Reflections on a Potential Trump Presidency

I have been trying to write about a variety of matters in recent weeks but, alas, am fixated on the ramifications of a potential Donald Trump presidency.

The man is insidious. He is an abomination. He gets under my skin.

To prevent my thoughts from being tarnished by what may happen at the so-called first presidential debate of 2016 scheduled for this evening, I decided to publish them in advance of that potential debacle.

I have been hounded for months by a sense of unease that a vulgar, ignorant reality television star may be elected my president. Psychologists who have been polling their patients report that most of them have been similarly obsessed and depressed with the possibility of a Trump presidential triumph.

In fact, as one columnist has astutely observed, the nation is having a Trump-induced nervous breakdown. Free-floating anxiety is everywhere. The sooner the election is over, the sooner we can begin processing either the end of the Trump candidacy or the hideous ramifications of a Trump presidency.

I have considered emigrating to Nova Scotia if the worst occurs. Political campaigns in Canada don’t last nearly two years. Canadian politicians are less offensive and even stellar. The winters would be cold and breezy, but the summers would be exceptionally pleasant. Beaches are abundant. And if I were to commit to working again rather than merely enjoying my retirement, I might be eligible for a gift of free land.

Of course, I would miss the United States in which I have spent my life, and could never again anticipate strolling across Central Park or grabbing an Italian meal in Little Italy during one of the religious festivals or watching the St. Patrick’s Day Parade swerve down Fifth Avenue or singing choral concerts in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. These would be significant losses. The siren call of New York City is firmly embedded in my DNA.

What motivates a singular, terminally offensive outlier like The Donald? Many pundits believe he was always a selfish, narcissistic man who was covetous of the power and public spotlight inherent in the presidency, that he was too often close to that power and spotlight but never entitled to claim it in his personal business portfolio. Hence, envy plaguing a man who had been propelled to the public consciousness by a reality television show could easily have caused that man to covet still more power and glory.

Others recall President Obama’s withering public takedown of Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the evening when the “President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again.” Comedian Seth Myers added more fuel to the fire, after which the cameras lingered on Donald Trump as the astute ridicule cut through the venue and was broadcast to the public, showing a man unable to respond or leave, confined to silence, rooted at his table, and glowering with suppressed rage at his public humiliation.

According to Roxanne Roberts of The New York Times, who sat immediately next to Donald and Melania, the following theory du jour evolved: “Trump was so humiliated by the experience . . . that it triggered some deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge. That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world.”

This takedown occurred in the wake of Trump’s “birther” initiative, a racist, Islamophobic campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s birth and hence his presidency, a campaign without modern precedent, founded on a shrewd assessment of the inherent racism that had been surfacing from the Stygian depths throughout the country during Obama’s presidency, positing that the president was a practicing Muslim who had been born in Kenya and was hence ineligible to be president. That birther campaign continues to exist in spite of Trump’s recent efforts to lay it to rest via his startling and false allegation that it was initiated by Hillary Clinton.

Most people don’t think we’ve heard the last of birtherism, a malignant concept to undermine political campaigns when office seekers may not look, live, or sound like majority European-origin caucasian Americans. The barely suppressed racism that has propped up Republicans and their Tea Party compatriots for the past eight years has emerged via Trump’s campaign and other outlets in the form of full-blown bigotry unrestrained by any notions of fair play or even smart politics.

Some would argue that Trump’s birtherism campaign helped rouse his white supremacist troops, who have been out in force during the endless presidential political primaries and thereafter, when people of color, Muslims, the disabled, immigrants, and women have been targets of unrestrained fury, social media-inspired contempt, and threats of violence.

America’s ability to educate its citizens to think critically about a host of issues has been revealed to be a widespread failure, permitting a demagogue like Donald Trump to become the ascendant politician in a presidential race of unprecedented vacuous vitriol and insults. We older Americans like to believe we are immune from the ramblings of a Donald Trump, that only younger voters such as millennials are trapped in or convinced by the circular reasoning of an American Hitler on the campaign trail. But we would be wrong.

Too many voters of all ages have failed to assess the real dangers of Trump should he reach the Oval Office, and even admire his determination and continual bluster and roaring at one rally after another. When Trump yells to his listeners that he alone can “make America great again,” they are oblivious to the facts that Obama has guided the country back to prosperity following the Great Recession of 2008, killed Osama bin Laden during a time of terrorism, led this country with grace and dignity, and diligently addressed the hobgoblins of global warming and nuclear proliferation.

A saving grace is the civil and criminal lawsuits and official investigations now being directed against The Donald regarding Trump University, illegal payments from the Trump Foundation (of other people’s money), providing campaign contribution bribes to at least two attorneys general to persuade them not to join the Trump University litigation, and rape of a minor. No matter the results of the litigation and investigations, Trump will attempt to put his unique and dangerous spin on the outcomes. As for the 3,500 or so past court cases involving Trump casinos, rental tenants and condo owners, small business contractors, and racial discrimination, Trump is dismissive about his liability and secretive about the settlements he has imposed on many long-suffering litigants.

