Donald J. Trump

BS, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words.

—DONALD J. TRUMP

From the moment he appeared on the public stage it was clear that Donald Trump was a Dickens character come to life: an exuberantly vulgar business ogre with an evocative, fake-seeming name who would do whatever it took to get his way, or who would say whatever he could think of to at least appear to be getting his way. New Yorkers knew him as a loutish, pouty, media-crazed local real estate developer and failed casino operator. He had it all: a Zsa Zsa–esque hi-glam foreign-born blond wife^* who was the first to refer to him as “The Donald”; his name plastered (okay, welded) onto every building he bought; and, in each square-jawed, man-of-affairs, uberserious photograph, an adolescent schoolboy’s idea of a commanding visage. So what if he was a widely derided buffoon among people of good, or any, taste? When you’re a narcissist, there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

And when, in 2004, he ascended to a prime-time slot as host of NBC’s The Apprentice and made “You’re fired!” his signature line (which he tried, but failed, to copyright), who could possibly be shocked that it was a cross between a sadistic Japanese game show and Idiocracy? Trump had, through an amazing combination of tirelessness, ambition, and obnoxiousness, accomplished the impossible. He had become both an actual businessman and a comic-book cartoon of himself.

Nonetheless, despite Trump’s decades of exposure, only the most diligent observers recognized the true malevolence lurking beneath the buffoonish behavior and otherworldly hair. Then, in 2011, he came out as a “birther,” peddling the baseless smear that Barack Obama was not a Hawaiian-born Christian but a Kenyan-born Muslim. “He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” he told Fox News, adding incoherently: “He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.”

Was it a surprise to learn that this self-branding loon, this “real estate mogul” whose businesses declared bankruptcy four times, this professionally bullying TV personality, this superrich Ivy League graduate was ostentatiously jumping into bed with the lowest, dumbest, creepiest, most bigoted faction of the American political right? Not to those who were onto him from the beginning. Back in the early 1970s, after young Donald’s father anointed him president of the family business, the Justice Department sued the Trump Organization for violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to black people. Trump, employing what would become a signature move,* punched back by countersuing the government for a randomly large number of dollars—in this case 100 million of them. He also loudly protested that if dark people on welfare were allowed into his buildings, entire communities of nice white people would, en masse, rise up and leave the city. Needless to say, his lawsuit was tossed out of court and he was legally compelled to rent to qualified people of color. Any color. There were no reports of thousands of nice white people attempting to flee New York City.

Much more may be said about Donald J. Trump. But this is not that kind of book: we will leave his racist, jingoistic presidential campaign—not to mention his insistence that he won by a landslide despite garnering nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, his prep school “military” record, his Vietnam draft deferments, his nutzoid claim to be “the most militaristic person you will ever meet,” the thinness of his skin, his claims that “the blacks* love me,” his marital escapades, his narcissism, his boorishness, his outer-borough concept of taste, the shoddiness of his edifices, his use of illegal-immigrant laborers, the truth about his net worth, his bromance with and role of useful idiot to Vladimir Putin, the book by Adolf Hitler he kept by his bedside, the fraudulence of Trump University, the Chinese origin of his ties, the failure of his line of hi-kwality steaks, his tweeting addiction, his grabbing of pussies, and countless other matters of public record—to the many chroniclers, biographers, psychologists, apologists, and humorists who are writing about him at the very moment we are writing this and will continue doing so for the next several decades.

We will simply add that while Trump is proud of having graduated from—his words—“the best school in the world,” we wonder how proud Wharton is of having excreted this monstrosity.