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• Included among the Political Analysis Posts List.
• I cannot really recall what the politics of Donald Trump were while I was living in New York. I guess the short answer is that he didn’t say that much about it.

Martin Winfree
December 12, 2018
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Shared with Public

POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART VII:

When I arrived at North Carolina State University in August 1969, I thought I understood what the Conservative Movement was all about based on the books and magazines and newspapers that I was reading. I think that I had already discovered the Human Events newspaper by then. Well, once I joined the College Republicans, it turned out to be a much bigger world than I knew about. While there were Nixon supporters among the general membership, the leaders in the club thought of Nixon pretty much the way I did: that he was a moderate (or worse) who was “selling us out”. There were a lot of past members of the College Republicans who were hanging around as well, and also other CR clubs at nearby Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

I won’t bore you with all of the details, but there was a very lively mix of competing philosophies among the College Republicans. College days are the best time for that, and I dare say that most people who have been to college have had that experience even if they weren’t political. Besides the “traditionalist” conservatives like me of the Goldwater and Reagan variety, there was a spectrum of libertarians that included fairly moderate libertarians (if there is such a thing ), rock-ribbed “Randist” followers of Ayn Rand and other figures in that movement whose names escape me, and even a few who espoused what was nearly an anarchist philosophy (though not of the bomb-throwing type that most people know about), who talked about setting up private highways and private armies and even private lighthouses. There were one or two people who were edging toward Neo-Nazism, and some who called themselves “monarchists” and I guess wanted the US to rejoin the British Commonwealth.

Late-night bull sessions and debates were the order of the day, and they were heavily lubricated with beer. I didn’t start drinking myself until after I graduated, but just about everyone else was. (Looking back, I guess that I was against the 18-year-old drinking age as well as the 18-year-old vote ). As a result of being involved in those gatherings over so many years, on top of having my own political philosophy change a few times since then, I have very little patience with politicians and commentators of whatever stripe who are strictly toeing the party line. I need to hear something unexpected or even daring from time to time from these people.

As a former “Hollywood liberal”, Ronald Reagan was a convert and a “real conservative” who was like that occasionally as a President, though I cannot call to mind anything specific. However, George H. W. Bush (who passed away a few weeks ago) was the son of moderate Senator Prescott Bush and was viewed as a moderate himself in his early political career. When he succeeded Reagan as President in 1988, he didn’t always seem to know what positions to take in the by-then strongly conservative political environment; and I noticed that he pretty much went with the hard-right position every time.

The same could be said of his son George W. Bush, who became President in 2000; although to be fair, the political positions that “Bush 43” embraced felt more genuine than had been the case with his father. Also, George W. Bush threw us a curve ball during his Presidency: He launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history; and it was mainly aimed at the area where the disease truly raged, sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, Reagan never so much as uttered the word “AIDS” during his term in office.

And now we have Donald Trump. I lived in New York City from very early in 1990 through the early spring of 1994, and Trump was a celebrity Manhattan businessman who was on the news regularly. Politically, “the City” is probably the most liberal city in the country, and the section where I lived (the West Village) is one of the most liberal sections of that city. My Congressman when I moved there was an old-style, hardline liberal named Ted Weiss; I had not known until I saw it just now that his predecessor in Congress was Democratic firebrand Bella Abzug.

Following Weiss’s death in 1992, he was succeeded by Jerrold Nadler, and he was my Congressman for the rest of my time in the City. I hadn’t thought much about him lately, until I began seeing Nadler on the news recently (and noticed that he had lost a lot of weight from when I knew him). As the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, he would likely be in charge of any hearings about Donald Trump that might come about after the 40-seat Congressional gains by the Democratic Party take effect in 2019. From what I can tell, he is being thoughtful about the whole thing, and I am happy to see that. By the way, I am just as proud that my representative in Congress while I was living in San Francisco was Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, that is what I said: proud!

Anyway, that is the political climate in New York City. In the business world though, the City is highly traditional; I dare say that even “casual Friday” remains a tough sell in most offices there. I started my New York career working for a major accounting firm; our section was later spun off as a separate company, though I was still in the office with all of the accountants (that was true when I transferred to San Francisco as well). The policy in the New York office was to have casual Fridays on the last Friday of the month (casual wear was also fine if you came in on the weekend or at night), and I remember being so ticked off if I happened to be away from the office on that day, since I would have to wait an entire month before casual Friday would roll around again.