In the final analysis, what is really frightening, according to Garrison Keillor, is that “the biggest con job since the Trojan horse is taking place in our midst. Millions of Americans are planning to base their votes for a man who has lived his life contrary to all of their most cherished values. They are respectful, honest, generous, loyal, modest, church-going people with no Mafia connections and good credit records who try not to spout off about things they know nothing about.”

Further, continues Keillor, “[t]he man is a fraud, a tax cheat, a compulsive liar, a clueless playboy, and his presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the country.”

And that is what keeps me up nights, immersed in a free-floating sea of anxiety, wondering just how stupid American voters are, how prone to accept at face value without more Trump’s narrative of a “crooked” Hillary Clinton, a woman of uncommon knowledge and experience who has been demonized in extremis. This Donald, this fascist candidate who boasts that he would leave the governing to his vice president and “do deals” to reduce the nation’s National Debt and punish members of NATO who failed to pay in full for American military commitments, whose knowledge of the Constitution is nonexistent, and whose commitment to the Free World extends only as far as his made-in-China lines of clothing and his business payments from Russian oligarchs, may be about to take the reins of government.

Which is why I haven’t been able to sleep for months and am considering a move to Nova Scotia.

What Is Going On in America? “The End Is Coming!”

The country has erupted into warfare. Weeks before the contentious political presidential conventions are due to begin in Cleveland and Philadelphia and as the summer days heat up, police have murdered two black men without cause but with stunningly revealing video in incidents that turned deadly in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

The first in Baton Rouge was the killing of Alton Sterling, a black father of five who was selling CDs outside a convenience store with the consent of the store’s owner and showed his licensed gun to a homeless man who had been annoying Sterling. The homeless man called police, who responded by shooting Sterling although he was not resisting nor attempting to use his weapon. The shooting was captured on at least two different video cameras including that of a bystander as two burly white officers wrestled Sterling to the ground and shot him several times.

The second murder of an innocent black man was the killing of Philando “Phil” Castile, a school lunchroom supervisor, in his car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, following a traffic stop for a broken tail light (“which wasn’t broken”). His fiancée Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting to Facebook from the passenger seat of the vehicle, demonstrating uncanny narrative sang-froid as Castile lay bloodied and dying on the driver’s seat next to her, with Reynolds’ frightened four-year-old daughter observing from the back seat. Castile had been reaching for his driver’s license after informing the officers who stopped him that he had a concealed carry permit and was armed. Notwithstanding this peaceable prelude, one of the white police officers who stopped Castile shot four times through the open window of his vehicle. Castile had no felony criminal record although he had accumulated a number of minor traffic violations.

In response, twelve Dallas police officers and two civilians were gunned down last night in an ambush and subsequent exchange of gunfire during a peaceful protest rally, five of the officers being shot dead by a “sniper” who was perched atop at least one “elevated position.” That assailant, Army reservist Micah Xavier Johnson—who had served a tour of duty in Afghanistan—is also dead, killed by a police robot bomb that was detonated near him by authorities after a three-hour standoff.

As that shooter had indicated to a Dallas police negotiator, ”The end is coming!”

When Johnson’s residence was searched, it was found to contain weapons, explosives, and a computer indicating that black power web sites had been consulted. Three other suspects who were present at the Dallas rally protesting violence by police were briefly taken into custody but were not charged.

Visions of the 1963 sniper murder by rifle of President John F. Kennedy—which made Dallas infamous—crowd into the consciousness of a generation that was stunned when JFK was gunned down during a motorcade on a bright sunny day in November.

But current events are both less momentous and significantly more troubling than an historic presidential assassination, and have morphed into open race warfare (following years of what black observers consider to be unheralded covert race warfare by mostly white police against African-Americans ranging from ubiquitous unwarranted police stops of unarmed men of color to outright police killings of African-American and Latino men).

The events have been unfolding against a backdrop of a jingoistic presidential campaign that has featured storm trooper-like rallies with all the trappings of a Nazi spectacle. And a major candidate, Donald Trump, who obscures and denies any similar motivations—although his words and actions flowing nightly from our television sets clearly indicate otherwise—has been screaming accusations and promises to his audience nightly as his face distorts in impotent fury. White power web sites inflame and are inflamed, and anyone with a sense of history cringes as brutal events unfold one after another.

“Black Lives Matter” chant protestors across the country, a cry that began in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, when unarmed black 19-year-old Michael Brown was shot twelve times during a confrontation and killed by a white police officer, whom a subsequent grand jury failed to indict. Witnesses reported the young man holding up his hands or otherwise making various gestures with his hands, even pleading ”Don’t shoot!” which became a national rallying cry. A Missouri grand jury sifted through a variety of conflicting accounts before failing to conclude that the police officer was wholly without cause to fear for his life and defend himself.

