Time magazine’s latest Donald Trump cover
It seems like there are two Donald Trumps. New Yorkers came to know Trump beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Trump took on massive building projects, as well as massive city and state bureaucracies, and usually succeeded. This includes building the Trump Tower; renovating the old Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Station and turning it into the black-glassed Grand Hyatt; and rebuilding the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park after New York City officials failed for years to accomplish the task. Trump also navigated strict New Jersey licensing requirements to build casinos in Atlantic City. Moreover, long before Donald Trump became a politician, in taking on all the challenges of these building projects, Trump loved to criticize politicians.
Now, Donald Trump has joined the ranks of politicians with the same exuberance with which he builds buildings and hosts reality television shows. Despite saying that he did not want to list “politician” as his profession when filling out the form for jury duty, Trump has been pandering with the best of them. As a Republican seeking the presidential nomination, this means trading in the most cynical forms of racism, from calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” to opposing H-1B visas for highly educated legal immigrants in his far right wing immigration reform plan, to using the term “anchor babies” in opposition to the plain language of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s GOP pandering also includes other Republican knee-jerk “cultural issues,” such as saying that he’s “a huge Second Amendment guy” who opposes currently proposed gun safety laws, and, in typical Trump hyperbole, that he’s “the most militaristic person ever.” Even Trump’s now-ubiquitous baseball cap covering the world’s most infamous combover is a Bubba-pandering sight that Trump the builder would rarely if ever be caught dead displaying.
Right now, the Donald Trump who is leading the Republican primary polls and being talked about in the media is Trump the destroyer. The question is whether Trump will tear down his builder reputation, the Republican Party, or more.
Photo by Ninian Reid, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/dejb2t
