The title of this book is deliberately provocative. At his rallies, Trump fondles the American flag as the loudspeakers blare “God Bless the USA.” His slogans are “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” How can anyone say that such a person opposes America? The answer is that Trump’s display of patriotism is a reality show—not reality.
In 2019, Trump abused his power for his narrow self-interest, pressuring the government of Ukraine for information about his political opponents. It should have shocked Americans that an American president would seek foreign interference in our elections. But it was not Trump’s first such betrayal. Consider what he said in July 2016: “I will tell you this—Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”[1] This invitation was so remarkable that it caught the eye of FBI counterintelligence.[2] And on that very day, as the Special Counsel’s office would reveal, the Russians made their first attempt to hack the servers used by Hillary Clinton’s personal office.[3] In the words of the Mueller report: “The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations.”[4]
Think about that: A candidate for president was asking a hostile foreign government to steal the private communications of a former secretary of state. Within hours, its military did as he had asked. We do not know, and may never know, whether the timing was coincidental or whether the Russian military was responding to Trump’s request. Either way, that request was an act of disloyalty to the United States. Trump later claimed to his supporters that he was joking. That was a lie; he made the remark with a serious tone during a press conference. When reporter Katy Tur asked if he had any qualms about what he had just done, he snapped, “Nope, it gives me no pause.”[5]
Then Trump failed to do the things that a patriot would do. In the summer of 2016, the FBI warned Trump that Russia and other foreign adversaries would try to infiltrate his campaign.[6] In an official joint statement on October 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the Russian government had likely directed the hacking of American political figures and organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”[7] By this point, a candidate who loved this country would have ordered an internal review to see if the Russians had compromised the campaign. A loyal American would have denounced foreign interference and pledged to support the intelligence community’s fight against it. Trump did no such things. To the contrary, the Mueller report found that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”[8]
Trump denied knowledge of Russian involvement. “Maybe there is no hacking,” he said shortly afterward in a televised debate. “But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia [is] because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.”[9] Trump went on: “I know nothing about Russia. I know—I know about Russia, but I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there.” That was another lie: on October 28, 2015, he had signed a letter of intent to proceed with negotiations for a Trump Tower in Moscow.[10] Those negotiations had continued well into 2016.[11] Love of country would have meant telling the truth about his dealings with a foreign adversary. Instead, he railed against leaks, and even after winning the presidency, he likened the intelligence community to Nazi Germany.[12]
On January 20, 2017, Trump put his hand on a Bible and swore to God “that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Constitution sets out the wording of that oath, which is unique to the president: no other federal officials pledge that they will “faithfully execute” their offices. That oath imposes a duty of diligence.[13] If Trump had sworn in good faith, he would have made investigating the Russian attack on our country a top priority of his administration, and he would have rallied Congress and the people to support this effort. He did not. Eventually, the Justice Department did appoint a special counsel, and when Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave Trump the news, his reaction revealed what he cared about. According to the Mueller report, “the President slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f---ed.’ . . . Sessions recalled that the President said to him, ‘you were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect.”[14] Trump did not mention the Russian threat to American democracy or his oath to protect the Constitution. He only talked about himself. In the months to come, Trump repeatedly obstructed the investigation, violating the “take care” clause of the Constitution. Among other actions, he fired the FBI director and tried to arrange for the firing of the special counsel, though a subordinate declined to carry out that order.
All the while, the Russians kept up the attack. According to the director of national intelligence, “we are seeing aggressive attempts to manipulate social media and to spread propaganda focused on hot-button issues that are intended to exacerbate socio-political divisions. . . . [T]hese actions are persistent, they are pervasive, and they are meant to undermine America's democracy on a daily basis, regardless of whether it is election time or not.”[15] FBI Director Christopher Wray said in April 2019: “That is not just an election-cycle threat; it’s pretty much a 365-days-a-year threat. And that has absolutely continued. We saw that, therefore, continue full speed in 2018, in the midterms.”[16] Rather than reverse course, Trump kept insulting the intelligence community and praising Vladimir Putin. After the public release of the redacted report, he made a point of calling Putin. “We discussed it,” Trump boasted to the press. “He actually sort of smiled when he said something to the effect that it started off as a mountain and it ended up being a mouse.” When a reporter asked if he had told Putin to stop meddling in our elections, he said that she was rude. Finally, he acknowledged: “We didn’t discuss that. Really, we didn’t discuss it.”[17]
Even worse, he invited the Russians to do it again. If foreigners offered information about your 2020 opponent to your campaign, George Stephanopoulos asked him in 2019, should they take it or call the FBI? When he said that he would want to hear it, Stephanopoulos followed up: “You want that kind of interference in our elections?” Trump said: “It’s not an interference, they have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. . . . The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.”[18] He later said that he would report foreign dirt to the FBI if it were “incorrect or badly stated.”[19] Thus he would treat the FBI as a Collusion Product Safety Commission, making sure that foreign adversaries could provide only the most accurate, well-written reports on his opponents.
When the story of his Ukraine pressure became public, he not only rationalized his actions, he extended a similar request to yet another country: “And, by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with—with Ukraine.”[20] Imitating his flimsy excuse for inviting Russian interference, his apologists claimed that he was just kidding. His demeanor, however, made clear that he was serious.
One could go on and on with related sins of omission and commission. Just as important, however, is that Trump is un-American in a broader sense. Even as he gaudily proclaims his love of country, he subverts nearly everything it stands for.