The city of Ferguson was eventually found by a federal investigation to have become a catalyst for unwarranted police actions by the mostly white police force against the nearly all-black population. Weeks of demonstrations with looting, violence, and destruction of local businesses by arson followed the shooting and polarizing lack of grand jury indictment, accompanied by police responses that included the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. Confrontations between protesters and law enforcement officers continued for months following the Michael Brown shooting.

A subsequent federal investigative report described a city that “used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics” [Q&A “What Happened in Ferguson,” The New York Times]. The Ferguson police chief resigned soon after that report was issued. 

Other similar incidents involving the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers have continued to occur in recent years all over the U.S. at an alarming rate, feeding into the very real sense of paranoia that has gripped the black community.

The world is asking, “What is going on in America?”

Donald Trump: The Ignoramus Who Would Be President

Donald John Trump: The paunchy balding billionaire with the dyed ducktail comb-over wearing figurative jackboots who decided on a whim to run for president with virtually no relevant background, who has been a free-associating bloviator with abandon before huge campaign crowds for nearly a year, and who has convinced me that it is necessary to write about him again in spite of my intense distaste for even the most innocuous publicity about him. He won’t go away, the public won’t disown him in spite of his tendency to blurt out terminally offensive remarks about minorities, women, the disabled, and anyone who disagrees with him, and his careless insults have been obliterating much of the prestige and glory that the United States has accumulated in the 240 years since the Declaration of Independence.

How is Donald Trump an offense and menace to this country and to the rest of the global community? Let me count the ways.

First, the following comment today from Republican consultant Mike Murphy:

“He fails my commander-in-chief test. I think he is a stunning ignoramus on foreign policy issues and national security, which are the issues I care most about. And he’s said one stupid, reckless thing after another, and he’s shown absolutely no temperament to try to learn the things that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know just about everything. . . . The guy has a chimpanzee-level understanding of national security policy.”

Which was preceded by the following from Paul Krugman of The New York Times:

“Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.”

Today Donald Trump came into his own, ignoramus-style:

— He consulted with 93-year-old Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and the co-creator of the secret Cambodian bombing campaign of 1969 and other horrors, meant to coerce the North Vietnamese military to abandon their Cambodian sanctuaries. (The campaign was code-named Operation Menu and included Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Supper, and Dessert.) It was a total failure and further inflamed U.S. public opinion against the continuation of the Vietnam War. Kissinger has remained resident in the U.S. for a long time because he fears being arrested for war crimes if he leaves the country. Trump’s purpose in consulting the eminence grise of the Nixon administration was to appear statesmanlike, to acquire foreign policy bona fides, to reassure both American voters and the global community that he could develop an adequate understanding of how the rest of the world wages or prevents war, controls the nuclear arms race, participates in intercountry organizations such as G8 and G20, consults together to deter and counter international terrorism, and conducts a panoply of other necessary actions. It is highly unlikely that he made much headway in a single afternoon session at Kissinger’s Manhattan apartment, but Donald likes to think of himself as a quick study, a very smart businessman who always wins. Why should global warfare be any different?

— Trump blithely asserted that “I would speak to [North Korean dictator] Kim Yong Un” without further ado, ignoring the history of the Korean War and subsequent stalemate that has been in effect since 1953—more than sixty years—as well as the inconvenient fact that diplomatic preparation and informational research are necessary prerequisites for such an important contact. This after casually indicating that U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Japan and South Korea, which should, rather, according to Trump Game Theory, develop their own nuclear arsenals for protection from North Korea (although neither wishes to take such steps). This from the potential future Commander in Chief, also a draft dodger who claims to have been prevented from serving in the Armed Forces due to heel spurs that entitled him to a medical deferment. And coming after Trump’s previous statement that he will bomb ISIS with nuclear weapons ”back to the Stone Age” (as if any reasonable military person could trust The Donald with the nuclear codes, which state of affairs makes reasonable people break out in a cold sweat).

— Trump has repeatedly indicated his contempt for the staunchest and most necessary and effective allies of the United States, including but not limited to NATO, the European Union, The British Prime Minister, and the new Lord Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, a Muslim who has been highly critical of Trump’s reckless religious extremism statements about Muslims and his intention to bar all Muslims from the U.S. Khan responded to Trump’s recent intention to make an exception for him to visit the U.S. although he would ban all other Muslims:

“Donald Trump’s ignorant view of Islam could make both our countries less safe. It risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of the extremists. Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam. London has proved him wrong.”

— Trump’s purported intention to make peace with Fox News broadcaster Megyn Kelly dissolved into non sequiturs, and when confronted with his use of the word “bimbo” to describe Kelly, all Trump could say in “retraction” was, “You’ve been called a lot worse.” Yah. You betcha. By Trump himself. And unknown numbers of misogynists inspired by him.

