The ad was signed with a flourish: Donald J. Trump. And its message was as ugly as it was simple.
“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I don’t think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer, and when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples . . . I want to hate these murderers and I always will . . . I recently watched a newscast trying to explain “the anger of these young men.” I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”
The ad appeared in New York newspapers on May 1, 1989. It rants on. And at the end, with a gift Trump was only then shaping and now has honed to an ugly point, he closed with his rallying cry: BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
It is in the fawning nature of some editors and some publishers and some reporters to press their noses against the windows of the wealthy and think there might be something there that we just don’t understand, or how else could these ads have been printed? Simple greed is a good answer. And prejudice somewhere between the publisher and the head of ad sales. A prejudice toward money. It is that simple. Probably.
Breslin understood what was happening. He understood it while many were still largely coddling the upwardly mobile Trump.
His first column on the Central Park Jogger case pointed out, very simply, that this crime, whoever committed it, was not the biggest crime in the city. That crime was the cause of many crimes, perhaps even this one:
The only reporting about these kids that could possibly help a reeling city at this time would be full disclosure of their education records, and some proof as to whether or not they can read and write. The rest of it, arraignments, trial, testimony, verdict, all has to do with the past. But at this moment, as long as the public attention is riveted on the magnitude of the crime, then the public must be shown what is actually happening in this city. There are tens of thousands of kids out on the streets, unable to read much more than a street sign, and yet capable, from age 10 and 11 and up, of being as dangerous as dynamite. Simply not enough people anywhere seem to understand this.
Interest in the street language of this crime—wilding—is an example. The word has to be 10 years old. That most news reporting thinks it is something new shows that the news reporting doesn’t even know the language of the most important story in the history of an American city.
“How’s the block.”
This was his column on April 23. The rape had occurred on April 19. The jogger would be in a coma for another eight days.
Trump’s ad came right about then, on May 1, so that the jogger would have something to see when she emerged into the light of life once more. And Breslin—who called him “Between you and I Trump,” as that is how Trump speaks, not caring, says Breslin, enough about his own language “to learn the object of a preposition”—wrote. The headline on the column that appeared in the next morning’s editions of Newsday and New York Newsday was “Beware of the Loudmouth Trump.” In part, this is what it said:
“I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”
Breslin quoted Trump so that his words could stand starkly against a different kind of language:
Such violent language sounds as if it were coming from someone who walks around with bodyguards.
Let us now turn to how the legitimate tough guys speak of violence. We had in Metropolitan Hospital the other night, at the bedside of the 28-year-old victim of the attack, the following:
Her badly wounded mother, father and two brothers. Officer Steven McDonald, paralyzed forever by a bullet. McDonald was shot by a 15-year-old at a spot in Central Park only a hundred yards away from where the young woman was attacked. Also present was Father Mychal Judge, a priest who spends all his time with those dying with AIDS. All stood around the young woman’s bed and held hands and prayed.
The family of the young woman did not stop expressing their gratitude for all those who pray for their daughter.
“Forgiveness,” Steven McDonald said in a wheelchair he can never leave.
“We must forgive or we cannot be,” Father Mychal Judge said.
The language of those who know.
The curious thing about “Between You and I” Trump is not that he destroyed himself yesterday, for all demagogues ultimately do that, but why he became so immensely popular with the one group of people who are supposed to be the searchlights and loudspeakers that alert the public to the realities of such a person. That would be those who work in the news business.
Even the most unhostile of eyes cannot say that his buildings are not ugly. Yet all news stories say “imaginative” when common sense shouts “arrogant.” Always, the television and newspapers talk of his financial brilliance, when anybody in the street knows that most of “Between You and I” Trump’s profits come from crap games and slot machines in Atlantic City, the bulk of that, the slot machines, coming from old people who go down there with their Social Security checks. It also is an undeniable fact of life that gambling keeps bad company.
Yet with the one quality Trump has, amazing brashness—“I just bought the sky!”—he has overwhelmed the newspapers and television more than anyone we ever have had in this city. Barnum or Mike Todd used guile and chicanery, but Trump understood that this year, you can blind their minds by showing them a diamond. During a celebration of greed, he became toastmaster.
It would be comforting if “Between You and I” Trump was doing it the old way, by having half the reporters on a payroll someplace. But the News business today is so utterly dishonest that the people are below taking bribes. Instead, Trump buys them with a smile, a phone call or a display of wealth that so excites these poor fools that they cannot wait to herald his brilliance. “He let me see his yacht!”
And so “Between You and I” Trump, who runs crap games and slot machines, became an all-news person. Trump today bought a man a wooden leg! All candidates stand with sides lathered with excitement as they wait for Donald Trump’s endorsement!
