Sean Hannity Blames Maxine Waters, Obama for Newspaper Shooting
"I've been saying now for days something horrible will happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine," says Fox News host
Jon Levine
Sean Hannity took a moment during his radio show on Thursday to report about a shooting at Maryland’s Capital Gazette newspaper, which left five dead and several injured on Thursday.
The Fox News host said he had no interest in turning the matter into a gun issue, but rather singled out Rep. Maxine Waters and former President Barack Obama as those who were really at fault.
“I’ve been saying now for days something horrible will happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine?” said the Fox News host. “Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters to follow them into restaurants and shopping malls and whatever else she said.”
Hannity also blamed Obama, who he said used similar rhetoric.
“I’m not turning this into a gun debate. I know that’s where the media will be in 30 seconds from now. That’s not it,” he added. “It’s so sad that there are so many sick, demented and evil people in this world.”
Hannity was alluding to a viral moment over the weekend when the liberal California congresswoman had encouraged a crowd of supporters to harass members of the Trump administration if they saw them out in public.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” she said to cheers.
Maxine Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."
The remarks were broadly condemned by both Democrats and Republicans.
Reps for Hannity at Fox News did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.
June 29, 2018
Super Bow Chick
From Sailing Anarchy
Those who have seen me on the front page before probably know a bit of my story—that I left racing just before high school, only to come back a few years ago and start an unlikely odyssey of big regattas, fast boats and many, many miles of travel. As a competitive, perfectionist, type-A personality, I wanted to hit the top of the game from the day I came back to it, and I found myself lusting after the foredeck on a TP52, maybe even in the Super Series some day. Improbable as it may be, I started working for it.
The road has been far more circuitous than planned—I have been welcomed and supported by many of the crews I’ve sailed for, and yet as I began to land bow spots on some of the biggest boats, I was also occasionally met with derision and weird, spiteful behaviour (we can say it doesn’t happen, but factually, some people just don’t want females aboard, no less in a key role). These negative experiences felt like deep setbacks, but along the way, I have also met some of the most wonderful owners and crewmates one could hope for. They’ve believed in me, one became a tremendous mentor, and they’ve taken me to national and world championships, pushed my limits and expanded my horizons.
I met many of those great people last month at J/70 North Americans, among them Eduardo Porter Ludwig (aka “Goldo”), owner of a TP52 named Patches. Patches sails from Acapulco in a lively, if little known, fleet of TP52s, Farr 40s and other noteworthy one-offs. This past weekend, Goldo gifted me a big step forward toward my sailing dream, by putting me on the bow of his TP52 (finally!).
The experience was just as rich as I imagined it would be. The boats themselves are gorgeous, and the bow is intensely physical, fast-paced, wet and salty. The crew aboard Patches is talented, cooperative, and welcoming—they worked flawlessly with me in both Spanish and English, and the mechanics of every set, douse and gybe were second nature. Calling the start was pure Hollywood, as we lined up a good quarter-length out on the other TP’s but still just inside the line at the gun in race two. Acapulco itself provides a stellar arena for racing, with a tropical backdrop, ocean swells and a variety of conditions from big breeze at the start of day one to challenging light air for the navigator course on day two. We came away with a picket fence of firsts for the weekend, and I couldn’t be happier.
This is a special thank you to Goldo, his bowman Javier “Pelitos” Mollo, and the whole crew of Patches for giving me a shot. It’s the people who take a chance on a potentially unlikely talent that open the sport for growth and progress, especially at the top levels where some of us find many closed doors. Photo thanks to Alex Salgado.
More to follow, as I will be back to race on the 52 again soon! – Aly Di Nas.
A lesson to sailors
Loss of Kelaerin, June 17, 2018
The owner of KELAERIN wrote:
“For months, I had been imagining the end of our circumnavigation. We would finally pass by the Fuca Pillar make our way into Neah Bay and have a good two days rest, or three, and get the boat all cleaned up. Our daughter wanted to meet us at the visitor’s dock in Squalicum Harbor, Bellingham so she asked that we not get in until Sunday, June 24, as she lived in Portland, Oregon and needed to have the time off from work to be there waiting for us. We would drive up to the dock with all our courtesy flags from over 50 countries flying on the staysail halyard, banners from various rallies and events we had participated in hanging on the lifelines and personal burgees from different organizations raised up the signal halyards. I hoped to make a banner showing a globe with our circumnavigation route over the 17 years. There would be our daughters on the dock and maybe a few interested friends waving us in and then a celebration with champagne and M&Ms, a tradition we started back in 1991 in Costa Rica. Then we would toast our life’s dream accomplished and rest on our laurels a bit before entering the next phase of our lives. Whatever that was, it would still certainly include boats.
A completely different scenario took over. We had left Oahu, Hawaii on May 26, 2018. After weeks of watching the “high” develop in the north Pacific, we felt we could safely leave now and have reasonable weather for the 21-27 day trip to Bellingham, Washington. We sailed just west of the high and had somewhat rough conditions for several days, but that was to be expected. Uncomfortable, not dangerous for us. When we got to latitude 38 degrees north we were able to make easting in the westerly winds blowing on the top of the high. So far so good, all as planned, although still kind of rough for the most part with confused seas much of the time.
Finally, at around 137 degrees longitude we were making a nice northeast course, and according to the chart plotter, heading straight for Cape Flattery. Kelaerin was making good an average of over 5 knots through the whole trip. The horse could smell the barn, so to speak, and we were becoming excited now that this trip would be over soon.
On the evening of June 15, Jim downloaded a grib file and came up to the cockpit, discouraged. For the previous week, we saw that about this time we should be seeing light to variable winds from the southwest. We could expect to have to raise the spinnaker for the light winds or motor part of the way.
But suddenly the reports were different. The wind was to be 21 to 26 knots from the north/northwest so it would still be a bumpy ride to the very end. The conditions, although uncomfortable, were nothing that should stop us from making progress.
On June 16, the winds slowly increased throughout the day. As we entered the night hours, we had winds well into the mid-30’s and seas were building. Still, Kelaerin was sailing fine, however, we were losing our direct line to Cape Flattery and making easting towards the Columbia River. The seas continued to build to over 4 meters, then 5 and now we were heading directly south with the waves on our stern, paralleling the coast, and sailing away from our destination.
Eventually we were sailing bare poles at almost 5 knots down steep waves, the largest waves I had ever seen while cruising. I estimated they were 30 feet. We decided to keep one hour watches. I went to bed around 2:30 for a quick nap and to warm up under the covers.
I awoke around 3:30 to first a hard hit by a wave, so hard it literally felt as though we had been hit by a train while sitting on the tracks. I was suddenly on the ceiling and tons of water came in through the companionway hatch. The noise inside the boat was deafening. I managed with some difficulty to swing out of the berth and when I put my feet on the floor I was standing in water up to my ankles. The water was sloshing violently back and forth and from bow to stern. I could barely comprehend what I saw. The aft cabin companionway ladder was across the cabin and bashed into the louvred door of the hanging locker. One of the two scuba tanks was out of their snap holders behind the ladder and sitting in the hanging locker. Jim called me from the cockpit and I answered him, telling him I couldn’t get out of the aft cabin. (If I had needed to escape, it would have to be through the deck hatch over the berth.) I was able to move the ladder and the scuba tank from the doorway into the pass through. Everything that was on the quarter berth was now on the floor. Stuff had been piled there and secured for years for passages, but now was a heap on the cabin sole. But the second scuba tank was now in that bunk. We had a bag of laundry sitting in the shop that was behind the engine and all the clothes were sloshing around the cables and chains of the steering. The heavy, sliding doors to the engine room were bashed into the pass through. I had some difficulty getting those out of the way and navigating myself through the mess and now into the main cabin. The sight was so horrifying and complex that I could barely take it in. Almost every locker door was open or broken and the lockers were bare, with the contents sloshing back and forth on the cabin sole. The bilge hatches were gone – they weren’t always the easiest to get up with their pull rings -- and the water tanks exposed to view. Locker lids either flat or on the cabin sides were askew and shelves were broken. It just couldn’t be possible that my beautiful boat, the one we had for 27 years and was so lovingly maintained, could look like this.
I got to the main cabin companionway and saw Jim at the wheel. He had blood covering half of his face. He looked shocked but was steering us down a huge wave. I had a hard time taking this view in as well. I was looking at clear sky where once there had been a full cockpit enclosure. I asked, “Where is the dodger?” and Jim just said, “It’s gone.” He asked me to get on the VHF and put out a MAYDAY call. I felt strange doing this, even hesitated for a few seconds, as I never pictured us asking for help. We never had since our first time together out in sailboats back in 1978. We got no answer. He then asked if I could take the wheel, which I did while he went down below to check the damage and make sure we weren’t taking on water.
While behind the wheel I had to keep the stern to the waves. I concentrated on steering and at some point as I looked forward I could see that the dinghy was gone. The handrails it had been tied to were broken, snapped like twigs.
Then I realized something else was missing….the liferaft. I leaned over to see if it had maybe been caught in between the cabin top and the lifelines or blanketed by the main sail but it was not there. It had been tied to a stainless steel luggage rack that we had constructed and bolted to the cabin top just forward of the dodger. The teak coaming that ran across the cabin top was broken off with a part of it in the cabin. It was probably that which had hit Jim and gashed him above his eye. The mainsail had been spilled out of the stack pack and was hanging down to the deck and possibly some of it over the lifelines and I could see that it was shredded in places. All these things had compiled in my mind and unbelievably I was ledgering the costs of the damage and what it would take to fix all of this. Never had I thought that at the end of our voyage we would have to rebuild our boat.
Jim appeared at the companionway and said that the SSB radio was dead. The two VHF radios were on but since no one answered our MAYDAYS we weren’t positive they were sending out our messages.
He was pretty sure, he said, that we weren’t taking on any more water. It had been almost two hours since the wave had tossed us now and we were both showing signs of hypothermia. Jim said my lips were turning blue and the blood caked on his face looked ghastly. I was doing o.k. with steering but every once in a while a bigger wave broke near me and we would begin to broach. I had to hold on to the wheel with everything I had to keep it stern to. I screamed now and then. I know this because my voice was getting hoarse.
We were in very dangerous shape now, with no communications and no way to get a weather report. No one was answering our MAYDAY calls. The boat was seriously damaged and we had tons of water going back and forth in the cabin. Things that had been in the aft cabin, including our spare Aries windvane which was tied down beneath the aft cabin berth, had been propelled incredibly through the walkthrough and into the main cabin and had managed somehow not to hit me when I was still in the bunk. I wondered why I saw the carton of milk on the cabin sole, the contents of our refrigerator and freezer scattered about the boat. The refrigerator lid was heavy with a pull ring and it took a little doing to get it up in normal conditions. Jim assessed that we had been turned upside down. When the wave hit, he was wearing his SoSpenders but not tethered. Jim has great reflexes, thankfully, and said he had to hold on to the steering pedestal with all his might or he would have gone over. In retrospect we don’t think the tether would have helped seeing as how so many other things had been ripped off the boat. He described the enclosure as shredding and blowing off like newspaper in the wind. Later inspection showed that the pedestal had broken at the base. It was lucky we had steering at all at this point. When he lifted the chart table lid there was nothing in it now, except a lone can of tuna fish. Nothing was dry, the stove was broken and the water tanks were probably fouled through the vents. The engine itself may have worked but the starter motor was surely dead as it was now underwater. The engine wouldn’t have helped anyway, not unless we could get closer to shore and now we were getting farther away every minute.
We had 4 electric bilge pumps, one was a large capacity pump. All 4 clogged with debris. The debris was from all the soft back books we had on board. The cheaper paper turned to mush with all the sloshing and went right through the screens into the pumps. There was no way we could operate the manual pump in these conditions and to get that much water out. While Jim was describing this to me, I kept looking over to where the liferaft had been. Then the reality of our situation seemed to be clear to both of us. I said, “I think we should activate the EPIRB” and he agreed. We had a 406 Mhz EPIRB and he went to get it out of its holder and brought it up to our binocular box on the cabin (the binoculars were gone) and set it in there and and pushed the button.
We couldn’t be sure that anyone would be able to get to us or hear us. We had the EPIRB properly registered and overhauled with new batteries every few years as required. Originally we had our daughters on the contact list, but we got frustrated with trying to get them at times. It could be days before we ever heard back and that could happen while we were in distress. Jim had asked old buddies of his if they would be contacts. Ed was a HAM radio operator and Richard was a tugboat captain. Both of these guys were in almost daily contact with Jim through winlink and Jim would report our position to them and the sea conditions. We had set off the EPIRB around 0538. The coast guard immediately contacted Ed and Richard to verify that we were indeed in trouble and they reported back our position the evening before, our course, our destination and that we had reported rough conditions. Then they went into action.
Almost 4 hours later, as I was at the wheel, I heard the Coast Guard call us on the old VHF radio in the aft cabin. I reached in to answer, “This is Kelaerin”, and immediately felt we just might survive this ordeal after all. They were coming from the Warrenton, Oregon base. They said they were 20 minutes away from us. I told them that incredibly the chart plotter was still functioning and I could give them our exact position, which I did. They informed me that when they arrived they would have only a few minutes with us and we needed to make the decision: they could give us a dewatering pump and we would be on our own or they could extract us from the vessel. I looked at Jim and asked, “which?” and he answered, “the dewatering pump”. Still at this point, I did not envision us leaving Kelaerin. The pilot radioed back that we had to think about that and have our possessions we wanted to take with us ready to go. Jim got back on the wheel for awhile while I changed clothes (a few things were still dry) and I went about the boat collecting hard drives, cameras, etc. This was much harder than I had anticipated. I could not get over all the stuff floating around inside the boat to get to the box where our passports and cash were. Jim’s wallet had been in the chart table and was just gone. My backpack which held my wallet was nowhere to be seen. Jim’s good Nikon camera was in a locker up forward with all kinds of stuff blocking the way. I got the hard drives, the go pro camera and the little Nikon Coolpix I used. Jim’s new LG phone was gone but mine had survived. I had a small dry bag and stuffed everything I could in there. Jim had gone up to get the cash but when he went into the cockpit he pulled it out of his pocket and the cash began flying in the wind out of his hands. I stuffed what was left into a small cooler. Then I went back to steering while Jim continued to try and get water out of the boat.
The Coast Guard continued to call me asking me to count down so their RDF could locate us. For a while I wondered if they would find us in time, but eventually I saw them coming. They informed me that they would drop a swimmer in so I told them we would lower the stern ladder and Jim would stream a heavy line so the swimmer could grab it. I informed them that I was going bare poles at 4.6 knots at that time and there would be no way whatsoever I could turn around. I’m sure they already knew that. I asked if they would drop the swimmer on the port side of the boat as the mainsail was blocking my view off the starboard side. The helicopter dropped low, on the starboard side, and the swimmer jumped in but I could not see any of this, only the blades as they whipped around near me. I was not aware when he came aboard. I kept looking for him not realizing he had already boarded and was discussing the situation with Jim at the stern. I was waiting for the pump and then looked over to see the Coast Guard swimmer coming towards the cockpit and informing me that we were getting off the boat. “No,” I said. “We are staying on the boat, we just need the pump.” Then Jim was behind him and said, “Joy, we are getting off.” I was incredulous. It was beyond comprehension that we would ever leave the boat. I still felt that, although, we were in serious trouble here, that we could save Kelaerin. How could we possibly leave her, after nearly 70,000 miles of cruising and 27 years together with only 150 miles to go? Jim had always said he wouldn’t abandon the boat unless he had to step up into a liferaft. So when he confirmed the Coast Guardsman’s declaration, with all his experience at sea, I knew finally that this battle was over. The sea had won.