Trump is an American in the way that Tony Soprano was a Catholic. He gained the status at birth, proudly displays the identity, sometimes goes through the ritual motions, but utterly disregards the substance. Devotion to country is not about misleading slogans and empty gestures. Instead, it is about ideas and ideals, and the hope that this nation can serve as an example to the rest of the world. To find America’s creed, we can look to the Founding documents and the words of its great public figures. The most important words are in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Founders and their heirs believed in truth—not mere opinions or propaganda, but objective reality available to all who would work to find it.[21] Trump rejects truth. He made thousands of false or misleading claims during his first two years in office.[22] He dismisses any facts he dislikes as “fake news,” and he sends his minions out to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge. Right after the inauguration, Kellyanne Conway defended the White House press secretary’s falsehoods about crowd size by saying he “gave alternative facts to that.”[23] During an interview about the special counsel’s investigation, his television lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Chuck Todd, “Truth isn’t truth.”[24]
As for the other key words of the Declaration, ponder what political scientist Harry Jaffa wrote: “Lincoln believed that moral treason consisted, above all, in denying the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’ or in denying that this was in fact the foundation of the American constitutional system.”[25] In 2005, Trump told the New York Times: “When they came up with the wonderful statement, all men are created equal, never has there been a more false statement.”[26] As we shall see later on, he has made the comment many times. In his other private and public utterances, he has encouraged all kinds of prejudice. And he has been walking the hateful walk since his earliest days in business, when he discriminated against African Americans in rental housing.
Trump’s violations of civil rights bear a close connection to another aspect of his un-Americanism: his contempt for the rule of law. “What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic?” said Alexander Hamilton. “The answer would be: An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws—the first growing out of the last.”[27] Trump could not grasp that sentiment. As a private citizen, he consorted with gangsters, exploited undocumented aliens, swindled customers, and cheated on his taxes—among many other things. As a candidate, he encouraged violence against protesters and bragged that he could get the military to follow illegal orders. As president, he undercut the rule of law in the United States and tried to corrode it overseas. As diplomat George Kent testified:
I do not believe the U.S. should ask other countries to engage in politically associated investigations and prosecutions. . . . As a general principle, I don’t think that as a matter of policy the U.S. should do that period, because I have spent much of my career trying to improve the rule of law. And in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, both of which want to join NATO, both of which have enjoyed billions of dollars of assistance from Congress, there is an outstanding issue about people in office in those countries using selectively politically motivated prosecutions to go after their opponents. And that’s wrong for the rule of law regardless of what country that happens.[28]
Obeying the law is not enough. The Declaration concluded: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The signers gave up much for their country, and over the following centuries, more than a million Americans died for it. Most people do not have to lay down their lives in battle, but Americanism does ask a certain level of service and sacrifice. As John F. Kennedy put it, “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Trump is not a fan of the second ask. He bone-spurred his way out of the Vietnam draft, cheated on his taxes, and corruptly used his office to enrich himself. State regulators shut down his “charitable” foundation for being a self-dealing fraud.
Just before Kennedy became president, he quoted Pericles: “We do not imitate—for we are a model to others.”[29] For someone who talks so much about American greatness, Trump does not see the United States this way. He has disparaged American exceptionalism and expressed admiration for authoritarian regimes. “I find China, frankly, in many ways to be far more honorable than Cryin’ Chuck and Nancy. I really do,” he said, referring to the Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.[30] Before GOP donors in Florida, he praised China’s president Xi Jinping: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.” Even if he were joking, why would he be lighthearted about dictatorship? As for the United States, he was not kidding: “I’m telling you, it’s a rigged system, folks. I’ve been saying that for a long time. It’s a rigged system. And we don’t have the right people in there yet. We have a lot of great people, but certain things, we don’t have the right people.”[31]
Trump does not want China to be more like the United States. He wants the United States to be more like China.
We know that Trump does not believe in American ideals. So what does he believe in? Trump has never held to a consistent and well-developed set of political principles. He has changed parties more often than he has changed wives and has flip-flopped on abortion, gun control, and other issues.[32] For all his high-decibel talk of defending borders, he put his name on a 2013 article that said: “We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability.”[33]
Nevertheless, it is possible to make out some of his attitudes. One involves his view of justice. For Trump, the word means nothing more than the advantage of the stronger.[34] Tony Schwartz, who did all the writing for Trump’s The Art of the Deal, put it this way: “There is no right and wrong for Trump. There’s winning and losing. And that’s very different from right and wrong.”[35] He damns his opponents by calling them “losers” or claiming that they are “failing,” even when they are not. In his eyes, to be rich, popular, or powerful is to be right. As a candidate, he shrugged off criticisms by citing his “great ratings.” When reporters asked about an upcoming meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who had slaughtered thousands of people under the cover of a “war on drugs,” Trump answered: “He is very popular in the Philippines. He has a very high approval rating in the Philippines.”[36] When another reporter challenged his wild claims about various topics, he sneered: “I guess I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m President, and you’re not.”[37]
This attitude clashes with the American tradition. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the little arts of popularity” were unworthy of the nation’s chief executive.[38] Jefferson drew a bright line between popularity and justice. It is a “sacred principle,” he said in his first inaugural address, “that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable.”[39] Whereas Trump believes that might makes right, Lincoln said the reverse: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”[40]