— Trump publicly released the names of eleven possible Supreme Court justices whom he would consider nominating if and when he is elected President and has taken office, although it is apparent that none of the eleven sitting conservative state and federal judges were consulted in advance about the release of their names, and surely some of them would decline to be nominated following their sudden exposure to public scrutiny by a controversial presidential candidate without warning or consent. Although several of those proposed justices are women, none are Latino, Asian-American, African-American, or Native American. All appear to be Christian. This when the stalled nomination of Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, by President Barack Obama in March 2016, a month after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, continues with no end in sight and with Senate Republicans continuing to vow to block any vote on the Garland nomination during the rest of Obama’s term. (In return, Harry Reid has promised to deny Republican Senators any recess until Merrick gets a hearing and an up or down vote.)

— Trump speculated on vice presidential picks even though he has yet to achieve the status of Republican nominee, and indicated he will demand that each such potential nominee provide his or her income tax returns, this in spite of Trump’s outright refusal to provide his own income tax returns, claiming that since they are being audited by the IRS (all returns since 2008), he “cannot” release them until the audits are concluded, a possibility that takes us six or more years into the future. So Trump’s gross income, business deductions and expenses, assets, employers, charitable donations (such as the still incompletely remitted $6 million he claimed he raised on a veterans’ web site in January for the benefit of twenty-two veterans’ charities, which sum landed in a private Trump account and is still more than 50% undistributed to the veterans’ groups), and his effective tax rate payments in recent years on his enormous income. And Trump’s brand-new filing of a required Federal Election Commission disclosure statement does not clarify matters that would be revealed on income tax returns although they do indicate that Trump holds bonds in at least two companies that he criticized on the campaign trail. Back to those premature VP possibles: none are Latino, African-American, Asian-American, or Native American. All seem to be Christian.

— The 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who had been trying mightily to recruit a third-party candidate to splinter the Trump vote and challenge the Democratic contender, today threw in the towel and admitted defeat. It is hard to predict what disaffected conservative politicians and voters will do next: sit this one out, cross over to vote for Hillary Clinton, or hold their noses and vote for Trump.

Dear Reader, did you follow all that Donald News for one day? My head is spinning and my liar meter has been zinging off the charts all day. Time for more truth-telling and less mendacity.

The Alternate Reality of the Republican Party

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” [H. L. Mencken]

The days, weeks, and months have gone by on the Republican campaign trail, and we are beginning a new year, 2016. Nowhere else in the world does a campaign for chief executive of a purportedly democratic country last for 18 months. Nowhere else in the world do candidates who are willfully ignorant and unprepared to assume such office have piggy banks openly topped off by billionaires seeking as many tax breaks as they can buy. Nowhere but in these United States.

The Republican candidates together and individually constitute a carnival, a parade of freaks and aberrations. The leader of the pack, real estate mogul Donald Trump, hair transplant flopping (dyed) over his surgically diminished forehead, is the quintessential cavalcade barker, full of invective, insults, and incitements to violence for the thousands who flock to his rallies. He has used barnyard language to insult a female Fox News debate moderator repeatedly, the most respected Latino broadcast reporter in the country (who was physically thrown out of a rally), a disabled man who attended one of his events, all Mexicans (calling them “rapists”), all Muslims (vowing to keep them all from visiting or immigrating to the U.S.), both Bill and Hillary Clinton, his Republican opponents . . . a never-ending cacophony of profane language. Everything and everybody is “disgusting.” This is the language of a schoolboy, an overgrown adolescent who has bullied his way through business and his personal life.

Donald Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks appeal in particular to white working class men with no more than a high school education who have a high rate of unemployment, inadequate job skills, poor health generally, and an unexpected increased death rate due in part to addiction to alcohol and other substances. In short, his most fervid supporters are feeling the pain and adore Trump for describing their grievances against the world as legitimate. He knows that his base does not notice the discrepancy between what he says about the state of the country and how the declining white working class is affected by the real state of the country, held in thrall to the 1%, of which he is a bona fide member. His demonizing tactics are eerily reminiscent of those of the late Alabama Governor George “segregation forever” Wallace, who ran for president four times, garnering 13% of the national vote as a third-party candidate in the 1968 election, apparently splitting much of the Democratic vote that would otherwise have gone to Democrat Hubert Humphrey, insuring the election of Richard Nixon.

Trump takes up most of the oxygen in the room, but is by no means the most dangerous of the GOP stable. That distinction belongs to Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz, Harvard Law School-educated bomb-thrower in the Senate. Cruz has an enviable string of professional accomplishments, but subsumes most of them in his religious fervor and terminal arrogance, antagonizing the powerful with breathtaking disregard. In 2013 he single-handedly shut down the U.S. government for 16 days at a cost of $24 billion to U.S. taxpayers, and he has alienated most of his fellow lawmakers and Republican cohorts. He looks and sounds a lot like Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, rattling a sword of evangelical Christianity on a crusade to remake the known world. Cruz had initially attempted to stay out of range of Trump by never publicly criticizing him, but those days are over. Cruz is the most talented and diabolically wrong of the GOP bunch. He uses his two young daughters as props in political ads and then reacts with phony outrage when this tactic is criticized.