Then everything went at hyperspeed. The Coast Guard swimmer said I had just a minute to go and gather my things. This is when good sense left and stupid crazy set in. Since we had not planned to leave the boat, I was not prepared well at all. I ran down below, threw out the computer, my “pink book” with all our personal and important info in it, my dry bag, and the red cooler into the cockpit. The CG had taken over the wheel and he kept telling me to be quick, “Go, go, go” he said. I ran back to the aft cabin (this was when nonsense set in for a bit) to retrieve some jewelry. Later I couldn’t believe I had done that as it had taken precious time when I could have better secured the more important items. I threw out my forearm crutch which I needed to walk and he was now telling me there was no more time and I had to get back to the stern of the boat. I asked, “what about my computer and the red cooler?” and he said he would get it and urged me back. Jim grabbed the red cooler and threw it towards the stern and it lodged out of my reach. I again said, “I need my computer and the red cooler” and the CG swimmer said, again it was OK. He told us to inflate our sospenders and jump. What!!!!! Of course this was the only thing to do, but I hesitated for a second and looked at the giant wave coming at us and said, “I’m not jumping in that” and he said GO NOW, Jim said JUMP and I was in the water. Jim later said he had never seen me swimming so fast. I just wanted to get to that basket being lowered before a wave tumbled me under and I might possibly never come back up. Getting into the basket was easy, I just rolled in and moments later I was in the helicopter. The basket lowered again for Jim and he was helped out into the helicopter. Then the swimmer came up and I was hoping that I would see the computer and the red cooler but, of course, it wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be there. The doors were closed and we started to fly away. I had to restrain myself from shouting that I wanted to go back. The hardest moment of both Jim’s and my lives were when we could see Kelaerin through the window and we both realized she was probably lost forever, that somehow we had failed her when she had been so good to us for so many years.
The ride back was over an hour long. The pilots made conversation with us through miked up helmets they provided. We all introduced ourselves. I was just amazed at how professional and highly trained these guys were. The swimmer had to grab the line behind the boat and pull himself into the ladder as we were going nearly 5 knots, which he did in just seconds. His job was to get us off the boat in short order once Jim had made the decision to leave Kelaerin. He was not cruel or impersonal when ordering me to get going. All through that I realized he had a job to do and could not brook any nonsense from me. He was completely in charge and trained to handle this situation. They must come up against some serious stubbornness when trying to get people off boats and they know how to handle it.
When we were about to land Jim heard the pilot tell ground control that they were landing off base at an alternate site near Astoria as they were down to one minute of fuel. ONE MINUTE!!! They had been at the far extension of their range when they had reached us 180 miles out to sea and no time to spare. When we disembarked the copter, I hugged all four Coasties, Jim shook their hands. The pilots came around with smiles on their faces….a job well done, a successful rescue. Then they told me that I was pretty cool on the radio and it helped them a lot. Thank God, I did something right. The EMTs were waiting for us and now I realized we were without any ID whatsoever, we were soaking wet and shivering, no shoes for me and I didn’t have my forearm crutch so I had to be supported across the tarmac to the ambulance.
My small dry bag which held my phone and the camera filled with water as I swam to the basket. Incredibly the phone still worked and I was able to call our girls. Our daughter, Kelly, lived in Portland so she dropped everything and came to Astoria to pick us up. Our oldest daughter, Erin, was visiting friends in Missoula and immediately booked a flight to Portland. They took excellent care of us, even buying us some clothes and Erin helped us get back online by buying a computer for us until our credit cards came within a couple of days.
I share this story in the hopes it helps anyone else for preparation or even the realization that just anything can happen during a passage.
Our biggest mistake that we could have avoided was not putting all our important personal items in a ditch bag. The lifesaving ditch bag had been on a shelf with the handle facing outwards so that we could grab it, but it was of no use if we had to jump in the ocean from a sinking boat and no liferaft. In any case, it wasn’t there after we flipped over and I have no idea as to where it went. I’ll be kicking myself forever for not having the IDs, passports, cash, hard drives and even the little bits of jewelry in a bag ready to go. As for everything else, it is an unimaginable loss. My pictures that we’ve taken over the years were on a hard drive. I had thought about putting them up on the cloud, but didn’t. All our logs were on hard drives, print and computers, but they could not be retrieved in time. I had my collection of courtesy flags and small coins, that were of no value to anyone else but me, in a bag under a setee seat. My assortment of boat cards from the many friends we have made while cruising is gone. We will have to rely on memory now for most of the last 17 years of cruising and that, at 70, is going to be quite a challenge. I’ll have to get on it soon.”
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Here is the text of the USCG Press Release:
Coast Guard rescues 2 off of sailing vessel 180 miles west of Grays Harbor, Wash.
WARRENTON, Ore. — The Coast Guard rescued a husband and wife off a sailing vessel 180 miles off the coast of Grays Harbor, Washington, Saturday morning.
An MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter aircrew, from Sector Columbia River, tracked the sailing vessel’s electronic position indicating radio beacon and safely hoisted the couple before transporting them to the sector’s base in Warrenton.
The Coast Guard District 13 Command Center in Seattle received an EPIRB alert at 5:46 a.m. from the 46-foot sailing vessel Kelaerin. The sailors were reportedly transiting between Hawaii and Bellingham, Washington, when they ran into rough weather and seas.
The helicopter aircrew and a crew aboard a C-27 Spartan aircraft from Air Station Sacramento were launched to assist. The helicopter crew arrived on scene at 9:33 a.m. and lowered a rescue swimmer to assess the situation. The sailing vessel wasn’t actively taking on water but seawater had washed aboard. The aircrew conducted the hoist at the request of the vessel owners because of health concerns.
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To ALL Sailors:
I have asked Joy (the boat owner who wrote about her rescue) for a way for us to send her our good wishes. I am sure the comments and feelings of fellow sailors would be some comfort to her and her husband now, so if you feel like it, post something below, as she may later see it.
In the meantime, I just want Joy and Jim to know that our compassion for fellow sailors is here for them, and that their story is being shared to help others prepare and be aware of what can happen. I think Joy would be happy to know that others value reading her experience and can learn from it, so if you appreciate her writing and sharing it, post a comment to her below.
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Want to share this post?
Here is a link to the same content (post) I posted to my own page so people could share it from there. Some FB sailing groups do not have a share button on their pages. Mine does and is public access.
I encourage sharing this story, so others can:
1. Learn from this tragic loss of a boat
2. Be prepared for ocean passages
3. Give some good will support comments for the writer of the account (Joy and Jim are the owners of the boat).
The owner of KELAERIN wrote:
“For months, I had been imagining the end of our circumnavigation. We would finally pass by the Fuca Pillar make our way into Neah Bay and have a good two days rest, or three, and get the boat all cleaned up. Our daughter wanted to meet us at the visitor’s dock in Squalicum Harbor, Bellingham so she asked that we not get in until Sunday, June 24, as she lived in Portland, Oregon and needed to have the time off from work to be there waiting for us. We would drive up to the dock with all our courtesy flags from over 50 countries flying on the staysail halyard, banners from various rallies and events we had participated in hanging on the lifelines and personal burgees from different organizations raised up the signal halyards. I hoped to make a banner showing a globe with our circumnavigation route over the 17 years. There would be our daughters on the dock and maybe a few interested friends waving us in and then a celebration with champagne and M&Ms, a tradition we started back in 1991 in Costa Rica. Then we would toast our life’s dream accomplished and rest on our laurels a bit before entering the next phase of our lives. Whatever that was, it would still certainly include boats.
A completely different scenario took over. We had left Oahu, Hawaii on May 26, 2018. After weeks of watching the “high” develop in the north Pacific, we felt we could safely leave now and have reasonable weather for the 21-27 day trip to Bellingham, Washington. We sailed just west of the high and had somewhat rough conditions for several days, but that was to be expected. Uncomfortable, not dangerous for us. When we got to latitude 38 degrees north we were able to make easting in the westerly winds blowing on the top of the high. So far so good, all as planned, although still kind of rough for the most part with confused seas much of the time.
Finally, at around 137 degrees longitude we were making a nice northeast course, and according to the chart plotter, heading straight for Cape Flattery. Kelaerin was making good an average of over 5 knots through the whole trip. The horse could smell the barn, so to speak, and we were becoming excited now that this trip would be over soon.
On the evening of June 15, Jim downloaded a grib file and came up to the cockpit, discouraged. For the previous week, we saw that about this time we should be seeing light to variable winds from the southwest. We could expect to have to raise the spinnaker for the light winds or motor part of the way.
But suddenly the reports were different. The wind was to be 21 to 26 knots from the north/northwest so it would still be a bumpy ride to the very end. The conditions, although uncomfortable, were nothing that should stop us from making progress.
On June 16, the winds slowly increased throughout the day. As we entered the night hours, we had winds well into the mid-30’s and seas were building. Still, Kelaerin was sailing fine, however, we were losing our direct line to Cape Flattery and making easting towards the Columbia River. The seas continued to build to over 4 meters, then 5 and now we were heading directly south with the waves on our stern, paralleling the coast, and sailing away from our destination.
Eventually we were sailing bare poles at almost 5 knots down steep waves, the largest waves I had ever seen while cruising. I estimated they were 30 feet. We decided to keep one hour watches. I went to bed around 2:30 for a quick nap and to warm up under the covers.
I awoke around 3:30 to first a hard hit by a wave, so hard it literally felt as though we had been hit by a train while sitting on the tracks. I was suddenly on the ceiling and tons of water came in through the companionway hatch. The noise inside the boat was deafening. I managed with some difficulty to swing out of the berth and when I put my feet on the floor I was standing in water up to my ankles. The water was sloshing violently back and forth and from bow to stern. I could barely comprehend what I saw. The aft cabin companionway ladder was across the cabin and bashed into the louvred door of the hanging locker. One of the two scuba tanks was out of their snap holders behind the ladder and sitting in the hanging locker. Jim called me from the cockpit and I answered him, telling him I couldn’t get out of the aft cabin. (If I had needed to escape, it would have to be through the deck hatch over the berth.) I was able to move the ladder and the scuba tank from the doorway into the pass through. Everything that was on the quarter berth was now on the floor. Stuff had been piled there and secured for years for passages, but now was a heap on the cabin sole. But the second scuba tank was now in that bunk. We had a bag of laundry sitting in the shop that was behind the engine and all the clothes were sloshing around the cables and chains of the steering. The heavy, sliding doors to the engine room were bashed into the pass through. I had some difficulty getting those out of the way and navigating myself through the mess and now into the main cabin. The sight was so horrifying and complex that I could barely take it in. Almost every locker door was open or broken and the lockers were bare, with the contents sloshing back and forth on the cabin sole. The bilge hatches were gone – they weren’t always the easiest to get up with their pull rings -- and the water tanks exposed to view. Locker lids either flat or on the cabin sides were askew and shelves were broken. It just couldn’t be possible that my beautiful boat, the one we had for 27 years and was so lovingly maintained, could look like this.
I got to the main cabin companionway and saw Jim at the wheel. He had blood covering half of his face. He looked shocked but was steering us down a huge wave. I had a hard time taking this view in as well. I was looking at clear sky where once there had been a full cockpit enclosure. I asked, “Where is the dodger?” and Jim just said, “It’s gone.” He asked me to get on the VHF and put out a MAYDAY call. I felt strange doing this, even hesitated for a few seconds, as I never pictured us asking for help. We never had since our first time together out in sailboats back in 1978. We got no answer. He then asked if I could take the wheel, which I did while he went down below to check the damage and make sure we weren’t taking on water.
While behind the wheel I had to keep the stern to the waves. I concentrated on steering and at some point as I looked forward I could see that the dinghy was gone. The handrails it had been tied to were broken, snapped like twigs.
Then I realized something else was missing….the liferaft. I leaned over to see if it had maybe been caught in between the cabin top and the lifelines or blanketed by the main sail but it was not there. It had been tied to a stainless steel luggage rack that we had constructed and bolted to the cabin top just forward of the dodger. The teak coaming that ran across the cabin top was broken off with a part of it in the cabin. It was probably that which had hit Jim and gashed him above his eye. The mainsail had been spilled out of the stack pack and was hanging down to the deck and possibly some of it over the lifelines and I could see that it was shredded in places. All these things had compiled in my mind and unbelievably I was ledgering the costs of the damage and what it would take to fix all of this. Never had I thought that at the end of our voyage we would have to rebuild our boat.
Jim appeared at the companionway and said that the SSB radio was dead. The two VHF radios were on but since no one answered our MAYDAYS we weren’t positive they were sending out our messages.
He was pretty sure, he said, that we weren’t taking on any more water. It had been almost two hours since the wave had tossed us now and we were both showing signs of hypothermia. Jim said my lips were turning blue and the blood caked on his face looked ghastly. I was doing o.k. with steering but every once in a while a bigger wave broke near me and we would begin to broach. I had to hold on to the wheel with everything I had to keep it stern to. I screamed now and then. I know this because my voice was getting hoarse.
We were in very dangerous shape now, with no communications and no way to get a weather report. No one was answering our MAYDAY calls. The boat was seriously damaged and we had tons of water going back and forth in the cabin. Things that had been in the aft cabin, including our spare Aries windvane which was tied down beneath the aft cabin berth, had been propelled incredibly through the walkthrough and into the main cabin and had managed somehow not to hit me when I was still in the bunk. I wondered why I saw the carton of milk on the cabin sole, the contents of our refrigerator and freezer scattered about the boat. The refrigerator lid was heavy with a pull ring and it took a little doing to get it up in normal conditions. Jim assessed that we had been turned upside down. When the wave hit, he was wearing his SoSpenders but not tethered. Jim has great reflexes, thankfully, and said he had to hold on to the steering pedestal with all his might or he would have gone over. In retrospect we don’t think the tether would have helped seeing as how so many other things had been ripped off the boat. He described the enclosure as shredding and blowing off like newspaper in the wind. Later inspection showed that the pedestal had broken at the base. It was lucky we had steering at all at this point. When he lifted the chart table lid there was nothing in it now, except a lone can of tuna fish. Nothing was dry, the stove was broken and the water tanks were probably fouled through the vents. The engine itself may have worked but the starter motor was surely dead as it was now underwater. The engine wouldn’t have helped anyway, not unless we could get closer to shore and now we were getting farther away every minute.
We had 4 electric bilge pumps, one was a large capacity pump. All 4 clogged with debris. The debris was from all the soft back books we had on board. The cheaper paper turned to mush with all the sloshing and went right through the screens into the pumps. There was no way we could operate the manual pump in these conditions and to get that much water out. While Jim was describing this to me, I kept looking over to where the liferaft had been. Then the reality of our situation seemed to be clear to both of us. I said, “I think we should activate the EPIRB” and he agreed. We had a 406 Mhz EPIRB and he went to get it out of its holder and brought it up to our binocular box on the cabin (the binoculars were gone) and set it in there and and pushed the button.
We couldn’t be sure that anyone would be able to get to us or hear us. We had the EPIRB properly registered and overhauled with new batteries every few years as required. Originally we had our daughters on the contact list, but we got frustrated with trying to get them at times. It could be days before we ever heard back and that could happen while we were in distress. Jim had asked old buddies of his if they would be contacts. Ed was a HAM radio operator and Richard was a tugboat captain. Both of these guys were in almost daily contact with Jim through winlink and Jim would report our position to them and the sea conditions. We had set off the EPIRB around 0538. The coast guard immediately contacted Ed and Richard to verify that we were indeed in trouble and they reported back our position the evening before, our course, our destination and that we had reported rough conditions. Then they went into action.
Almost 4 hours later, as I was at the wheel, I heard the Coast Guard call us on the old VHF radio in the aft cabin. I reached in to answer, “This is Kelaerin”, and immediately felt we just might survive this ordeal after all. They were coming from the Warrenton, Oregon base. They said they were 20 minutes away from us. I told them that incredibly the chart plotter was still functioning and I could give them our exact position, which I did. They informed me that when they arrived they would have only a few minutes with us and we needed to make the decision: they could give us a dewatering pump and we would be on our own or they could extract us from the vessel. I looked at Jim and asked, “which?” and he answered, “the dewatering pump”. Still at this point, I did not envision us leaving Kelaerin. The pilot radioed back that we had to think about that and have our possessions we wanted to take with us ready to go. Jim got back on the wheel for awhile while I changed clothes (a few things were still dry) and I went about the boat collecting hard drives, cameras, etc. This was much harder than I had anticipated. I could not get over all the stuff floating around inside the boat to get to the box where our passports and cash were. Jim’s wallet had been in the chart table and was just gone. My backpack which held my wallet was nowhere to be seen. Jim’s good Nikon camera was in a locker up forward with all kinds of stuff blocking the way. I got the hard drives, the go pro camera and the little Nikon Coolpix I used. Jim’s new LG phone was gone but mine had survived. I had a small dry bag and stuffed everything I could in there. Jim had gone up to get the cash but when he went into the cockpit he pulled it out of his pocket and the cash began flying in the wind out of his hands. I stuffed what was left into a small cooler. Then I went back to steering while Jim continued to try and get water out of the boat.
