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Donald Trump’s Manhattan office was covered in photos, mostly of himself meeting celebrities, when Tim Wilson visited in 2008.
OPINION: The first thing you notice when you walk into Donald Trump’s office in New York is how far off the ground is. Taxis crawl like ants down Fifth Avenue.
The second thing you notice are the images. Lots of pictures of himself posing with celebrities from the 1980s, people like Magic Johnson. Look, it seems to be saying, I am someone. I am someone because I know these famous people. They liked me.
Very quickly you realize that Trump really cares what people think of him. Even as I write this, it seems like a strange admission of vulnerability on the part of a politician who liked to brag about being so strong.
Evan Vucci / AP
What surprised Wilson at their meeting was how much Trump cared about what people thought of him.
I met the man who would be president in 2008, the year Barack Obama stormed the White House promising hope and change. I was there to film a television article about the luxurious life of Trump. We filmed in the boardroom.
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I have never sat at such a large or golden table. Trump, as the staff called him, was on the other side. We yell at each other.
Americans like to yell at each other about politics, but they don’t really vote much. In 2016, the Pew Center reported that only 56% of those who could vote did so. That was not a single low number. Voter registration is decentralized and is primarily an individual responsibility. But culture is also to blame, I think.
Let’s go back to Trump’s office. You have never seen a desk like this. Covered in paper. Sheaves of it. Stacked high, piles the size of small children. Pieces of A4, with decisions, made or undone, buried in that desk. It was chaos disguised as order. Chaos disguised as order … but with the appearance of chaos.
Trump accomplished a few things during his presidency. Covid aside, which has been a disaster, it has been good for the economy. 56 percent of voters surveyed just before the election said their families were better off financially than four years ago, and that was despite the pandemic.
He put justices on the Supreme Court whom his voters would approve. Those judges will affect the United States for years to come.
Supplied
Former television journalist Tim Wilson interviewed Donald Trump in 2008.
Trump has exacerbated America’s political culture. Someone who cares so much what people think of him can always campaign effectively. But the tweets, the media fights, the bragging and the celebrity have only delayed the reckoning.
Both Democrats and Republicans have a representation and participation problem.
The Democrats solved their problems by doing a double deal. Vote Democrat and ask for some politics as usual at Joe Biden. And you also have a bit of politics, as you expect, with Kamala Harris. GovTrack.us says it has the most left-leaning voting record in the Senate, a Senate that includes Bernie Sanders.
With Trump, who was a celebrity before he became a politician, and managed to be an anti-politician, the Republican Party postponed its own problems. Are they populists? Which represent?
Many of the friends I had in New York who called themselves Republicans this year advised everyone they knew to vote for the Democrats.
Regarding this choice, the autopsies have already begun. In fact, Trump was making them himself. “Can you imagine if I lose?” he told a crowd in Georgia in October. “All my life, what am I going to do? I’m going to say, ‘I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics.’ I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I will have to leave the country? I do not know.”
He may leave the country, but the problem of voter turnout in America will remain.
The 2008 elections that brought Obama to power motivated only 58 percent of American voters to cast their vote. Early results suggest turnout figures were highest in 2020. It would be a supreme irony if one of Trump’s legacies as president were that he persuaded more Americans to go to the polls, often to vote against him.
Here in New Zealand we are leaning toward a more presidential campaign, but more than 82 percent of eligible New Zealanders still turned out last month’s vote.
Although we often discuss issues imperfectly, we are still more involved than Americans. That is something worth framing and hanging on the wall.
* Former television host Tim Wilson is now Executive Director of the Maxim Institute.
