Volume 6         Number 226  

Much is written about president Trump’s rare brand of populism, which is meant to appeal to the damaged, politically ignored workers coupled with his below-the-radar catering to the wealthy class. This unique strategy let him win and keep the adoration of both groups. At the same time, his outlook and behavior have shocked most of the rest of the world, who abhor it. But you will be hard pressed to find any information on how he developed his strategy and style.

So let’s go back and put together the pieces of the puzzle. In order to be a populist you have to go along with the idea of the power of regular people and support their right to have control over their government, rather than giving power to the usual group of the wealthy and political insiders. Hand in hand with this goes the notion that the “regular people” are being held back by some group or groups, who are stepping in to deprive them of what is rightfully theirs. Over the years, likely scapegoats have been African-Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Slavs, Italians, and lately, Latinos and refugees from Muslim countries.

This fits right into the personality, and the history of Donald Trump. After all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. As far back as 1927, even before Donald was born, his father Fred, a real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens, was arrested for rioting at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, New York. While he was not listed as being a member of the KKK, it is not unlikely that Donald grew up hearing unkind things about African-Americans and other minorities.

In fact, in one of his earliest public records, as a young man of 27 working for Dad, the two and their company were accused by the Department of Justice (DOJ) of discriminatory practices. The charge was they had been systematically avoiding renting apartments to African-Americans in their post-World-War-II housing development out in the borough of Queens, New York.

They were charged with having their rental offices forward applications to the home office for approval with a big letter “C” on it when they had certain potential renters. This let the application approvers know that the prospective renter was of the colored race. These applications were quickly denied. As a forecast of things to come, when caught red-handed, the Trumps agreed to settle the suit. They would no longer deny rentals to qualified African-Americans. They also ran ads in African-American media to seek renters. But as part of the agreement, there was no admission of guilt. The president has tried to explain this ever since by saying  that there was no admission of guilt, but you be the judge.

It turns out that the Trumps were represented by Roy Cohn in this suit. Donald had known Cohn from their playboy antics around the “club set” in New York. The housing case drew him into the Cohn orbit and he learned plenty from this operator. Cohn had a history going back to the 1950s, when he was a young attorney in Washington and played a role in getting the death penalty for the accused spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, despite scant evidence of their guilt. Then it was on to the crazy McCarthy hearings, a Communist witch hunt, also in the 1950s. Here he ruthlessly went after blameless people with unsubstantiated charges.

After leaving government Cohn set up a practice in New York City and became known among the richest and most corrupt New Yorkers as a lawyer and fixer. His lack of scruples made him a legend. He taught his willing new protégé, Donald Trump, how to keep authorities off his track while engaging in shady business dealings and how to manipulate the media. He was at his best in blaming and bullying others. Cohn never apologized for anything, no matter how egregious his actions had been. It was said he never made a deal that he wouldn’t welch on and settle for ten cents on the dollar. Trump soaked it all up.

Cohn’s notoriety became a model for Trump: how to cast yourself as a loveable scoundrel and use the media to make you a star. That was quite an education. It is said that Donald Trump is Roy Cohn and that “he swallowed Roy Cohn whole.” Roy Cohn was finally disbarred and died of Aids in 1986, by which time Donald Trump had moved on, and he did not acknowledge his second father in any way.

In 1989, now a middle-aged man of 43, Mr. Trump had not outgrown his prejudices. This was shown in the famous Central Park Rape Case.  A young professional white woman was jogging in the park, was knocked out and raped one fall night. Five black youths were eventually arrested, confessed after being brutalized by police, and found guilty after a tumultuous trial in which they recanted their confessions. While the trial was going on, “citizen” Trump, seeking notoriety, ran full-page ads in a number of New York newspapers with a provocative headline, Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police, finding the boys guilty even before the trial. Years later the case was reopened, and the boys were exonerated based on DNA testing. Over the years Donald Trump, in his usual style, has refused to apologize for his premature attack on the young men. His defense is, Well, they confessed, didn’t they?

During the 1980s and 1990s Trump became a publicity hound. He would pepper the New York tabloids and radio announcers with made-up stories about his business successes and female conquests. Mr. Trump would even save money by not hiring a publicity person, calling the media pretending to be his own agent and praising himself to the skies. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s there were six bankruptcies and failed Trump casinos.

Then came a Godsend, The Apprentice TV show on NBC in 2004. As it is said in The New Yorker of July 24, 2017, “If The Apprentice didn’t get Trump elected, it is surely what made him electable. Over 11 seasons, in various incarnations, the television producer Mark Burnett helped turn the Donald Trump of the late nineties—the disgraced huckster who had trashed Atlantic City and a tabloid pariah to whom no bank would lend—into a titan of industry, nationally admired for being in his own words, “the highest quality brand.” At its peak in 2004, 28 million viewed the finale. All in all, probably 50 million watched at one time or another.

What they saw wasn’t much different then what he has done on the political scene. He received endless praise from his support team. His mean streak streak was described as tough love. If he insulted people, it was because they deserved it. He was a “family man” and a “business genius”. He rated women’s looks constantly and could be crude and gross. Viewers saw his opulent lifestyle, his helicopter, Trump Towers and his limousines. All scandal and debt were gone.