The Coast Guard continued to call me asking me to count down so their RDF could locate us. For a while I wondered if they would find us in time, but eventually I saw them coming. They informed me that they would drop a swimmer in so I told them we would lower the stern ladder and Jim would stream a heavy line so the swimmer could grab it. I informed them that I was going bare poles at 4.6 knots at that time and there would be no way whatsoever I could turn around. I’m sure they already knew that. I asked if they would drop the swimmer on the port side of the boat as the mainsail was blocking my view off the starboard side. The helicopter dropped low, on the starboard side, and the swimmer jumped in but I could not see any of this, only the blades as they whipped around near me. I was not aware when he came aboard. I kept looking for him not realizing he had already boarded and was discussing the situation with Jim at the stern. I was waiting for the pump and then looked over to see the Coast Guard swimmer coming towards the cockpit and informing me that we were getting off the boat. “No,” I said. “We are staying on the boat, we just need the pump.” Then Jim was behind him and said, “Joy, we are getting off.” I was incredulous. It was beyond comprehension that we would ever leave the boat. I still felt that, although, we were in serious trouble here, that we could save Kelaerin. How could we possibly leave her, after nearly 70,000 miles of cruising and 27 years together with only 150 miles to go? Jim had always said he wouldn’t abandon the boat unless he had to step up into a liferaft. So when he confirmed the Coast Guardsman’s declaration, with all his experience at sea, I knew finally that this battle was over. The sea had won.
Then everything went at hyperspeed. The Coast Guard swimmer said I had just a minute to go and gather my things. This is when good sense left and stupid crazy set in. Since we had not planned to leave the boat, I was not prepared well at all. I ran down below, threw out the computer, my “pink book” with all our personal and important info in it, my dry bag, and the red cooler into the cockpit. The CG had taken over the wheel and he kept telling me to be quick, “Go, go, go” he said. I ran back to the aft cabin (this was when nonsense set in for a bit) to retrieve some jewelry. Later I couldn’t believe I had done that as it had taken precious time when I could have better secured the more important items. I threw out my forearm crutch which I needed to walk and he was now telling me there was no more time and I had to get back to the stern of the boat. I asked, “what about my computer and the red cooler?” and he said he would get it and urged me back. Jim grabbed the red cooler and threw it towards the stern and it lodged out of my reach. I again said, “I need my computer and the red cooler” and the CG swimmer said, again it was OK. He told us to inflate our sospenders and jump. What!!!!! Of course this was the only thing to do, but I hesitated for a second and looked at the giant wave coming at us and said, “I’m not jumping in that” and he said GO NOW, Jim said JUMP and I was in the water. Jim later said he had never seen me swimming so fast. I just wanted to get to that basket being lowered before a wave tumbled me under and I might possibly never come back up. Getting into the basket was easy, I just rolled in and moments later I was in the helicopter. The basket lowered again for Jim and he was helped out into the helicopter. Then the swimmer came up and I was hoping that I would see the computer and the red cooler but, of course, it wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be there. The doors were closed and we started to fly away. I had to restrain myself from shouting that I wanted to go back. The hardest moment of both Jim’s and my lives were when we could see Kelaerin through the window and we both realized she was probably lost forever, that somehow we had failed her when she had been so good to us for so many years.
The ride back was over an hour long. The pilots made conversation with us through miked up helmets they provided. We all introduced ourselves. I was just amazed at how professional and highly trained these guys were. The swimmer had to grab the line behind the boat and pull himself into the ladder as we were going nearly 5 knots, which he did in just seconds. His job was to get us off the boat in short order once Jim had made the decision to leave Kelaerin. He was not cruel or impersonal when ordering me to get going. All through that I realized he had a job to do and could not brook any nonsense from me. He was completely in charge and trained to handle this situation. They must come up against some serious stubbornness when trying to get people off boats and they know how to handle it.
When we were about to land Jim heard the pilot tell ground control that they were landing off base at an alternate site near Astoria as they were down to one minute of fuel. ONE MINUTE!!! They had been at the far extension of their range when they had reached us 180 miles out to sea and no time to spare. When we disembarked the copter, I hugged all four Coasties, Jim shook their hands. The pilots came around with smiles on their faces….a job well done, a successful rescue. Then they told me that I was pretty cool on the radio and it helped them a lot. Thank God, I did something right. The EMTs were waiting for us and now I realized we were without any ID whatsoever, we were soaking wet and shivering, no shoes for me and I didn’t have my forearm crutch so I had to be supported across the tarmac to the ambulance.
My small dry bag which held my phone and the camera filled with water as I swam to the basket. Incredibly the phone still worked and I was able to call our girls. Our daughter, Kelly, lived in Portland so she dropped everything and came to Astoria to pick us up. Our oldest daughter, Erin, was visiting friends in Missoula and immediately booked a flight to Portland. They took excellent care of us, even buying us some clothes and Erin helped us get back online by buying a computer for us until our credit cards came within a couple of days.
I share this story in the hopes it helps anyone else for preparation or even the realization that just anything can happen during a passage.
Our biggest mistake that we could have avoided was not putting all our important personal items in a ditch bag. The lifesaving ditch bag had been on a shelf with the handle facing outwards so that we could grab it, but it was of no use if we had to jump in the ocean from a sinking boat and no liferaft. In any case, it wasn’t there after we flipped over and I have no idea as to where it went. I’ll be kicking myself forever for not having the IDs, passports, cash, hard drives and even the little bits of jewelry in a bag ready to go. As for everything else, it is an unimaginable loss. My pictures that we’ve taken over the years were on a hard drive. I had thought about putting them up on the cloud, but didn’t. All our logs were on hard drives, print and computers, but they could not be retrieved in time. I had my collection of courtesy flags and small coins, that were of no value to anyone else but me, in a bag under a setee seat. My assortment of boat cards from the many friends we have made while cruising is gone. We will have to rely on memory now for most of the last 17 years of cruising and that, at 70, is going to be quite a challenge. I’ll have to get on it soon.”
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Here is the text of the USCG Press Release:
Coast Guard rescues 2 off of sailing vessel 180 miles west of Grays Harbor, Wash.
WARRENTON, Ore. — The Coast Guard rescued a husband and wife off a sailing vessel 180 miles off the coast of Grays Harbor, Washington, Saturday morning.
An MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter aircrew, from Sector Columbia River, tracked the sailing vessel’s electronic position indicating radio beacon and safely hoisted the couple before transporting them to the sector’s base in Warrenton.
The Coast Guard District 13 Command Center in Seattle received an EPIRB alert at 5:46 a.m. from the 46-foot sailing vessel Kelaerin. The sailors were reportedly transiting between Hawaii and Bellingham, Washington, when they ran into rough weather and seas.
The helicopter aircrew and a crew aboard a C-27 Spartan aircraft from Air Station Sacramento were launched to assist. The helicopter crew arrived on scene at 9:33 a.m. and lowered a rescue swimmer to assess the situation. The sailing vessel wasn’t actively taking on water but seawater had washed aboard. The aircrew conducted the hoist at the request of the vessel owners because of health concerns.
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To ALL Sailors:
I have asked Joy (the boat owner who wrote about her rescue) for a way for us to send her our good wishes. I am sure the comments and feelings of fellow sailors would be some comfort to her and her husband now, so if you feel like it, post something below, as she may later see it.
In the meantime, I just want Joy and Jim to know that our compassion for fellow sailors is here for them, and that their story is being shared to help others prepare and be aware of what can happen. I think Joy would be happy to know that others value reading her experience and can learn from it, so if you appreciate her writing and sharing it, post a comment to her below.
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Want to share this post?
Here is a link to the same content (post) I posted to my own page so people could share it from there. Some FB sailing groups do not have a share button on their pages. Mine does and is public access.
I encourage sharing this story, so others can:
1. Learn from this tragic loss of a boat
2. Be prepared for ocean passages
3. Give some good will support comments for the writer of the account (Joy and Jim are the owners of the boat).
2 senators
The fate of the Supreme Court could ride on these 2 senators
Moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski brace for a ferocious lobbying campaign from both sides.
By BURGESS EVERETT and JOHN BRESNAHAN
Sen. Susan Collins took a notable phone call Thursday as she enters the eye of the Supreme Court confirmation storm: It was White House counsel Don McGahn, sounding out the moderate Maine Republican in what she called a “preliminary discussion” of the high court vacancy.
Republicans control the Senate by a single seat and Arizona Sen. John McCain has been absent for months. That means any single GOP senator has enormous sway over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
None matter more than Collins and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who also received her own call from McGahn on Thursday. Then on Thursday evening, the two were part of a small group of bipartisan senators to meet directly with the president himself.
A year ago, the two moderate Republicans, along with McCain, stopped Obamacare repeal in its tracks while helping to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now, as they weigh how to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, the two are about to be squeezed more than ever — by liberals seeking a Republican to stop the court from outlawing abortion rights, among other potential conservative rulings, and by their fellow Republicans looking for a show of party unity on a hugely consequential vote.
But the two senators said Thursday they won’t simply fall in line behind whomever Trump nominates.
“There’s pressure because of the gravity of such a nomination,” Murkowski acknowledged. “I am not going to suggest that my opportunity as a senator in the advise and consent process is somehow or other short-cutted just because this is a Republican president and I’m a Republican.”
“No matter how I vote there are going to be people who are furious at me,” Collins said. She added that she views her vote as immune from partisan pressure because “it’s a Supreme Court nominee. It’s not the assistant deputy secretary for weights and measures at the Commerce Department. This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. It matters.”
Both senators suggested Trump need not pull a judge from his list of potential nominees, a document filled with down-the-line conservatives that would dramatically shift the balance of the court to the right. Collins said an “outside group” should not be dictating whom the Senate considers; Murkowski said Trump has already kept his commitment to the list by elevating Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and should extend his search beyond that list.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) met privately with Murkowski about the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon, though she declined to comment on the nature of the conversation.
GOP leaders are already advising Trump to draft a justice who is restrained in rhetoric and that the president try to appeal to moderates. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said a nominee who stated to senators that he or she would “work hard to overrule these precedents … that’s going to cause a lot of problems” for centrist senators.
A buttoned-up justice with somewhat opaque views on hot-button issues might be more palatable to Murkowski and Collins, Cornyn suggested.
Though the duo rejected the GOP’s effort to nix Obamacare, they also voted for Gorsuch. And most Republicans anticipate they will ultimately get behind Trump’s next pick.
“I expect the Republicans to back the nominee, whoever it is,” said Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a close Trump ally. “I would never tell anybody how to vote but this is one where the president’s demonstrated he will put forward a very reasonable candidate.”
Still, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader, said he hoped the White House is closely consulting with the two senators, even as much of the GOP’s pressure campaign is focused on Democrats from red states where Trump is popular.
“As much as you can, find somebody Collins and Murkowski can support,” Thune said. Because “I think we ought to plan to get this done with Republican votes.”
Marc Short, White House director of legislative affairs, said the Trump administration had “met with a handful” Democrats before Gorsuch’s nomination. Short also said Trump was going to act quickly on a nomination. “He’s already reviewed the list [of potential nominees], and it’s a finite list,” Short told reporters on Thursday. “I would expect him to act expeditiously.”
Republicans believe Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin if West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana are in play because of their conservative social positions and reelection campaigns. Those two Democrats, plus Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, voted for Gorsuch.
Manchin is considered most likely to support Trump’s nominees at this point given the conservative bent of his state, but he’s not giving anything away at this early stage: “I’m just waiting for a nominee. I swear,” he said Thursday.
Moderate Democrats might be inclined to wait until late in the process if they end up supporting Trump’s nominee, putting Murkowski and Collins more under the microscope until then. And Democrats will focus their efforts on the two moderate Republicans.
“Our focus has to be on getting a handful of Republicans … this is a legacy vote,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I don’t know how you can say you were pro-choice if you cast a vote that will be looked upon that criminalized abortion and put women in jail.”
Murkowski opposed President Barack Obama’s appointee Elena Kagan, but otherwise she and Collins have voted for nominees under presidents of both parties. Collins and Murkowski both met with Obama nominee Merrick Garland, who never received a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.
The two senators said this nominee will be no more important than any other Supreme Court votes they’ve cast. But each acknowledged that the political stakes might be higher than ever, given their party’s narrow majority, the approaching midterms and the potential for the Supreme Court to be reshaped for a generation.
“This is what goes on in the Senate. Sometimes you’re in the pressure cooker,” Murkowski said. Asked whether a pressure campaign could backfire, as it did on Obamacare repeal, she paused and replied: “I could just say something flip, like ‘Watch me.’”
Then she added: “I don’t mean to be flip. ... I take it very, very seriously.”
Moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski brace for a ferocious lobbying campaign from both sides.
By BURGESS EVERETT and JOHN BRESNAHAN
Sen. Susan Collins took a notable phone call Thursday as she enters the eye of the Supreme Court confirmation storm: It was White House counsel Don McGahn, sounding out the moderate Maine Republican in what she called a “preliminary discussion” of the high court vacancy.
Republicans control the Senate by a single seat and Arizona Sen. John McCain has been absent for months. That means any single GOP senator has enormous sway over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
None matter more than Collins and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who also received her own call from McGahn on Thursday. Then on Thursday evening, the two were part of a small group of bipartisan senators to meet directly with the president himself.
A year ago, the two moderate Republicans, along with McCain, stopped Obamacare repeal in its tracks while helping to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now, as they weigh how to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, the two are about to be squeezed more than ever — by liberals seeking a Republican to stop the court from outlawing abortion rights, among other potential conservative rulings, and by their fellow Republicans looking for a show of party unity on a hugely consequential vote.
But the two senators said Thursday they won’t simply fall in line behind whomever Trump nominates.
“There’s pressure because of the gravity of such a nomination,” Murkowski acknowledged. “I am not going to suggest that my opportunity as a senator in the advise and consent process is somehow or other short-cutted just because this is a Republican president and I’m a Republican.”
“No matter how I vote there are going to be people who are furious at me,” Collins said. She added that she views her vote as immune from partisan pressure because “it’s a Supreme Court nominee. It’s not the assistant deputy secretary for weights and measures at the Commerce Department. This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. It matters.”
Both senators suggested Trump need not pull a judge from his list of potential nominees, a document filled with down-the-line conservatives that would dramatically shift the balance of the court to the right. Collins said an “outside group” should not be dictating whom the Senate considers; Murkowski said Trump has already kept his commitment to the list by elevating Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and should extend his search beyond that list.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) met privately with Murkowski about the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon, though she declined to comment on the nature of the conversation.
GOP leaders are already advising Trump to draft a justice who is restrained in rhetoric and that the president try to appeal to moderates. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said a nominee who stated to senators that he or she would “work hard to overrule these precedents … that’s going to cause a lot of problems” for centrist senators.
A buttoned-up justice with somewhat opaque views on hot-button issues might be more palatable to Murkowski and Collins, Cornyn suggested.
Though the duo rejected the GOP’s effort to nix Obamacare, they also voted for Gorsuch. And most Republicans anticipate they will ultimately get behind Trump’s next pick.
“I expect the Republicans to back the nominee, whoever it is,” said Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a close Trump ally. “I would never tell anybody how to vote but this is one where the president’s demonstrated he will put forward a very reasonable candidate.”
Still, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader, said he hoped the White House is closely consulting with the two senators, even as much of the GOP’s pressure campaign is focused on Democrats from red states where Trump is popular.
“As much as you can, find somebody Collins and Murkowski can support,” Thune said. Because “I think we ought to plan to get this done with Republican votes.”
Marc Short, White House director of legislative affairs, said the Trump administration had “met with a handful” Democrats before Gorsuch’s nomination. Short also said Trump was going to act quickly on a nomination. “He’s already reviewed the list [of potential nominees], and it’s a finite list,” Short told reporters on Thursday. “I would expect him to act expeditiously.”
Republicans believe Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin if West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana are in play because of their conservative social positions and reelection campaigns. Those two Democrats, plus Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, voted for Gorsuch.
Manchin is considered most likely to support Trump’s nominees at this point given the conservative bent of his state, but he’s not giving anything away at this early stage: “I’m just waiting for a nominee. I swear,” he said Thursday.
Moderate Democrats might be inclined to wait until late in the process if they end up supporting Trump’s nominee, putting Murkowski and Collins more under the microscope until then. And Democrats will focus their efforts on the two moderate Republicans.