On the other hand, what business leaders care about in New York is that you do your job. Period. Your politics, your friends, your personal life, your sexual orientation, how you spend your leisure time, what you use as entertainment while you are working at your desk – none of that is ever an issue until it starts interfering with your work. One man that I worked with had Rush Limbaugh on all morning not long after he arrived on the scene, and others had a variety of radio stations playing.

Thankfully, I was told by the sales staff at our local department stores in Raleigh that I needed gray suits and formal ties if I was going to move to New York City – that really none of the suits that I had been wearing in North Carolina would work there. By the way, by “gray”, I don’t mean the light gray suits that are fairly common in the South – these are charcoal gray suits that I am talking about, and they are just this side of black.

In other words, Donald Trump and I dressed the same way while I was living in New York City, and the suits and ties that he is wearing now are basically indistinguishable from what he was wearing when I saw him on the news back in the day (though I did notice that he wore a navy blue suit the other day). I remember thinking at the time that that was pretty cool; everyone that I saw during the day and at work was also dressed like that, but this was a guy who was on TV all the time.

The accounting firm that I worked for (Pannell Kerr Forster) specialized in the hospitality industry (basically hotels and restaurants), and Trump was also in that line of work. I used to wonder how I would react if Trump called up and said, how’d you like to work for me. Actually, there was never any chance of that. All of the major real estate dynasties in New York City were closely held family businesses like the Trump Organization, and I imagine that this is still the case.

When I transferred to San Francisco in 1994, the relentless pressure-cooker business world in New York was just starting to get to me. I once told my boss in New York that there is an energy in the air in the City that you can feel, and he told me, “I can feel it at the airport.” My new home was a serious big-city environment also, but the stress level was several orders of magnitude lower. In the San Francisco office, they recommended the Men’s Wearhouse as the place to buy my suits, and casual wear was fine for the entire summer.

I cannot really recall what the politics of Donald Trump were while I was living in New York. I guess the short answer is that he didn’t say that much about it. I remember thinking that he was pro-choice and probably a moderate liberal, but maybe that was just because those were my own beliefs. In any case, I don’t think I am going to raise any eyebrows when I say that Trump doesn’t seem to be an authentic conservative; and like George H. W. Bush, he seems to go with the hard-right positions just to be safe.

Trump though takes it a whole lot further than Bush ever did. I remember watching Real Time with Bill Maher one time fairly early in his term, where Bill Maher talked about Trump. He first gave an example of a Trump move to eliminate the ban on lead bullets, because if bald eagles eat them from a carcass that a hunter had killed, they will die. Removing the ban serves no conservative principle, adds no jobs, saves no one money. So why was it done?

This would be a good time to address that term “politically incorrect” that Trump’s supporters love to bandy about, since that is what Bill Maher’s show was originally called. The Politically Incorrect show had that name I imagine because the discussions often brought up controversial topics, and the conversations had a pungent mix. In Trump’s case, saying you are “politically incorrect” only means that you are acting like an asshole.

Or, I don’t know; maybe I am wrong about that. Here is the way that Bill Maher discussed the lead bullet proposal on his show; maybe he is being an asshole also? “Because when a sportsman experiences the exquisite joy of blowing the head off a chipmunk or wolf and leaves it to rot, bald eagles eat the carcass; and when it has lead in it, it poisons them to death slowly and painfully. If it doesn’t have lead, eagles – you know, the symbol of our f**king country, before they were replaced by a trucker hat – they don’t die. Why not leave that rule alone? Because hunting is a sacred sport? Is it even really a sport? Is it a sport if one team doesn’t know the game is going on?”

And Maher concluded: “It’s just about some warped idea that the way to show strength is by being a dick. And that in a nutshell is what Republicanism has become. Looking at any problem and saying, ‘what would a dick do?’” Maher went on to give another dozen examples at least of something that Trump had done or talked about doing, where he was “being a dick”; I didn’t think he was ever going to run out of them.

As an aside, people love to dump on Bill Maher because he is an open and ardent atheist. I remember once watching The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert interviewed George Will. Will was one of the first stridently conservative commentators on the Sunday talk shows and elsewhere; anyway, he mentioned in the interview that he was basically an atheist. I think Colbert was as surprised as I was to hear him say that; Colbert was not at all trying to draw that out of him, George Will just said that on his own. Like it or not, folks, they are out there.