do you think she looks Black?” Trump asked Marcus.
Young has said very little about the relationship over the years. In one of her few interviews on the topic, she described a boyfriend who exhibited a cultural ignorance about Black people and appeared to rely on stereotypes to process unfamiliar activities. When they attended a tennis match featuring the sisters Venus and Serena Williams, Trump expressed surprise at the racially diverse crowd because he appeared to believe that Black people were not interested in tennis. “ He was impressed that a lot of black people came to the U.S. Open because they were playing,” Young recalled to The New York Times in 2017. Yet she also helped Trump ingratiate himself into a new world of Black celebrities, such as the rap artist Sean Combs and the influential music producer Russell Simmons. Trump would later point to those associations as examples of why he couldn’t be a racist, because he knew Black people, and, more significantly they had engaged with him without taking issue. (Weeks after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side.” He laughed as he said it; Young told him that wasn’t something to joke about.)
From chapter twenty:
After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Trump was reluctant to dispense aid, due in part to his refusal, in conversations with aides, to accept that the island was a part of the United States; he seemed to view it as a distressed property, referring to it as a place with “absolutely no hope” when an aide described its potential.
