New York made him, now it may break him
This city has been the setting for Donald Trump’s recent legal losses and his toughest challenges
NEW YORK It’s fitting that Donald Trump’s entry into the Manhattan real estate world 49 years ago came in the heart of Midtown. Like Midtown, Trump has always been the TV version of New York, dazzling and skin deep, empty, like a human billboard in Times Square.
He crossed the East River sometime around 1975. He arrived from Queens a fully formed version of who he is today, all money and artifice, like Jay Gatsby if Jay Gatsby had only ever been in love with himself.
For 15 years, he built and bought, using his father’s cash and his own shameless gift for self-promotion. He slapped his name on anything and everything: hotels, condos, coops, casinos. He lied and lost money and his reputation grew and grew.
Even when the ’90s came and the money dried up, and the bankruptcies flourished, he didn’t stay down long. In November 1992, his flagship casino went under. A month later, the New York Times ran a story that asked, in the very first line, “Is Donald Trump back?”
New York created Donald Trump, in other words. For decades, New York enabled him and kept him alive. He was a hustler, a striver and a bridge-and-tunnel con. But he was New York through and through. If nothing else, then, there may be some poetic closure to the fact that it is New York that may finally take him down.
Last week, Trump sat in a New York criminal court for what was likely his final appearance before facing trial on charges of election interference in April. The New York trial, tied to alleged hush money paid to a former pornographic actor, is, at this point, the only one of Trump’s four criminal cases that seems likely to reach a verdict before the election next November. It took place in a building in Lower Manhattan that is as far from the cubic zirconia glitz of Trump’s Midtown as Brighton Beach is from the Upper West Side.
In a brief hearing, Judge Juan Merchan dismissed the arguments of Trump’s attorneys, who had been pushing for dismissal or additional delays. He questioned their interpretations of reality. He made it clear, in his growing exasperation, that he was moving this forward to a trial. The next day, Merchan issued a gag order preventing Trump from speaking publicly about witnesses, potential jurors, court staffers or their families. (Trump spent the week instead attacking Merchan’s daughter online.)
There is something in the fact that it is a New York judge cutting through Trump’s thickets of obfuscation and delay. It was New York juries, after all, who found Trump liable for defaming the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll earlier this year, and a different New York judge, in a separate civil trial, that found him and his adult sons guilty of serially inflating his wealth in corporate documents in February.
Trump’s finances have been the subject of inflation and speculation for decades in New York. Spy magazine ran a feature in 1991 listing all the times and all the ways Trump lied about his wealth during his gogo ’80s rise. “It was a perfect moment for a Donald Trump … brazen, pushy, not old money,” said Kurt Andersen, Spy’s co-founder in a recent interview with the Star. “His well-known, infamous, notorious, tendency to be a deadbeat is kind of interesting and amazing to me.”
Trump didn’t exactly appear from nowhere in 1975. His father, Fred, was a phenomenally successful landlord who had parlayed the postwar building boom into an enormous fortune in Brooklyn and Queens. But Donald, always Fred’s favourite, wanted to succeed over the river, where the old money lived.
He got his first big break in 1975, when he won the right to redevelop the old Commodore Hotel, on top of a train station in Midtown. The Hyatt Grand Central, as it is now known, was his first big project and the last one that would never bear his name. It’s still there today, at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 42nd Street.
Age hasn’t been particularly kind to the Grand Hyatt. Today its glass exterior glows a kind of sickly golden green. It is alternately dwarfed by newer, nicer skyscrapers, or shamed by the elegant stonework of its neighbours from New York’s first gilded age.
That’s the remarkable thing about Trump’s New York. Walk around the city for a day and you’ll realize it was never built to last. The site for his prized Trump Tower was cleared by illegal immigrants from Poland (who were stiffed on their pay) and built with poured concrete supplied by the mob.
Like the Grand Hyatt, it hasn’t aged well. The fogged glass exterior looks grimy. The inside, all bronze and chrome, looks dated and cheap. Even a generous critic would admit it is at best a fine building in a row of gorgeous ones, nothing anyone will remember after its namesake is gone.
That’s the story with all of Trump’s buildings, at least the ones he built and didn’t buy. The Trump Plaza, dirty concrete and dingy glass from top to bottom, may be the ugliest building on the Upper East Side. It was built on the ashes of a hospital for orphans and financed as part of a scheme by Trump’s father to avoid paying inheritance tax.
After his court appearance last week, Trump’s motorcade drove him to the Trump Building at 40 Wall St. A century-old neo-Gothic skyscraper, it is the only interesting tower in the city that bears the Trump name. Trump didn’t build 40 Wall St. He acquired a ground lease to it in 1995. According to a judge’s ruling from September, he has been serially lying about its value since at least 2010 in order to obtain fraudulent loans.
Donald Trump can feel like forever right now. He has been in public life for 50 years and ever-present for the past eight. His name is everywhere, on everything, from buildings to indictments to political flags. But when you step back and consider what he has actually done, tangibly, you realize that almost none of it is etched in stone.
He has been losing this year, in New York courts. If he keeps on losing, he will, eventually, fade away. Nothing he has built will last, not his towers, or his movement, or even his name.
In fact, if you want to understand the real, lasting legacy of Donald Trump, it helps to drive a few hours south of New York to Atlantic City, N.J. There, on the boardwalk, next to the convention centre, overlooking the ocean, is the site of what was once the crown jewel in the Trump empire. The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel was demolished in 2021. There’s nothing on the lot now to indicate it was ever there. It’s just a dirty field of fenced-in grass with a sign warning trespassers to stay away. It was a shining Babel reduced to rubble in 20 seconds where nothing was left behind.
He has been losing this year, in New York courts. If he keeps on losing, he will, eventually, fade away. Nothing he has built will last, not his towers, or his movement, or even his name, Richard Warnica writes