Trump also breaks with American tradition by reducing national greatness to crude material terms. “I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them,” he said in 2013, adding that he disliked talk of American exceptionalism because other countries have been “eating our lunch for the last 20 years.”[41] At a 2016 rally in Bismarck, North Dakota, he said: “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.”[42] The Founders approved of the pursuit of wealth, but they would have condemned the notion that it is all that defines us. When the British tried to buy off American colonies by adjusting the tea tax, Benjamin Franklin said: “They have no idea that any people can act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe that three pence in a pound of tea . . . is sufficient to overcome all the patriotism of an American.”[43] President Reagan promoted economic growth during the 1980s, but at the 1992 Republican Convention, he reminded his fellow Americans that there is much more to their nation: “My fondest hope for each one of you—and especially for the young people here—is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism.”[44]
Campaigning for president, Trump promised his followers that he could single-handedly solve their problems through his personal willpower. Accepting the Republican nomination, he said: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”[45] A Trump-bylined article in the National Enquirer began: “I am the only one who can make America great again!”[46] And during his 2016 Bismarck speech, he said: “Politicians have used you and stolen your votes. They have given you nothing. I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”[47] In the first Federalist paper, Hamilton warned that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”[48]
Note Trump’s use of the first-person singular, suggesting a view of power that is personal, not institutional. For him, the red, white, and blue are merely his gang colors. As president, he treats the government as personal property, giving jobs to unqualified family members and speaking of “my generals and my military.”[49] When he talks about loyalty, he means loyalty not to the Constitution but to Donald Trump. Reflecting on Trump’s demand for fealty from the director of the FBI, James Comey reflected: “Ethical leaders never ask for loyalty. Those leading through fear—like a Cosa Nostra boss—require personal loyalty.”[50]
In Trump’s binary view of the world, there are only friends and enemies. Anyone who disagrees with him is disloyal and therefore an enemy. He uses the word openly, often referring to the mainstream media as “an enemy of the people.” This frame of mind is profoundly un-American. On the eve of the Civil War, when thousands of Southerners were reaching for their rifles in rebellion, Lincoln refused to use the language of enmity. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”[51] Richard Nixon, who privately had subordinates keep lists of his opponents, declined to brand them as “enemies” in public. Barack Obama once let the word slip in a discussion of legislative politics and backtracked after harsh criticism from Republicans.[52]
Where does Trump’s mindset come from? In explaining the philosophies of other presidents, one might look to the books that they read. Political scientist Lee Edwards once recalled a 1965 visit to Ronald Reagan’s home library, where he found many works of history and economics. The volumes were not just for show but were “underlined, dog-eared, with notations in the margins! This guy had read these books!”[53] Accordingly, a study of the works of free-market thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek provides insights into Reagan’s economic policies. This approach would not work with Donald Trump. His ghostwriter Tony Schwartz said: “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”[54] When a reporter asked if Trump had read any presidential biographies, he admitted: “I never have. I’m always busy doing a lot.”[55] He has sometimes pretended to have read other books. In a 1987 interview, he had this comical exchange when Pat Buchanan asked him to name the best book that he had read besides The Art of the Deal:
Trump: I really like Tom Wolfe’s last book. And I think he’s a great author. He’s done a beautiful job—
Buchanan: Which book?
Trump: His current book. He’s just current book, is just that.
Buchanan: Bonfire of the Vanities.
Trump: Yes. And the man has done a very, very good job. And I really can’t hear with this earphone, by the way.[56]
Buchanan’s subsequent campaigns and writings anticipated many of the themes that Trump would later adopt, but there is no evidence that Trump ever glanced at any of Buchanan’s work. It is more likely that Trump advisers, such as Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, passed along some of Buchanan’s phrases and policy proposals. The real key to Trump lies not in the pages of books, but in his upbringing and background.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) once tried to excuse Trump’s bad behavior by saying that he “comes from a different world.” In a way, Hatch was right. C. S. Lewis once wrote: “Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.” Lewis assumed that such a place was imaginary, since people “have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.”[57] But such a setting does exist: it is the world that produced Donald J. Trump. It is not the New York City of heroic first responders and industrious immigrants. Instead, the man in the Oval Office comes from a smaller place within the city, a subculture comprising lechers, bigots, grifters, and gangsters. This subculture celebrated hedonism and mocked honesty. This setting shaped Trump from his childhood in the 1950s to his young adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s—the passage from last days of Mad Men through Studio 54 to the Trump-unread Bonfire of the Vanities.
Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, emigrated from Germany in 1885. He was 16 years old at the time, and under his grandson’s policies, American authorities would have barred him as an unaccompanied alien minor.[58] He was able to enter the United States, though, and he plied a variety of trades, such as running businesses in Seattle and the Klondike that provided accommodations for prostitutes.[59] In 1905, he tried to move back to his native land with his German-born wife and reclaim his citizenship, but officials threw him out because he had failed to fulfill his military obligation.[60]
A few months after returning to the United States and settling in the New York borough of Queens, the Trumps had a son named Fred. Friedrich died when Fred was twelve, and after graduating from high school, the younger Trump went into the homebuilding business. By all accounts, Fred Trump was hardworking, but he also had a dark side. On Memorial Day of 1927, about a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan took part in a parade in Queens. What the New York Times described as a “near-riot” broke out, resulting in seven arrests.[61] According to the story, one of the seven was “Fred Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road”—an address that matched Trump’s residence at the time. According to another news account, all of the arrestees were wearing Klan robes.[62] To be clear, the court discharged him, and there is no further documentation that he belonged to the Klan. It is possible that he was a bystander and that the second news account erred in suggesting that he was wearing Klan regalia. It is also fair to say that there is more evidence for Fred Trump being a Klansman than for Barack Obama being a Kenyan.
