Reflections on The Donald

For a starter, I cannot go past this animated gif from Glenn Le Lievre published in Crikey.

I'll follow it with a scan of a few Doonesbury strips from (I believe) 1989 - yes 27 years ago G Trudeau was finding The Donald doing the same shtick he is today.  Click the image to read it!
When we lived in NYC (2005 -06) we joined the Municipal Arts Society (MAS), primarily to go on their walking tours of neighborhoods with interesting architecture.

One one walk to the Upper West Side the leader explained that a bunch of high rise apartments were a Trump development.  His original plan had been basically a 30 story wall for about 10 blocks along the Hudson waterfront, which caused MAS to have a conniption.  The Donald got back to them and said "What would you do about the site?"  So they got an architect to come up with a proposal that reduced the height, broke the blocks up and put a fair bit of the site as public open space and provided it to The Donald.

He accepted it, on the grounds that they wouldn't grizzle about it.  They reckoned this was a fair thing and signed off on it.  When this was announced to the membership of MAS the phones melted and they got more resignations from the Society that day than in any year before or since.  People just couldn't believe he would stick to a deal - which on this occasion he actually did. The key message is that the membership of MAS didn't trust The Donald (although they didn't fit the demographics of the "deplorables").

In March 2006 there was a major blizzard, which dumped about 60cm of snow on Manhattan.  I went out for a walk to see what was going on and went past Trump Tower on 1st Avenue at 47th St.  A young black guy was shoveling the sidewalk in front of the building.  I asked if The Donald was due to come and help him.  A cruel thing to do as the guy laughed so hard he fell into the snowbank!


Comments

Jeni from Northern Rivers Dreaming said…
We still miss Doonesbury, always brilliant and spot on, especially on this occasion!
29 October 2016 at 11:04:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
I think Trudeau may still be doing the weekend strips.

One of my joys of the Lifeline Bookfairs - which I am sure you remember - is finding Doone's compendia covering periods I didn't read the strip because they were only in The Australian.

Martin
29 October 2016 at 20:22:00 GMT+11
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