Trump, the Eternal Outsider

Bonnie Greer offers a fascinating insight into Donald Trump's determination to wreak vengeance on those he perceives as the elite.

Donald Trump in the 1980s. Photo: ZUMA Press/Alamy

New York City, in the 1980s, during the AIDS pandemic, was a city in and of hell.

But since it was New York City, Manhattan to be specific, it felt pretty normal to some extent.

Not that it felt normal to have your friends die like flies, at what I realise now was a very young age, or to see those who could make it having to go home to reactionary parents in Iowa or somewhere off the grid like that.

Off the grid to us anyway, who lived that old NewYorker magazine cover: a map of Manhattan and then outer darkness beyond it.  

Nobody really understood that we were in a pandemic, that we were in one of those long moments in history in which it felt like there wasn’t really any hope. We thought that the entire world would be extinguished.

My generation had been born and grew up with the threat of extinction.

Told to get under our desks in primary school because a nuclear bomb could blow up on top of us; we had that nestling in our psyches when the Vietnam War came along - a conflict that Trump medically avoided, and then there was Richard Nixon, an era of his very own, and then there was the Recession and on and on.

But in the 1980s, we were in the middle of serious hedonism encircled by a sense of doom that it was all over. All of it.

Trump emerged full blown then, a real estate tycoon and a “mook” – New York Italian gangster jargon for a low-lifer – from the borough of Queens.