What's Behind The Trump Logic?

While it is a bit twee to claim that every cloud has a silver lining, the horror of seeing Donald Trump in the news every day is made at least slightly better by the spate of wit it has unleashed — essays, tweets, memes and even hashtags. A particularly beautiful meme turned up on my feed. It followed that excellent law of Godwin, where Trump's autobiography was Mein Coif. There are certainly more Trump hair jokes right now than pieces about the politics, business interests and work of the man. Given how hard it is to take him seriously, it's not entirely unbelievable.

By all accounts Trump has always been a ridiculous, comically wicked Disney villain: the kind you scare your children with if you are anywhere on the political spectrum that's left of the far right. I mean, remember, this is a man that Fox News has issues with — an organisation that has had a 'terrorism expert' claim Birmingham to be an area that is only accessible to Muslims. When an outrageously wealthy American man who believes in a homogeneous Christian America gets into trouble with Fox News, it means his views are so deranged that they are not even marketable.

And yet, he is now a serious contender in the US presidential elections. There is a possibility that he may be nominated to be the GOP candidate for 2016. Trump, with his bluster and his banality, is no longer simply an absurd figure. And perhaps he never was. A man with the net worth of $4.5 billion and inexplicable popularity, it is time to take a serious look at who he is and where he comes from. Trump's history is one incredible trove of contradictions. Coming from a family of immigrants, having married non-US citizens twice and having happily exploited undocumented immigrants for labour in his constructions, Trump regularly talks "closing the borders" of the US to solve its problems.

The most consistent thing that stands out in all the biographies of Trump is privilege — privilege and a stubborn amnesia about the past. Both Fred Trump and his young son used to claim that they were of Swedish descent. But in August this year, the online newspaper Buzzfeed launched an investigation after Trump mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren about her claims of Native American heritage.

The investigation did not disappoint, of course. Andrew Kaczynsk, reporting for Buzzfeed, says that census data showed that Trump's grandfather (confusingly also named Fred) was born in Kallstadt in Germany. He came to America in 1905 and the Trump family eventually decided it would be easier to go with Swedish roots because a rather profitable chunk of their property was leased to Jewish tenants, and it would be a little bit awkward to air the kind of views they did while also owning up to generational ties to Weimar and Reich Germany.

Fred Trump (Donald's father) continued to make that claim because it made being a landlord in Manhattan a lot easier. In due course he married Mary Anne Trump and they had five children. Our current scourge, the flair-haired Donald, was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. A proud father, Fred said in an interview that young Donald was a "rough" fellow; no doubt a cute way to talk about the making of a bully.

Young Trump's education was predictably arranged at an expensive private school where Fred was a member of the Board of Trustees. After that he hopped from a college in Bronx to the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He came out with a B.S. (I mean Bachelor of Science, of course) in Economics and proceeded to spend the '70s being photographed standing next to Cadillacs and buying up property with the same 'daddy's money' that he has now accused the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of doing.

His first appearance in media was for as illustrious a reason as his current popularity. In 1973, New York Times journalist Morris Kaplan reported on the court case against Trump and his father for their alleged anti-black bias in renting their apartments in Brooklyn. At this point, the Trump family owned 14,000 apartments in the city — a huge number not only in terms of the number of people it directly affected by making them houseless, but because the company was already influential enough to strengthen racist bias in tenancy agreements.

It is interesting that while no formal penalties were levied, Trump Management were forced to an agreement with the Federal Government that involved giving all their vacancy details to the New York Urban League for two years.

Clearly Donald Trump's greatest asset is the ability to believe (and believe in) his own words despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a man who has repeatedly run into embarrassments with the law, the government. He has failed to show any evidence of the extraordinary business acumen that apparently ensures his success. His Atlanta casino, cheesily called the Taj Mahal, went bankrupt in September 2014. According to IBN, this was not even the first time. Trump has filed for corporate bankruptcies in 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009.

Yet, on his website www.trump.com, this man continues talking about himself with undiminished confidence: "Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment. He is the archetypal businessman — a deal maker without peer."

With multiple bankruptcies, law suits, allegations of criminal behaviour, intolerable grammar and in Cher's immortal words 'ego the size of Texas', Donald Trump continues to be a force. One can only hope that he manages to alienate the GOP and the global Right in time before any irreversible mistake happens. And given Marine le Pen's recent discomfort with Trump's Islamophobia, it looks like it may not be so implausible after all.