Donald Trump's Queens Tragedy

Bonnie Greer's latest exclusive column for Byline Supplement subscribers examines the supreme ironies of Donald Trump's Manhattan trial

The 1970s movie Saturday Night Fever was not about a working class Italian kid wanting to win a dance contest, and therefore validating his existence.

It was about a working class Italian kid who wanted to live in Manhattan. New York City. The Big Apple.

He was through with being a bridge and tunnel person and wanted to cross the Brooklyn Bridge to the town of which it is said: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

He was through with being what New Yorkers call a “mook”, originally a term for the go-fer for a Mob boss: the guy who picked up the sandwiches and the Diet Cokes. The lowest of the low.

If you lived in Brooklyn or Queens, etc, you lived in what was called “the outer boroughs” and as far as many Manhattanites were concerned, you did not really exist. So it did not, and probably still does not, matter if you were born and raised rich in Queens, for example. It’s still Queens.

This is the story of Donald J Trump: he’s from Queens.

To him – and for millions of people who crave being the elite and hate them at the same time – this is the simple and basic story of his life.

Washington DC is about being from Queens. Mar-a-Lago is about being from Queens.

And the irony of his first criminal trial taking place in Manhattan, the prosecution being brought by the city’s District Attorney – the first African American to hold that elected post, a Harvard Law grad born and raised in Harlem, and with the judge being an immigrant from Colombia – is like something out of a Greek tragedy or some farce.