For the weeks of his criminal trial in the ‘Big Apple’?
Trump, who fled to Florida to get away from the Law…..
Has been back in New York….
Holded up in Trump Tower….
He has gone sluming to Upper Manhattan and the Bronx in search of crowds and people of color he would LIKE to vote for him , but won’t and didn’t back in the day…..
The ole timer that was born in a Queens hospital up the road for JFK Airport returns home….
To memories of a time that has long pasted….
When his criminal trial finishes for the day, Donald J. Trump typically returns to the marble-and-gold triplex atop Trump Tower, the high rise he built in the early 1980s and used to establish a public image as a master builder.
It is the silver lining for Mr. Trump, as he spends his first sustained period of time in Manhattan since he moved to Washington in 2017. He passes the days in a dingy courtroom downtown, where he faces 34 felonies, listening to people from his old life describe him as a depraved liar who sullied the White House. At the end of it all, he could be sent to prison.
But in the evenings, people who have spoken to him say, he has been enjoying being back in the penthouse apartment that he moved into four decades ago. He still considers it home — and a permanent reminder of the easiest period of his life.
That period was the greed-is-good era in which Mr. Trump sold himself nationally as a titan of industry, despite a relatively small, and local, real estate portfolio. He had just built a glittering tower on Fifth Avenue, infuriating elites and demanding a tax break from the city. And it is the era he alludes to constantly, referring to 1980s cultural touchstones, including the news show “60 Minutes,” Time magazine and celebrities like the boxer Mike Tyson….
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The era that shaped Mr. Trump was perhaps best encapsulated by the author Tom Wolfe in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which a wealthy investment banker strikes a young Black man in a hit-and-run in the Bronx amid widespread racial tensions, and is ultimately tried in the borough’s beaten-down criminal courthouse as the tabloids devour the story.
It was a building not unlike the one in which Mr. Trump has sat most days each week for six weeks, the fluorescent lighting beaming down on the decrepit benches and the letters reading “In God We Trust” over Justice Juan M. Merchan’s head.
Some days, Mr. Trump has eviscerated his lawyers and complained privately that he has no Roy M. Cohn, his original fixer and mentor and lawyer. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohn was born into outer-borough privilege and then alternately reviled and accepted by powerful people. Mr. Cohn, a closeted gay man who tried to purge the federal government of gay people, died in 1986; he had AIDS but told people it was liver cancer.
The lawyer, whose connections included President Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and mobsters, had introduced the Queens-bred Mr. Trump to a new world and had taught him to always deny wrongdoing, to attack his attackers and to seek lawyers willing to do anything. But at the start of the ’80s, as he was gaining respectability himself, Mr. Trump already seemed ready to put some distance between himself and Mr. Cohn.
“All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Mr. Trump told the journalist Marie Brenner a few years before Mr. Cohn’s death. “He’s a genius. He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius.”…
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He never spent much time back at Trump Tower while he was president. Most weekends, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla., or to Bedminster, N.J. He said he was avoiding Manhattan because his motorcade would snarl traffic. But Manhattan had rejected him at the ballot box. Residents had even laughed in his face as he went to vote on Election Day in 2016; one told him, “You’re gonna lose!”
And so in September 2019, after consulting his tax lawyers, Mr. Trump rejected Manhattan right back, switching his residence to Florida. By the time he left office, 14 days after an attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, he was close to done trying to appease anyone but himself.
This month, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee has sought to troll the city he left, to show he can still dominate a place that, in the post-pandemic period, has continued to feel off-kilter…..
image…Mr. Trump and his mentor and original fixer, Roy Cohn, center, in 1981.Credit…Sonia Moskowitz/WWD, via Penske Media, via Getty