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8 year oldNEW YORK—Donald Trump was having a moment.
Dressed in a tuxedo jacket and bow tie, the real estate mogul and former reality television star took the stage at last week’s New York State Republican Gala as the unlikely frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. But in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan, the real estate project that put him on the Manhattan map in 1980, Trump devoted less than half his speech to politics — declaring the subject to sometimes be “a little boring.”
Instead, as he scanned the crowd of nearly 1,000 Republican donors and party officials, including many f-rom the Manhattan social orbit he’d been circling just outside of for decades, Trump sought a different kind of validation: one focusing on his business achievements. “I built this hotel,” he declared, motioning to the room around him. “Everybody said, don’t do it. It can’t be done. It’s never going to happen. Bad area. Bad location. Tremendous crime. The city is dying. And the city was dying. It wasn’t just like not doing well. The city was dead.”
Even his beloved father, a real estate developer who was his mentor, told him, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” Trump recalled. But he followed his gut. Trump ran out unsavory tenants and ignored critics who mocked his glassy redesign of the decrepit Commodore Hotel adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. And to improve the hotel’s image, he tweaked the address, changing the building’s location to tony Park Avenue — even though it technically fronts East 42nd Street. “It’s on the Park Avenue ramp, in all fairness, right?” Trump explained with a shrug.
The Grand Hyatt was Trump’s first big success, the project that launched his career as a major player in Manhattan real estate and beyond. And now here he was, back inside the building whe-re it had all began, this time commanding an even grander stage as an insurgent presidential candidate close to capturing his party’s nomination. But instead of enjoying the moment, Trump seemed consumed with something that has dominated much of his life: Trying to win respect f-rom a hometown crowd that has always seemed to look down on him.
Long before Trump was bickering with Republican party officials desperate to block him f-rom winning the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, he was at war with the “establishment” of New York — including fellow businessmen and members of Manhattan society who viewed the developer and reality TV star, born and raised across the river in Queens, as a tacky, vulgar outsider whose only qualification was his bank account.
Because of that, the New York GOP primary has taken on particular significance to Trump. It’s not just his quest to get to the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, and it’s more than just a getting a home-state victory. For Trump, who came into Tuesday with a more-than-20-point lead in the primary according to several polls, winning New York is personal, a chance to perhaps finally get some bit of the respect he has been seeking most of his life.
Publicly, Trump has professed not to care that much what critics say about him. But in his books and interviews dating back nearly 40 years, the real estate mogul has long has a chip on his shoulder about “the establishment” looking down on him. The tone of many of these pieces echoes the increasingly ugly back-and-forth between Trump and members of the Republican Party who believe his candidacy could sink the party if he wins the nomination.
In an interview with New York Magazine in 1980, Trump openly complained about being viewed as a joke by other real estate developers, pointing to his Grand Hyatt project and Trump Tower, which was then under construction. At the time, he had demolished a series of Art Deco sculptures that had been a part of the original building on the Trump Tower site, enraging landmarks groups who had fought to save them. The controversy also alienated New York’s well-to-do who didn’t like Trump’s brash flamboyance.
Asked about the controversy by Vanity Fair in 1990, Trump raged. “I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” he declared at the time. “Do you think, if I failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.”
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