What is less disputable is that Fred Trump discriminated against African Americans. During the 1930s and 1940s, he made a fortune in the construction industry. After the Second World War, he focused on developing and operating apartment complexes. In December 1950, singer Woody Guthrie leased a unit in a Trump-run Brooklyn complex named Beach Haven. Although Brooklyn’s African American population was growing, the complex was nearly all white. After learning about Trump’s rental practices, Guthrie wrote in his notebook: “Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hatred he stirred up.”[63] The practices continued. In 1963, a Trump rental agent took an application from an African American nurse. Decades later, the agent recounted a talk with his boss: “I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there.’”[64]
Fred Trump’s business methods were problematic in other ways. While building Beach Haven, he took on a limited partner who was very helpful in procuring capital and preventing labor problems. The partner could do these things because of his ties to the Mafia crime families.[65] The federal government subsidized much of Trump’s construction at the time, and a scheme to get massive excess payments from the Federal Housing Administration landed him before a US Senate committee. Trump parried the senators’ questions in a way that foreshadowed his son’s rhetorical tactics. When Herbert Lehman of New York pointed out that the excess payment was lying in a bank account under his control, he denied that he had pocketed it: “I first have to take it out before I pocket it, Senator, isn’t that right?” He even managed to cast himself as a victim of an unfair accusation. “This is, I believe, very wrong and it hurts me. The only thing I am happy about is that it is not true.”[66]
Donald Trump was born in 1946. Fred raised him and his siblings to be ruthlessly competitive, repeatedly reminding them, “Be a killer.” He endowed them with a sense of entitlement, telling young Donald, “You are a king.”[67] Fred backed up this pronouncement by providing a kingly lifestyle and a great deal of money. An investigation by the New York Times found that the elder Trump’s empire supplied Donald Trump with an annual income of $200,000 a year (2018 dollars) by the time he was three years old. Donald was a millionaire in primary school, and as a teenager, he was part owner of an apartment building.[68]
It was not all luxury. Donald was a wild child, and when Fred found that he had a cache of knives, he sent him to a strict boarding school, the New York Military Academy.[69] Donald fit in well at the school, with its good-looking uniforms and emphasis on athletics over academics. Although its military discipline marginally improved his behavior, it did not deepen any sense of patriotism or desire for military service. On graduating in 1964, he enrolled at Fordham University and got the first of several educational draft deferments, which continued after he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1966. After graduating in 1968, he got a medical deferment. Many years later, his lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen testified that Trump told Cohen to fend off questions about how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. “Mr. Trump claimed it was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment. ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”[70] Reporting in 2018 suggested that the diagnosis had come from a Queens podiatrist, who made it as a favor to Fred Trump.[71]
Trump settled back into New York City, going into business with his father. At the time, the metropolitan area was a cauldron of corruption. In 1965, voters had elected a “reform” mayor, but he was profligate with taxpayer money and ineffectual in cleaning up official misconduct. Crookery stretched from the city’s political leadership down to the police on the beat. “Ten percent of the cops in New York City are absolutely corrupt,” said whistleblower Frank Serpico, “ten percent are absolutely honest, and the other eighty percent—they wish they were honest.”[72] The city was also boiling with street crime and racial tension. Its white working class was increasingly angry and resentful, and a couple of high-profile incidents showed how those feelings could become political fuel for public figures clever enough to exploit them.
One such public figure was mob boss Joe Colombo. Whereas other leaders of organized crime had sought a low profile, Colombo brazenly mounted a public relations offensive that drew on the language and techniques of the civil rights movement. Alleging that the government’s fight against the Mafia was an expression of ethnic prejudice, he founded an organization called the Italian American Civil Rights League. The group soon claimed 45,000 members and drew support from prominent New York politicians. Among other activities, it picketed the local FBI headquarters. Anticipating the age of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” Colombo explained to the New York Times: “Mafia, what’s the Mafia? There is not a Mafia. Am I head of a family? Yes. My wife and four sons and daughter. That’s my family. They even got that wrong.” Expounding on an FBI “conspiracy against Italian Americans,” he continued: “What gives the Government the right to label anybody. What are we, in Nazi Germany?”[73] Colombo had some impact. His efforts resulted in the scrubbing of the words “Mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra” from the script of The Godfather and some official documents. Nevertheless, the Mafia was quite real. At a rally soon after the interview, a gunman shot him, probably on orders from a rival boss. He lingered for several more years but was totally disabled. His “civil rights” group soon disappeared.
As a New Yorker, an avid consumer of tabloid news, and the son of a builder who dealt with gangsters, Trump surely took note of Colombo’s public relations strategy. Perhaps it is pure coincidence, but in 1988, Trump would make his first name-licensing deal—involving limousine hood ornaments—with a reputed member of the Colombo crime family.[74]
A case of disorganized crime must have also caught Trump’s attention. On May 8, 1970, hundreds of construction workers rioted in lower Manhattan, beating up long-haired students who were protesting the Vietnam War. Wearing hard hats, waving American flags, and carrying signs that said “America: Love It or Leave It,” the rioters soon became avatars of white working-class America.[75] Instead of denouncing the mob violence, President Nixon promptly welcomed construction union leaders to the White House, and accepted their gift of a ceremonial hard hat labeled “Commander in Chief.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was assuming more and more responsibility in the family business. On October 16, 1973, he appeared on the front page of the New York Times for the first time, under the headline “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” The story reported that the Department of Justice had sued Trump and his father for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in apartment rentals. Trump said that accusations of bias were “absolutely ridiculous,” adding that he and his father “never have discriminated, and we never would.”[76] In fact, local government and advocacy groups had sent black and white testers to apply for Trump apartments. Agents would encourage white testers to rent, while turning away black testers or steering them to certain complexes with large numbers of minorities.[77] Trump then countersued, claiming abuse of government power. During a break in the depositions, Trump casually said to a government attorney: “You wouldn’t want to live with those people either.”[78] Two years later, the Trumps settled, signing a consent order in which they agreed not to engage in racial discrimination. Donald claimed victory, saying that the consent order did not include “any requirement that would compel the Trump organization to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as any other tenant.”[79] By seeming to equate African Americans and welfare recipients, he confirmed suspicions of racial bias.
