My Trump Surprise

You may remember that Trump and I grew up in Queens at the same point in history. I mentioned it recently. He grew up rich in southern Queens, Jamaica Estates, while I was growing up in a factory town in northern Queens. I knew Jamaica Estates very well. My family doctor had his office there, in an apartment building that was probably owned by Trump's dad. I attended evening summer school at Jamaica High School one year. That's not quite Jamaica Estates, but it is north of Hillside Avenue. I delivered the mail in Jamaica as a young man. There is a famous early photo of Trump and his dad, standing on an overpass with giant apartment buildings behind them. That was in the early to mid-1970s. I read the accompanying article with interest. After that, Trump was regularly featured in newspaper articles ranging from borderline scandalous, to vaguely positive, to financially embarrassing. We've known a lot about him for a long time.

At some point, around the late 1980s, I believe, I discovered something about Trump that surprised me. He's not a Jew! All early mentions of Trump included details about his father's real estate empire and great wealth. They never mentioned that the family was Presbyterian. I only knew one man who owned a few apartment buildings in Manhattan, and he was a Jew. He was the uncle of a good friend of mine. Based on other reading from newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, and driven by naivete mostly, I had come to the belief that the big-time real estate business in New York was dominated by Jews. You know, like the Kushner family. Perhaps it was. Fred Trump may have been an exception, for all I know.

I don't think that there was any prejudice in my belief. I have always liked Jews. There were people in my family who were prejudiced against blacks and Puerto Ricans, but I don't recall a bad word spoken about Jews. My own father admired Jews (the family doctor mentioned in the first paragraph was Jewish. He was a first-class family doctor who delivered me and my sister, made house-calls for $5, and took great care of us until he retired). If people needed a lawyer, and in New York you must hire a lawyer to represent you in the purchase of any real property, the odds were great that the lawyer was a Jew. I never heard anyone complain about this. In fact, just the opposite was true. I do remember multiple references like this: “he's so stupid, he hired a Christian lawyer.” My uncle, later in life and on his deathbed, wrote to me, “don't worry about me. My doctor is a Jew from New York. And you know there's only one thing better than a Jewish doctor from New York, and that's two Jewish doctors from New York.” Upon reflection, maybe people were just being careful. No sense in pissing off most of the lawyers and doctors in the world.

My confession is this: I spent the first fifteen years of Trump's public life with the casual belief that he was a Jew.

I discovered my error about the time that Trump was going broke in the casino business in Atlantic City. How can you go broke in the casino business? It began to make sense when I discovered that he wasn't Jewish. “Oh,” I thought, “I see.”

Now put your mask on! Go meditate or something! Buckle up, Buttercup. The next eighteen months are going to be all bad road, all the time.