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Absurd New York #91: Quotes by Trump Edition

In a world of slogans and soundbites, a brand jingle here and a sales pitch there, with oxymoronic pairings and definitions-be-damned, where search engine optimization is more sought after than content, and “liking” what’s written or uttered more lauded than actually comprehending it, are we becoming more anesthetized to words? Is the overload of all these things making us lazy and less willing to be critical of what passes before us? If so, isn’t that frightening? For all those who have the ability, and all those who still value language, the answer is emphatically YES.

In perhaps the most poignant part of Roger Waters’ current Us + Them Tour, Waters forces the issue. Near the end of Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” the show’s massive LED screens flash a few of the things Donald Trump has said around the arena. Whether you care about Trump or not, whether you remember what he’s composed for public consumption or not, no matter: You’re challenged to think. You’re tasked with understanding his words and considering what they mean. Any maybe, just maybe, being detached from the image he cultivates for a moment you’ll be able to take a true measure of the man. Let’s give it a try.

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“Im not schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” 

On March 12, 1989, a piece by Glenn Plaskin appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The headline was “Trump: The People’s Billionaire.” Under the subheading “Tiny Trumps,” Plaskin wrote that “For R and R, in between tending to the little Trumps...Daddy raids corporations.” Also, having convinced banks and other investors to lend him money on the strength of his name alone--they gave him “instant credit” lines because they thought he had “unlimited collateral”--Trump went about building the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City for $725 million and purchasing the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South for $400 million. In reality, though, he only spent $50 million of his own money to buy the Taj. The remaining $675 million was “financed with uncollateralized junk bonds.” As far as the Plaza went, most of that $400 million was “borrowed.” 

As Trump “reflected” during the interview, Plaskin recorded his words: “I’m not a schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” And he wouldn’t. When Trump bankrupted the Taj in 1991 and the Plaza too in 1992, he wasn’t left holding the worthless bonds or losing income from missed interest payments, his investors were. As far as the economic losses that got passed down to his employees, well, they weren’t his problem either. None of them did any damage to his bank account. 

“A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall.”

Trump first tweeted it out on July 14, 2015, and then again on July 28th as an attack on Jeb Bush, one of his then opponents in the Republican presidential primary. He’d double down with it again on September 17, 2016, only this time he including the hashtag “#AmericaFirst.” After being elected president, Trump decided to make his Twitter decree a cornerstone of national security policy. “Mexico will pay for the wall!” he tweeted. Of course it will, that’s why he’s spent the past year and a half trying to cajole Congress into giving him the funds. 

So aside from sounding like Pink, the megalomaniac protagonist of Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall”--who, coincidentally, also wanted to barricade himself off from the rest of the world--what gives with Trump’s definition of what makes a nation? If you peruse the nearest map, you’d notice plenty of boundaries drawn around land masses across the globe. Don’t those markings designate countries? Is Canada, for example, somehow less a country because it hasn’t defined its sovereignty with a magnificent wall on the United States’ northern border?

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!”

Although Trump has offered variations on this theme over the years, the original appeared via Twitter on November 7, 2012. Back then, the high temperature in New York was 41 degrees fahrenheit and the low 34. Sounds like just another pre-winter day in the Northeast, right? 

Well, according to the folks at Custom Weather, not exactly. From 1985 to 2015, the average November day posted a high of 54 and a low of 41. Now, granted that particular November 7th was colder than normal, but it’s not as if the recorded high were zero and the low -15 as Trump would have had Twitter believe. Besides, his conclusion was wrong anyway. Given that November 7th’s readings were outliers, perhaps they were actually the predicted effect of a climate in flux. If so, he needn’t have clamored for global warming at all. It had already arrived. 

“I was down there and I watched our police and our fireman, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down.”

On April 18, 2016, that’s what Trump said at a presidential campaign stop at the First Niagara Center--today’s KeyBank Center--in Buffalo, NY. Yes, he inexplicably confused 9-11 with the Japanese-based chain store, sure, and didn’t bother to correct his mistake, but the core of what he proclaimed wasn’t true anyway. 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Trump actually called into the live broadcast on WWOR-TV Fox 5 Local News. (Although the station’s antenna was destroyed with the Twin Towers, its signal was being transmitted by other conduits.) He told anchors Alan Marcus and Brenda Blackmon that he saw the tragedy unfold from his apartment in Trump Tower at 5th Avenue and 56th Street--several miles from ground zero. Moreover, when Marcus asked “Did you have any damage, or did you--what’s happened down there?” he replied:

“40 Wall Street [a 71-story building he owned under the guise of “40 Wall Street, LLC”] actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest--and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

Despite the horrific circumstances, he apparently couldn't resist promoting his interests. He even threw in an extra hyperbole. According to city property records, the 66-story building at 70 Pine Street--formerly known as the American International Building and the Cities Service Building--was actually 25 feet higher than his 40 Wall Street at the time. And still is. 

