The Trump Balloon

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-trump-balloon


Daily Comment
July 8, 2015
The Trump Balloon
By David Remnick


snip//

For decades, the many institutions of the press—high and low, left and right—have fed off Trump’s unapologetic vulgarity, his willingness to say absolutely anything. What did it matter to Trump if Jon Stewart used him as nightly cannon fodder? It was, as we now say, good for the brand. And what is the Trump brand? Over the years, we have been treated to Trump hotels, Trump magazine, Trump Airlines, Trump apartment buildings, Trump golf courses, Trump reality shows, Trump University, Trump the Game, Trump Chocolate, Trump the Fragrance, Trump Model Management, Trump Ice, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka.

The personal brand is, depending on your inclinations, a gilded jackass or an up-from-nothing tell-it-like-it-is-type-a-guy (without the up-from-nothing part). But it’s always been more than buffoonish entertainment. The sheer number of people and peoples who Trump has managed to insult, bully, and mistreat is, in its way, awe-inspiring. He congratulated Alejandro González Iñárritu for winning numerous Oscars for “Birdman” with this gracious remark: “Well, it was a great night for Mexico, as usual in this country.” He once told Bryant Gumbel, in an interview for an NBC program on race, what he thought about affirmative action: “If I was starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really do believe they have the actual advantage today.” In the seventies, the Trump real-estate company was sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in its rental practices in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. After settling the case with Trump, the Justice Department sued yet again for non-compliance. In 1989, Trump took out an ad in the Daily News, and three other newspapers, about the Central Park jogger rape case, in which he declared that the “criminals of every age” who had been arrested twelve days earlier—five African-American and Hispanic teen-agers—were “crazed misfits,” part of “roving bands.” “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” the ad read. “BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Years after it turned out that someone else had committed the crime, and the young men had finally been released from prison, Trump wrote an unapologetic op-ed for the paper in which he called the city’s push for restitution payments to the men “a disgrace.” He made it plain that, to him, their lives were nothing, and, besides, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Trump’s blithe moral contempt has many targets. Women? He once told Esquire, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” Climate change? Here’s a tweet, circa 2012: “It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!” Trump has been among the country’s foremost (i.e., loudest) “birthers,” constantly prompting the idea, against all evidence, that Barack Obama was born in some other country and, therefore, is constitutionally unable to hold the office.

Trump is now running for President of the United States. His platform appears, in the early stages, to be a smelly soup of billionaire populism and yahoo nationalism—all flavored with a tangy dollop of old-timey racism. On Mexicans: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” (When challenged that a report he cited concerned immigrants who had been raped, he said, “Somebody’s doing the raping!”) Donald Trump is currently polling second among Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, and nationally.

snip//

Donald Trump is a joke, too, but of a different sort. His intention is not to inspire laughter or relief; his targets are not the powerful. He doesn’t punch up. He spews forth ugliness everywhere he goes. It would be nice, and maybe wise, simply to ignore him, in the hope that he will, after all these many years, just go away. But he never really does, and the most immediate concern is not that he will win the office he pursues but that he will get in the heads of the candidates around him. Trump’s father was a self-promoter who dispersed discounts in his balloons. The son offers only toxic gas.