Although Cruz’s actions as Texas Solicitor General—which have had a considerable influence on current gun laws as interpreted by the Supreme Court with reference to the Second Amendment—“may be pleasing to conservatives, other aspects of his record are sure to attract critics. He argued against leniency for an unjustly sentenced man whose lawyer had made a technical mistake; he invoked 13th-century ‘Saxon law’ and the practice of cutting off testicles to justify harsher punishments in a rape case; and he referred to a late-term abortion technique as ‘infanticide.’” [Michael Kruse in Politico]

Ted Cruz would be a disastrous and divisive president, harkening back to the 18th century or earlier, governing by evangelical precepts as much as constitutional interpretations. God save the King (or the Sheriff of Nottingham).

As for the other GOP contenders, including the second Cuban-American candidate Marco Rubio (currently fending off officious remarks about his shiny new high-heeled boots rather than addressing personal and official financial shenanigans) and curiously uninformed neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, whose fall from grace appears to be gathering steam, they appear to be poised to collapse like nine-pins after the early caucuses and primaries in the next few months. It is Trump and Cruz who in the end will probably be left standing, whipping up their extremist constituencies as the GOP prepares for next summer’s nominating convention extravaganza.

The Rego Park Vigilante: C’est Moi!

If a visitor to my borough of Queens in New York City were to stroll along the streets of my neighborhood, he might encounter me out for a walk, white hair and all. The steep hills promote great calf muscles for pedestrians, and both the Long Island Railroad and Queens Boulevard (the twelve- to fourteen-lane “Avenue of Death”) provide geographic boundaries for many of the homes of a particular ethnic mix in mid-Queens.

And what a mix it is.

First, a little history. Rego Park is an entity or village named and largely built by the real estate development firm Real Good Construction Company beginning in the 1920s. Prior to that time, the area was mostly farmland or fields, and was part of the great Hempstead Swamp first settled in 1653 by Dutch and English farmers as agricultural land. Eventually, the colonial farm families leased their property to Chinese farmers, who grew crops for the Manhattan Chinatown markets.

Queens is far from the myriad attractions of Manhattan, reached by seemingly endless subway rides—frequently lengthened by a variety of delays due to poor maintenance and decades-old trains—or numbing, congested car commutes. And Queens, like the borough of Brooklyn to its south, forms part of the western end of Long Island, containing highways and commuter trains traveling toward the outer reaches of the summer playgrounds of wealthy Manhattanites, joined by the Hampton Jitney buses transporting still more residents, summer employees, and beach lovers.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, with between 176 spoken languages in the public schools to as many as 800 spoken languages in the borough, many almost extinct and no longer found in their places of origin throughout the world. Fewer than 50% of Queens children under five years old speak primarily English in their homes. Nearly one-quarter speak Spanish as a first language, and about 10% speak Russian or Bukhari (Jewish Russian Uzbeki, a cousin to Farsi). “It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The greatest number of Chinese-speakers outside of China proper live in Queens, or about 18% of the borough’s population, plus a number of other Asian-language speakers, including Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos.

Living in the midst of such diversity can be a challenge. Most Latino immigrants know enough English to get by, and the younger Bukhari generations have been in the country long enough to become fluent in spoken English. But the elderly Bukharis who emigrated with their children are often lost and isolated, or associate only with each other, and the great numbers of Chinese who have been settling in Rego Park to escape overcrowded Flushing further east in Queens (let alone the well-known but shrinking and gentrifying Chinatown in Manhattan) seem to have arrived from the mainland more recently. Their command of English is just about nonexistent for the older generations, and the younger set exchange spirited comments in Mandarin or other Chinese dialects. The youngest children are growing up bilingual, the usual tradition of immigrant children, often translating for their parents.

The city children’s services language access policy, by executive order, requires that essential public documents be printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Korean, Bengali, Urdu, and French. Some of these languages are more prevalent in Brooklyn or the Bronx, or even Staten Island and Manhattan. The non-Hispanic Caucasian population now constitutes a minority of the 8.4 million New York City residents, and in Queens, the most populous and second-largest borough, nearly half the population is foreign-born.

Alas, many immigrants are unfamiliar with American rules and regulations, especially for vehicular traffic (nor do many of them seem interested in learning those rules and regulations). And the neighborhood where I live is so congested that auto owners may circle the block for an hour or longer to park their cars legally. It is common for pedestrians to be physically threatened by impatient drivers at intersections who often circle those intersections while hoping to find a legal parking space, affecting the safety of hapless pedestrians trying to cross the street. Loud car honking and double parking are endemic.

