The media’s kissing up to Trump started early
Two days before next year’s midterm election will be the 50th anniversary of the New York Times’ first profile of Donald Trump.
In retrospect, it was quite an embarrassment, and it set the stage for many more embarrassments to come as lazy journalists depicted Trump as a colorful character instead of the business scammer, sex predator, and pathological liar that he is.
The 1976 NYT profile, headlined “Donald Trump, Real Estate Promoter, Builds Image as He Buys Buildings,” observed in the first paragraph that “he looks ever so much like Robert Redford.”
The article also reported that Trump “says he is publicity shy.”
Trump said he would soon be honored as Man of the Year by a Jewish hospital and remarked: “I’m not even Jewish, I’m Swedish. Most people think my family is Jewish because we own so many buildings in Brooklyn.”
Trump is not Swedish. That was a lie his father came up with to hide his German ethnicity.
Perhaps the biggest falsehood in the story was that Trump “graduated first in his class” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance. That repeated misinformation from a 1973 NYT story by Alden Whitman. The source of that claim is unknown, but Trump or his father would be a logical guess.
The author of the NYT’s first-ever profile of Trump, Judy Klemesrud, had another claim to fame. She wrote a 1970 story headlined “Those Treats May Be Tricks” that fueled unfounded fears over tainted Halloween candy – which is an extremely rare occurrence. (In 2021, the NYT owned up to its role in hyping the threat.)
Stories like that, when published by supposedly reputable publications, take on lives of their own.
And that’s exactly what happened with the claim that Trump was first in his class at Penn.
In 1983, the Boston Globe said Trump “graduated first in his class from Penn’s Wharton School.” In 1986, the New York Daily News reported the same. In 1989, the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News wrote: “For those who think Trump lacks substance where it is needed, don’t forget he graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania at the head of his class.”
This media misinformation helped establish Trump’s image as a financial visionary. Later articles, such as a New York Daily News profile in 1989 headlined “The People’s Billionaire,” kept it going. Celebrity interviewer Glenn Plaskin’s Daily News story described Trump’s $1,950 Brioni suit, his 225 rooms in various living spaces, and his phone conversation with an adoring fan, a bedridden boy suffering from a muscle disorder.
But Plaskin was especially impressed with Trump’s business acumen.
“He is sprayed with a monthly geyser of $200 million, hard cash guzzling in from his two Atlantic City hotel-casinos,” the article declared, quoting Trump as saying, “Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.”
That was two years before Trump’s first bankruptcy filing for a casino. He would end up filing for bankruptcy protection six times, most related to his casinos.
Trump told Plaskin that he wasn’t drafted for the Vietnam War because “I had one of the highest lottery numbers. That was luck, not talent.” Trump didn’t mention the suspicious diagnosis of bone spurs that exempted him from the draft – a diagnosis he received a year before the military draft lottery started.
No wonder Trump agreed to a Playboy interview with that same interviewer in 1990. (That was the interview in which Trump praised China for the Tiananmen Square massacre.)
While Trump’s early self-promotion worked in some media circles, it inspired ridicule in others. But even outlets that took issue with his shameless braggadocio took advantage of it to amuse their readers and viewers. Among the most mocking was Spy magazine, which called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
But when Spy’s editor, E. Graydon Carter, was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun in 1989, he underestimated Trump’s toxicity.
“He’s just an interesting, delightfully unpredictable character,” Carter said. “I don’t know where we’d be without him. I don’t know what he’s chasing, but it’s fun watching him chase it, though.”
Decades later, we know exactly what he’s chasing: a dictatorship.
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