Live from New York City in the 1970s: : Donald Trump’s Avenging Angels: How the Orange-Haired Monster Has Rewritten the History of American Conservatism: "We used to talk about Goldwater, Reagan and Buckley...
...That just doesn't cut it any more. I’ve been studying the history of American conservatism... almost 20 years.... I thought I knew what I was talking about. Then along comes Donald Trump to scramble the whole goddamned script. Now, historians must begin to consider alternate genealogies... for the orange-haired monster.... I’ve done my best to begin the work—thinking through, for instance, Trumpism’s connection to fascism.... Other bodies, however, are buried closer to home.
No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia. Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when The New York Times reported ‘1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all’... all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and... one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father....
We now know Fred Trump was notorious enough a racist to draw the attention of Woody Guthrie.... Twenty years later... the United States Justice Department sued Trump père et fils for violating the Fair Housing Act.... [Trump] told the press the suit was a conspiracy to force them ‘to rent to welfare recipients,’ a form of ‘reverse discrimination.’ This proud and open refusal to rent to welfare recipients... was Donald Trump’s defense against racism. It is in this saga that we locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass--then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.
Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning’ during game two of the World Series.... Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight.... "Death Wish"... "Taxi Driver".... Trump’s political debut, after all, came in response to... the infamous attack on a female jogger in Central Park, Trump purchased full pages in four New York newspapers demanding, ‘Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!’.... He concluded: ‘I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave the citizens of this City.’... These same police straight-jacketed by liberal timorousness had already coerced the rape suspects into confessions later proven to be false. That’s N.Y.C.’s avenging-angel conservatism in a nutshell...