“Our focus has to be on getting a handful of Republicans … this is a legacy vote,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I don’t know how you can say you were pro-choice if you cast a vote that will be looked upon that criminalized abortion and put women in jail.”
Murkowski opposed President Barack Obama’s appointee Elena Kagan, but otherwise she and Collins have voted for nominees under presidents of both parties. Collins and Murkowski both met with Obama nominee Merrick Garland, who never received a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.
The two senators said this nominee will be no more important than any other Supreme Court votes they’ve cast. But each acknowledged that the political stakes might be higher than ever, given their party’s narrow majority, the approaching midterms and the potential for the Supreme Court to be reshaped for a generation.
“This is what goes on in the Senate. Sometimes you’re in the pressure cooker,” Murkowski said. Asked whether a pressure campaign could backfire, as it did on Obamacare repeal, she paused and replied: “I could just say something flip, like ‘Watch me.’”
Then she added: “I don’t mean to be flip. ... I take it very, very seriously.”
Reasserts zero tolerance policy
White House reasserts zero tolerance policy as Border Patrol suspends it
By TED HESSON and ANDREW HANNA
The White House scrambled Monday to reassert its "zero tolerance" policy after a key Department of Homeland Security official said Border Patrol agents had stopped enforcing it.
"We're not changing the policy," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the daily briefing. "We're simply out of resources. And at some point, Congress has to do what they were elected to do."
Earlier Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters in South Texas that Border Patrol, which McAleenan's agency oversees, was no longer referring for criminal prosecution families caught crossing the border.
"We're not prosecuting those parents," McAleenan said. He cited as the reason President Donald Trump's executive order last week requiring parents to be detained with their children, after an earlier policy of separating parents and children prompted a national uproar.
McAleenan said the suspension was temporary, but he didn't say when prosecutions would resume.
Several DHS officials have said privately that the president's order made it impossible to continue zero tolerance, but McAleenan was the first to say so publicly.
The White House and the Justice Department continue to insist that zero tolerance is still in effect, even as it becomes increasingly evident that it's broken down.
"If we refused to prosecute these adults for illegal entry — as many of our critics want us to do — that would be a disservice to the people of this country," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech Monday in Reno, Nevada.
But the Justice Department can't prosecute parents who cross the southern border with children if Border Patrol doesn't refer them for prosecution.
Border Patrol's suspension of those referrals reinstates what Trump has publicly criticized as a “catch and release“ policy for migrant families.
Trump's executive order barring the separation of parents and children rendered the zero-tolerance policy unenforceable almost immediately because there wasn't sufficient detention space to house the thousands of family members who arrive at the border each month.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates three family detention facilities with a total of 3,326 beds, according to a 2018 report to Congress. More than three-quarters of those beds were filled as of June 20, according to the agency.
In addition, federal officials cannot hold migrant children in detention for more than 20 days under the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, which established basic standards for the treatment of minors.
The Justice Department last week asked U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee to revise the Flores agreement to allow children to be detained indefinitely along with their parents. But Gee, an Obama appointee, is considered unlikely to grant the request. A ruling could come as early as this week.
The suspension of zero tolerance leaves the Trump administration with no clear plan to move forward.
CBP spokesman Andrew Meehan said in a written statement that the agency took “temporary action“ so that Congress can pass legislation that deals with family separation. “We encourage them to act,” he said.
But any such action is a very long shot. Republican leaders in the House postponed a planned vote last week on a compromise immigration bill that would tackle much of Trump’s agenda while giving so-called Dreamers who arrived in the U.S. as children a path to citizenship.
A separate House vote on a hard-line immigration bill from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) failed Thursday on a 193-231 vote.
The executive order, assembled hastily at Trump’s request on the morning of June 20, sparked tensions among agencies that struggled to enact it, POLITICO reported last week.
For instance, the order didn’t make clear whether the administration would seek to reunite children and families previously separated under the zero-tolerance initiative.
A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families said initially that no special procedures would be taken to reunite separated children with their parents. A different official later walked back that statement, but made no promise that all families would be reunited.
On Saturday evening, the administration said it had reunited 522 separated children with parents or guardians and outlined efforts to reconnect families.
The decision to suspend zero tolerance may ease a growing housing crunch for unaccompanied minors.
Under the policy, adults were referred for federal prosecution under illegal entry and re-entry statutes. Children traveling with them were then placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The separated children flooded the shelter system, which held nearly 12,000 children last week.
To create additional shelter capacity, the administration opened a “tent city” earlier this month near a port of entry in Tornillo, Texas.
But the contract for that facility will end July 13, an HHS spokesperson told a local ABC affiliate. The federal government has not made a decision on whether to extend the contract, according to an ACF spokesman.
The tent city has come under scrutiny by immigration advocates who question whether it meets Flores standards to house minors.
Liberal lawmakers and advocates descended on the shelter last week to protest zero tolerance, calling for the release of children separated from their families.
The Trump administration could soon have more beds for children on the way. HHS has asked the Defense Department to determine whether it can provide 20,000 temporary beds for unaccompanied minors from July through the end of the year, according to a notification sent to congressional offices last week.
At the White House press briefing Monday, Sanders was pressed on what additional resources the administration was seeking to deal with migrants at the border.
"We're looking at every option available, we've asked the Pentagon to help with additional space,” she said. “But a lot of that will depend on our ability to stop people coming into the country illegally."
By TED HESSON and ANDREW HANNA
The White House scrambled Monday to reassert its "zero tolerance" policy after a key Department of Homeland Security official said Border Patrol agents had stopped enforcing it.
"We're not changing the policy," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the daily briefing. "We're simply out of resources. And at some point, Congress has to do what they were elected to do."
Earlier Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters in South Texas that Border Patrol, which McAleenan's agency oversees, was no longer referring for criminal prosecution families caught crossing the border.
"We're not prosecuting those parents," McAleenan said. He cited as the reason President Donald Trump's executive order last week requiring parents to be detained with their children, after an earlier policy of separating parents and children prompted a national uproar.
McAleenan said the suspension was temporary, but he didn't say when prosecutions would resume.
Several DHS officials have said privately that the president's order made it impossible to continue zero tolerance, but McAleenan was the first to say so publicly.
The White House and the Justice Department continue to insist that zero tolerance is still in effect, even as it becomes increasingly evident that it's broken down.
"If we refused to prosecute these adults for illegal entry — as many of our critics want us to do — that would be a disservice to the people of this country," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech Monday in Reno, Nevada.
But the Justice Department can't prosecute parents who cross the southern border with children if Border Patrol doesn't refer them for prosecution.
Border Patrol's suspension of those referrals reinstates what Trump has publicly criticized as a “catch and release“ policy for migrant families.
Trump's executive order barring the separation of parents and children rendered the zero-tolerance policy unenforceable almost immediately because there wasn't sufficient detention space to house the thousands of family members who arrive at the border each month.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates three family detention facilities with a total of 3,326 beds, according to a 2018 report to Congress. More than three-quarters of those beds were filled as of June 20, according to the agency.
In addition, federal officials cannot hold migrant children in detention for more than 20 days under the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, which established basic standards for the treatment of minors.
The Justice Department last week asked U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee to revise the Flores agreement to allow children to be detained indefinitely along with their parents. But Gee, an Obama appointee, is considered unlikely to grant the request. A ruling could come as early as this week.
The suspension of zero tolerance leaves the Trump administration with no clear plan to move forward.
CBP spokesman Andrew Meehan said in a written statement that the agency took “temporary action“ so that Congress can pass legislation that deals with family separation. “We encourage them to act,” he said.
But any such action is a very long shot. Republican leaders in the House postponed a planned vote last week on a compromise immigration bill that would tackle much of Trump’s agenda while giving so-called Dreamers who arrived in the U.S. as children a path to citizenship.
A separate House vote on a hard-line immigration bill from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) failed Thursday on a 193-231 vote.
The executive order, assembled hastily at Trump’s request on the morning of June 20, sparked tensions among agencies that struggled to enact it, POLITICO reported last week.
For instance, the order didn’t make clear whether the administration would seek to reunite children and families previously separated under the zero-tolerance initiative.
A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families said initially that no special procedures would be taken to reunite separated children with their parents. A different official later walked back that statement, but made no promise that all families would be reunited.
On Saturday evening, the administration said it had reunited 522 separated children with parents or guardians and outlined efforts to reconnect families.
The decision to suspend zero tolerance may ease a growing housing crunch for unaccompanied minors.
Under the policy, adults were referred for federal prosecution under illegal entry and re-entry statutes. Children traveling with them were then placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The separated children flooded the shelter system, which held nearly 12,000 children last week.
To create additional shelter capacity, the administration opened a “tent city” earlier this month near a port of entry in Tornillo, Texas.
But the contract for that facility will end July 13, an HHS spokesperson told a local ABC affiliate. The federal government has not made a decision on whether to extend the contract, according to an ACF spokesman.
The tent city has come under scrutiny by immigration advocates who question whether it meets Flores standards to house minors.
Liberal lawmakers and advocates descended on the shelter last week to protest zero tolerance, calling for the release of children separated from their families.
The Trump administration could soon have more beds for children on the way. HHS has asked the Defense Department to determine whether it can provide 20,000 temporary beds for unaccompanied minors from July through the end of the year, according to a notification sent to congressional offices last week.
At the White House press briefing Monday, Sanders was pressed on what additional resources the administration was seeking to deal with migrants at the border.
"We're looking at every option available, we've asked the Pentagon to help with additional space,” she said. “But a lot of that will depend on our ability to stop people coming into the country illegally."
Taking his PAC money
Republicans burn Curbelo after taking his PAC money
By MARC CAPUTO
Congressman Carlos Curbelo touted his “What a Country!” political action committee as a way to support like-minded Republicans on immigration, dishing out $152,600 to 61 House Republicans over the past three years.
But when Curbelo most needed their support, most of those Republicans deserted him.
Curbelo needed just 25 Republicans to support his push for a “discharge petition,” a parliamentary move designed to bypass House leadership and bring the issue of immigration reform to the House floor. But only 20 of the 61 Republicans he contributed to signed on, leaving the effort two votes short of the necessary threshold.
Worse, 13 Republicans who received money from “What a Country!” both refused to sign the discharge petition and also voted against the compromise legislation this week — denying the Miami Republican on his signature issue, immigration reform.
That failure is now haunting him on the campaign trail in Florida’s 26th congressional district, the nation’s most Democratic-leaning seat held by a Republican running for reelection.
Curbelo said there’s only so much he could expect in return for the contributions.
“There is no quid pro quo when people receive contributions from a political action committee,” Curbelo told POLITICO when asked if he felt burned by the 41 Republicans who received “What a Country!” money but didn’t sign the discharge petition.
“I’m very grateful to all of the members who have received support from the PAC and acted to advance a balanced solution that would have solved many of the challenges with our immigration system,” Curbelo said.
To approve the discharge petition, 25 House Republicans had to join all 193 Democrats to get to a majority and bypass leadership. But with only 23 Republicans, including Curbelo, the measure looked stalled.
That’s when Curbelo and other Republican immigration moderates, led by California Rep. Jeff Denham, decided on a different course that essentially killed the petition. In changing directions, the moderates all but ensured Democrats were cut out of the process and wouldn’t vote for the final product. That happened, twice, on consecutive weeks, culminating with the Wednesday defeat of an internal Republican “compromise” bill.
The measure that failed Wednesday set aside $25 billion to build President Donald Trump’s border wall, eliminated some family-based immigration visas and also gave a pathway to citizenship for almost 2 million “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to this country as kids. Democrats opposed the wall and the visa restrictions and wanted more legalization for more undocumented immigrants.
Now, what Curbelo describes as a pragmatic decision to get something rather than nothing, his Democratic opponent calls a lack of principles.
“He’s caving,” said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, echoing criticisms from immigrants-rights groups like America’s Voice. “For someone who talks about bipartisanship, to have zero Democrats involved in writing an immigration bill that is going to come to the floor for a vote shows you that he caves to his party, that he is not fighting for Dreamers, that he’s letting down his community.”
Mucarsel-Powell said Curbelo “waited a few months before the election” and that it was too late. If she had been in office, she said, she would have signed on to a “clean DREAM Act.”
Curbelo pushed back on that notion and pointed out that Trump said he wouldn’t have signed the legislation but indicated he would have signed the legislation that died Wednesday.
“Until the last hour, we were asking colleagues to sign the discharge petition. The only thing we could not do is force members to go to the floor and sign the petition,” Curbelo said. “Once it was clear to us that our colleagues were not willing to proceed, we did the best we could to produce a bill that guaranteed a future in our country for Dreamers, secured the border and reformed other parts of our immigration system.”
Mucarsel-Powell also took issue with Curbelo’s PAC.
“I would have never given campaign donations to anti-immigrant Republicans, which he’s done from his PAC,” she said. “He says one thing and does another. That’s who Curbelo is.”
Among those who received contributions were New York’s Lee Zeldin, who has repeatedly said he opposes “amnesty.” Curbelo’s fellow Floridian, Rep. Vern Buchanan, also voted against the Wednesday legislation after refusing to sign on to the discharge petition.
Curbelo said that “What a Country!” wasn’t solely dedicated to immigration reform, however. He said he uses the political committee to support fellow Republicans who share his views on the environment, gun control and taxes.
But when Curbelo first announced the committee in January to his hometown paper, immigration sounded like its focus.
"What a Country recognizes that the United States is the land of opportunity, where anyone who comes here and works hard and plays by the rules can get ahead," Curbelo told the Miami Herald. "It will support candidates who understand the importance of overhauling our nation's immigration laws to secure our borders, promote legal immigration and reward those who contribute to our economy."
About 18 months later, when the paper noticed Curbelo was giving to politicians who voted against protecting Dreamers, Curbelo expressed confidence his Republican colleagues would be there for him: “When the time comes they will be poised to help us on the immigration issue … I could have just established a generic leadership PAC but I decided voluntarily — I didn’t have to do this — to employ this resource to advance a policy agenda that is important to me.”
Curbelo said he’s not done trying to get an immigration bill passed. And he said that Democrats have themselves to blame for the failure of this legislation because a majority of House Republicans supported it and Democrats didn’t do enough.
“It’s clear for many Democrats that the politics of immigration are far more important than the solutions for immigration,” he said, noting how Democrats failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform when they controlled all three branches of government after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
“They doubled down on that position by voting unanimously with a minority of Republicans to defeat legislation that would have guaranteed a future in America -- a pathway to citizenship – for 2 million undocumented young immigrants who were brought to this country as children,” he said.
By MARC CAPUTO
Congressman Carlos Curbelo touted his “What a Country!” political action committee as a way to support like-minded Republicans on immigration, dishing out $152,600 to 61 House Republicans over the past three years.
But when Curbelo most needed their support, most of those Republicans deserted him.
Curbelo needed just 25 Republicans to support his push for a “discharge petition,” a parliamentary move designed to bypass House leadership and bring the issue of immigration reform to the House floor. But only 20 of the 61 Republicans he contributed to signed on, leaving the effort two votes short of the necessary threshold.
Worse, 13 Republicans who received money from “What a Country!” both refused to sign the discharge petition and also voted against the compromise legislation this week — denying the Miami Republican on his signature issue, immigration reform.
That failure is now haunting him on the campaign trail in Florida’s 26th congressional district, the nation’s most Democratic-leaning seat held by a Republican running for reelection.
Curbelo said there’s only so much he could expect in return for the contributions.
“There is no quid pro quo when people receive contributions from a political action committee,” Curbelo told POLITICO when asked if he felt burned by the 41 Republicans who received “What a Country!” money but didn’t sign the discharge petition.
“I’m very grateful to all of the members who have received support from the PAC and acted to advance a balanced solution that would have solved many of the challenges with our immigration system,” Curbelo said.
To approve the discharge petition, 25 House Republicans had to join all 193 Democrats to get to a majority and bypass leadership. But with only 23 Republicans, including Curbelo, the measure looked stalled.
That’s when Curbelo and other Republican immigration moderates, led by California Rep. Jeff Denham, decided on a different course that essentially killed the petition. In changing directions, the moderates all but ensured Democrats were cut out of the process and wouldn’t vote for the final product. That happened, twice, on consecutive weeks, culminating with the Wednesday defeat of an internal Republican “compromise” bill.
