[REWIND] March 30, 2016: Tom Wolfe’s View of Trump

One of the preeminent chroniclers of the sociological circus that is New York City, Tom Wolfe recently spoke to The American Spectator at his Upper East Side apartment about the Big Apple’s most famous resident turned presidential candidate.

TAS: Having written so much about New York City, the rise of Donald Trump must be a subject of interest to you.

Tom Wolfe: It is. There is a lot of distress and contempt for government and he is capitalizing on that. He has also said a lot of things that are politically incorrect. He comes out and says things like, no more illegal immigrants from Mexico, no more immigrants from Islamic countries, and so on, and a lot of people say, “Hey, yeah, finally, someone has come out and said what I believe.”

Trump is not caught up in the whole ethos of politics. He goes from gaffe to gaffe and it only helps him. I have never seen anything quite like it.

You would think, for example, that his refusal to be on a television program with Megyn Kelly [at Fox News] would hurt him. My God, if you can’t debate Megyn Kelly, what are you going to do with Vladimir Putin? But it didn’t hurt him at all. That seemed to help him also.

I love the fact that he has a real childish side to him, saying things like: I am too worth ten billion! Most politicians would play that down, that they have all this money, but he is determined to let people know that. And he wants people to know that five billion of it comes from just his name—that you can start a hotel and call it Trump and it is going to be a success.

TAS: Do you see him as a New York original?

Wolfe: He is a lovable megalomaniac. People get a big kick out of going to his office and behind his desk is this wall of pictures of himself in the news. The childishness makes him seem honest.

Many people have pointed out that he doesn’t present policy programs. There is a great scene in one of George Bernard Shaw’s novels involving an old politician who is talking to his young assistant, and they are going over a speech that he is about to deliver. The young man says, “Sir, what you have said is all principles. There are no programs.” And the old politician says, “Ah, now you are catching on, now you are getting the idea.” That seems to be Trump’s approach.

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Source: The American Spectator