This writer brooks no threatening vehicles. That is, although I realize that many Rego Park drivers are unfamiliar with the words “pedestrian” or “right of way,” and may not have encountered stop signs or traffic lights in their native cities or towns, they surely understand the concepts involved. Moreover, I am not easily intimidated. If I think I am in the right entering a crosswalk on foot—and I walk slowly with a slight limp—but some impatient driver attempts to flatten me with a car, I will catch the driver’s eye and hold up my hand in a “stop” position, and continue on my way.

Unfortunately, this is not always effective. And it is probably foolhardy. I may end up like the Roadrunner cartoon character splayed out flat on the pavement.

That is, some drivers play “chicken,” starting and stopping close to me as I cross the street to see if I will move aside so they may enter the crosswalk while I am still walking in it. Usually, pretending not to see these bullies will keep them at bay, but more than one has circled around me in the crosswalk with a vehicle, missing me by inches.

In such a case, if I can reach the car I will bang on the trunk with the flat of my hand as the car moves by to let the driver know this is verboten. (I try to take into account the repressive/permissive societies in the drivers’ countries of origin that encouraged this kind of direct action, coupled no doubt with bribes and other indicia of many third-world or former U.S.S.R. populations.) Generally, when events go this far, the driver (95% of the time a young male driver oozing testosterone) will pause for me. But there are times when a car has sped up inches from me and I recently screamed in fright when one of these child-like men used this tactic to try to intimidate me.

One young woman nearly ran me over during a turn into my crosswalk while speaking on a cell phone. When I told her that it was illegal to talk and drive, she looked at me blankly and continued her conversation.

And often one of these drivers will stop his car (frequently blasting rock, hip hop, rap, Spanish, Bukharan, or Arabic music), open the door and step out to give me a piece of his mind. When the drivers realize I am not a young stud like them spoiling for a fight but a senior citizen trying painfully to walk across the street, they tend to give up and return to their cars. One screamed F___ Y__ at the top of his lungs, letting the sound echo through the block as he drove off with his arm out the window and his index finger pointing skyward. I am then tempted of course to respond in kind, but playing with fire can get you burned, so I tend to limit my response to slapping the trunk of such a car as it drives by.

It is hard to adapt to a neighborhood where profanity is profuse in public, and street noise rarely stops. That’s what a resident of a lower middle-class neighborhood must expect in the electronic age in particular, where people have for years been typing out (often illiterate) cursing accusations and exclamations against anyone who posts an opinion that differs from that of the writer. Thus has anonymity of the Internet raised the stakes and made profanity (misspelled and mispunctuated) more the rule than the exception, verbally as well as typed on the Internet, at which I shake my head as much at the truly poor English as at the unbridled sewer language that has become common and predictable in the purported egalitarian electronic era.

But I digress.

Being the building and neighborhood scold means more than confronting misbehaving auto drivers. It encompasses:

(1) Writing down plate numbers and descriptions of parked cars with car alarms that may go off every hour for days on end, no doubt purchased used from former Manhattan owners whose replacement vehicles have better alarm systems. I may leave a note on the windshield of such vehicles telling them to get their hair-trigger alarms fixed or face a report to the police. One such owner was watching me write him such a note from an adjacent location and started his car remotely inches from where I stood, startling me.

(2) Reporting other street problems to the police, such as the placement by a stressed superintendent of a full-sized refrigerator by the curb for recyclable pickup the next day. I had already advised the super that he had a legal obligation to secure the door, to keep children from suffocating inside due to curiosity. That provided no response except a nasty remark, so I noted the street address and reported the problem to the police. Some hours later, I checked the refrigerator and saw that a chain had been fastened around the door. A young life potentially saved.

(3) Contacting utilities that have done work in the roads outside my window (used jackhammers to dig into the street to gas or electric lines, cable lines, water or sewer lines, and the like) and then left an unfinished worksite covered with one or more very heavy large steel plates (either emblazoned with the name of the utility doing the work or identified by a small saw horse bearing the utility's name next to the curb). Often the work is begun at the end of the workweek and the plate(s) left on the street through the weekend or considerably longer awaiting completion of repairs. For many of these plates, all four corners are not level with the street so that when a heavy vehicle such as a small truck or even an ordinary car drives over it, the plate may resound like a bomb going off, and this happens day and night. Hence, I find myself at odd hours checking the sites to determine the culpable utility and then make the requisite telephone call to get the errant plate adjusted. We don’t tend to have explosions in Rego Park, but when one of these plates is being subjected to a series of vehicle drive-overs, it can sound like a war zone (and wake the entire neighborhood in the middle of the night).

(4) Policing the halls of my co-op building from the intrusions of soliciting strangers. Dozens of menus may litter the hallways, left by employees of neighborhood restaurants. Worse, there is a con outfit calling itself IDT Energy that illegally gains access to homes, claiming that it can discount gas and electric costs if the resident will provide copies of recent Con Edison and National Grid electric and gas bills and then sign an authorization form. There is plenty of anti-consumer fine print in the sign-up contracts. This is, of course, a scam, but many elderly immigrants are so easily convinced by someone in a suit with an ID badge that they can pay lower rates that they let these people into the building and permit them to have free access to all the residents.

