As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail.
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Illustration Credit: Cristiana Couceiro; Source photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
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The young Donald Trump was the Nelson Muntz of Jamaica Estates. (Or was he its Draco Malfoy? Scholars will debate such questions for generations.)
In any case, Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. The Trump family, whose fortune was made in outer-borough real estate, had a cook and a chauffeur, and “Little Donny” was a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York. This was just the sort of place, it was hoped, where Donald would mature into a young man of rectitude and self-regulation.
That, in fact, did not happen. Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him. Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an astute early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”
At home, Trump apprenticed with his father, collecting rents and learning the finer points of discriminatory housing. He eventually came under the tutelage of the attorney and sybarite Roy Cohn. What lessons Trump learned from Cohn were entirely malevolent: Never show weakness. Never apologize, never explain. Attack, never defend. Engender loyalty through intimidation. With his curious coif and self-satisfied expression, Trump made himself a presence in Page Six. Indecency and aggression were his brand. Cruel, narcissistic, duplicitous—the list is long and by now so familiar that even some of Trump’s supporters concede that his most poisonous attributes are, to use the D.C. lingo, baked into the cake.
In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York papers after the arrest of five Black and Latino teen-agers who became known as the Central Park Five. (Their convictions for rape were eventually overturned.) His screed resonates as a credo today:
The ad led Murray Kempton, New York’s greatest columnist, to consider the spectacle of Trump—“the man demeans anything he touches”—as he moved through the big city:
But not Trump. His insistence on a message of contempt was not something that he concealed. To the contrary, his hunger for attention was, then as now, embodied by his preposterous signature. As a businessman, he was often accused of cheating his contractors; as the star of “The Apprentice,” he was himself only more so, a puffed-up cartoon C.E.O. who relished making his would-be employees stammer, quake, and cry. As a Presidential candidate, he made his world view clear: there was “us” and there was “them.” And, with him in the White House, the fear factor would prevail. (Or, as he once told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”)
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David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Bruce Springsteen, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Benjamin Netanyahu, Leonard Cohen, and Mavis Staples. He also serves as the host of the magazine’s national radio program and podcast, “The New Yorker Radio Hour.”
Remnick began his reporting career in 1982, as a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he covered stories for the Metro, Sports, and Style sections. In 1988, he started a four-year assignment as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book, “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.” In 1994, “Lenin’s Tomb” received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.
Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine. It has won more than fifty National Magazine Awards during his tenure, including multiple citations for general excellence. In 2016, The New Yorker became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and now has won eleven Pulitzers, including the gold medal for public service. Remnick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Remnick has written seven books: “Lenin’s Tomb,” “Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia,” “King of the World” (a biography of Muhammad Ali), and “The Bridge” (a biography of Barack Obama), along with “The Devil Problem,” “Reporting,” and “Holding the Note,” which are collections of some of his pieces from the magazine. He has also edited or co-edited many anthologies of New Yorker articles, including “The Matter of Black Lives,” “The Fragile Earth,” “Life Stories,” “Wonderful Town,” “The New Gilded Age,” “Fierce Pajamas,” “Disquiet, Please!,” and “Secret Ingredients.”
Remnick has taught at Princeton University, where he received his B.A. in 1981, and at Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife, Esther Fein; they have three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha.