Donald Trump and My Mother-in-Law

When Donald Trump was just out of school and had begun working for his father, Fred Trump, my late mother-in-law was an office manager in the Trump office in Brooklyn. This was in the late 1960s. I was a freelance writer at the time, beginning to make some headway, and Donald must have become aware of me via office conversations. He said to her, "I don't envy him anything, except that he lives in Manhattan."

It is actually touching, in a way, to think of today's Donald Trump as once having been another young kid with Manhattan dreams.

According to my mother-in-law, the senior Trump was widely regarded as a good man, a fair landlord, and a good person to his employees. So Donald Trump knows what a good man is.

With his embrace of the Obama birther issue, Donald Trump said to African-Americans, to the young who would think of Barack Obama as a role model, to the older who would think of him with pride, that the most successful African-American in America, in the world, is a cheat and a fraud. Well, he has not just said it to African-Americans.

Since my original awareness of Donald Trump was when he was a young kid working for his father, a good man, I keep waiting for Trump to pivot away from racism, to moderate his views the way people running for office do. It isn't happening, is it? That kid who must have known better has grown into our immutable Donald.

Oscar Levant's remark comes to mind, "Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath." It's looking like there is no phony Donald Trump hiding the real Donald Trump. He's the real tinsel.