The measure that failed Wednesday set aside $25 billion to build President Donald Trump’s border wall, eliminated some family-based immigration visas and also gave a pathway to citizenship for almost 2 million “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to this country as kids. Democrats opposed the wall and the visa restrictions and wanted more legalization for more undocumented immigrants.
Now, what Curbelo describes as a pragmatic decision to get something rather than nothing, his Democratic opponent calls a lack of principles.
“He’s caving,” said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, echoing criticisms from immigrants-rights groups like America’s Voice. “For someone who talks about bipartisanship, to have zero Democrats involved in writing an immigration bill that is going to come to the floor for a vote shows you that he caves to his party, that he is not fighting for Dreamers, that he’s letting down his community.”
Mucarsel-Powell said Curbelo “waited a few months before the election” and that it was too late. If she had been in office, she said, she would have signed on to a “clean DREAM Act.”
Curbelo pushed back on that notion and pointed out that Trump said he wouldn’t have signed the legislation but indicated he would have signed the legislation that died Wednesday.
“Until the last hour, we were asking colleagues to sign the discharge petition. The only thing we could not do is force members to go to the floor and sign the petition,” Curbelo said. “Once it was clear to us that our colleagues were not willing to proceed, we did the best we could to produce a bill that guaranteed a future in our country for Dreamers, secured the border and reformed other parts of our immigration system.”
Mucarsel-Powell also took issue with Curbelo’s PAC.
“I would have never given campaign donations to anti-immigrant Republicans, which he’s done from his PAC,” she said. “He says one thing and does another. That’s who Curbelo is.”
Among those who received contributions were New York’s Lee Zeldin, who has repeatedly said he opposes “amnesty.” Curbelo’s fellow Floridian, Rep. Vern Buchanan, also voted against the Wednesday legislation after refusing to sign on to the discharge petition.
Curbelo said that “What a Country!” wasn’t solely dedicated to immigration reform, however. He said he uses the political committee to support fellow Republicans who share his views on the environment, gun control and taxes.
But when Curbelo first announced the committee in January to his hometown paper, immigration sounded like its focus.
"What a Country recognizes that the United States is the land of opportunity, where anyone who comes here and works hard and plays by the rules can get ahead," Curbelo told the Miami Herald. "It will support candidates who understand the importance of overhauling our nation's immigration laws to secure our borders, promote legal immigration and reward those who contribute to our economy."
About 18 months later, when the paper noticed Curbelo was giving to politicians who voted against protecting Dreamers, Curbelo expressed confidence his Republican colleagues would be there for him: “When the time comes they will be poised to help us on the immigration issue … I could have just established a generic leadership PAC but I decided voluntarily — I didn’t have to do this — to employ this resource to advance a policy agenda that is important to me.”
Curbelo said he’s not done trying to get an immigration bill passed. And he said that Democrats have themselves to blame for the failure of this legislation because a majority of House Republicans supported it and Democrats didn’t do enough.
“It’s clear for many Democrats that the politics of immigration are far more important than the solutions for immigration,” he said, noting how Democrats failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform when they controlled all three branches of government after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
“They doubled down on that position by voting unanimously with a minority of Republicans to defeat legislation that would have guaranteed a future in America -- a pathway to citizenship – for 2 million undocumented young immigrants who were brought to this country as children,” he said.
Doesn't matter, who ever will be shit...
Could a woman be what Trump needs for SCOTUS?
Some conservatives say nominating a female justice may defuse a looming fight over abortion rights.
By JOSH GERSTEIN
No matter whom President Donald Trump picks for the Supreme Court this time around, the nominee is almost certain to come under withering liberal attack as a grave threat to women’s rights. Several conservatives close to the White House, however, say they know just how to blunt that looming assault: Pick a woman for the job.
With Roe v. Wade appearing to hang in the balance, the battle to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy will be an order of magnitude more intense than the fight last year over filling the seat left vacant after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Choosing a female nominee could turn down some of the heat on the abortion issue, give some political cover to female Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and complicate the imagery in TV ads that are expected to savage the nominee, whoever he — or she — may be.
“I think the optics do matter. It’s harder to make the case that a woman is against women’s rights,” said Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice, a veteran of several Supreme Court fights. “It takes on special significance when people expect abortion to probably be the biggest issue. … I think it’s given even more significance by the fact the two most moderate Republican senators are women.”
Of the 25 people on Trump’s public list of potential nominees, six are women. Four — 10th Circuit Judge Allison Eid, 6th Circuit Judge Joan Larsen, Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces Judge Margaret Ryan and 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes — were on lists released during the 2016 presidential campaign. Two — 7th Circuit Judge Amy Barrett and Georgia Supreme Court Justice Britt Grant — were added last November.
Conservative activists in close touch with the White House sent conflicting signals Thursday about how many women are being seriously considered for the nomination.
One person familiar with White House thinking said officials were keen on picking a woman and were closely vetting Barrett and Eid.
Another Republican close to the White House said attention was focused on about five potential nominees, with Barrett as the only woman on that list.
More than a year ago, as Trump’s team was running the process that led to the selection of Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia, a top adviser told POLITICO that the White House was considering whether a woman nominee would be a better fit.
As lawyers combed through possibilities for that first vacancy, the adviser said, they also asked: “Who are your better bets for seats that are going to be potentially more contentious?”
Leonard Leo, who recently took leave from the conservative Federalist Society to advise the White House on the nomination process, did not rule out that gender could play a role in Trump’s decision.
“I don’t think that given the current composition of the court it’s necessary to nominate a woman,” Leo told POLITICO on Thursday. “I really think this decision depends most heavily upon whether there is a female candidate who is really extraordinary. The relevant question would be: Are there female candidates who distinguish themselves in that way and fit very well within that Gorsuch model, perhaps better than male candidates?”
Leo also said he was confident that any effort to tar a female nominee as anti-woman would fall flat.
“If Democrats and the left choose to undertake that strategy in the face of a female nominee, I suspect they’re going to look rather foolish,” he said. “The interesting question is not whether that strategy could be overcome. The interesting question is whether anyone would be stupid enough to invoke it in the face of a serious female nominee.”
Another conservative legal activist, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, expressed similar doubts.
“It will be a little harder for them to make the case that this woman is anti-woman. … but Justice Thomas gets called a self-hating black man regularly,” said Severino, who clerked for Clarence Thomas. “Of course, this could have resonance with some people. But with other people they could become even more angry. … They’re going to say she’s a traitor to her gender.”
A liberal legal advocate, Caroline Fredrickson of the American Constitution Society, said she would not be surprised if Trump did select a woman as his nominee.
“The optics of Trump judicial nominees is bad so far, in that they’ve been overwhelmingly white and male,” Fredrickson said. “So, I think as a part of their communications strategy, they might think nominating a woman might cause people to believe he’s nominating someone more mainstream. … I think that would be misplaced, because the women on his shortlist are just as hard right as the men.”
Among conservative legal activists, Barrett seems to be the crowd favorite. Her public statements on Roe v. Wade and abortion rights, however, could add even more fuel to what is likely to a be a combustible mix at a Senate confirmation hearing. While she was a law professor at Notre Dame, an official school magazine reported that Barrett declared her conviction that life begins with conception and criticized Roe as a judicial fiat that created abortion on demand.
“It would be hard to overstate the degree to which Barrett’s academic work has been tailored to dismantle Roe v. Wade,” an Alliance for Justice report said.
A Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Barrett could end up as a much higher-profile reprise of her hearing for the 7th Circuit last September. That session set off a political battle as Democrats suggested that she indicated her Catholic views could affect her judging and Republicans accused Democrats of anti-Catholic bias.
“Dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said at the hearing.
“My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on my discharge of my duties as a judge,” Barrett insisted.
After the hearing, the presidents of the University of Notre Dame and Princeton University complained that Democrats seemed to be imposing an unfair religious test on Barrett.
Barrett was confirmed the following month, 55-43, but many legal observers believe the Trump White House will ultimately conclude that it does not want to put forward a nominee whom some senators, including Collins and Murkowski, could regard as unduly provocative on the abortion issue.
The public views of the other female nominees on that issue are more murky. Eid unsuccessfully urged her colleagues on the Colorado Supreme Court to take up a legal case involving an injunction against the display of graphic images by anti-abortion protesters. Some anti-abortion groups have taken her stance as a sign that she opposes abortion.
Nominees who have publicly recorded comments or writings on abortion could find it more difficult to resist senators’ questions on the topic. However, some lawyers say that a nominee could mimic Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s approach at her 1993 hearing and decline to get into issues that could come before the court.
“When the hearing does happen, of course I think the Ginsburg rule is completely appropriate,” said Erin Hawley, a University of Missouri law professor.
“I would be all for a woman nominee,” said Hawley, while adding: “Judicial philosophy should be the main factor.”
Among those who seem to be promoting a female nominee: Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
“I think the Trump SCOTUS nominee will only be able get 56 votes if she affirms in one way or another that Roe is settled law, and if her record isn’t startlingly at odds with that,” Kristol wrote on Twitter. “There may not be 50 votes in Senate to confirm a plausibly ‘this means overruling of Roe’ nominee.”
The conservative, who is often harshly critical of Trump, said he believes the nod will go to Ryan, the military appeals court judge. “Ryan also a Marine!” Kristol added.
Among conservative activists, Barrett and Eid are mentioned most often as plausible picks, followed by Larsen. Sykes, 60, is considered by many to be too old to be likely to offer the decades on the court that Trump has said he wants a nominee to serve. Grant, 40, fares better actuarially but has been on the bench for less than a year and a half and is still awaiting confirmation to the 11th Circuit.
Asked whether he’s advocating for a woman for the slot, Kristol said: “Not sure if it’s a good idea but suspect Trump may think it’s a good idea — Just speculating Trump might be inclined toward that, especially since Collins and Murkowski are two of the obvious possible defectors.”
Kristol said he thought someone “more opaque” on abortion than Barrett would get the pick — a view that Levey, of the Committee for Justice, also endorsed.
“I think,” he said, “it is unlikely that Trump will pick someone with a strong pro-life record.”
Some conservatives say nominating a female justice may defuse a looming fight over abortion rights.
By JOSH GERSTEIN
No matter whom President Donald Trump picks for the Supreme Court this time around, the nominee is almost certain to come under withering liberal attack as a grave threat to women’s rights. Several conservatives close to the White House, however, say they know just how to blunt that looming assault: Pick a woman for the job.
With Roe v. Wade appearing to hang in the balance, the battle to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy will be an order of magnitude more intense than the fight last year over filling the seat left vacant after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Choosing a female nominee could turn down some of the heat on the abortion issue, give some political cover to female Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and complicate the imagery in TV ads that are expected to savage the nominee, whoever he — or she — may be.
“I think the optics do matter. It’s harder to make the case that a woman is against women’s rights,” said Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice, a veteran of several Supreme Court fights. “It takes on special significance when people expect abortion to probably be the biggest issue. … I think it’s given even more significance by the fact the two most moderate Republican senators are women.”
Of the 25 people on Trump’s public list of potential nominees, six are women. Four — 10th Circuit Judge Allison Eid, 6th Circuit Judge Joan Larsen, Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces Judge Margaret Ryan and 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes — were on lists released during the 2016 presidential campaign. Two — 7th Circuit Judge Amy Barrett and Georgia Supreme Court Justice Britt Grant — were added last November.
Conservative activists in close touch with the White House sent conflicting signals Thursday about how many women are being seriously considered for the nomination.
One person familiar with White House thinking said officials were keen on picking a woman and were closely vetting Barrett and Eid.
Another Republican close to the White House said attention was focused on about five potential nominees, with Barrett as the only woman on that list.
More than a year ago, as Trump’s team was running the process that led to the selection of Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia, a top adviser told POLITICO that the White House was considering whether a woman nominee would be a better fit.
As lawyers combed through possibilities for that first vacancy, the adviser said, they also asked: “Who are your better bets for seats that are going to be potentially more contentious?”
Leonard Leo, who recently took leave from the conservative Federalist Society to advise the White House on the nomination process, did not rule out that gender could play a role in Trump’s decision.
“I don’t think that given the current composition of the court it’s necessary to nominate a woman,” Leo told POLITICO on Thursday. “I really think this decision depends most heavily upon whether there is a female candidate who is really extraordinary. The relevant question would be: Are there female candidates who distinguish themselves in that way and fit very well within that Gorsuch model, perhaps better than male candidates?”
Leo also said he was confident that any effort to tar a female nominee as anti-woman would fall flat.
“If Democrats and the left choose to undertake that strategy in the face of a female nominee, I suspect they’re going to look rather foolish,” he said. “The interesting question is not whether that strategy could be overcome. The interesting question is whether anyone would be stupid enough to invoke it in the face of a serious female nominee.”
Another conservative legal activist, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, expressed similar doubts.
“It will be a little harder for them to make the case that this woman is anti-woman. … but Justice Thomas gets called a self-hating black man regularly,” said Severino, who clerked for Clarence Thomas. “Of course, this could have resonance with some people. But with other people they could become even more angry. … They’re going to say she’s a traitor to her gender.”
A liberal legal advocate, Caroline Fredrickson of the American Constitution Society, said she would not be surprised if Trump did select a woman as his nominee.
“The optics of Trump judicial nominees is bad so far, in that they’ve been overwhelmingly white and male,” Fredrickson said. “So, I think as a part of their communications strategy, they might think nominating a woman might cause people to believe he’s nominating someone more mainstream. … I think that would be misplaced, because the women on his shortlist are just as hard right as the men.”
Among conservative legal activists, Barrett seems to be the crowd favorite. Her public statements on Roe v. Wade and abortion rights, however, could add even more fuel to what is likely to a be a combustible mix at a Senate confirmation hearing. While she was a law professor at Notre Dame, an official school magazine reported that Barrett declared her conviction that life begins with conception and criticized Roe as a judicial fiat that created abortion on demand.
“It would be hard to overstate the degree to which Barrett’s academic work has been tailored to dismantle Roe v. Wade,” an Alliance for Justice report said.
A Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Barrett could end up as a much higher-profile reprise of her hearing for the 7th Circuit last September. That session set off a political battle as Democrats suggested that she indicated her Catholic views could affect her judging and Republicans accused Democrats of anti-Catholic bias.
“Dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said at the hearing.
“My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on my discharge of my duties as a judge,” Barrett insisted.
After the hearing, the presidents of the University of Notre Dame and Princeton University complained that Democrats seemed to be imposing an unfair religious test on Barrett.
Barrett was confirmed the following month, 55-43, but many legal observers believe the Trump White House will ultimately conclude that it does not want to put forward a nominee whom some senators, including Collins and Murkowski, could regard as unduly provocative on the abortion issue.
The public views of the other female nominees on that issue are more murky. Eid unsuccessfully urged her colleagues on the Colorado Supreme Court to take up a legal case involving an injunction against the display of graphic images by anti-abortion protesters. Some anti-abortion groups have taken her stance as a sign that she opposes abortion.
Nominees who have publicly recorded comments or writings on abortion could find it more difficult to resist senators’ questions on the topic. However, some lawyers say that a nominee could mimic Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s approach at her 1993 hearing and decline to get into issues that could come before the court.
“When the hearing does happen, of course I think the Ginsburg rule is completely appropriate,” said Erin Hawley, a University of Missouri law professor.
“I would be all for a woman nominee,” said Hawley, while adding: “Judicial philosophy should be the main factor.”
Among those who seem to be promoting a female nominee: Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.
“I think the Trump SCOTUS nominee will only be able get 56 votes if she affirms in one way or another that Roe is settled law, and if her record isn’t startlingly at odds with that,” Kristol wrote on Twitter. “There may not be 50 votes in Senate to confirm a plausibly ‘this means overruling of Roe’ nominee.”
The conservative, who is often harshly critical of Trump, said he believes the nod will go to Ryan, the military appeals court judge. “Ryan also a Marine!” Kristol added.
Among conservative activists, Barrett and Eid are mentioned most often as plausible picks, followed by Larsen. Sykes, 60, is considered by many to be too old to be likely to offer the decades on the court that Trump has said he wants a nominee to serve. Grant, 40, fares better actuarially but has been on the bench for less than a year and a half and is still awaiting confirmation to the 11th Circuit.
Asked whether he’s advocating for a woman for the slot, Kristol said: “Not sure if it’s a good idea but suspect Trump may think it’s a good idea — Just speculating Trump might be inclined toward that, especially since Collins and Murkowski are two of the obvious possible defectors.”
