Don, The Quixotic

A pugnacious student, canny businessman, doting father, and the worst enemy you could make. Meet Donald J. Trump, the man who would be president.

- Navin J. Antony

The fable of the mouse that fell into a pail of milk, perhaps, best illustrates the effect Donald Trump and his presidential campaign has had on America. The mouse had no business being inside the pail; but it did fall, and Trump did take the political plunge. The mouse struggled and struggled, till it churned the milk to butter and crawled out. With his divisive and disconcerting rhetoric, Trump fared equally well: he churned the cauldron of American politics—pitting the rich against the poor, natives against immigrants, believers against non-believers, Middle American conservatives against East Coast liberals—until his way to the White House was buttressed. There was method in his madness.

Trump always loved a good fight. In The Art of the Deal, his 1987 bestseller, he talks about how he almost got expelled from school because he punched his music teacher in the face, “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music”. As an adult, he took the fight to boardrooms, where he made his name as a hard-nosed negotiator who got what he wanted. In his 2004 book, How To Get Rich, Trump reveals his secrets of negotiation, through chapters titled such as ‘If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’ and ‘Sometimes, you still have to screw them’.

In one chapter, titled ‘Sometimes, you have to hold a grudge’, Trump describes how his relations with family friend and former New York governor Mario Cuomo soured. In the late 1990s, he called up Cuomo to ask for a favour from Cuomo’s son, Andrew, who was then running the department of housing and urban development in New York. According to Trump, the favour was “perfectly legal and appropriate”.