Hard for a New Yorker to Take Trump Seriously

9/12/2015

Donald Trump, left. Disco Ball, right.

Now I read there is a new book about Donald Trump, exploring his boasts and threats and exaggerations. He was a rich boy screw-up sent to military school, which he compares to actual service.

Right. And listening to sergeants at ROTC in the late 50's, describing combat in Korea, was the same as being there.

For New Yorkers, this arrogant bombast from Trump is familiar stuff -- because we know him. (See Jim Dwyer's column in the NYT recently.)

In my home town, Trump has long been a punch line, accompanied by eloquent shrugs and the word "Echhh."

I still regard Trump as a bad leftover from the 70's, when the city was plagued by vandalized payphones, graffiti in the subways, the reek of urine everywhere, Yankee fans chanting "Boston Sucks!" and disco. Don't forget disco.

Whom do I blame for the civic vulgarization in the '70's?
In 1973, an auslander, George Steinbrenner, bought the Yankees, bullying people and winning championships.
In 1976, Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-speaking media mogul, purchased the once haimish New York Post and filled it with sniggerings and inaccuraciies.

And in the late '70's, a builder's son, Donald Trump, bought the Commodore Hotel and remodeled it as the Grand Hyatt. Everything is grand with him. Later, he tried to build Brasilia on the west side of Manhattan and blabbed about his sex life and the tactical bankruptcies he had taken. What a guy.

Now he makes fun of Carly Fiorina's face. (I'm not a fan, but I will say she carries herself better than any of the schlubs in the GOP primaries.) My wife pointed out an article on Salon.com, claiming that Trump's constituency is based on angry white males who feel, well, "emasculated." Okay.

Ultimately, it appears that some people Out There on the Steinberg Map have been watching reality television so long they cannot tell a TV celebrity from a simplistic racist.

Disco lives.

Thor A. Larsen

9/12/2015 05:52:46 pm

Hello George,
You bring up the subject of Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate, I simply could not keep quiet. I see that there are several reasons why he is leading the polls at the moment. For one, few Republicans are enthusiastic about the other Republican candidates. Also, there seems to be many Republicans who enjoy loud-mouth, limited intellectual bully and TV entertainer. Well, I think Mr. Trump is a big asset for the Democrats and I hope he stays in the race!

George Vecsey

9/13/2015 08:19:37 am

Thor, great to hear from you. Trump's brother was a contemporary of ours. Some of our classmates went to grade school with him, and one (no name mentioned) knew Donald quite well, as a kid brother of a friend. Same Donald, apparently.
I knew nothing good could ever come of those reality shows.
Best to you both,
GV

Brian Savin

9/14/2015 08:59:33 pm

George, I loved this piece but confess to holding my breath as I was reading because I was concerned whether you could pull if off without partisan politico-speak. Oh me of way, way too little faith. You absolutely nailed it. I pray we can get rid of this guy quick. He has been able to articulate prejudices, and is even beginning to misarticulate concerns of Democratic progressives. A smart charlatan is still a charlatan. He is damaging our democracy, ruining what may be left of my Grand Old Party, and is obstructing our nation's ability to engage in serious discussion. Thanks for giving me at least some hope that there is enough reasoning left in our political consciousness that this guy can be outed.

George Vecsey

9/14/2015 10:37:00 pm

Brian, thanks so much. Funny thing is that I, a born lefty, courtesy of my parents, (I'm retired, can say that), find myself thinking about "my" GOP, also. Not Nixon and McCarthy of my youth, but people I met and covered -- Howard Baker, John Sherman Cooper, and Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, still around on TV, just to name three. Elected officials of principle. That party is gone. Best, GV

Alan D. Levine

9/16/2015 05:15:33 pm

George--That's the very same big (or is it little) three I considered to be symptomatic of a vulgarization of the city in the 1970s.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Hard for a New Yorker to Take Trump Seriously

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