Donald Trump is from Queens. So am I, but from a different part of the borough. We were all ethnic in my grandparents’ part of town, mostly Jewish and Irish. My dad used to play in a local basketball league—this was before the jump shot was invented (really)—the Jews against the Irish kids from Seaside, led by the legendary McGuire Brothers. No surprise, the Jews got creamed…even if my dad had an elegant two-handed set shot, I’m told. Ethnicity was a love/hate relationship. My grandmother would part the wooden Venetian blind slats and point over next door to florid Mrs. Costello sitting on her porch with the snow white hair and say, “The Irish have thicker skulls than normal people do.” She also called the Polish painter, “Mr. Polack.” But the men all played pinochle in their undershirts at a portable card table on the street on hot summer night. They sweated together, smoked cigars, laughed and shouted. There were distinctions and bigotry…and also respect, and love and eventually intermarriage. Several of the most important people in my life turned out to be Irish. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a beloved mentor; Tim Russert was a beloved friend. William Butler Yeats predicted my marriage when he wrote, “I love the pilgrim soul in you.” I feel a soul-devotion and kinship for those folks. Eventually, I came up with an aphorism: The three things the Jews and the Irish had in common were…guilt, wordplay and corned beef.
That was the complicated nature of ethnicity in Queens. Our parents competed, cast a wary eye, fought against each other sometimes—West Side Story was very close to home for a lot of us—and fought and died together overseas, in the service of the country that they all desperately loved.
Donald Trump came from a different part of town. The ritzy part, the Estates. His family was not “ethnic” in the New York sense. They were German and Scottish. They were Protestants…of a certain ashamed sort, too ashamed to use their real name—Drumpf. Of course, there were a lot of Jews who took a similar path: Ralph “Lauren” was born Ralph Lifshitz. There are all those unpronounceable Eastern Europeans who became Silvers and Golds and Roses and Morrises…and Teutonic Drumphs who became Trumps. They were all so eager to be as American as they could be. Fred Trump was so desperate to be a real, red-blooded American that he is reliably reported to have attended Klu Klux Klan rallies in the 1920s. He and his son, Donald, discriminated against black tenants. Woody Guthrie, a one time Trump tenant in Coney Island—I wrote Woody’s biography—wrote a song about the villainous landlords:
"I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line"
The Trumps, you see, were white people. A hundred years ago, Jews and Italians and the Irish weren’t. Donald Trump was born and marinated in the original identity politics: white protestant people were deemed superior. You hired Jews for doctoring and lawyering, you hired Irish to clean the house, you hired Italians for construction work. You can see, and sometimes hear, these ancient prejudices oozing out of him.
A man whose family turned Drumpf into Trump assumes that Kamala Harris turned Indian into Black for personal advancement. A man who grew up in Queens—and whose family saw all those garlicky Jews and Italians as different, as lesser—knew intuitively that he could use those inclinations against the 21st century version of immigrants, the Latinos, the darker Asians and always, eternally, the blacks.
To be sure, the Democrats gave him a great gift by misplaying their hand. Instead of celebrating the essential unity and equality of Americans, they subdivided us into identity groups—they experimented with race-based policies, with the best intentions at first, but identifying people according to race is simply not the American way. In the beginning, it was the very worst of our heritage, until the liberation of the enslaved in 1863 and the establishment of equal rights under law in the 1960s. Academic leftists, in a period of the most profound racial progress in American history, tried to sell the country on the immutability of white racism; white liberals gobbled up the “antiracist” rantings of charlatans like Ibram X. Kendi. They supported phony, distorted movements like Black Lives Matter; they established a vast network of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucrats to prioritize racial distinctions. Resentment over this—this tragic, stupid, overplaying of identity over unity—is the throbbing heart of Trump’s movement. The stiff-necked, politically correct left-puritans made it impossible for us to josh each other in the most fundamental American way—to rib each other’s ethnicity, playfully and lovingly. They made it easy for Trump.
Which doesn’t make him any less of a race-baiting pig. His performance at the National Association of Black Journalists was the horror laid bare. It was always there—from his scurrilous birther campaign against Barack Obama—but now we have the receipts. He is a vomitous bigot, intent on feeding ethnic enmity—the very opposite of what America was built to cherish.
Ethnicity, I believe, can be a force for love and unity. As a New Yorker, that’s at the heart of who I am. In Donald Trump’s mouth and mind, ethnicity is a poison. This evil, damaged man stands against the most basic idea of what makes us us.
The left has made a mistake—that same old Leftist mistake—by intellectualizing this, by making it abstract and turning the Trump threat into an assault on democracy. They grasp at filaments—”In four years, you won’t have to vote anymore”—as a sign that he intends a dictatorship. Maybe so, but probably not. He’s really saying that in four years, he’ll have it all fixed…and anyway, in four years there’ll be a horde of ambitious Republican pols looking to run for president. The system isn’t going away.
American Democracy is not at stake in 2024.
American decency is.
And a Trump victory would tell us something truly horrible about ourselves.
My grandfather’s family (11 children, 10 of them boys) were Jewish. My great-grandfather owned a general store in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn—an Irish enclave. The boys were sent down to the docks to pick up the goods for the store. On the way back, they formed phalanx. The stronger boys protected their brothers from the Irish gangs that tried to steal the boxes. The local politicians (all Irish) solved the problem: when they were holding a meeting, they asked all the boys—the Irish and the (few) Jews to help them set up the chairs and take them down when the meetings were over. The result: the two groups became friends. At that time, the NY police force was mostly Irish. No Jews. My grandfather applied to join the force. The fathers of his friends vouched for him and he became the first Jewish detective at Headquarters. For the rest of his life, he had as many Irish as Jewish friends. Another mixed neighborhood story like yours.
Patricia Beard
As the product of the ethinc world of outer borough NYC -- mostly Irish Catholic on my side, but with much beloved Sicilian cousins -- this spoke to me. My grandparents had a bungalow in Rockaway -- amazingly it is still standing on Beach 109th Street-- that is the source of my earliest memories. Poor Joe would have had to put up with my landsmen's (there must be a Gaelic word for this) behaviors. Later we belonged to the Breezy Point Surf Club on the far tip of the Rockaway peninsula, and we would drive from Bay Ridge on the Belt Parkway, where we could watch the Trump apartment buildings going up in Coney Island. Everybody knew, in the way you knew things back then, that the Trumps were keeping out, excuse this, "the coloreds." Brooklyn had great sweetness, but it hid real ugliness. In a way I am glad that my father died decades ago, because I don't have to know whether he would have supported Trump. He was a Goldwater Republican -- our conversations in the late sixties were like those in All in the Family, but nowhere near as well written -- and I suspect he would.
New York used to give the country people like FDR, Mayor LaGuardia, Shirley Chisholm, but now we have inflicted outer borough bozos like Trump and Rudy Guiliani, the product of my father's high school, Bishop Loughlin, on the country and the world. Jimmy Breslin, would that you could be with us at this hour to explain to us wtf it all means.