Kristol said he thought someone “more opaque” on abortion than Barrett would get the pick — a view that Levey, of the Committee for Justice, also endorsed.
“I think,” he said, “it is unlikely that Trump will pick someone with a strong pro-life record.”
Be concerned...
Obama: ‘You are right to be concerned’
In his first public comments in months, the former president talks about anger, regrets — and what the Republicans are doing right.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
Barack Obama’s message to Democrats: Stop dreaming of him.
Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday here in the lush backyard of two party megadonors, Obama warned of a country and world on the brink — “you are right to be concerned,” he told the crowd — but said they’d flub their chance to change that if they kept pining for a magical savior.
“Do not wait for the perfect message, don’t wait to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving that somehow, ‘OK, I’ll get off my couch after all and go spend the 15-20 minutes it takes for me to vote,’” Obama said in his first public comments in months, which only a few reporters and no cameras were allowed in for. “Because that’s part of what happened in the last election. I heard that too much.”
“Boil it down,” Obama said, reiterating an argument he made on the campaign trail for Ralph Northam in 2017 about the existential challenge Trump poses to America. “If we don’t vote, then this democracy doesn’t work.”
He almost accepted some of the blame for the state of the party, though he framed it less as the DNC atrophying from years of benign neglect while he was in the White House and being saddled with his reelection campaign debt and more as people making the mistake of falling too much in love with him.
“I’ll be honest with you, if I have a regret during my presidency, it is that people were so focused on me and the battles we were having, particularly after we lost the House, that folks stopped paying attention up and down the ballot,” Obama said.
Obama stuck to his routine of never saying President Donald Trump’s name in public, but he spoke at length about what his problems are with the Trump presidency — and why he thinks Democrats would be foolish to believe that they’re in good shape to beat him just because they’ve been doing well in winning recent elections.
“Fear is powerful,” Obama said. “Telling people that somebody’s out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life — that’s an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world. It is a deliberate, systematic effort to tap into that part of our brain that carries fear in it.”
He did not specifically discuss immigrant families being separated at detention centers. He did not discuss the travel ban or other rulings from the Supreme Court this week. Teed up gently but directly by DNC chairman Tom Perez, who was seated next to him on a small stage asking questions to prompt the discussion, he dodged a question about Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Merrick Garland’s name wasn’t mentioned, and neither was the current push by most Senate Democrats — and supported by Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden — to say that Trump’s nominee should also not be given a hearing until after the next election. No one mentioned Joe Crowley’s shocker primary loss, or the burst of youthful optimism and talk of socialism that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win has injected into Democratic politics. He spoke only obliquely about the “Me Too” movement, saying that the current Republican leadership believes in “women staying in their place in all kinds of ways.”
His only direct comments on current events were about the newspaper office shooting in Maryland earlier Thursday, which he said left him heartbroken but hopeful that people would see this one as the turning point to take action on gun laws.
Instead, he talked mostly in general terms about how the Republicans and Democrats tell “different stories.”
“There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” Obama said. “We are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or in charge.”
The event was the first of three fundraisers Obama is doing in California this week, with two scheduled Friday in San Francisco for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Thursday night’s event was to boost a DNC that is still struggling to reassert and refinance itself a year and a half into the chairmanship of Perez and with the massive undertaking of the 2020 election looming just behind the midterms. On that front, Obama said, Democrats could learn from Republicans, who have continued rapidly building out their infrastructure and fundraising despite Trump’s daily pummeling of the GOP to reshape it in his image.
“They don’t worry about inspiration,” Obama said. “They worry about winning the seat and they are very systematic about work not just at the presidential level but at the congressional and state legislative levels.”
But the tension between the desperation among many Democrats that Obama needs to lead the charge against Trump and the shift away that the former president and Democratic officials are pushing played out in Perez himself: He called Obama out onto the stage by saying, “Let’s give it up for the real president of the United States,” then 20 minutes later, downplayed what he called “political venture capitalists — they want to find the next Barack Obama” — who aren’t focused on the nuts and bolts of party building.
Opinions were divided within the audience, too.
“You only have a few super candidates,” said former California Gov. Gray Davis, applauding the focus on mechanics.
“Notwithstanding his post-partisan rhetoric, Democrats need him, his inspiration, his energy and his memory to get through these dark days,” said Eric Bauman, the California Democratic chairman who is helping lead efforts for his party to flip several key nearby House seats.
The event stuck to the focus-on-the-midterms message, with Christina Aguilera performing Aretha Franklin’s “Freedom” (“You better think / Think about what you’re trying to do to me”) and the hosts handing out gift bags in the end with a big red bag of Intelligentsia coffee beans inside and a “Stay Energized for November” sticker on front.
A new national message will come, Obama argued, as the 2020 field of presidential candidates emerges. The people who are looking for one now are being ridiculous, he said, but if they needed something to hold them over, he said his own old slogan still works.
“All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable TV and howling at the moon, ‘What are we going to do?,’ their hair’s falling out, they can’t sleep,” Obama said. “The majority of the American people prefer a story of hope. A majority of the American people prefer a country that comes together rather than being divided. The majority of the country doesn’t want to see a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.”
Obama mocked Trump and others for being among the angry: “They’re mad even when they win.”
Trump’s executive actions and legal maneuvers to cut down Obamacare after failing to repeal it in Congress are a perfect example of what he means, Obama said.
“I am not surprised that instead of replacing what we had done with something better, they just have done their best to undermine and erode what’s already in place,” he said. “Of course people are going to be angry about that, because if you had health care and suddenly somebody who says they’re going to make it better comes in and makes it worse, you’ll be pissed. You should go out and vote.”
Obama called that an opportunity for Democrats.
“Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you, and the other side has been peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue that you can get away with it for a while, but at a certain point, you confront reality,” he said. “The Democrats’ job is not to exaggerate; the Democrats’ job is not to simply mimic the tactics of the other side. All we have to do is work hard on behalf of that truth. And if we do, we’ll get better outcomes.”
In his first public comments in months, the former president talks about anger, regrets — and what the Republicans are doing right.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
Barack Obama’s message to Democrats: Stop dreaming of him.
Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday here in the lush backyard of two party megadonors, Obama warned of a country and world on the brink — “you are right to be concerned,” he told the crowd — but said they’d flub their chance to change that if they kept pining for a magical savior.
“Do not wait for the perfect message, don’t wait to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving that somehow, ‘OK, I’ll get off my couch after all and go spend the 15-20 minutes it takes for me to vote,’” Obama said in his first public comments in months, which only a few reporters and no cameras were allowed in for. “Because that’s part of what happened in the last election. I heard that too much.”
“Boil it down,” Obama said, reiterating an argument he made on the campaign trail for Ralph Northam in 2017 about the existential challenge Trump poses to America. “If we don’t vote, then this democracy doesn’t work.”
He almost accepted some of the blame for the state of the party, though he framed it less as the DNC atrophying from years of benign neglect while he was in the White House and being saddled with his reelection campaign debt and more as people making the mistake of falling too much in love with him.
“I’ll be honest with you, if I have a regret during my presidency, it is that people were so focused on me and the battles we were having, particularly after we lost the House, that folks stopped paying attention up and down the ballot,” Obama said.
Obama stuck to his routine of never saying President Donald Trump’s name in public, but he spoke at length about what his problems are with the Trump presidency — and why he thinks Democrats would be foolish to believe that they’re in good shape to beat him just because they’ve been doing well in winning recent elections.
“Fear is powerful,” Obama said. “Telling people that somebody’s out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life — that’s an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world. It is a deliberate, systematic effort to tap into that part of our brain that carries fear in it.”
He did not specifically discuss immigrant families being separated at detention centers. He did not discuss the travel ban or other rulings from the Supreme Court this week. Teed up gently but directly by DNC chairman Tom Perez, who was seated next to him on a small stage asking questions to prompt the discussion, he dodged a question about Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Merrick Garland’s name wasn’t mentioned, and neither was the current push by most Senate Democrats — and supported by Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden — to say that Trump’s nominee should also not be given a hearing until after the next election. No one mentioned Joe Crowley’s shocker primary loss, or the burst of youthful optimism and talk of socialism that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win has injected into Democratic politics. He spoke only obliquely about the “Me Too” movement, saying that the current Republican leadership believes in “women staying in their place in all kinds of ways.”
His only direct comments on current events were about the newspaper office shooting in Maryland earlier Thursday, which he said left him heartbroken but hopeful that people would see this one as the turning point to take action on gun laws.
Instead, he talked mostly in general terms about how the Republicans and Democrats tell “different stories.”
“There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” Obama said. “We are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or in charge.”
The event was the first of three fundraisers Obama is doing in California this week, with two scheduled Friday in San Francisco for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Thursday night’s event was to boost a DNC that is still struggling to reassert and refinance itself a year and a half into the chairmanship of Perez and with the massive undertaking of the 2020 election looming just behind the midterms. On that front, Obama said, Democrats could learn from Republicans, who have continued rapidly building out their infrastructure and fundraising despite Trump’s daily pummeling of the GOP to reshape it in his image.
“They don’t worry about inspiration,” Obama said. “They worry about winning the seat and they are very systematic about work not just at the presidential level but at the congressional and state legislative levels.”
But the tension between the desperation among many Democrats that Obama needs to lead the charge against Trump and the shift away that the former president and Democratic officials are pushing played out in Perez himself: He called Obama out onto the stage by saying, “Let’s give it up for the real president of the United States,” then 20 minutes later, downplayed what he called “political venture capitalists — they want to find the next Barack Obama” — who aren’t focused on the nuts and bolts of party building.
Opinions were divided within the audience, too.
“You only have a few super candidates,” said former California Gov. Gray Davis, applauding the focus on mechanics.
“Notwithstanding his post-partisan rhetoric, Democrats need him, his inspiration, his energy and his memory to get through these dark days,” said Eric Bauman, the California Democratic chairman who is helping lead efforts for his party to flip several key nearby House seats.
The event stuck to the focus-on-the-midterms message, with Christina Aguilera performing Aretha Franklin’s “Freedom” (“You better think / Think about what you’re trying to do to me”) and the hosts handing out gift bags in the end with a big red bag of Intelligentsia coffee beans inside and a “Stay Energized for November” sticker on front.
A new national message will come, Obama argued, as the 2020 field of presidential candidates emerges. The people who are looking for one now are being ridiculous, he said, but if they needed something to hold them over, he said his own old slogan still works.
“All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable TV and howling at the moon, ‘What are we going to do?,’ their hair’s falling out, they can’t sleep,” Obama said. “The majority of the American people prefer a story of hope. A majority of the American people prefer a country that comes together rather than being divided. The majority of the country doesn’t want to see a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.”
Obama mocked Trump and others for being among the angry: “They’re mad even when they win.”
Trump’s executive actions and legal maneuvers to cut down Obamacare after failing to repeal it in Congress are a perfect example of what he means, Obama said.
“I am not surprised that instead of replacing what we had done with something better, they just have done their best to undermine and erode what’s already in place,” he said. “Of course people are going to be angry about that, because if you had health care and suddenly somebody who says they’re going to make it better comes in and makes it worse, you’ll be pissed. You should go out and vote.”
Obama called that an opportunity for Democrats.
“Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you, and the other side has been peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue that you can get away with it for a while, but at a certain point, you confront reality,” he said. “The Democrats’ job is not to exaggerate; the Democrats’ job is not to simply mimic the tactics of the other side. All we have to do is work hard on behalf of that truth. And if we do, we’ll get better outcomes.”
How could a failure get so far???
The Lost City of Trump
It was supposed to be his legacy. Today it’s a mere shadow of his dream—but he declared victory anyway. How the saga of Trump City foreshadowed the president’s chaotic path to the White House.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
he week before Thanksgiving in 1985, a 39-year-old Donald Trump announced his plan to make sure nobody would ever forget him.
At a showy news conference at his sleek, glass-wrapped Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan, and later that evening at a cramped, tense community meeting in the cafeteria of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the Upper West Side, Trump unveiled drawings and models of his vision for the old Penn Central rail yards on the bank of the Hudson River. It wasn’t just the largest undeveloped tract of land in Manhattan; it was “the greatest piece of land in urban America,” he crowed. And on those 76 acres, he intended to build nearly 8,000 apartments and condominiums for up to 20,000 people, almost 10,000 parking spots, some 3.6 million square feet of television and movie studio space, and some 2 million square feet of “prestigious” stores. There would be no fewer than six 76-story towers, and looming atop it all one unprecedented skyscraper twice that height. It was a behemoth endeavor meant to go, his promotional materials proclaimed, “beyond the grandeur and excellence that has become synonymous with projects bearing the Trump name.”
This was supposed to be his legacy. Not Trump Tower. Not a clutch of casinos. Certainly not a political office of any kind.
In a metropolis of superlatives, he was striving to be New York’s biggest builder, a cocksure maker of tangible, unmissable things—and here, now, he wanted to build a city within the city, a conspicuously separate entity, of a style and scale no one had accomplished, not even the man who had shaped modern New York, Robert Moses. It was, in the words of the New York Times, his “bid for immortality.” First, he called it Television City; then, simply and unsurprisingly, Trump City. That centerpiece skyscraper would be the world’s tallest building, and he was going to live at the top.
And he failed.
Confronted over the span of two decades with a complicated thicket of social and governmental interests, frustrated by the incremental realities of bureaucracy and stymied by a disciplined, well-funded and committed opposition, Trump raged and feuded with nonpliant politicians and intractable citizens and critics from an established intellectual elite. In the end, nothing even approaching his grandest ambition was ever built. No other chapter in Trump’s long life reveals more about the man who now inhabits the Oval Office. “It’s all a wonderful sort of mosaic,” says Jim Capalino, one of New York’s most prominent lobbyists, who worked for Trump at the time, “of all of the characteristics and all of the personality traits and bluster and bravado and insecurity that are … shaping his presidency.”
The behavior of Trump during his manic first year and a half as president that has most confounded observers has its clear precursors in the war he waged on the edge of Manhattan. Evident then as now are a bullheaded disregard for nuance and detail, unpredictability magnified by impulsivity—and ultimately a peculiar strain of pragmatism some see as admirable and others consider merely cold-eyed. The insights the saga provides into Trump could fuel a playbook for the current “resistance” battling him and his administration—but also serve as a reminder of the strengths that make him nearly impossible to back into a corner. Thwarted by his opponents and weakened by the consequences of his own worst attributes, Trump actually did come away with something. Television City never happened, and Trump City never happened, either, but Trump nonetheless pocketed millions of dollars. Buildings were built. And some of those buildings still bear—at least for now—the name Trump Place.
“I’ve always given Trump credit,” says Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist and an urban critic who was one of his harshest foes, “for recognizing that defeat was staring him in the face—and switching gears.”
“He was a survivor and a chameleon,” says Rich Herschlag, chief borough engineer for Manhattan in the 1990s. And as much as some people see a string of losses, Herschlag came to view the actual result on the Upper West Side as a triumph for Trump, likening it to the “umbilical cord” connecting the man then to the man now. “Without it,” he says, “it’s pretty safe to say he would have been selling blenders on cable television.”
Trump found a way to win after all—with the help, remarkably, of enemies he converted to allies. What looked like Trump’s white whale in the ’80s ended up in the ’90s being key to his ability to dodge personal financial ruin and permanent reputational stain. He got to keep selling—not blenders on cable television, but himself, on NBC, in prime time, with “The Apprentice,” which amounted to the groundwork for his presidential bid.
“I think he thought he got away with something there,” says Brendan Sexton, a former president of the Municipal Art Society, an organization more than a century old that promotes historical preservation and sensible development in New York—and that tangled with Trump in this instance before ultimately teaming up with him. “And maybe he did.”
I asked Sexton what lessons he took from his experiences with Trump on the Upper West Side.
“That what he does, he has been successful at,” he said. “And that it’s important to recognize that, or you go into the next discussion overconfident, thinking that he couldn’t possibly pull this crap off. And you wake up six months later, look around, and wonder, ‘How the hell did he pull that crap off?’ And that’s a real danger. And it keeps happening.”
***
Trump’s obsession with the site he ultimately wanted to turn into his own city started when New York was a fiscal wreck and desperate for any new economic activity.