When I encounter these people, generally four or five aggressive young people swarming through the building on a weekday afternoon when most of the younger men are out working, I remind them that they are illegally trespassing on private property and must immediately leave the building or I will call the police. The last time this happened, quite recently, four men and one woman screamed abuse at me and initially refused to leave. As I yelled at them to get out, other residents came out of their units but did not help me, being wholly unacquainted with the problem (and possibly not understanding English anyway), although it has existed for years. The leader of the pack held up a video camera as he refused to budge and filmed and threatened me. He confronted me physically. By this time I was in the hallway with my keys and my phone, having locked my door behind me.

It took quite a while to move these five people off the third floor and down to the lobby and toward the entrance. Finally, having reached the local police who urged me to call 911, I telephoned the police emergency number and, at that point, the group of scam artists went to the building next door after attempting to ridicule me to concentrate their efforts on cheating our neighbors down the block. It took another fifteen minutes for the police to respond, and I was warned never to come out of my unit to “escort” these thieves from the building.

I can be pretty loud and aggressive when I feel it is warranted, and would do it again. And no doubt will. Especially since my building management and board of directors have ignored this problem for many years.

This is my promise: To be a royal pain toward anyone who is illegally in my building trying to sell anything.

But maybe it’s time to get a can of mace. Or pepper spray. Or both.

This might net me a medal (or a bullet) some day.

You can’t be too careful.

Maybe a good camera would help. Rego Park is not the garden spot of Queens. Or New York City generally.

It is, instead, the recipient of huge clouds of carbon monoxide that waft up from Queens Boulevard (and from within the subways under the road), or as my niece, a transplant nurse, once advised me, not a place where lung transplants are accepted. Nor, for that matter, are any lungs from New York City considered appropriate for transplants. The air pollution, while considerably healthier than Beijing or other megalopolises, is downright unhealthy much of the time and just about always next to the main roads.

This neighborhood should probably pay me a salary since I have become its watchdog, watchman, watchlady, or (best of all) its safety guard. I may not escort small children across the road to attend school, but I keep my eyes open and don’t hesitate to speak up. It’s too bad that Curtis Sliwa moved away from Forest Hills down the road a bit a few years ago. I could use a few Guardian Angels to patrol more regularly.

Readers?

Donald Trump: People Will Eventually Catch On

As anyone who follows American politics has been made aware, billionaire Donald Trump claims to be running for the Republican nomination for President. As a Libertarian.

He says he is actually running. He holds rallies with significant turnout. He leads the fifteen other Republicans who are vying for the nomination in the polls. His private jet takes him all over the country to meet his public. He promises to release his financial statements including income tax returns (just as soon as Jeb Bush does the same), claiming a net worth of $10 billion, perhaps less than half what he really owns. He appears at a variety of press conferences. He is a guest on news programs. He gets invited to some talk shows.

There is even a Twitter hashtag #TrumpYourCat that features photos of cats wearing Trump hairpieces made with their own combed-out fur—such as Grumpy Cat a/k/a the scowling Trumpy Cat.

Just what and who is this strange-looking pontificating windbag with the flying locks that threaten to ascend like a helicopter in a stiff wind?

He is a 69-year-old native New Yorker born in the Borough of Queens, of German and Scottish ancestry, a billionaire who was given his financial start by his successful father, a New York City real estate developer. As a teenager, the young Donald had been dismissed from a private Queens secondary academy for behavioral problems, and thereafter transferred to the New York Military Academy, where he played numerous sports, including football. He attended Fordham University and the Wharton School to concentrate on real estate studies, graduating with a B.S. in economics and anthropology—as well as a war chest of $200,000 courtesy of his father. Some years later Donald John Trump was even awarded an honorary doctorate by the evangelical Liberty University of Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by that avatar of the Moral Majority, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell.

This was some years after Trump’s Bavarian paternal grandfather changed the paterfamilias surname of Drumph to the more dazzling Trump.

And like Howard Hughes before him, The Donald has a “morbid fear of shaking hands.”

Trump began his real estate empire in middle-class real estate in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and then turned around a forlorn Cincinnati apartment complex belonging to his father, selling it for a tidy profit. Focusing again on New York City and a variety of larger building projects, Trump ultimately used a $40 million city tax abatement to turn a bankrupt Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, and created The Trump Organization. By 1988 he had acquired his first gambling casino, and then another, nearly losing all in a corporate bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The year 2001 saw the completion of the 72-tower Trump World Tower across from the United Nations (which Trump insists is 90 stories high), perhaps the tallest residential building in New York, glass walls gleaming with dark bronze tint in the sun. Trump claims to have considered a career as a film producer or studio executive, but chose to concentrate on more lucrative opportunities in real estate development.