In actuality it was all mirrors. The producer Bill Pruitt revealed that his actual office in Trump Towers was a mess, with chipped wooden furniture and funny smells. So the famous boardroom shown on TV was a set based on the high-powered office portrayed in the movie Network.

The contestants are all strivers who wanted to achieve some kind of business success. They competed for the honor of being given a shot at being an apprentice in the Trump organization. Mr. Trump whittled them down by saying, “You’re fired,” which foretells his days in the White House. He got himself fired from the show in 2015 after his ratings dropped, and he bad mouthed African-Americans and other minorities in his emerging run for the presidency.

Nevertheless, The Apprentice was said to reposition him in the American imagination as a billionaire, a savvy, capable entrepreneur and a business success. It carried over to his campaign and a lot of Americans bought it. Regular viewers became part of his most ardent supporters and they felt that his supposed success as a business man would carry over to the White House. His shtick was to present himself as a self-made billionaire who would use his knowhow to dig us out of the swamp that Washington had become for many years. It was a scam, all entertainment.

After The Apprentice his name was a household word. So the Trump Organization began to back off of real estate and focus on licensing out the Trump name to other builders to slap on their buildings, for a small percentage of the take. He began buying up and building golf courses as well as licensing out the Trump name on liquor brands, clothing and just about everything you can think of. Most of these proved to be duds. Then he started eying the White House, perhaps as a lark and perhaps due to his intense dislike for President Obama.

Mr. Trump had a head start on becoming a populist because he already had a built in dislike of the “other” which would resonate with the distressed citizens he wanted to capture. But how was he to do this? Well, it was known that Mr. Trump wasn’t a student of history, and he probably didn’t learn this stuff in college, where he was a disinterested student. Back in 1990, first wife Ivana, in their divorce proceedings testified, “From time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” In an article in Vanity Fair, Ivana told a friend that her cousin ”clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler’ when visiting Trump’s office.” That was long before his run for the presidency, before his presidential aspirations, but some seeds had been planted.

The cap on it all was Steve Bannon. He was the alt-right editor of Brexit, a nationalist website and publication with several million followers, and the bible for white skin-heads. The two, Donald and Steve, are said to have met in 2010 through David Bossie, the head of the conservative group Citizens United. While they have had a turbulent relationship, Bannon’s imprint on Donald Trump is not to be underestimated.

You can see that the alt-right philosophy trumpeted by Mr. Bannon extols an American identity that supports immigration only by people of European birth, to ensure we maintain our cultural and racial homogeneity. This readily plays into Trump’s long existing racism and his dislike and disdain for people of color. He was forever praising strong authoritarian-type leaders and their style of government.

The two developed a history. Trump touted Breitbart News articles 186 times on social media in the years before his candidacy. It was sure that now Trump was reading everything that Bannon had to say and they were trading emails frequently.

Probably because of the readings of Hitler and the interchanges with Steve Bannon, as well as the techniques developed in his Roy Cohn days, Trump emerged on the escalator in the Trump Towers in 2015 to declare his candidacy for president with a strategy and execution that led to his election the following year. He would take a populist stance to garner votes while really catering to his wealthy buddies and his own personal needs. This would embody the basically fascist outlook. This included:

• A powerful appeal to nationalism as embodied by “Make America Great Again” and “drain the swamp.”
• Disdain for human rights.
• Hatred of a wide number of enemies, prominently including the media, political opponents and undesirable foreigners, particularly illegal immigrants.
• Rampant sexism
• Obsessions with his supposed enemies
• Protection of the wealthy, corporate interests and disregard of labor
• Taking the government apart to rid us of the professional department of state people, scientific and environmental departments
• Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
• Obsession with crime and punishment
• Rampant cronyism and corruption
• Engaging in suspicious activities with Russia
• Receiving “emoluments”– profiting from foreign and homegrown patrons of his businesses who enrich him to curry favor and gain influence

Now a senior citizen of 65, in 2011 he had not outgrown his racist antics, but only  honed them. As a run-up to his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump used President Obama’s origins as a calling card to racists in this country. By questioning the legitimacy of his presidency, because of the bogus claim President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Mr. Trump sent a nationwide message to the  white nationalists out there who saw themselves as disenfranchised, that he would be their champion.

The President was forced to provide his long form birth certificate to quell all the controversy that this accusation had aroused.  Obama was painfully forced to produce papers, like blacks had to do in the pre-Civil war days to prove they were not runaway slaves. Mr. Trump was now to become a player in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump then proceeded to follow his playbook through grueling primaries, where he used his scripted strategy to wipe out close to 20 more qualified individuals. He then surprised the world, and himself, by winning the election by beating a weak Hillary Clinton. He used massive rallies where he expounded on his populist claims, belittled everyone in sight and focused on swing states, where there were plenty who felt left behind by economic and cultural shifts.