In the mid-1970s, Trump obtained options to develop three of the choicest assets of the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad—the crumbling Commodore Hotel at Grand Central Station, the West Side rail yards running from 30th to 39th streets and those running from 59th to 72nd streets. The properties needed a developer “who seemed best positioned in the New York market to get rezoning and government financing,” Ned Eichler, a vice president of Palmieri and Co., the firm appointed to dispose of the real estate of the bankrupt railroad, told reporter Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice in 1979. Zoning, Eichler told Barrett, is a “highly political activity,” especially in New York, and there had not been a “rezoning of this magnitude on a piece of property this politically sensitive in the recent history of the city.” Eichler’s assessment was that Penn Central would benefit from having a developer who was “very, very high in his political position.” Trump was not yet 30 and completely unproven, but thanks to his father’s considerable wealth and political connections, he was just that kind of developer.
The Palmieri people in charge of the Penn Central properties had pegged the younger Trump to be in some sense as desperate as the city was—desperate to earn the approval and affection of his flinty, businesslike father by outdoing him. John Koskinen was the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in President Barack Obama’s second term. Back then, though, he was a Palmieri principal along with Eichler. While Eichler did the railyards negotiations, Koskinen handled the Commodore. He found Trump “irrepressible.”
A young Donald Trump leans over a model of the skyline from a proposed development. | Getty Images
Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images
“He had a tremendous amount of energy,” Koskinen told me.
Trump took his option on the Commodore and turned it into the Grand Hyatt. He took his option on the yards from 30th to 39th Streets and turned it into a brokerage fee from the city and the state; the land would ultimately house the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Before doing either of those two things, though, he took his option on the yards from 59th to 72nd Streets, the true jewel of the lot, he always believed, and pitched 20,000 apartments—an audacious proposal that would have surpassed, in one fell swoop, the real estate empire his father spent a lifetime building in Brooklyn and Queens.
Members of the Upper West Side’s politically potent Community Board 7 scoffed—the proposal was too discordant with the character of the neighborhood, they thought, and simply too big. Over the next few years, Trump downgraded to 14,500 units, then 8,000, but they kept rebuffing him. Meanwhile, New York’s ongoing financial crisis had ended the generous public subsidies on which Trump’s father had gorged. It was 1979. Trump was stalled. Otherwise wrapped up in the early stages of the construction of Trump Tower, in addition to his initial maneuverings in Atlantic City, Trump let his option lapse. “The toughest business decision I ever made,” he would say in The Art of the Deal.
In the fall of 1984, though, one of his staunchest foils looked out her window and spotted Trump standing by the West Side Highway in what she termed his “Fountainhead pose”—feet planted, hands on hips, his face a picture of conviction. Sally Goodgold called everybody she could reach, according to Barrett’s biography of Trump, to warn that he was going to buy the yards. She was right. Ten years earlier, he had gotten the site from Penn Central for no money down; now, in January 1985, for $115 million, he got it back—not only an option but actual ownership.
In the whole scope of his life, with the obvious exception of Election Day 2016, and maybe the night of the finale of the first season of “The Apprentice,” Trump never was riding higher than at that moment. Trump Tower was then gleaming and new, a beacon for unabashed wealth. “The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump,” read the headline in the New York Times in 1983. “The Secret to Donald Trump’s Success,” said the cover of GQ in 1984. To that point, he had experienced little else.
The Times in April 1985 compared Trump to the late Robert Moses—“New York’s master builder,” according to the paper’s obituary—who over nearly half a century in various public offices oversaw construction of the Triborough Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the West Side Highway, Jones Beach State Park, 658 playgrounds and 416 miles of parkways. Moses amassed his power methodically as a head-down insider, and he exercised it ruthlessly, believing what mattered the most was the blunt, black-and-white ability to “get things done.” Said the Times, “If Mr. Moses were to be born again, he’d probably return as Mr. Trump.”
“Trump did want to be identified with him,” Robert Caro, who wrote the definitive biography of Moses, The Power Broker, told me. “For a time, I used to hear—people would say to me—‘Donald Trump is the next Robert Moses.’ … But I always felt he himself was behind people saying that, if you know what I mean—that he wanted to be the next Robert Moses. And that’s really a terribly revealing thing. Moses, he didn’t let people stand in his way. He targeted—he not only evicted all these people, … he hounded them out like cattle. He targeted poor neighborhoods and particularly poor neighborhoods that were black … and Puerto Rican … because he felt they were the most defenseless against him.”
Caro continued: “To admire him is to say a lot about yourself.”
“Defining power in this age is certainly different than it was 25 years ago,” Trump told the Times in 1985. “Things were done less delicately. You used to be able to bull something through, but power today is much tougher to achieve.” He added, “I’ll say that I don’t think of myself as having power, and yet if I want to do something I seem to be able to get it done.”
And now what he wanted to get done was what he had wanted to get done in the first place. He wanted another shot at a legacy-cementing project on the old Penn Central yards. The mammoth mall. The giant garage. All the apartments and the very tall buildings and the even taller building that would have taken the record from the Sears Tower in Chicago. “New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” Trump said. “And, frankly, so do I,” he added.
He billed it as a potential “tremendous psychological boost to New York.” As important or more, Trump wanted to live in the penthouse, he said to Jerry Nadler, the Brooklyn-born Democrat who has been in Congress since 1992 but at the time was a member of the New York State Assembly representing the Upper West Side. “Above the clouds,” Trump told him.
And he wanted to break ground in 1987, which for a project of this magnitude was tantamount to tomorrow. The opposition that had derailed him before, gathered again at John Jay, gasped at the realization that they were going to have to fight another round against Trump—this time an ascendant, emboldened Trump.
“He gave a schedule of anticipated rapid approval by the city and anticipation of rapid start of construction, which seemed wildly ambitious to those of us who knew about the public process that you’d have to go through,” Steve Robinson, a young architect then who became intimately involved with the neighborhood’s opposition, told me. “But that’s what he said: ‘This is it, and this is when I’m going to get my approvals, and this is when I’m going to start construction.’”
Ruth Messinger, who was the neighborhood’s City Council member at the time, was at the meeting, too. “It was like, ‘I’m sure this is what you want, and here I am, and isn’t this great?’” she said in a recent interview. “Like, ‘I’m an emerging developer, I’m a great person, I can sort of do things that are good for me, and they’re good for everybody else, and here’s what I’m going to do for you.’”
There was no misunderstanding. This was the message Trump meant to convey.
“He was not that interested in anybody telling him that he had to rethink or resize his expectations,” said Capalino, the lobbyist. “He wanted what he wanted. He was confident he could get it.”
“My track record,” Trump said, “is unparalleled.”
***
The timetable wasn’t the only thing that roiled the opposition. There was also what he was proposing: a sun-blotting row of hulking buildings plus the practically phallic tower shooting into the sky. As a piece of architecture, it was “laughable,” in Robinson’s estimation, “almost childlike.”
Paul Goldberger, at the time the architecture critic for the Times, dismissed the plan as “woefully simplistic.” He thought it looked like “rocket ships lined up in bleak open space.”
Carter Wiseman, the critic for New York magazine, knew Trump from an earlier tour of Trump Tower. Trump “kept grabbing my arm, squeezing my arm, and saying, ‘Carter, you’ll appreciate this marble, this marble is quality marble,’” Wiseman told me recently. “And it looked like something that should have been in a men’s room in a whorehouse.” He had described Trump Tower in print as “an anonymous, 68-story shaft.” Now, though, as 1985 flipped to 1986, what Trump wanted to erect on the Upper West Side was no longer cartoonish and gaudy, Wiseman believed, but something more sinister.
“Trump’s vision for the Penn Yards is really based on a very old idea, one made popular in the 1920s—and since then universally discredited in theory and in fact,” Wiseman wrote. “Isolated towers from the fifties and sixties survive in most of the world’s major cities as reminders to planners that this brand of angst-inducing exclusivity is nasty to live with. Hard lessons have shown that the way to make a residential complex work is to create some sense of intimacy, or at least communal identity. But for all the adolescent, outdated striving for bigness, Trump is onto something thoroughly contemporary in the life of eighties New Yorkers. It is fear.”
Trump, after all, lived at the top of Trump Tower, high above the sidewalks and the subways, sealed off from the heart of a city he used for personal enrichment but not much else. For Wiseman, the issue wasn’t even so much the “brooding row” of buildings. It was that the development was an “island-upon-an-island,” aggressive in its separation from the city in which it stood.
Trump didn’t disagree. “I don’t want to cater to the community immediately surrounding Television City,” he told the Miami Herald. “I want to build my own thing.”
For many of the citizens of the Upper West Side, too, this was pointedly the most troublesome facet of Trump’s proposal. “He doesn’t give a shit what the zoning is, or what the neighborhood is, or what people think—he’s ready to impose his will,” says Gratz, who once called Trump “the Liberace of development.” So, Gratz, Robinson and a handful of others formed a group to try to stop him. They called it Westpride. They enlisted the help of boldface names who were neighbors—feminist Betty Friedan, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, political commentator Bill Moyers, the novelists Judith Rossner and E.L. Doctorow, and Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses. They held boat cruises and cocktail parties to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. They used the money to hire attorneys and log public records requests. Robinson, who is writing about the experience in a book called Turf War: Stopping Trump on Manhattan’s West Side, expected to be published next year, says they wanted to do more than just “throw rocks and march in the streets.” Throughout the latter half of the ’80s, the membership and fervor of Westpride and like-minded, smart- or small-development organizations soared.
New York Mayor Ed Koch, meanwhile, tangled mightily with Trump. The frequently combustible relationship between two of the biggest, brashest personalities in the biggest, brashest city in America crested on the Upper West Side. “Ed always had this sense that Donald was looking for six quarters for a dollar,” says Capalino, a Koch aide before he lobbied for Trump. Trump “liked to assert that he was going to do this and everybody else was going to go along with it,” says Alair Townsend, one of Koch’s deputy mayors, who led the administration’s negotiations with Trump. “It didn’t happen.” Koch refused to give Trump tax breaks that would have aided his efforts to build Television City; instead, his administration gave them to NBC, which stayed at Rockefeller Center rather than move to Trump’s planned development or over to New Jersey. The administration probably “gave too much,” Koch aide George Arzt told me. “However, it undercut Trump—and he recognized that no longer did he have any plan, and he yelled and screamed about it.”
Trump responded to Koch and the other prongs of this resistance in ways that would be familiar to anyone who watched his presidential campaign, or has paid even cursory attention to his tenure in the White House. He lashed out, sneering at the community activists, considering them a “small group of devout enemies” who didn’t have “enough to do.” He called Koch “a horrible manager” and a “moron,” and said he should resign. “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right,” Koch shot back. “Piggy, piggy, piggy,” the mayor added.
Vitriol wasn’t Trump’s only tactic. He tried to butter up women, many of whom found his overtures eye-rolling and unwelcome. Trump always called Townsend “hon” or “deary,” she told me. “He would consistently call me Ruthie—and there’s no one in America who calls me Ruthie,” Messinger says. “He obviously thought it was cute or seductive or something. I thought it was disgusting and stupid and out of touch.”
In 1987, Trump changed architects—but not his objective. He fired Helmut Jahn, his flashy first pick from Chicago, when he realized Jahn’s gargantuan design would never get green-lighted by the necessary city agencies and boards. And he hired Alex Cooper, acknowledged throughout the city as something like the antithesis of the flashy Jahn. Cooper was respected for his tasteful community-integrated work. For Trump, then, it was a savvy political play—except he remained unwilling to decrease the size or to give up on the world’s tallest building. Cooper’s design was scarcely any smaller than Jahn’s.
“There is absolutely no doubt that it will go through,” he told the Times. “This will be the biggest project in the history of the city,” he said in the magazine Manhattan, inc. And in 1988, Trump changed the name of the prospective development; Television City became Trump City. He did that, he said, “because I’m so happy with the way the job has developed and the tremendous response I’ve gotten.” These fact-free assessments only got bolder after his original start date for construction came and went.
The reality, though, was that he was stuck.
“Mr. Trump has so far suffered only defeats with Television City,” Goldberger wrote in the Times that year, offering an insight that would be all the more trenchant in the years and decades to come. “It would seem that Mr. Trump does not so much avoid failure as know how to land on his feet and change course so deftly that no one catches on.”
Flummoxed by political headwinds and the disciplined activism of the Upper West Side, Trump shifted his attention to the acquisition of things other people had made rather than creations of his own. In a frenetic, debt-burdened shopping spree, he bought a yacht, the Plaza Hotel, the half-finished structure of a third casino and an airline, the Eastern Airlines Shuttle—which he rebranded as the Trump Shuttle. And he started talking about running for president. He wasn’t really running, not yet, he told Newsweek, “but if I did … I’d win.”
And then the gleam of Trump’s burgeoning empire started to tarnish.
Tabloid bombshells in early 1990 about the breakup of Trump’s first marriage bled into less sensational but even more alarming headlines about his deteriorating financial situation. They appeared everywhere from USA Today and the Wall Street Journal to Businessweek and Forbes. The news jumped to TV. The tenor of the coverage of the fall of Trump was a mixture of voyeuristic fascination and tsk-tsk schadenfreude. “If Donald Trump does become the victim of overweening ambition, that will hardly be a new chapter in human nature,” political analyst Jeff Greenfield said on ABC’s “Nightline.” Trump was, it turned out, more than $3 billion in debt. “Trump was invincible,” Caro told Newsday that June. “Now he’s not, and I think that will help. Too often people used to say that you can’t fight Trump. He’s too big. … But I don’t think he has that invincible image anymore.” It was in this context that his opponents on the Upper West Side presented something they had been working on—an alternate plan for the 76-acre plot, drastically reduced, considerably more in tune with the neighborhood as a whole.
That’s when Trump did something that shocked them.
***
“Trump City,” Capalino said in Newsday in August 1990, “is absolutely central to Donald’s view of how history will judge him—whether or not as one of the 20th century’s greatest urban planners and developers.”
Four months later, though, Trump outright gave up on that goal. His bid for immortality would be replaced by a struggle for survival.
The moment of this massive hinge in his life came early one morning a couple weeks before Christmas. The Upper West Side resistance, 30 or so members, according to Gwenda Blair’s biography, gathered in a conference room of a law firm of a Westpride leader. Their meeting was scheduled for 7 a.m. Trump arrived right on time. His opponents’ alternative idea had been in the newspapers already, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but they wanted to deliver to Trump in person a formal presentation of their plan. It featured a park by the river, smaller, shorter buildings—and no world’s tallest building. And it wasn’t called Trump City but Riverside South.
“He looks at it, and he says, ‘I love it, it’s great.’ He said, ‘I want to build that,’” says Robinson, one of the architects, along with Paul Willen, environmental planner Dan Gutman and others who had devised the alternative.
One question from Trump: “He said, ‘By the way, how many square feet is it?’” Robinson recalls. “And somebody said, ‘Seven million.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘You know what this property cost me?’ And Bruce Simon, who’s one of the most powerful labor lawyers in the country”—one of the founders of Westpride—“said, ‘Donald, what’s your number?’ And Trump said, ‘I’ve got to have at least 11 million, 12 million square feet.’ That’s when Bruce stood up and said, ‘Donald, it was a pleasure to meet you—we really don’t have anything to talk about.’”
At that, though, Trump quickly relented again. “Trump said, ‘Wait, wait—wait a minute,’” Robinson says. “‘Sit down, sit down—let’s talk.’”
And then … “he agreed,” Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society at the time, told me recently.
“It wasn’t much of a negotiation,” Barbara Res, a construction manager on Trump Tower who had returned to work for Trump as a vice president in the early ’90s, told me. “He pretty much gave them what they wanted. Basically, they gave him a plan, and he said, ‘OK.’”
“He had to,” Robinson says. “He was dead in the water.”
“He came to the meeting,” Gutman adds, “and in effect capitulated.”
And that was the end of Trump City. In a news conference at City Hall, they announced this unlikely alliance. “All you folks convinced me to do really what was right,” Trump told them, and everybody else.
For Willen, the architect, it was stunning—and telling, too. “Not everybody understood what happened, and how remarkable that was,” he told me. “Yet it was somehow characteristic of Donald Trump. The 180-degree turnabout he made revealed something about his audacity and his willingness to … go in any direction at any moment.”