The Donald has built a number of other residential and commercial towers, including the luxurious 52-story Trump International Hotel and Tower completed in 2003 and located at Columbus Circle, characterized by a golden world globe at the intersection of Central Park West and Central Park South. A recent kerfuffle over the disappearance of marble benches in the lobby for the use of the public at another Trump tower located at 725 Fifth Avenue—replaced by stores selling luxury goods marketing the Trump name—has received almost no attention by the New York Department of Buildings.

The Trump Entertainments Resorts, Inc. owns the Trump Taj Mahal, and formerly owned other gaming properties, most in Atlantic City. Four business bankruptcies, including one filed in 2014, have kept these properties afloat and protected Trump’s personal assets.

Other Trump businesses over the years have included:

— A television show that Trump hosted, “The Celebrity Apprentice,” which immortalized Donald’s favorite punchline, “You’re fired!”

— The Miss USA pageant, although it has suffered from adverse publicity generated by Candidate Trump

— Trump bottled water Trump Ice, which was short-lived and is hard to find

— The search engine GoTrump.com for luxury travel deals, which lasted about a year before it was shut down

— Trump Magazine, a glitzy annual magazine now known as the Jewel of Palm Beach, which is distributed at Trump properties and through a resort media group

— The New Jersey Generals football team, which lasted only a season or two

— Trump Airlines (formerly, Eastern Air Shuttle), which was a Trump property for about four years before being sold

— Trump University, which has been described as being an “extended infomercial” preying on student fears, is no longer in business, and has been sued by the New York State Attorney General for defrauding students

Real estate businesses are still the most lucrative enterprises in Donald Trump’s portfolio, but other less well-known ventures have met differing fates, i.e., there have been Trump Mortgage, which vanished shortly after the 2007 real estate crash, Trump Steaks, high-priced and still served in Trump properties around the world, Trump Vodka which may or may not still be marketed under the Trump name, and Trump: The Game, a Monopoly-like board game that has survived, barely.

The reader will note the preponderance of Trump’s name on nearly all of his businesses.

His personal life reflects his views on women: They must be young, gorgeous, and compliant. To date he has married a young Czech skier Ivana Zelníčková, who remained a celebrity in her own right, by whom he fathered two sons and a daughter. After their divorce in 1992, The Donald married the pretty young Marla Maples, fathered a fourth child, and was divorced within six years. He is currently married to the former Melania Knauss, by whom he has fathered a fifth child, now nine years old. His children have so far produced seven grandchildren.

No one seems to question his overt hostility toward women who may criticize or disagree with him. That is, as Jezebel noted only three years ago:

“The trouble with Trump is the hostility he reserves for the women he doesn't like, basing his insults and jabs largely on their looks, weight, and sex lives. The most notorious of these was his 2006 battle with Rosie O'Donnell—a fight that was such a media shitstorm that . . . years later, he continues to dredge up when he needs some attention. Responding to her comments on The View about his defense of Miss USA Tara Conner, Trump called O'Donnell a ‘fat pig’ and an ‘animal’ to basically anyone who would listen, from reporters to late night talk show hosts. The worst of it was probably a two-minute rant he filmed for Entertainment Tonight that was so vile, the show decided not to air it on television.”

Donald Trump has pretended to enter the race for the presidency at least twice in recent presidential election lead-ups, and then dropped out quickly. But in 2015 he is actually proceeding with his “campaign,” having achieved significant notoriety in recent years with his endless shrill demands that President Obama produce his birth certificate, claiming that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen (causing the President to actually produce the birth certificate). A remarkable display of crazy, playing right into the hands of similar constituents.

Trump has in recent weeks before huge, boisterous crowds:

— Described immigrants who yearn for a path to legal citizenship or even residency as being violent offenders, including rapists, purposefully sent to the U.S. to harm Americans, and adding that U.S. officials were being "dumb" in dealing with immigrants in the country illegally: "These people wreak havoc on our population.”

— Characterized Senator John McCain, who endured more than five years of captivity and torture by the North Vietnamese, as no war hero, suggesting that McCain might have been a war hero if he hadn’t been caught. (Trump sought and received four Vietnam War student deferments and then was reclassified 4-F for purportedly having bone spurs in one or both feet; draft records are incomplete and neither support nor contradict this claim.)

— Been described by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as a “jackass,” and in response, Trump yelled out Graham’s private office telephone number at a public rally and urged his audience to let Graham know how they feel about him

— Criticized candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry for wearing glasses as a foil to make voters think he looks intelligent

— Become a bombastic hero to crowds of ignorant conservative Republican voters who are thriving on Trump’s outrageous rhetoric and finding an outlet for their anger at feeling helpless under an onslaught of circumstances that they do not understand and cannot accept (and which the Republican party has largely created)

Republicans worry whether any of the other hopefuls in their party can keep up with Trump’s fast (and profane) mouth on a primary debate stage: possibly the quick but mean-tempered Chris Christie, maybe another contender with courage and a thick skin.

In the final analysis, let us look at Trump’s own prediction from one of his ghost-written books, Trump: The Art of the Deal: “You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”