He’s called for a wall to keep the Mexicans out, demanded the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and now, to cries of outrage from around the world, has insisted that all Muslims be barred from entering the United States.
For any other candidate running for the US’s top office, any of these controversial outbursts would surely have spelt disaster. But for the Teflon-coated, egomaniacal cartoon character that is Donald Trump, the author of a dozen self-promoting books on business, life and politics, each such faux pas has only fuelled his populist appeal.
According to the latest poll of Republican voters, carried out by Zogby Analytics after his remarks about Muslims, Trump is now 25 points ahead of his nearest rival in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The irony of Trump’s cynical effort to scare his way into the White House by demonising Muslims seeking a better life in America is that he is actually a grandson of immigrants.
Friedrich Drumpf, a poor German barber running away from army service, came to America in 1885, the same year that the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, arrived in New York aboard the French steamer Isère.
“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads part of the famous inscription at the statue’s base. Over the decades, those words, which characterise the tolerant, welcoming ethos of the American nation, have offered hope to generations of poor and persecuted people from around the world, from Jews who fled the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe to displaced Muslims seeking refuge from war-torn Syria today.
Somehow, though, despite their own family’s great good fortune in being welcomed to the US, the Trumps have never seemed much affected by that invocation of human decency.
Drumpf changed his surname to Trump, and did reasonably well in the new world, not by cutting hair, but by supplying food and supplies to gold-rush miners in the Yukon.
But his property-developer son Fred – Donald’s father – really turned round the family’s fortunes. It was from Fred, perhaps, that Trump inherited his intolerance of those not like him.
According to a contemporary report in The New York Times, Fred was arrested in 1927 in a clash with police during a march in Queens by the white supremacists the Ku Klux Klan.
Trump, concluded the BoingBoing group blog that unearthed the report earlier this year, was “not responsible for any youthful sins his father may have committed”. But, “given the racially charged tone of the younger Trump’s campaign, it raises questions about the values he was taught by the man whose fortune he inherited.”
Over the years, Trump has presented himself as a self-made man. “I made it the old-fashioned way,” he has said of his fortune, but his success was built on the foundations laid by his father, a highly successful property developer who left an estate worth in excess of US$250 million when he died in 1999.
Trump, reported The Village Voice this summer, was "a scion of a wealthy family who got ahead, in large part, thanks to family connections – many of them political".
Donald John Trump was born in Queens, New York, on June 14, 1946. The fourth of Fred and Mary Trump’s five children, he was sent first to a private school but as a teenager badly in need of discipline, was transferred to the New York Military Academy.
“He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,’’ his father told one interviewer in 1983.
After two years at university in The Bronx, his education continued at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, from which he graduated in 1968 with a degree in economics.
With the Vietnam War still under way, in 1968, the 22-year-old Trump, classified 1A for unrestricted military service, seemed certain to see action.
Somehow, however, as an investigation carried out in 2011 by website The Smoking Gun discovered, he received a series of student and medical deferments “that helped spare him from fighting for his country”.
Such is Trump’s apparent lack of self-awareness that in July he attacked the Arizona senator John McCain, who fought and been shot down as a navy pilot during the Vietnam War, saying he was “not a war hero” because he had been captured.
Instead of fighting for his country, Trump joined the family business, and soon started developing his own projects. By 1973, his Trump Management Corporation owned 14,000 apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, operated in a manner that in October that year earned him his first headline, on the front page of The New York Times.
“Major landlord,” it read, “accused of anti-black bias in city.”
Trump and his father were accused of refusing to rent properties “because of race and colour”. The charges evaporated only when the company agreed to accept tenants on welfare.
After two years and a series of major property deals in Manhattan, however, Trump was being feted by New York’s media.
A breathless profile in The New York Times in November 1976 described him as "tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth". Riding around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with the registration plate DJT, "he dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs, and at only 30 years of age … is worth more than $200 million".
Also, simpered the writer, "he looks ever so much like Robert Redford". For a while, it seemed Trump could do no wrong. But as The New York Times put it, "feeling quite invincible and omniscient, Trump spiralled out of control in the late 80s, spending profligately and unwisely to feed his voracious ego".
By 1990, The Wall Street Journal estimated, Trump was $2 billion in debt. "All this might have crushed someone less in love with himself," noted The New York Times. By his own admission, in the early '90s, Trump owed banks "billions and billions of dollars. My personal debt was $900 million."
Over the years, the man whose every business venture has been prefixed by his name made full, skilful use of US bankruptcy laws to evade personal and corporate debt. "I've used the laws of this country to pare debt," he told ABC in 2011. "We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on The Apprentice. It's not personal. It's just business."
In 2004, he found even more fame and wealth as the producer and presenter of that very aforementioned reality TV show, in which contestants competed for jobs in one of his companies.
Today, though he lends his name and face to other people's projects, property developing is largely in the past for Trump, described in Forbes' 2015 list of the world's most powerful people as an "entrepreneur [and] personality" with a net worth in the region of $4.5bn.
Trump’s personal life has been conducted in the same glare of publicity as his business deals. In 1976, he met Ivana Zelnícková, a former model from Czechoslovakia. They married the following year. Three children later, they divorced in 1991, with Ivana walking away with “only” $14m, and not the half-share of the $5bn her lawyers said his assets were worth (conveniently, The Donald, as Ivana had called him, was bankrupt at the time).
The “other woman” in the divorce was Marla Maples, another model, whom Trump married in 1993. One child and four years later, they too separated, divorcing in 1999. After taking an unsuccessful tilt at Britain’s Princess Diana after her divorce from Prince Charles, Trump settled for yet another model, the Slovenian Melania Knauss, with whom Trump had his fifth child. The couple married in 2005, and Melania became a naturalised US citizen the following year.
Perhaps one of the reasons that Trump’s latest run at the presidency wasn’t taken seriously at first is that he has flirted with the idea before – in 1988, 2004 and 2012 – and dissing the opposition has always been his modus operandi. In 2011, he even famously questioned the authenticity of Barack Obama’s citizenship.
After Trump bailed from the race in 2011, one writer pointed out he had been “periodically popping out of the bushes to declare that he ‘might’ be running for president” for over 20 years”.
But, wrote Christopher Byron, “wouldn’t you know it, something always seems to come up at the last minute to change his mind, and he slips back into the bushes, having reaped an incalculable harvest of free publicity as the self-appointed loudmouth of the campaign”.
This time, the loudmouth with questionable hair has got to within shouting distance of the Republication nomination.
Back home, Trump’s remarks about Muslims have earned condemnation from across the political spectrum, with the Pentagon going so far as to suggest that they “bolster ISIL’s narrative”.
It remains to be seen how Trump’s remarks might damage his business interests in the Middle East – earlier this week, Damac, whom he has a partnership with on Dubai’s nearly completed Trump International Golf Club, complete with luxury Trump-branded villas, said it was sticking by him despite his comments, while the Dubai-based Landmark Group has suspended sales of Trump-branded home-decor products in its 1,350 stores across the Middle East.
In other news, more than 130,000 people have signed a petition to ban him from the United Kingdom, while Trump has postponed a scheduled visit to Israel on December 28.
In 1976, an admiring colleague said that Trump was such a good salesman that “he could sell sand to the Arabs”.
After the events of the past week, it’s probably fair to assume that those days have gone.
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