Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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For anyone who has ever assumed that Donald Trump was a providential creation, sent earthward to provide America with a concrete reason never to recreate the 1980s, Gwenda Blair has written a book to assure us of the existence of Trump antecedents, each of whom put his pants on one leg at a time. Blair, the author of the new biography Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire, has taken great pains to introduce the three successive patriarchs of the Trump empire, at least two of whom show a striking resemblance to homo sapiens.

The story begins with Friedrich, whose life is perhaps the most remarkable of the three recounted by Blair. His story, understandably, is a bit rushed: one moment he arrives in New York Harbor in 1885 from Germany, the next he rushes off to John D. Rockefeller’s Monte Cristo galena mine in Washington state to seek his fortune.

Friedrich may have been the founder of the empire, but the plainly intuitive business sense inherited by his son and grandson probably came from the other side of the family. Friedrich’s most important contribution was probably changing the family name from Drumpf to Trump, no doubt with the assistance of a semi-literate clerk on Ellis Island. Every man with dynastic aspirations, take heed: could Donald be the international icon he is today had he been oppressed by the eternal trauma of childhood taunts? Could he have overcome a name like Drumpf?

Next in line for the hot-seat is Trump’s father, Frederick. Fred was probably an even shrewder businessman than his notoriously dexterous son. Certainly, he did more for the middle-class than simply feed their hunger for icons; he built normal houses for the working people of Brooklyn and Queens and is largely responsible for the East Flatbush neighborhood as it exists today. Even as Fred’s star rose, he never lost his commitment to affordable housing - or his modesty. In fact, Fred’s economic modus operandi was closer to his son’s than his modus vivendi. Fred lived relatively modestly (extremely modestly by Donald’s standards) and was secretive about his growing wealth and he still possessed some of his immigrant father’s humility.

When Blair finally gets to Donald, the story turns and confronts us with a sudden countervalency of excess. The soft-spoken success of his predecessors is noisily displaced in Donald’s wake: here is a man who demanded royalties for use of the name Trump even from people legally possessing that surname, a man who lobbied as recently as 1987 to build an 18.5 million square-foot development called Television City (replete with pyramidal 150-story tower) in the middle of Manhattan, and who would have a board-game named after himself (his penchant for naming everything after himself makes Blair’s index rather monotonous: the word ‘Trump’ seemingly appears somewhere in every entry).

From an early age Donald was eager for a career in real estate. After apprenticing with Fred and following for a time in his able father’s footsteps, Trump began to chart his own course. He turned, for one, to casino gaming, and was able almost single-handedly to revive tourism in Atlantic City in the late 1970’s, turning tracts of seaside swamp into cash cows—huge, themed, Vegas-style casinos that could empty hundreds of thousands of pockets with astonishing efficiency.

But when his chef d’oeuvre, the more than one-billion-dollar Taj Mahal casino, failed in 1990, Donald quickly became "the Brazil of Manhattan." He was coughing up a million a day for interest payments, and with the slowing of the real estate market his cash flow was heading steeply in the wrong direction. The man who was born to close was about to be foreclosed. By 1992 things had gotten so bad that Fred Trump actually tried to buy and hoard three million dollars of chips from one of his son’s casinos. (Sadly, the act of charity was eventually foiled by a phalanx of party-pooping lawyers and IRS agents.) Then there was the devastating blow of losing his membership in Forbes’s billionaires’ club.

Trump’s comeback was signaled by his massive, well-regarded renovation of Manhattan’s Gulf & Western Building in 1994. Then, when Donald pushed through his plans for the controversial Trump World Tower on First Avenue (futile protests were led by nearby residents Walter Cronkite and Kofi Annan), it was clear that The Closer was again a force to be reckoned with. Yet Trump never fully regained his erstwhile cachet.

Blair justifiably suggests that the three generations of Trumps provide a good index for the variants of capitalism the nation has donned and doffed since 1850. The Trump patriarchs also provide a lexicon of personality types through the progress of industrial and post-industrial America. What is striking about all of these men is the extent to which they are products, not only of their wealth, but of their time.

Certainly, there is much to like about Trumps. It is plump with zany anecdotes and juicy ironies, and Blair has an uncanny ability to elicit from people the droll and the strangely apropos: "It looks the quintessential phallic symbol," deadpans an unidentified woman on the subject of Trump’s latest design plans. Blair evinces a good deal of sound research and efficient if not breathtaking prose.

Trumps is valuable to any student of the mechanics of meticulous biography. If Blair suffers at all, it is in her unwillingness to probe her subject’s cultural milieu. The social project of icon-building is too interesting to leave undissected. Yet Blair somehow manages to do so, offering almost no anthropological insight about the evolution of icons. For those of her readers seeking out deeper cultural verities than the price of Donald’s loafers, this will seem a glaring omission. Do we choose our icons or do they choose us? Is it a necessary condition of our taste for celebrity that we deserve transparently Faustian attention-mongers like Trump? Blair is silent about many of these larger questions, unwilling to donate a few copies of her worthy biography to the shelves of full-blown cultural criticism.

Thus Blair commits the sin of many well-intentioned, latter-day biographers: in an attempt to deconstruct the myth of celebrity, she substitutes copious detail about her subject for what is perhaps most interesting, the phenomenon of celebrity itself. After reading Blair’s book we begin to wonder why Trump is or ever was lionized, and our disillusionment is depressing because as a mere man he seems to mean less. Blair doesn’t seem to realize that part of placing any icon under the microscope is placing the culture of which he is a part under the microscope. Despite thorough biographies like Blair’s, we will probably never eschew our inner tabloid-reader and dismiss über-icons like Trump; the collective leg-humping of celebrity is too enmeshed in the edifice of our culture. Our icons may have egos the size of trolleys, they may be living, breathing arguments against the is-ought hypothesis, but they are what we’ve got, as indispensable as they are emetic. So even if Blair refuses, in her seriousness, to let Trump be viewed in the complete context of his self-prostitution, the many Americans who ignore this book will continue to have no objection.