Representing Trump in the case was attorney Roy Cohn, who had risen to infamy in the early 1950s as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s counsel. Trump had first met Cohn at a members-only Manhattan nightspot whose clientele, wrote journalist Harry Hurt III, included “European and Latin American party lovers, and assorted political fixers and gentleman mobsters.”[80] Cohn became Trump’s consigliere, giving him entrée to his unique set of local connections. Cohn’s clients included leading Mafia figures, and he even reportedly hosted meetings of the Mafia commission at his townhouse.[81] These mob ties proved critical to the building of Trump Tower. Though most skyscraper construction relies on steel girders, Trump made the unusual decision to use concrete—and the local concrete business was under mob control. Wayne Barrett quoted FBI sources that Trump “did it through Cohn,” adding that Cohn might even have set up a meeting between Trump and “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family.[82] At the time, other New York developers were urging the FBI to loosen the grip of the mob-run concrete cartel.[83] If Trump made any such pleas, or if he had any misgivings about working with organized crime, he kept them well hidden.
Through his father, Trump already had political contacts, but Cohn helped him expand his network. “Roy was very, very connected . . . unbelievably,” Trump told writer Timothy O’Brien. “And Roy started introducing me to a lot of people. I got to know everybody.”[84] In 1979, for instance, a young New Jersey political operative named Roger Stone was seeking office space for the Reagan campaign, and he went to Cohn’s townhouse, where he was meeting with Salerno.[85] Cohn told him to see Trump, who agreed to help. That relationship lasted for decades.
Cohn also introduced Trump to other aspects of life in New York. Among his clients were the owners of Studio 54, a disco notorious for debauchery. Cohn arranged for Trump to be there for opening night, and he became a regular. Trump later remembered “things happening there that I have never seen again. . . . Stuff that couldn’t happen today because of problems of death.”[86] The mention of “death” was a reference to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. In 1997, Trump would tell shock jock Howard Stern: “I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there—it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”[87]
AIDS came close to home when Cohn contracted the disease in the 1980s. After he disclosed that he was ill, Trump started withdrawing work from him. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,” Cohn said. “Donald pisses ice water.”[88]
When Cohn died in 1986—disgraced and disbarred—he had left his mark on Donald Trump. His influence was not so much a matter of teaching Trump new things, but refining and reinforcing the attitudes that he had inherited from his father, especially regarding the law. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” Cohn famously said. “I want to know who the judge is.” Trump associate Louise Sunshine told journalist Michael Kruse of seeing the portrayal of Roy Cohn in the play Angels in America: “It took me back to the years when Donald, Roy Cohn and I used to sit at lunches at the 21 Club, time after time after time,” she told me. “And it totally brought back all the memories, and it brought back exactly who tutored Donald in ignoring the law, and not caring about the law—it was Roy Cohn. He had total disregard for the law—a disregard for the law which Donald has.”[89]
Trump’s defenders would disapprove of the whole approach of this book. It is useful to anticipate several of the objections that they might raise.
They would probably start with one of their favorite tactics, “whataboutism.” A rhetorical device that derives from the old Soviet Union, whataboutism counters an accusation with a charge against the accusers or people that they admire. Hence, the refrain, “What about Hillary’s emails?” Like so many rationalizations, whataboutism starts with a bit of truth: throughout American history, many political leaders have indeed done bad things. Trump himself has made this point. In response to questions about racist supporters of a Robert E. Lee statue, he said: “How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?”[90]
Whataboutism is not new, and neither is its refutation. One hundred and fifty-nine years before Trump talked about slaveholding presidents, Abraham Lincoln dealt with the same kind of argument. In debate, when Stephen A. Douglas mentioned Jefferson’s slaves, Lincoln replied: “While Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.’”[91] Political scientist Jacob Levy reminds us that “all those presidents put forward a public rhetorical face that was better than their worst acts. . . . And their words were part of the process of persuading each generation of Americans that those were constitutively American ideals.”[92]
America stands as an ideal even when Americans fall short of it. In 1980, Ronald Reagan quoted Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as calling America a leader toward a pluralist and free society, adding: “He is right. We have strayed off course many times and we have been careless with the machinery of freedom bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers, but, somehow, it has managed to survive our frailties.”[93] Martin Luther King said that the authors of the Constitution and the Declaration were “signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” but that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” But instead of merely decrying history, he challenged the nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”[94]
Trump’s ghostwriters sometimes shoehorn references to American ideals into his public statements in which he recites them with all the sincerity of a Trump University sales pitch. As Daniel Krauthammer has observed, “in Trump’s unprepared remarks at rallies, in debate performances, TV interviews, press conferences, tweets, they barely appear. Clearly, they do not preoccupy him. Our ideals and their fulfillment are not, in his view, what made America great.”[95]
When he utters words that seem statesmanlike and responsible, he is often winking at his audience. At a campaign rally, he said: “When we have a protester inside, which isn’t even very often, I say, ‘Be very gentle, please don’t hurt him.’”[96] Readers should take those words neither seriously nor literally. That admonition followed a series of incidents in which Trump encouraged violence against demonstrators. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he said: “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you, seriously. Okay, just knock the hell, I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”[97]
