After decades of embarrassment, New York finally dumps Trump

New York just told Donald Trump to pay up and get outta town — and while he was at it, to leave his fraudulent businesses behind for the locals to sort out.

After laying on that nearly half-billion-dollar fine (including interest) in the state's civil fraud case and adding a three-year ban on Trump conducting any business in the state, doing any kind of business there, New Yorkers can perhaps find relief from a half-century of embarrassment about “The Donald.”

Should the disgraced former part-time occupant of the White House scheme to further fleece his supporters by hawking golden Trump sneakers along Canal Street or by selling gold foil–wrapped Trump dogs on Fifth Avenue in front of the building he used to control, he can just fuhgeddaboudit.

Despite the city's reputation for incivility, it takes a lot to push New Yorkers to outright rejection. They’re generally a cosmopolitan bunch interested in doing their own thing while looking the other way at the vagaries of humanity and people in general. Trump is such a comprehensively whiny, needy and malicious man-child that most Americans may feel they’ve been locked up with a wildly misbehaving toddler for nearly a decade now. But New Yorkers have had to endure the “personal brand” he created, comprising equal parts of privilege, bull***t and exploitation — all of it wrapped in hugely inflated self-regard, masking obvious pathological insecurity — for half a lifetime now. As far back as the late 1970s, denizens of the Big Apple were being warned on the regular about this malign “user of users” by legendary Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. 

Trump floods the zone with so much crap so often that one must endlessly search for new ways to describe his astonishingly awful behavior, which is, as we surely ought know by now, part of the playbook of fascists. What you find when you check for synonyms for bad behavior is that nearly every word fits him like a (smallish) glove. Just flip alphabetically through the dictionary in your mind and the words pop up: aggressive, amoral, boor, bully, cad, conman, crass, criminal, cruel, disturbed, disorderly, defiant — and each one seeming to augment or amplify the one before. I suppose one bad trait leads to another, and someone like Trump is all-in on bad behavior. He even eats his steaks well done, with ketchup. He infamously cheats at golf. That he is also reportedly a malodorous individual is, unlike his expensive yet untailored suits or his clown-scale red ties, perfectly fitting.

That's why so many of his fans like him — he has convinced them he must be a bad man to do good against all the malevolent forces, especially the “deep state” that has “crushed their American dream,” largely meaning government services most American depend on to keep us at least reasonably safe, healthy and prosperous. Of course many of Trump's fans are still flush enough to keep filling his campaign coffers and spending pretty darned freely, including on those $400 garish desecrations-of-the-flag sneakers. Maybe they're hankering for the supposedly great economy that a Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán can provide.

Speaking of dictators, remember what some of Trump’s picks to work in the White House — he called them "the best people" — ended up saying about him? Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, previously the CEO of ExxonMobil, said Trump was uninterested in briefings, often formed views that had no basis in fact and denigrated our allies. (Tillerson reportedly called Trump "a f***ing moron.") Former Marine general and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis warned that Trump was the first president who didn't even try to unite the American people, saying he had made “a mockery of our Constitution.” John Kelly, also a former Marine general and second on the long list of Trump's White House chiefs of staff, reportedly called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.” 

I could go on, but consider that these accomplished and successful men, picked by Trump for prestigious posts, realized quickly, and to their horror, just how manifestly unfit he was for the highest office in the land, even before — as Dr. John Gartner recently told Salon's Chauncey DeVega — his brain was clearly dementing.

But let's get back to New Yorkers, who also resoundingly rejected Trump at the voting booth in both 2016 and 2020.

After Justice Arthur Engoron handed down that hefty penalty in the fraud case, Eric Trump burbled some nonsense about how his dad had created the skyline of the city. Um, no. The Manhattan skyline was created not by builders of craptastic apartment towers but by visionary architects like Cass Gilbert (Woolworth Building), Shreve, Lamb and Harmon (Empire State Building), Daniel Burnham (Flatiron Building), John Roebling (Brooklyn Bridge), William Van Alen (Chrysler Building), James Renwick (St. Patrick’s Cathedral) and David Childs (One World Trade Center). I lived in New York when the ego-fluffing grotesquerie of Trump Tower was completed on Fifth Avenue. It was never an important element of the skyline; now it's a punchline. 

It's fair to state that Eric’s specious claim about his pop annoyed many people. So let's take this a bit further. Beyond the actions (always louder than words) of Justice Engoron and state Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom grew understandably weary with Trump’s courtroom antics in court, what do other quintessential New Yorkers have to say of him? 

Oscar-winning actor, Manhattan restaurateur and lifelong New Yorker Robert De Niro could be said to know a thing or two about criminals and their motivations. Well, we know what he thinks — that Trump is a loser and wannabe mobster with no moral code: 

Even gangsters have morals and they have ethics. They have a code, and you know when you give somebody your word, it’s your word, because it’s all you have is your word. This guy, he doesn’t even know what that means.

Trump models himself so much on a mob boss that those words from the star of “Mean Streets,” “The Godfather Part II” and “Goodfellas," among numerous other great American films, have to sting.

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Writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz, in a wide-ranging and, naturally, New York-centric conversation with Salon, described Trump as representing “a level of moral squalor so profound” that even other real estate developers in the city looked down on him. Lebowitz admitted she underestimated his chances in 2016, but she points out that he lost the vote by a massive margin in New York City, even on the formerly Republican Upper East Side: 

Of all the horrible things about Donald Trump, you know one of the things that most bothers me — and perhaps you — is that people outside New York think he’s a New Yorker. No one in New York thinks he’s a New Yorker.

Before you sneer at my using the words of members of the artistic or intellectual elite — as if that were a bad thing — consider that to Donald Trump, the coddled rich kid from nearly-suburban Jamaica, Queens, who dreamed of showing the denizens of Manhattan that he was big stuff — the king of the unwonted comb-over and the unwanted come-on, who bankrupted so many business ventures and then bankrupted the American presidency — those judgments cut to his dark, turbulent core.

Trump himself must be in a New York state of mind these days, and none too happy about it. The first of his four criminal trials, the one about paying hush money to a porn star — and the way things are going, maybe the only one that will actually happen before the November election — is scheduled to begin in a Manhattan courtroom on March 25.