by David Rosen
Donald Trump, the great grifter of American politics, is again playing the media for all its worth. He’s having a field day pulling the yoyo of headlines from one assertion to a follow-up denial and then a bellicose rejoinder. And it’s working.
The artful conman keeps popular attention off his innumerable failures, both domestic and international, by focusing on emotional issues that embolden his hardcore base and inflame everyone else.
Trump’s most recent target are four Congressional Democrats — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN). He insisted that they “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” He intentionally forgot – or simply didn’t know – that all four women are American citizens and only one, Omar, is a naturalized citizen, born in Somali and arriving in the U.S. at 10 years of age.
In a follow-up campaign rally in Greenville, NC, Trump picked up his attack on the four Congresswomen, with special vehemence targeted at Omar. As he ranted, the crowd chanted, “Send her back.” Soon after, he told the audience, “if they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.” As criticism mounted to his role in fostering the chant, he quickly sought to distance himself from the chant – only to further his attack on Omar.
The story drew more drama when CNN’s Anderson Cooper argued that Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, had “primed” the crowd during her warm-up speech prior to the president’s appearance at the NC rally.
The Trump forces are priming the pump for the 2020 reelection campaign. The “send her back” chant may well serve the same role as the infamous “lock her up” chant played in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. And he won!
Gone unasked is whether Trump needs to be sent back to where he came from?
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Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, Sr., was born Friedrich Drumpf (1869-1918) and emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1885 at age 16. After first disembarking in New York, he traveled west, making it to California, then journeying to Seattle and to British Columbia where he reportedly ran a restaurant, bar and brothel. After bouncing back to Germany, he was ordered to leave Bavaria as punishment for refusing mandatory military service – something his son and grandson would also do. He settled in Woodhaven, Queens, working as a barber and restaurant manager.
David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter who has exhaustively examined Trump’s life and business practices for nearly three decades, is the author of two revealing studies of the president, The Making of Donald Trump (2016) and It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (2018).
Johnston pulls no punches in his assessment of Trump’s family lineage. “He comes from a family of criminals,” he explains. “His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred (1905-1999), had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Trump's father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today's money.” Following the family line, Johnston notes, “Donald got his showmanship from his dad, as well as his comfort with organized criminals.”
On Memorial Day 1927, New York faced a series of riots by reactionary groups that challenged the meaning of nation’s core beliefs in “equality,” an issue the nation has fought a bloody civil war over. On that day, in the Bronx, sympathizers of Mussolini and the Italian fascist movement along with supporters of Ku Klux Klan held a rally. In Queens, Pres. Drumpf’s father, Fred, along with six other fascists, was arrested as 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through his Jamaica neighborhood.
Grandpa Drumpt’s decedents lived in Jamaica Estates, a well-to-do and all-white neighborhood, with up-market homes set back on tree-lined streets. Fred was a real-estate a strict father, a stern, formal man with a thick mustache and hair combed back who insisted on wearing a tie and jacket while at home. The senior Trump forbade his children from cursing, calling each other by nicknames or – for the girls -- wearing lipstick. Fred was a conservative Republican who admired Barry Goldwater.
In his 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, Trump looked back nostalgically to his childhood. “We had a very traditional family,” he wrote. “My father was the power and the breadwinner, and my mother was the perfect housewife.” In a chapter titled “Growing Up,” he recounted a story in which he allegedly punched his second-grade music teacher in the face because he “didn’t think he knew anything about music.” The purpose of the story was to show how the boy nurtured the man to come.
During the 2016 campaign, The Washington Post ran a revealing story, “Confident. Incorrigible. Bully: Little Donny was a lot like candidate Donald Trump.” Based on interviews with some of Trump’s neighborhood friends, teachers and others, it offers an insightful profile of the future president as a youth. The authors’ thesis is simple: “Donald J. Trump left an indelible impression in the prosperous Queens neighborhood where he evolved from a mischievous, incorrigible boy into a swaggering young man.”
One of the people interviewed, Ann Trees, 82, taught at Kew-Forest School where Trump was a student through the 7th grade. “He was headstrong and determined,” Trees stressed. “He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face — I use the word surly — almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”
At school, young Trump was among a group of boys who pulled girls’ hair, passed notes and talked out of turn. “We threw spitballs and we played racing chairs with our desks, crashing them into other desks,” he recalled. The article includes interviews with two childhood neighbors who said Trump could erupt in anger, pummeling another boy or, playing baseball, smash a baseball bat if he made an out. It claimed, “He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head.” One interviewer claimed, “Donald was known to be a bully.”
Drumpt the boy from Queens became the huckster he is in Manhattan. One of his first apartmentswas the penthouse on a swank East 65th Street building and he was driven around town in a silver Cadillac limo with “DJT” emblazoned on the license plates. He was introduced to the world of Manhattan high-flyers by no less an authority of immorality than Roy Cohn.
Cohn gained initial notoriety as the lead prosecutor in the 1951 espionage trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; they were convicted and executed, the only Americas civilians to be put to death, electrocuted, as victims of a political show-trial. In the mid-50s, he served as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s (R-WI) principle assistant in his anticommunists witch-hunts.
During the ‘70s, Cohn was a Big Apple lawyer for big-money interests, including Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. He was also a mob consigliere for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful mafia group in New York, and mafia boss Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.
In ’73, Drumpt-the-younger met Cohn at Le Club, a Manhattan nightspot for the rich, famous and those on the make. Cohn and the Drumpts, father and son, joined forces that year and represented Trump-senior in a case brought by the Justice Department housing discrimination against black and other minority tenants. In this, and other cases, Cohn defended Trump-senior and became Trump-the-younger’s consigliere.
As Johnston points out, “with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano -- at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices.” He notes, “What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery delays.”
***
And now Donald Drumpt is president. Should he be sent back?
Obviously, the chant “send her back” is a provocation, a simple, declarative assertion intended to rally support among Trump’s followers by invoking difference. The slogan seeks to separate “us” from “them.” In more “normal” times such obviously mean-spirited political ranting would be rejected as an almost Nazi-like incantation to race or antisemitic hatred. Today, it’s a political slogan for a reelection campaign. However, if Trump’s campaign falters and he gets more desperate, the slogan could foretell --like what happened in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017 – a lot worse to come.
Trump -- like the four Congresswomen he attacked – is an American and neither him nor the courageous Congresswomen are going anywhere. He is playing to his crowd and they are, unfortunately, eating it up. The only way to really counter his mean-spirit and racist provocations is to send him back to Queens where Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is one of the Representatives.
This article was originally published in American Herald Tribune on July 23, 2019.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of UMMnews.