With specific regard to Trump’s dealings with criminals, his defenders might contend that a New York businessman would have had no choice. This excuse does not stand up to scrutiny. Trump was not a candy store owner paying protection money to the local thugs. He was a powerful tycoon who actively sought opportunities for deals with shady characters, both in the United States and abroad. Either he knew that he was playing in dirt or he engaged in what lawyers call “willful blindness,” deliberately averting his eyes from the alleged crimes of his associates. He did have choices. Like most other business leaders, he could have done due diligence and stayed clean. He could have gotten in touch with the authorities if he got wind of criminal activity. Instead, he chose another path. As he put it in 2019, “I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. You don’t call the FBI.”[98]
Trump’s choices were not victimless. Organized crime, which brings death and destruction to communities across the country, depends on enablers and collaborators like Trump. As a crusading prosecutor once put it:
Organized crime cannot flourish and grow in a society where voluntary adherence to the rule of law prevails. It does flourish where it can feed off the illegal tendencies of many people. It flourishes in a society where too many people are looking for breaks above and beyond the law, where the duties of being a citizen of the greatest Nation on Earth—paying taxes, testifying in court, serving on juries—are considered burdens to be avoided and sometimes illegally evaded. The existence of organized crime constitutes an indictment of our entire society because it cannot exist without broad support, tacit and otherwise.[99]
The prosecutor was Rudy Giuliani.
Some of Trump’s more sophisticated defenders acknowledge his poor character but argue that it is irrelevant. His bad behavior, they say, is purely a matter of personal style and language, not the conduct of official duties. Among other things, this argument overlooks his conflicts of interest, such as those arising from the corporations, lobbies, and entities linked to foreign governments that pay top dollar to rent rooms at Trump hotels. As for language, words are policy. Words matter. As Rush Limbaugh loves to say, words mean things. Presidential statements are especially important in the realm of international affairs, where the chief executive acts as the spokesperson for the entire nation. When the president praises dictators, asks foreign leaders for dirt on domestic political opponents, or fails to condemn abuses of human rights, he is setting national policy.
In immigration, law enforcement, and other areas, those who carry out policy often have broad discretion. Trump’s words signal to them how they should exercise it.[100] Between his endorsement of “rough” treatment of suspects and his attacks on undocumented aliens, he seems to be having an effect. One federal judge said that ICE was engaging in tactics “we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away. We are not that country; and woe be the day that we become that country under a fiction that laws allow it.”[101]
Trump’s malignant sway goes even farther, reaching millions of voters. He was only slightly exaggerating when he said “You know what else they say about my people? The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible.”[102] The words of our two greatest presidents cast light on the impact of our least pro-American one. In a draft of his first inaugural address, George Washington said that “no wall of words—that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”[103] In their 1858 debates, Abraham Lincoln decried Stephen Douglas’s indifference to slavery, saying “he is blowing out the moral lights around us . . . penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”[104]
Philip Bump, “Donald Trump’s Falsehood-Laden Press Conference, Annotated,” Washington Post, July 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/27/donald-trumps-falsehood-laden-press-conference-annotated.
Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos, “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia,” New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.html.
US Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, U.S. v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. (1:18-cr-215, District of Columbia), July 13, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download; Michael S. Schmidt, “Trump Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton. Were They Listening?” New York Times, July 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/trump-russia-clinton-emails.html.
US Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019, vol. 1, p. 4, https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf.
Justin Wise, “MSNBCs Katy Tur Denies Trump Was Joking When Telling Russia to Get Clinton’s Emails,” The Hill, March 5, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432624-katy-tur-calls-out-trump-for-saying-he-was-joking-when-telling-russia-to-get.
Ken Dilanian, Julia Ainsley, and Carol E. Lee, “FBI Warned Trump in 2016 Russians Would Try to Infiltrate His Campaign,” NBC News, December 18, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-warned-trump-2016-russians-would-try-infiltrate-his-campaign-n830596.
US Department of Homeland Security, “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security,” October 7, 2016, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national.
US Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, Report on the Investigation, vol. 1, p. 5.
Presidential Debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, October 9, 2016, https://www.debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/october-9-2016-debate-transcript.
Letter from Donald Trump to Andrew Rozov, October 28, 2015, http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/12/18/attachment.1.pdf.
U.S. v. Michael Cohen (1:18-cr-850, Southern District of New York), criminal information at https://www.justice.gov/file/1115596/download.
“Intelligence Agencies Should Never Have Allowed This Fake News to ‘Leak’ into the Public. One Last Shot at Me. Are We Living in Nazi Germany?” Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, January 11, 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/819164172781060096.
Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, and Jed Shugerman, “Faithful Execution and Article II,” Harvard Law Review 132 (June 2019), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3260593.
US Department of Justice, Special Counsel’s Office, Report on the Investigation, vol. 2, p.78.
“Transcript: Dan Coats Warns the Lights Are ‘Blinking Red’ on Russian Cyberattacks,” National Public Radio, July 18, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/07/18/630164914/transcript-dan-coats-warns-of-continuing-russian-cyberattacks.
“A Conversation with Christopher Wray,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 26, 2019, https://www.cfr.org/event/conversation-christopher-wray-0.
Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Pellegrini of the Slovak Republic before Bilateral Meeting, May 3, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-pellegrini-slovak-republic-bilateral-meeting.
Transcript: ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos’s Exclusive Interview with President Trump, June 16, 2019, https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/transcript-abc-news-george-stephanopoulos-exclusive-interview-president-63749144.
Meredith McGraw, “Trump Now Says ‘Of Course’ He Would Report ‘Incorrect’ Dirt from Foreign Adversary to FBI,” ABC News, June 14, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-now-report-incorrect-dirt-foreign-adversary-fbi/story?id=63713574.
Remarks by President Trump before Marine One Departure, October 3, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-marine-one-departure-67/.
Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2014), 116–17.
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Made 8,158 False or Misleading Claims in His First Two Years,” Washington Post, January 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/21/president-trump-made-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-two-years.
NBC News, Meet the Press transcript, January 22, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-01-22-17-n710491.
NBC News, Meet the Press transcript, August 19, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-august-19-2018-n901986.
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 351–52.
Bill Carter, “Trump Redevelops His Own Series,” New York Times, August 31, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/arts/television/trump-redevelops-his-own-series.html.
Alexander Hamilton, letter, Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, August 28, 1794, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-17-02-0130.
Excerpts from Joint Deposition, George P. Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and House Committee on Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2019, https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20191107_-_kent_transcript_excerpts_final_-_9188369.pdf.
John F. Kennedy, Address to a Joint Convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, January 9, 1961, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcommonwealthmass.htm.
Remarks by President Trump before Marine One Departure, January 10, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-marine-one-departure-30.
Kevin Liptak, “Trump on China’s Xi Consolidating Power: ‘Maybe We’ll Give That a Shot Some Day,’” CNN, March 8, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/03/politics/trump-maralago-remarks/index.html.
For his multiple changes of party registration, see: “Donald Trump Twice Dumped Republican Party,” The Smoking Gun, August 6, 2015, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/trump-a-republican-for-now-908431. For his issue reversals, see Jeremy Diamond, “Abortion and 10 Other Donald Trump Flip-Flops,” CNN, April 1, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/31/politics/donald-trump-positions-flip-flops/index.html.
Donald Trump, “Trump: Europe Is Terrific Place for Investment,” CNN, January 22, 2013, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/22/business/opinion-donald-trump-europe.
Bret Stephens, “Don’t Dismiss President Trump’s Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity,” Time, February 18, 2017, updated February 26. http://time.com/4675860/donald-trump-fake-news-attacks.
John Bowden, “‘Art of the Deal’ Co-Writer: Trump Will Resign So He Doesn’t ‘Lose,’” The Hill, March 19, 2017, https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/334188-art-of-the-deal-ghostwriter-trump-will-resign-so-he-doesnt-lose.
Margaret Talev and Jennifer Jacobs, “Trump Defends Invite to Philippines’ Duterte Amid Drug War,” Bloomberg News, May 1, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/trump-defends-invite-to-philippines-duterte-amid-drug-war-toll.
Michael Scherer, “Read President Trump’s Interview with TIME on Truth and Falsehoods,” Time, March 23, 2017, http://time.com/4710456/donald-trump-time-interview-truth-falsehood.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 68, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp.
Thomas Jefferson, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/201948.
Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm.
David Corn, “Donald Trump Says He Doesn’t Believe in ‘American Exceptionalism,’” Mother Jones, June 7, 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/donald-trump-american-exceptionalism.
Eli Stokols, “Unapologetic, Trump Promises to Make America Rich,” Politico, May 26, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/unapologetic-trump-promises-to-make-america-rich-223632.
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Thomas Cushing, June 4, 1773, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/franklin-the-works-of-benjamin-franklin-vol-vi-letters-and-misc-writings-1772-1775/simple.
Ronald W. Reagan, address at Republican National Convention, Houston, August 17, 1992, http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/reagan/stories/speech.archive/rnc.speech.html.
Donald J. Trump, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 21, 2016, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/318521.
Donald Trump, “Donald Trump Writes Exclusively for the National Enquirer,” National Enquirer, August 19, 2015, https://www.nationalenquirer.com/real-life/donald-trump-writes-exclusively-national-enquirer.
Eli Stokols, “Unapologetic, Trump Promises to Make America Rich,” Politico, May 26, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/unapologetic-trump-promises-to-make-america-rich-223632.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed01.asp.
See, for instance, Donald J. Trump, Remarks in an Exchange with Reporters, October 25, 2017, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/331564.
James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018), 243.
Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/202167.
Dan Farber, “Obama Explains His Remark about Punishing ‘Enemies,’” CBS News, November 1, 2010, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-explains-his-remark-about-punishing-enemies.
“Lee Edwards Shares His Life in Pursuit of Liberty with TFAS,” The Fund for American Studies, May 17, 2018, https://tfas.org/news/lee-edwards-shares-life-pursuit-liberty-tfas.
Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” The New Yorker, July 25, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all.
Marc Fisher, “Donald Trump Doesn’t Read Much. Being President Probably Wouldn’t Change That,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-doesnt-read-much-being-president-probably-wouldnt-change-that/2016/07/17/d2ddf2bc-4932-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html.
Crossfire transcript, December 23, 1987, Nexis Uni.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2015 [1952]), 6.
Philip Bump, “Under Trump’s New Immigration Rule, His Own Grandfather Likely Wouldn’t Have Gotten In,” Washington Post, August 3, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/08/03/under-trumps-new-immigration-rule-his-own-grandfather-likely-wouldnt-have-gotten-in.
Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015 [2000]), 50, 86.
Kate Connolly, “Historian Finds German Decree Banishing Trump’s Grandfather,” The Guardian, November 21, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/trump-grandfather-friedrich-banished-germany-historian-royal-decree.
“Warren Criticizes ‘Class’ Parades,” New York Times, June 1, 1927, 16.
Mike Pearl, “All the Evidence We Could Find about Fred Trump’s Alleged Involvement with the KKK,” Vice, March 10, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvke38/all-the-evidence-we-could-find-about-fred-trumps-alleged-involvement-with-the-kkk.
Will Kaufman, “Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a Real Estate Empire’s Racist Foundations,’” The Conversation, January 21, 2016, https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026.
Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder, “‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias,” New York Times, August 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html.
Blair, The Trumps, 171; Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth (New York: Regan Arts, 2016 [1992]), 49.
Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate: Eighty-Third Congress. July 20, 1954, 409–10, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/politics/trump-archive/docs/fha-investigation-1954-part-1.pdf.
Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2015), 39.
David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches from His Father,” New York Times, October 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html.
Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Trump Revealed (New York: Scribner, 2016), 37–38.
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Hearing with Michael Cohen, Former Attorney to President Donald Trump, 116th Cong, 1st sess., February 27, 2019, 14–15, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20190227/108969/HHRG-116-GO00-20190227-SD003.pdf.
Steve Eder, “Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam?” New York Times, December 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-vietnam-draft-exemption.html.
Michael F. Armstrong, They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), vii.
Fred Ferretti, “Italian‐American League’s Power Spreads,” New York Times, April 4, 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/04/archives/italianamerican-leagues-power-spreads.html.
William Bastone, “Trump Limos Were Built with a Hood Ornament,” The Smoking Gun, September 22, 2015, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/trump-and-staluppi-092157.
Nicholas Herzeca, “The Hard Hat Riot: The Decline of New York City’s White Working-Class and the Origins of the Reagan Democrat,” undergraduate thesis, Claremont McKenna College, 2014.
Morris Kaplan, “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in the City,” New York Times, October 16, 1973, 1, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2186612-major-landlord-accuse-of-antiblack-bias-in-city.html.
Kranish, Trump Revealed, 55.
Michael Kirk, PBS Frontline interview with Elyse Goldweber, May 23, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/elyse-goldweber/.
Joseph P. Fried, “Trump Promises to End Race Bias,” New York Times, June 11, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/11/archives/trump-promises-to-end-race-bias-realty-management-concern-reaches.html.
Harry Hurt III, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point, 2016 [1993]), 81.
Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, 244.
Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, 191–92.
David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017), 45.
Timothy L. O’Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald (New York: Grand Central, 2016 [2005]), 67–68.
Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, August 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship.
Kranish and Fisher, Trump Revealed, 80–81.
Andrew Kaczynski, “Trump Isn’t into Anal, Melania Never Poops, and Other Things He Told Howard Stern,” Buzzfeed, February 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/trump-isnt-into-anal-melania-never-poops-and-other-things-he#.ldZMnyq0a.
Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, 278.
Michael Kruse, “Trump’s Long War with Justice,” Politico, August 26, 2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-long-war-with-justice-department.
Remarks by President Trump on Infrastructure, August 15, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-infrastructure.
Fifth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Galesburg, Illinois, October 7, 1858, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate5.htm.
Jacob T. Levy, “Why Words Matter,” The Bulwark, March 16, 2019, https://thebulwark.com/why-words-matter/.
Ronald Reagan, Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Chicago, August 18, 1980, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/285595
Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom.
Daniel Krauthammer, “What Makes America Great?” The Weekly Standard, April 28, 2017, https://www.weeklystandard.com/daniel-krauthammer/what-makes-america-great.
Jose A. DelReal and Sean Sullivan, “Democrats Fear That Violent Anti-Trump Protesters Are Only Helping Him,” Washington Post, June 3, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-fear-that-violent-anti-trump-protesters-are-only-helping-trump/2016/06/03/37b8c17e-299b-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html.
“Trump: If a Protester Throws a Tomato at Me, ‘Knock the Crap Out of Them’ [Video],” Daily Caller, February 1, 2016, https://dailycaller.com/2016/02/01/trump-if-a-protestor-throws-a-tomato-at-me-knock-the-crap-out-of-them-video.
ABC News Oval Office interview with President Trump, June 13, 2019.
Testimony of Rudolph Giuliani, United States Senate, Committee on Judiciary, Organized Crime in America, Part 2, S. Hrg. 98-184, pt. 2, July 11, 1983, p. 135, https://congressional-proquest-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/congressional/docview/t29.d30.hrg-1983-sjs-0080?accountid=10141.
Levy, “Why Words Matter.”
Ragbir v. Sessions, 18-cv-236 (KBF) (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 29, 2018), https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/open-university-project/ragbir-v-sessions-iii-et-al-18-cv-236.pdf
“Trump: ‘I Could Stand in the Middle of Fifth Avenue and Shoot Somebody and I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters,’” RealClearPolitics, January 23, 2016, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/01/23/trump_i_could_stand_in_the_middle_of_fifth_avenue_and_shoot_somebody_and_i_wouldnt_lose_any_voters.html.
George Washington, Undelivered First Inaugural Address: Fragments, April 30, 1789, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-02-02-0130-0002.
First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm. See also Ramon Lopez, “Answering the Alt-Right,” National Affairs, Fall 2017, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/answering-the-alt-right