It’s A Small World

It amazes me to think that a decade ago I couldn’t have told you much of anything about Donald Trump. Back then, he was as important an annoyance as the squirrel who constantly buries peanuts in one of my hanging baskets. Today, Trump annoys me quite a bit more than the squirrel who, while still annoying, is at least cute to look at.

Since I live in Florida and didn’t watch reality television and never watched his show, Donald Trump was only a passing reference in movies or tv shows set in or around New York. I now marvel at how often while rewatching an old Law and Order I hear Lennie Briscoe say something like, “Who does he think he is, Donald Trump?” I guess New Yorker’s despised him long before the rest of us.

This New York connection and the “it’s a small world” theory were emphasized this weekend at a dinner party we attended in Boynton Beach. Boynton Beach is a town roughly 20 minutes south of Palm Beach and the current home of King Trump. Several guests, there were nine of us, had backgrounds in or near New York. Three of the guests had personal stories involving the Trump family.

Story 1

Couple one, the husband was the facilities manager for the United Nation’s complex for forty years and his wife had been a loan officer in a New York bank. Years ago, she had been tasked to approve a loan for Donald Trump. She had reviewed his application and was amazed at the almost laughable appraisals of the property he was using to try to secure his loan. She and others in her bank knew enough about New York real estate to realize the appraisals had been grossly overvalued.

At a subsequent meeting with Trump employees she asked how they came up with those property evaluations. She was informed that Mr. Trump had personally made those estimates and then they got a vague and convoluted explanation of the process. She denied the loan and later received a nasty and threatening letter that he was going to withdraw all his money from their bank.

True to his threat, he closed his account at her bank and moved it to HSBC. She didn’t know if he ever got a loan from them but said, had she known he was going to become our president, she would have kept a copy of the letter. While specific loan defaults at HSBC are unknown, Trump did manage to default on loans at several other US banks. One default in Chicago amounted to over $287M. Trump’s sons now brag that they don’t need American banks and can do quite well with loans from Russia and the Middle East.

Story 2

Another dinner participant taught at a private school in New York. She related that she had taught a young Donald Trump Jr. in grade school in Manhattan. She described him as a cute and polite kid. He was nothing out of the ordinary, especially given that this was a school filled with other similar rich kids.

Story 3

The last Trump story (my personal favorite) involves a couple who, while they had lived in New England, had their first and probably last Trump encounter after they moved to Palm Beach. He had been a professor of mathematics and later the head of a college and his wife was also a mathematician. They had been invited to a large cocktail party at Mar a Lago. At some point in the evening Mr. Trump approached them. Before they could manage introductions, she was holding a glass of champagne in one hand when someone behind her bumped into her elbow and she inadvertently threw the full glass of bubbly all over the guest of honor.

She remembers that he was impeccably dressed, hair immaculate, and fully spray-tanned before the mishap. She then lost sight of him as two large men in suits quickly intervened and blocked her progress as the orange-one disappeared from view. While her political leanings were not made evident, I did detect a slight smile in the retelling of the encounter.

This period of our history will be told, not in anecdotal stories such as these but in more significant terms involving our loss of personal freedoms, the dissolution of the rule of law, and the cowardice of the elected officials we assumed would act as moderators on our behalf tasked to protect us from the whims of a madman. I would rather trust my backyard squirrel with the future of our nation. At least he knows how to save a peanut for a rainy day.