If you want to understand what Donald Trump is doing to American democracy, a good place to start is with the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco gem that he bought in 1979, for fifteen million dollars. Constructed in the late nineteen-twenties, to serve as the flagship store for the retailer Stewart & Co., it was a handsome twelve-story limestone box, which the critic Walter Rendell Storey, writing in the Times, described as “a classic expression of metropolitan architecture.” High on its front façade were two delightful friezes of classical nudes dancing with scarves, which the sculptor Rene Chambellan had carved.
Trump made clear that he intended to level the site, which is where Trump Tower now stands. At the request of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he promised to save the friezes, as well as some ornate grillwork that was around the building’s main entrance. The story of how he reneged on these pledges is pretty well known. But, in case you haven’t heard it, here is a brief account, taken from Harry Hurt’s 1993 book, “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.” “On his orders, the demolition workers cut up the grillwork with acetylene torches, jackhammered the friezes, dislodged them with crowbars, and pushed the remains inside the building, where they fell to the floor and shattered in a million pieces.”
The Times devoted a front-page story to Trump’s vandalism, and polite society recoiled in horror. The brash young developer was defiant. Posing as John Baron, the now infamous alter ego who supposedly worked for the Trump Organization, he told reporters that he had ordered an independent appraisal of the friezes, which found them to be without merit. Behind the scenes, Trump was content to take the publicity hit: with the old building gone, he was free to put up his gilded tower. “He simply doesn’t care,” Louise Sunshine, a veteran real-estate executive who used to work for Trump, told Frontline, in 2017. “He simply thinks that bad publicity is good publicity, and certainly better than no publicity at all.”
Trump was right, of course. Before long, the controversy over the friezes was largely forgotten, and much of New York was embracing him. Celebrities were attending his events, gossip columnists were placing stories for him, and banks were falling over one another to lend him money. The great Trump scam was under way, and he had learned some invaluable lessons. To the ruthless go the spoils. If you have enough gall and shamelessness, you can get away with almost anything.
Forty years on, Trump is taking his jackhammers to the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution, and the very notion that a President can be held to account. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump, during a July 25th call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, urged Zelensky “about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent” Joe Biden, whose son Hunter had business interests in the Slavic country. The contents of the July call are the subject of a complaint, by an anonymous intelligence whistle-blower, which the Trump Administration has refused to pass along to Congress.
After having been subjected to a two-year investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller into whether he, or any of his associates, conspired with Russia to interfere with the 2016 election, Trump might be expected to be somewhat sensitive to the suggestion that he urged another foreign country to dig up dirt on a possible Presidential opponent. Not a bit of it. During a back-and-forth with reporters at the White House on Sunday, he openly admitted that he brought up Biden during his call with Zelenksy. The subject of the call was “largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice-President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said.
Asked about the other critical issue—whether he withheld two hundred and fifty million dollars in military aid to squeeze the Ukrainian leader—Trump said that he wanted Germany and France to pay more. That wasn’t a denial, either; it sounded more like a cover story. And on Monday Trump appeared to acknowledge that the aid money did come up during his conversation with Zelensky. “It’s very important to talk about corruption,” Trump said when he was asked again about the July call. “If you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country you think is corrupt?”
There you have it. To the charge that he used the power of his office to try to get dirt on a domestic political opponent, Trump’s response is the same as it was when he was accused of demolishing the friezes: Yes, I did it. So what? To charges that he dangled U.S. aid as part of a squeeze play, he says the money was indeed linked to the corruption issue, which, to him and Giuliani, meant trying to pin some discredited corruption charges on Biden.
Again, none of this should be shocking. Trump adopted the same unapologetic and defiant stance after he urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, after he fired an F.B.I. director who refused to give him a pledge of loyalty, and after he publicly backed Vladimir Putin over the entire U.S. intelligence community. The effort to turn the Ukraine scandal into a story about Biden is also entirely familiar. During the Russia investigation, Trump and his Republican lackeys did the same thing with their attacks on John Brennan, Robert Mueller, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok. Any evidence that suggested that Trump’s campaign courted Russian help, or that he attempted to obstruct the subsequent investigation, was all part of a “witch hunt” by the “deep state”—terms that have rolled out again in recent days.
Can the Presidential wrecking ball be stopped before Trump reduces everything to rubble? Not by the laws of the land, which—he has been delighted to discover—don’t seem to apply to a sitting President. Impeachment was the remedy that James Madison and some of his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention came up with, and this could prove to be the moment at which Nancy Pelosi, losing control of her caucus, finally takes the plunge. But Madison assumed that all parties and factions in Congress would be sufficiently independent to bring a rogue President to heel. That assumption no longer applies. With most elected Republicans terrified of incurring the wrath of the MAGA hordes, it seems inconceivable that the Senate would convict Trump of impeachable offenses, regardless of the evidence.
That doesn’t mean that the Democrats shouldn’t go ahead, though, especially if the whistle-blower’s complaint turns out to be as serious as reported. Trump is making a mockery of virtually everything that Americans are supposed to hold dear: the law; representative government; the division of powers; the military; intelligence; the foreign-service officers who try every day to serve the interests of the country rather than those of Trump, Inc.; and the very idea that the U.S. system of government is one worth replicating elsewhere. It’s a tragic situation, and there’s no guarantee it will improve.
Trump certainly won’t change. Right now, he’s banking on Republican cowardice and general scandal fatigue to get him through the whistle-blower story. If he manages to ride it out, he’ll go into next year’s campaign even more convinced that he can get away with anything, and even more likely to set new precedents for Presidential wrongdoing. That’s who he is.