Now 40 Wall Street didn’t suffer any damage in the terrorist attack, but the Trump Organization still applied for a $150,000 grant being offered to help small businesses in the aftermath. Known as World Trade Center Business Recovery Grants, they were given to businesses in Lower Manhattan with less than $8 million in annual revenue. However, in spite of generating $16.8 million that year, 40 Wall Street was still awarded a grant by the Empire State Development Corporation. 

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass.”

While researching a story printed in the May 1991 edition of Esquire called “Donald Trump Gets Small,” Harry Hurt III was expertly entertained by the man himself. Trump took him on a VIP tour of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and that apparently had the desired effect. When Hurt began his story, he scribed, “Given the kind of year he has had, Donald J. Trump might be forgiven a little ego candy.” What? Even then, the media seemed unfazed by what was happening under his shiny veneer. 

At the time, the very casino Trump was showing to Hurt, the Taj Mahal, was going bankrupt. The Trump Castle, another Atlantic City casino, was destined for a similar fate until his father forestalled the inevitable. In December 1990, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips at the Castle and left them in the casino cage so his son could use them pay off a bond payment on the property. Meanwhile, as Ivana Trump argued for more money from their divorce settlement, Marla Maples, the woman with whom Trump committed adultery while married to Ivana, was “pressuring him to propose in the wake of his highly publicized dalliance with model Rowanne Brewer.” But all that was seemingly of little consequence. Hurt remarked:

“One might think that the chill breath of potential collapse and enough tacky publicity to shame Pia Zadora might have taken the swagger out of Donald J. Trump. One would be wrong.

‘You know,’ [Trump] muses philosophically as we return to our ringside seats [in the Taj Mahal for the Ray Mercer-Frabcesci Damiani heavyweight fight], “it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.

‘But,’ he adds after a pause that suggests this is a distinction with a difference, ‘she’s got to be young and beautiful.’”

In other words, he’d never be held accountable by the media, by investors, by anyone if he could razzle-dazzle them with the women he attracted. Case and point: Hurt’s profile reads like a breezy apology for the economic havoc Trump was soon to unleash on Atlantic City. Something like “Give him a break, he’s too nice a guy to punish. After all, he gave me ringside seats, a few fun girls, and a comped penthouse suite for the night.”

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So how did you do? Did you measure the man by his words, or were you dumbfounded again by the show?

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My Morning Jacket – Beacon Theatre – October 19, 2023

Any great rock band worth its weight in guitar strings has a few of those songs in its repertoire. You know the ones: the heavy artillery numbers that bring the proverbial house down, that have everyone in the place singing along at the top of their lungs, songs that make you go “Whoa!” and talk about them for days or even weeks after the show. Twenty years ago, My Morning Jacket impossibly put out an album almost entirely full of songs like that, It Still Moves, and they’re playing it in full at select cities along their current fall tour, with the first one being at the Beacon Theatre last night.

The play-the-whole-album gambit can sometimes make for an uneven concert, the excitement of hearing a classic record played end to end offset by a lack of spontaneity with a fixed setlist with tracking fit for at-home listening, not necessarily a sold-out theater on Broadway in New York City. With MMJ, though, the crowd is typically more worried about spontaneous combustion than a lack of spontaneity, and from the opening “Mahgeetah” to the closing coda of “One in the Same,” the band stretched the album to a full hour and 45 minutes, with barely a pause between songs. Several of the fan-favorite big guns got an extended treatment — “Dancefloors” with unending dueling guitars from Jim James and Carl Broemel pushing the audience over the edge early, a massive dose of overfuzzed bass from Tom Blankenship on “Run Thru,” and the full-band slow-build of “Steam Engine” at the end, Broemel moving to saxophone while James went psychedelic on guitar creating a spontaneous jam far afield from whence it came. In between there were quieter moments like “Golden” turning the intensity of the set inside out, James’s voice 20 years sweeter than it was when he first recorded it, bathed in yellow lights and Broemel’s pedal steel. 

A seven-song encore played like a half-sized second set, containing its own arc of rarities and selections from other corners of My Morning Jacket’s repertoire. Beginning with James solo in pin-drop silence on “I Needed It Most” and ending with a deliciously drawn-out “Phone Went West” in which they expertly folded in bits of George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” My Morning Jacket showed that for all its greatness, It Still Moves is but one piece of an impressively larger whole, and they’ve got two more sold-out nights at the Beacon to highlight the rest of their catalog, expect more heavy artillery and spontaneous combustion. —A. Stein | @Neddyo

(My Morning Jacket play the Beacon Theatre again tonight.)

(My Morning Jacket play the Beacon Theatre again tomorrow.)

(My Morning Jacket play Roadrunner in Boston on Tuesday.)

(My Morning Jacket play Palace Theatre in Albany, N.Y., on Wednesday.)

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