His thinking on anything was accepted. One paper—I think it was The Times but I have all these piles of clips around me and to tell you the truth I cannot read them—ran four separate stories on Donald Trump in one day.
Finally yesterday, in order to cash in on a young woman in a coma, to make an unedited statement, he ran his ad and showed himself for all to see what he was.
This is what James Earle Breslin saw and wrote in 1989. J.B. Number One.
As with many important things in life, it was overlooked. So when we ask how Donald Trump became president, those who wielded pens, notebooks, and computers and those who stood in front of television cameras first ought to look in the mirror and ask how they missed it and failed to call attention to it before it was far, far too late.
Years later, in the editions of October 22, 2002, Breslin wrote of the young men who became known as the Central Park Five and returned to the courts to ask to have their records scrubbed.
Missing in court at yesterday’s hearing on the five young men convicted in the Central Park jogging case was Donald Trump, who at the time of the crime perpetrated as lousy an act as he knew how, and that he can do . . .
This column was one that should chill anyone who thinks about what makes a person fit for office.
Trump was seen yesterday on television in McDonald’s commercials. Here he is, dead on the screen, with hair of swirled cement and strange color, and with a bad chin. . . . If McDonald’s likes its Trump commercials then send them a message. Stay out.
On April 19, 1989, a young woman jogging alone through the darkness at the north end of Central Park was attacked, beaten bloody, raped and left for dead. She just did live. Five young men, all of color, were picked up the day after the attack. A career-mad assistant district attorney whose name, Linda Fairstein, should not be forgotten, and five detectives, one of who still refers to the defendants as “mutts,” had the five isolated and questioned for hours. Out of this came confessions that appear to have been coerced at least and maybe forced on them by detectives. . . . And then here came Donald Trump crying out to the lowest instincts, to the meaner parts of life. On the morning of May 1, 1989, Trump paid $85,000 for four full page ads that ran in Newsday, the Daily News, the Post and the New York Times newspapers and pulled them into the bottom of the sewer. It was the most inflammatory of newspaper advertisements. At that moment the city shrieked over five young Blacks who were under arrest for attacking a white girl. Were they guilty? Of course. How could they not be? Blacks on a white girl. As he ran his ad, it did not occur to Trump that they might be not guilty of the crime. In his life such a thing is dust for the maid to vacuum.
Breslin then reprints much of the ad before he closes with a summary that can be read again and again:
That court session yesterday was about throwing out these old convictions because the evidence is fraudulent. If the woman jogger had died and the young men were convicted of murder and executed, and the evidence of being not guilty suddenly came out now, it would be murder by the state and Trump would be as good as an accomplice. The most you’d get out of him would be a shrug. Calling for the police to be let loose meant exactly what it said. Louima, Diallo. Let’s go. Break their heads. Slam ’em. Find out what they did later. I’m Donald Trump and I want these people to suffer. The ad should be engraved on a wall someplace, the courthouse, a university, anywhere where it will stare down at the public and let them see this Trump for all he is and for the act he perpetrated on our city at a time when we were weak.
Six months and five days after Trump’s ad, David Dinkins, when the votes were counted, learned that he would become the first Black man to become the mayor of New York and that on January 1, 1990, he would inherit this troubled hellscape of fear, hate, and economic anemia. Donald Trump was, of course, looking for tax advantages, according to Breslin, who deemed in a day when his mood was better that tax abatements were Trump’s sole contribution to civic discourse.
Mayor Abe Beame in the 1970s was mocked for his height, for his fiscal failure, for the fall of New York; but always to his face. Dinkins was maligned in whispers behind his back: psst—he’s a clerk. Psst: if he wasn’t Black . . . Psst. Psst. Psst. And yet, against so many odds he brought his own tennis game—an education in itself to white New Yorkers—and the USTA’s considerable money, money that still gushes into the city. He brought Restaurant Week. He brought Fashion Week. He brought in Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who put his flag atop the thirty-year mountain of crime and said: Now we will begin to take this mountain down. His methods, especially later, were the subject of much legitimate criticism. But he and David Dinkins began to turn that tide. Dinkins did it in beautiful bow ties and perfectly tailored blazers. He did it with class. He redefined New York—it’s not a melting pot, he said. It’s a gorgeous mosaic. He certainly made any number of mistakes, and every one of those seemed to be leaked by Rudy Giuliani’s team to the media. Ugly stuff. Rudy was becoming an ugly man.
Breslin was at this point earning $500,000 a year, according to a number of published reports. That in 2024 would be somewhere near or north of $1.3 million. He was living in Manhattan. He was living well.