No hometown love in Big Apple
NEW YORK— His name, in gaudy gold letters, may be affixed to 17 buildings across the city. But Donald Trump is little more than a worm in the Big Apple.
They intend to spit him out, New Yorkers.
By every measurable standard — the polls, the media tracking, the barroom chatter and Gotham’s own political history — Trump will get a firm kick in the ass Tuesday from the city where he was born.
N.Y.C., largest and most diverse metropolis in America — it doesn’t need to get great again, never stopped being so – is the antithesis of populist Trumpism: Tolerant, broad-minded, intellectual, sophisticated, shrewd and raised to glory on the sweat of immigrants. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ....
Even the money — especially the old money, which has traditionally wrapped itself in civic duty and philanthropy — has turned up its nose, revolted. At a white-tie charity dinner last month, Trump was booed by the New York elite at an event attended by Hillary Clinton.
For the first time in 72 years, a presidential contest is being waged by two New Yorkers, Trump and Hillary Clinton, albeit transplanted on her part with a residential address in Westchester. She’s the former senator and secretary of state; he’s the tycoon behind an eponymous real estate empire and has never served the commonwealth a day in his life.
Not since Thomas Dewey ran against Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor versus incumbent wartime president, have New Yorkers gone mano a mano. Dewey would probably not recognize his party today. In the state’s past, even in its present, Republicans have been and generally are centrists, with notable exceptions such as former mayor Rudolph Giuliani (at least latterly), who’s been tirelessly shilling for Trump. Out in front of a GOP littered with reactionary pols who’ve lost their conscience and their minds.
“Trump is no different than any of the other Republicans,” insists Doug Simon, 58, stepping out Saturday evening on the Upper West Side. It’s a startlingly harsh position. “They all believe the same thing. Some of them just wrap it in different packages. I think in New York Trump has become despised. His unsavory practices and behaviours have been opened up for everyone to see.’’
Simon’s wife, Diane, calls the Trump phenomenon “sad, so sad’’ and says her aversion was spawned in the mogul’s reality TV days hosting The Apprentice. “When you call someone a loser, how does that make them feel?”
Well, precisely how Trump will be feeling on election night, the Simons confidently predict. They completely expect no victory party for the Republican candidate at the New York Hilton Midtown — surprisingly, the chosen venue is not among Trump’s realty holdings.
This conversation is taking place on the doorstep of 180 Riverside Blvd., one of three colossi that march alongside of the Hudson River. It’s called Trump Place. On Tuesday, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city — Barack Obama won 83.75 per cent of the vote in Manhattan in 2012, Mitt Romney just 14.92 per cent — the building will function as an official polling site for voters living in this swath of the densely populated island.
To be clear: Trump developed this property in the 1990s, but it’s no longer managed by his company. In fact, of those 17 towers that bear his name, he actually owns only four but developed seven others and licensed his name (increasingly a preferred practice for Trump) to others developers. Which is the case, by the way, for the 65-storey Trump Tower in downtown Toronto that was placed in receivership by an Ontario court on Tuesday after its owners failed to meet debt payments.
Door-stopping residents on Saturday, it quickly became evident that Trump has few devotees in the building and it will apparently be quite gratifying for them to cast their ballots against him.
“We’re actually moving away,” says Doug Simon. “I would prefer if this place was named after Trudeau. Either Justin or Pierre, doesn’t matter.’’
Owners and tenants have since October been circulating a petition to have “Trump” removed from the building’s address, citing the candidate’s “appalling treatment of women, his history of racism, his attacks on immigrants, his mockery of the disabled, his tax avoidance and his outright lying” as sufficient reason to dump Trump.
“I predict we’re going to take the name Trump off this building,” says Dan, who didn’t want his surname used. “We’re getting more and more signatures.” They’re up to about 750. “It’s embarrassing to have his name on the building.’’
An N.Y.C. outlier, he continues, and not remotely representative of the place, for all that Trump, born in Queens, built up his brand here, once celebrated as a risk-taking man-about-town who matched his patent leather shoes to the colour of his limousines.
“New York isn’t about racism and bigotry and misogyny,” says Dan. “That’s why his name should come off.’’
Adding insult is that residents pay for the dubious privileged of Trump semantics — $75,000 a year by the property managers to license the name. “So not only do we take it down but we save money.”
Dan didn’t realize a polling station will be set up on the premises. “It would give me pleasure if I had to walk to Alaska to stop this man. The fact it’s in my building makes it even more convenient.”
Patrick Coats, a 26-year-old hedge fund analyst, was among those who signed the petition. “Trump is not at all representative of New Yorkers or New York state. Maybe his message will resonate with a different type of people. I hope not. I hope it’s Hillary because I love America.”
This is, admittedly, just a tiny pocket of the bright lights big city, of 8.5 million people, where hundreds of languages are spoken. But New York is a mélange of umpteen distinct neighbourhoods, with 36 per cent of the population foreign-born, according to the most recent U.S. census; the largest Asian-Indian population in the Western Hemisphere, the largest African American community of any city in the U.S., and the largest Jewish community outside Israel.
Nearly all the demographics tilt away from Trump’s core base, with the blue-collar segment (factory jobs, transportation and construction workers) — those who might be most responsive to the candidate’s siren song of returning millions of lost jobs to a hard-hit constituency — only a small sector, comprising merely 16 per cent of the region, according to a CityLab survey of socio-economic residential segregation.
But the “service class,’’ which includes low-skill workers who hold routine service jobs in food service and preparation, retail sales, clerical and administrative positions, is the largest class in Manhattan, making up 48.1 per cent of the region’s workforce.
There is, of course, the other side of New York City, the glitz and the glamour and the astonishing wealth.
That’s where Trump lives, when he’s not at Mar-a-Lago in Florida — a “must-win” state where he stumped for the third time in recent weeks on Saturday. Hereabouts, the Trumps — wife Melania, 10-year-old son Barron — doss down in overthe-top opulence: the marbled triplex penthouse of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park, a building 11 times bigger than the White House he hopes to occupy. He’s not the most famous or notorious resident of the hotel-condo-retail complex either. A directory recently compiled by Bloomberg shows a slew of jailbirds, faux aristocratic nobility, mobsters, a Russian oligarch or two, called 725 Fifth Avenue home.
The Trump Bar at ground level, however, was mostly filled with acolytes from the boonies yesterday, proudly wearing their “Make America Great Again” ball caps — available for purchase in the garden-level Trump Store, along with such signature items as hoodies, mugs, tie clips, books by and about Trump, daughter Ivanka-branded clutch purses, Melania’s kids clothing line and Donald’s designer cologne: Empire.
Out front, damners and defenders vie for public attention, demonstrators spilling on to the street as police officers keep the sides apart. It’s become Ground Zero for the Trump Circus.
Holding aloft her pro-Trump banner — and a pair of manacles, symbolically intended for Hillary — was Mariza Decurtis, a professional photographer who described herself as “foreign-born,” from Italy, “but legal.”
“Trump is a decent man, a good family man. He has a huge heart. What he said about women, that conversation that was tape recorded, it was just a little joke, like all men make. I’m more offended by the Clinton family, for what her husband has done to women and she covered up for him.
“She’s taking money from Arab countries that treat women horribly. She will be indicted, I’m sure.
“Donald Trump will save this country.”
But he won’t take Manhattan.