Once in the White House the president took a sledge hammer to the bureaucracy, just the way he promised, with basically awful results. His administration features incompetent, unscrupulous people in his own image, and they quickly get fired. Well-qualified people have avoided his administration like the plague. Mr. Bannon made a short appearance as chief strategy advisor, but was quickly banished because his rhetoric was so abusive and the press destroyed him. Nevertheless, throughout the Trump administration, Bannon has remained a supporter and continued to counsel the president through the medium of nighttime telephone conversations.

The president unsuccessfully tried to give his populist followers a superficial version of many of the things he promised, or at least to appear to do so, while in reality, he saved all the goodies for the wealthy. This included massive tax relief for the very wealthy, and doing away with as many federal regulations as possible, anything that Mr. Trump considered onerous to making a buck.

His admiration of dictators, from Russia’s Putin to Kim Jong-Un of North Korea to the presidents of Turkey  and Hungary, has endangered our relationships with the great American alliances of the post-World War II partnership and placed our country in jeopardy. His trade tariffs and escapades in the Middle East have also rendered us vulnerable.

But the thing that sets him most apart from all who have come before him is his constant lying. This has become the hallmark of his election and term in office. It is a given that all politicians and presidents, as do all of us, lie at least occasionally. But he lies all the time and about everything. Scorekeepers have totted up as many as 12 lies a day–more in a day than his prior president Obama had in eight years of his term in office. Donald Trump has perfected the art of lying, distortion and exaggeration to new heights.

Often, he gets away with his lies because they are so frequent that before the media or people can dwell on one it is replaced by another, the latest fib. So each only gets a cursory examination. It makes peoples’ heads spin, trying to keep track of them, so they each get short shrift. On the other hand, President Obama made one major misstatement about people being able to keep their current health insurer when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted. That turned out only to be true if the provider was approved by the ACA or accepted its conditions. Mr. Obama was raked over the coals for that one by the Republican Party for years.  Mr. Trump, of course, usually gets a pass on any misstatement because he is forever dropping new “doozies.”

Mr. Trump has perfected the use of the social media device, Twitter, to an extent that no one had dreamed of. He gushes out his lies at any moment to Washington and his admirers, particularly in the dead of night. He has sent out thousands of his venomous tweets and makes political pronouncements to what he claims is over 60 million avid viewers. But the experts say that this is about 12 million or 20 percent of regular followers, still not a small number, alsoindicative of Trump’s ability to exaggerate.

Even his supporters shrug their shoulders as if to say, That is Donald being Donald. But in fact it is evil, corrosive and is destroying the very fabric of our society and nation. We see his continual lying being emulated by his close associates like William Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Pence, his press secretaries and members of his political party. They have gone to new heights of lying to emulate him and satisfy his insatiable need.

President Trump dwarfs all politicians who have come before him, in his mendacity. It tears away at the very essence of our society. This is like a psychopathic disease that has gotten worse. As he gets deeper into his presidency, he lies more and more. He can contradict himself with a new lie in the next paragraph or even next sentence. What’s really scary is that he probably doesn’t even know he is doing it.

This president has created a new standard of behavior that many fear those who follow will emulate. This has put our country in peril, because it has torn our relationship with our allies and given sustenance to our enemies. It is not an exaggeration to say he will go down as the greatest liar of all time. He makes Pinocchio appear to be a piker.

Once you look at all of this, you realize all the puzzle pieces that got him where he is today: the racism he learned from his father, the influence of Roy Cohn, the shyster years as a welching New York businessman, gaining notoriety through trickery and how to use the media, the TV exposure on The Apprentice, the readings about Hitler and probably other dictators, the influence of Steve Bannon, and most of all the incessant lying.

So there he was, on January 20, 2017, poised to be inaugurated as the 45^th president of the United States. Psychologists have analyzed his personality to try to discover what makes Donald Trump tick. It is mostly said that he is some kind of “ultimate narcissist.” But it is also appropriate to dig into his past, as this paper has done, and look at the things that shaped him. While he encountered all of these people and events along the way, it doesn’t mean he had to incorporate all of them into his very being. Some psychologists say it is as if we have valves that open to let us take in things we see and hear that we choose, and remain closed to disregard others. The collection of what we take in makes us into a person. It stands to reason that Donald Trump chose to take in the very worst of what he encountered.

On his inauguration he was set to put all those influences into play, with new wrinkles of his own. So there he was on his very first day in office, coming up with the falsehood that this was the “most well attended inauguration in history.” In truth there were gaping empty chairs throughout the vast lawn and most celebrity entertainers had avoided the event like the plague. The new administration was launched on that note.

It is no surprise that he has a failed presidency and is on the verge of impeachment. The saving grace is that he is such an unlikely combination of influences and experiences that he is likely to be one of a kind. But is he? Who is to say that another unsavory populist or whatever will not come around to excite the masses and lead our country to further disasters?

“Donald Trump is not simply a serial liar, he is attempting to murder the very idea of truth, which is even worse. Because without truth a free society cannot operate.”

          –Peter Wehner, former member of three Republican administrations and a Conservative writer.