Trump's salacious trial — riddled with mocking reports of porn stars, hush money payments and star witnesses who've done time — puts a last nail in the coffin where the corpse of his elite status dream begins to rot, opines the New York-based journalist Elizabeth Spiers.
"The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic," Spiers writes.
"If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, the song goes, but Mr. Trump couldn’t make it here — at least not the way he craved."
Spiers details Trump's long and less than successful history of pursuing affluence, influence and power in New York City and puts much stress on the many privileges upon which the successful real estate mogul's son was never able to capitalize.
This, Spiers argues, spurred retaliations that saw the developer destroy historic Art Deco friezes he promised to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, infinitely more consequential, call for the execution of a man who now serves on the New York City Council.
"He took out ads in major media outlets (including this one) calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York State after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a jogger in Central Park," Spiers writes. "The five men had their convictions vacated in 2002, but Mr. Trump still refuses, out of malice or vanity, to apologize or acknowledge their innocence."
Among those men was Harlem's City Council member Yusef Salaam, who took out his own ad when Trump was arrested in 2023.
“I hope that you exercise your civil liberties to the fullest, and that you get what the Exonerated Five did not get," Salaam wrote, "a presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”
Spier notes Trump's desperate pursuit of publicity that saw him use the name of his youngest son as a pseudonym to tell gossip columnists about his sexual escapades, John Barron, and the less than satisfactory results.
"He was ruthlessly skewered by New York publications," Spiers writes, "most famously by Spy magazine, which called him a 'short-fingered vulgarian.'"
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Trump's desperation for approval only earned him more sneers as he made his assent to the White House, and those sneers only inspired more desperation, Spiers contends.
"Mr. Trump also feels that he has been put upon," she writes, "by all of the New York City liberals who did not take him seriously when he put on a face full of makeup, donned a comically long tie and climbed into the clown car bound for Washington."
That's why Trump has since worked so hard to vilify the city that made his name nationally recognizable upon reaching the White House, and why he's so desperate to return their, Spiers writes.
"It’s easy to understand why he bashes his hometown as a crime-ridden hellscape, and why the Oval Office appealed," argues Spiers. "Washington offered him political power but also something he may have wanted even more: the respect New York denied him."
But New York also did Trump a service by developing the deep-rooted social anxieties he's channeled into a powerful tool of control, she contends.
"Mr. Trump was successful in part because he projected his own anxieties onto the people who were loyal to him," Spiers argues.
"When pressuring the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election, he said, 'They’re going around playing you and laughing at you behind your back, Brad, whether you know it or not, they’re laughing at you.'"
Now, as Trump returns to the city he feels rejected him and faces a criminal trial that daily reminds the world of the scorn he faced in the hands of New York City tabloids, the nation will see the former president as New Yorkers always have, Spiers concludes.
"The rest of the country is seeing a side of Mr. Trump that New York City residents have always been familiar with," Spiers writes. "The guy who’s angry that he hasn’t been accepted in the elite circles he admires and is outraged that others have."