But this flip-flop didn’t play in public as comeuppance for a greedy developer. Quite the opposite. Good-government types lauded the unconventional compromise. And Trump earned plaudits from public officials and mostly glowing headlines for his more conciliatory stance. The optics were not altogether ideal but came nowhere close to egg on the face. Trump biographer Blair called it “a coup.” He went, said Blair, who lived on the Upper West Side at the time, from “being evil developer to being civic-minded guy.”
“Instead of having all these banshees, you know, causing him trouble, now he’s going to be standing in a photograph with the Parks Council, the Municipal Art Society, the National Resources Defense Council,” Barwick says. “All these virtuous people are suddenly on his side.”
“He used them,” Ethel Sheffer, a community board member, told me, “so that he could be standing up there with the good guys.” The key for Trump, though, was this: “They believe,” Sheffer says, “they were using him.”
“He’s a very good deal-maker,” Richard Kahan, who helped broker the agreement between Trump and his former adversaries, told the Times back then. “It’s quite extraordinary that a man can work on a project for four or five years”—longer even than that, counting the ’70s—“and then be able to change direction so quickly and make a brand-new start. Whether he’s doing it out of self-interest or in the public interest, the result is good for everybody.”
And it was in fact good for Trump. The Riverside South coming-together, “his abrupt about-face,” Goldberger wrote in 1991, “hit urban development circles with about the same impact that the news that the Soviet Union had given up on Communism had in political circles. Don’t laugh; there are more similarities between Mr. Trump and the Soviet Union than one might think. After all, the developer and the country are motivated by the same impulse: survival. Mr. Trump knew that it would be a freezing day in August before his own plan could ever win approval and, like any skillful politician, he jumped on the opposition bandwagon so deftly that he made it look like his own.”
“I didn’t surprise anyone as much as I surprised myself,” Trump would say in a subsequent book, The Art of the Comeback. “After I decided to go with the civics, I went around Manhattan telling people this was either the dumbest or the smartest decision I’d ever made in business.”
It was one of the smartest. Because the partnership loosened the logjam and made the proposed project palatable to the politicians who needed to support it—from Messinger, by then the borough president in Manhattan, to Mayor David Dinkins, who had succeeded Koch, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo. And because of what it allowed Trump to do next: find a buyer.
In 1994, Trump and a consortium of Hong Kong businessmen worked out a deal. In essence, they would be the cash, and he would be the face—they would pay $90 million to assume the more than $250 million Trump owed on the property to Chase and other banks, plus approximately $6 million in back taxes, according to the South China Morning Post at the time, and he would keep a 30 percent ownership stake and be responsible for day-to-day permitting and construction. The agreement almost ended just before both sides signed contracts because Trump got angry and “used a string of foul language, including racial epithets regarding Asians,” a lawyer close to the negotiations told American Banker in August of that year. But the Hong Kong businessmen shrugged their shoulders. “Doing business with Mr. Trump is anybody’s guess,” a spokesman for the group said at the time. “We are linked up with Mr. Trump purely because of this piece of land.” It was, in other words, a good enough deal for them to put up with the periodic boorishness of the seller.
It was a good deal for Trump, too, though. He had filed for corporate bankruptcy four times in 1991 and ’92, but the Riverside South sale to the Hong Kong group helped him avoid having to file for personal bankruptcy. By the end of that year, he was being called “the king of comebacks” on CNN. “Trump is definitely back,” Trump said.
“The Hong Kong guys saved him,” says Arzt, the Koch aide.
“It was absolutely essential to him not dying,” Res adds.
And Trump played his prescribed part in the partnership. Construction started in 1997—a decade later than he had predicted. The project was smaller. It wasn’t fully or even mostly his. But his name was on it. “In a way, it is my greatest construction achievement,” he said. And in 1999, in front of Trump Place, he let the magician David Blaine get “buried alive” for a week in a plexiglass coffin. It’s something Houdini wanted to do, Blaine explained, but he died before he could. It was a showy ode to the art of the escape. Reporters swarmed. The lesson Trump would take from the spectacle? “You can do things in your own mind that you don’t think you can do.” Moreover, he let Blaine do the stunt on the site for a reason that was far more obvious. “I did it,” Trump told the New York Post, “because everybody gets to see the buildings.”
***
Today, hardly anybody talks about the buildings. Trump Place is not Trump Tower. It’s not even the Grand Hyatt. Trump Place is just … buildings. One afternoon not long ago, I walked the length of the old Penn Central yards, up, then back. Three of the buildings that once said Trump Place no longer do. Residents angry about his election had the large gold letters removed. A judge in Manhattan recently ruled that people in another one of the buildings could make the same choice. I stood there and squinted in the sun to make out the scantest visible remnants of his name. I considered the obvious metaphor. But it’s not right. Trump’s not fading away. And what Trump got from the Upper West Side was of such significance that it makes this still one of the most important plots of land in his life.
What he got from these 13 blocks wasn’t what he wanted, not even close, not in 1975, not in 1985—but he still got a lot. He got to keep going.
He made a lot of money, too, albeit not as much as he could have. Even so, the coffers filled up, especially after the company he sold to in 1994 sold to another company in 2005—a transaction that gave Trump small but lucrative stakes in a pair of office towers in New York and San Francisco. He publicly derided the deal as not good enough and filed a lawsuit, claiming he could have done better, which a court dismissed as nonsense.
But perhaps most importantly, from Television City and Trump City and Riverside South and Trump Place, he got an education. And the lessons Trump took from his decades of attempting to develop the property, in the indeterminate way he absorbs what he does, were lessons, too, for the people who worked against him, and then with him.
“He took command of the ground,” Barwick says. “The whole posture wasn’t, ‘OK, you’ve got me, I’m going to give in to your will.’ He shared—or pretended to, at least—shared the vision.” And that was after years of demanding, so unyieldingly, so much more. “He turned quickly. He’s capable of turning on a dime.”
Two photos. Top: Trump peers out of a helicopter window and looks at the southern Manhattan skyline, with the Twin Towers in a prominent position. Bottom: The dirty facade of a building after the words “Trump Place” were removed from the exterior after his election to the presidency. | Getty Images
Mogul to President Trump peers out over New York from a helicopter in 1987. After his election, “Trump Place” was stripped from three buildings. | Joe McNally/Getty Images; Peter Foley/Getty Images
“I also think he recognized this was a defeat that he had to turn into a victory, and he enlisted us in a way that did that for him,” Gratz says. “And we went along with it because we knew we could have a major impact.” Someone was going to build there, they decided, and they wanted some say over it. “And that park and those designs and that street grid and all the urban features are there not because he has any clue how to do these things, none, zero, zip—nor does he care—unless he’s forced to. And we forced him.”
What, then, could the “resistance” today learn looking back at Trump’s experience on the Upper West Side?
“You have to find a way to get him over a barrel,” Gutman told me. “You have to back him into a corner or get him over a barrel.”
And what did Trump learn?
“Did he learn from the Television City debacle that he shouldn’t get too big, too fast, too loud? No,” Sexton says. “He put something out that was so big, so fast, so loud, it scared the hell out of people, and they mobilized to oppose it—that was an actual tactical blunder by him. But it doesn’t seem like he learned the lesson of not doing that anymore.”
And why would he have? Ultimately, Sexton says, he wasn’t punished.
“So maybe what he learned,” he says, “is—yeah—think big, talk big, make a big splash. And let the other guys fight to keep up with him.”
On the Upper West Side, Trump was overbearing, tactless and tone-deaf. His proposals were extreme, offensive and ill-conceived. Many of the people who fought him thought they beat him. They prevented him from doing what he actually wanted to do. But those buildings were built. That money was money he made. It’s the Trump paradox: He’s the most successful failer of all time. Because what really happened with what became Trump Place was that he created such a disturbance for so long that his opponents literally did his work, designing his development for him, which saved him, which enabled him to maintain a veneer of credibility, which allowed “The Apprentice” to present him as it did, which let him run for president. The election was an apt capstone. He lost (the popular vote), but he won (the Electoral College). And so, his transactional, bluff-and-bluster, react-to-me life became a candidacy, and now a presidency, that is driving change on a far larger canvas than just the New York skyline.
It was supposed to be his legacy. Today it’s a mere shadow of his dream—but he declared victory anyway. How the saga of Trump City foreshadowed the president’s chaotic path to the White House.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
he week before Thanksgiving in 1985, a 39-year-old Donald Trump announced his plan to make sure nobody would ever forget him.
At a showy news conference at his sleek, glass-wrapped Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan, and later that evening at a cramped, tense community meeting in the cafeteria of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the Upper West Side, Trump unveiled drawings and models of his vision for the old Penn Central rail yards on the bank of the Hudson River. It wasn’t just the largest undeveloped tract of land in Manhattan; it was “the greatest piece of land in urban America,” he crowed. And on those 76 acres, he intended to build nearly 8,000 apartments and condominiums for up to 20,000 people, almost 10,000 parking spots, some 3.6 million square feet of television and movie studio space, and some 2 million square feet of “prestigious” stores. There would be no fewer than six 76-story towers, and looming atop it all one unprecedented skyscraper twice that height. It was a behemoth endeavor meant to go, his promotional materials proclaimed, “beyond the grandeur and excellence that has become synonymous with projects bearing the Trump name.”
This was supposed to be his legacy. Not Trump Tower. Not a clutch of casinos. Certainly not a political office of any kind.
In a metropolis of superlatives, he was striving to be New York’s biggest builder, a cocksure maker of tangible, unmissable things—and here, now, he wanted to build a city within the city, a conspicuously separate entity, of a style and scale no one had accomplished, not even the man who had shaped modern New York, Robert Moses. It was, in the words of the New York Times, his “bid for immortality.” First, he called it Television City; then, simply and unsurprisingly, Trump City. That centerpiece skyscraper would be the world’s tallest building, and he was going to live at the top.
And he failed.
Confronted over the span of two decades with a complicated thicket of social and governmental interests, frustrated by the incremental realities of bureaucracy and stymied by a disciplined, well-funded and committed opposition, Trump raged and feuded with nonpliant politicians and intractable citizens and critics from an established intellectual elite. In the end, nothing even approaching his grandest ambition was ever built. No other chapter in Trump’s long life reveals more about the man who now inhabits the Oval Office. “It’s all a wonderful sort of mosaic,” says Jim Capalino, one of New York’s most prominent lobbyists, who worked for Trump at the time, “of all of the characteristics and all of the personality traits and bluster and bravado and insecurity that are … shaping his presidency.”
The behavior of Trump during his manic first year and a half as president that has most confounded observers has its clear precursors in the war he waged on the edge of Manhattan. Evident then as now are a bullheaded disregard for nuance and detail, unpredictability magnified by impulsivity—and ultimately a peculiar strain of pragmatism some see as admirable and others consider merely cold-eyed. The insights the saga provides into Trump could fuel a playbook for the current “resistance” battling him and his administration—but also serve as a reminder of the strengths that make him nearly impossible to back into a corner. Thwarted by his opponents and weakened by the consequences of his own worst attributes, Trump actually did come away with something. Television City never happened, and Trump City never happened, either, but Trump nonetheless pocketed millions of dollars. Buildings were built. And some of those buildings still bear—at least for now—the name Trump Place.
“I’ve always given Trump credit,” says Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist and an urban critic who was one of his harshest foes, “for recognizing that defeat was staring him in the face—and switching gears.”
“He was a survivor and a chameleon,” says Rich Herschlag, chief borough engineer for Manhattan in the 1990s. And as much as some people see a string of losses, Herschlag came to view the actual result on the Upper West Side as a triumph for Trump, likening it to the “umbilical cord” connecting the man then to the man now. “Without it,” he says, “it’s pretty safe to say he would have been selling blenders on cable television.”
Trump found a way to win after all—with the help, remarkably, of enemies he converted to allies. What looked like Trump’s white whale in the ’80s ended up in the ’90s being key to his ability to dodge personal financial ruin and permanent reputational stain. He got to keep selling—not blenders on cable television, but himself, on NBC, in prime time, with “The Apprentice,” which amounted to the groundwork for his presidential bid.
“I think he thought he got away with something there,” says Brendan Sexton, a former president of the Municipal Art Society, an organization more than a century old that promotes historical preservation and sensible development in New York—and that tangled with Trump in this instance before ultimately teaming up with him. “And maybe he did.”
I asked Sexton what lessons he took from his experiences with Trump on the Upper West Side.
“That what he does, he has been successful at,” he said. “And that it’s important to recognize that, or you go into the next discussion overconfident, thinking that he couldn’t possibly pull this crap off. And you wake up six months later, look around, and wonder, ‘How the hell did he pull that crap off?’ And that’s a real danger. And it keeps happening.”
***
Trump’s obsession with the site he ultimately wanted to turn into his own city started when New York was a fiscal wreck and desperate for any new economic activity.
In the mid-1970s, Trump obtained options to develop three of the choicest assets of the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad—the crumbling Commodore Hotel at Grand Central Station, the West Side rail yards running from 30th to 39th streets and those running from 59th to 72nd streets. The properties needed a developer “who seemed best positioned in the New York market to get rezoning and government financing,” Ned Eichler, a vice president of Palmieri and Co., the firm appointed to dispose of the real estate of the bankrupt railroad, told reporter Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice in 1979. Zoning, Eichler told Barrett, is a “highly political activity,” especially in New York, and there had not been a “rezoning of this magnitude on a piece of property this politically sensitive in the recent history of the city.” Eichler’s assessment was that Penn Central would benefit from having a developer who was “very, very high in his political position.” Trump was not yet 30 and completely unproven, but thanks to his father’s considerable wealth and political connections, he was just that kind of developer.
The Palmieri people in charge of the Penn Central properties had pegged the younger Trump to be in some sense as desperate as the city was—desperate to earn the approval and affection of his flinty, businesslike father by outdoing him. John Koskinen was the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in President Barack Obama’s second term. Back then, though, he was a Palmieri principal along with Eichler. While Eichler did the railyards negotiations, Koskinen handled the Commodore. He found Trump “irrepressible.”
A young Donald Trump leans over a model of the skyline from a proposed development. | Getty Images
Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images
“He had a tremendous amount of energy,” Koskinen told me.
Trump took his option on the Commodore and turned it into the Grand Hyatt. He took his option on the yards from 30th to 39th Streets and turned it into a brokerage fee from the city and the state; the land would ultimately house the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Before doing either of those two things, though, he took his option on the yards from 59th to 72nd Streets, the true jewel of the lot, he always believed, and pitched 20,000 apartments—an audacious proposal that would have surpassed, in one fell swoop, the real estate empire his father spent a lifetime building in Brooklyn and Queens.
Members of the Upper West Side’s politically potent Community Board 7 scoffed—the proposal was too discordant with the character of the neighborhood, they thought, and simply too big. Over the next few years, Trump downgraded to 14,500 units, then 8,000, but they kept rebuffing him. Meanwhile, New York’s ongoing financial crisis had ended the generous public subsidies on which Trump’s father had gorged. It was 1979. Trump was stalled. Otherwise wrapped up in the early stages of the construction of Trump Tower, in addition to his initial maneuverings in Atlantic City, Trump let his option lapse. “The toughest business decision I ever made,” he would say in The Art of the Deal.
In the fall of 1984, though, one of his staunchest foils looked out her window and spotted Trump standing by the West Side Highway in what she termed his “Fountainhead pose”—feet planted, hands on hips, his face a picture of conviction. Sally Goodgold called everybody she could reach, according to Barrett’s biography of Trump, to warn that he was going to buy the yards. She was right. Ten years earlier, he had gotten the site from Penn Central for no money down; now, in January 1985, for $115 million, he got it back—not only an option but actual ownership.
In the whole scope of his life, with the obvious exception of Election Day 2016, and maybe the night of the finale of the first season of “The Apprentice,” Trump never was riding higher than at that moment. Trump Tower was then gleaming and new, a beacon for unabashed wealth. “The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump,” read the headline in the New York Times in 1983. “The Secret to Donald Trump’s Success,” said the cover of GQ in 1984. To that point, he had experienced little else.
The Times in April 1985 compared Trump to the late Robert Moses—“New York’s master builder,” according to the paper’s obituary—who over nearly half a century in various public offices oversaw construction of the Triborough Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the West Side Highway, Jones Beach State Park, 658 playgrounds and 416 miles of parkways. Moses amassed his power methodically as a head-down insider, and he exercised it ruthlessly, believing what mattered the most was the blunt, black-and-white ability to “get things done.” Said the Times, “If Mr. Moses were to be born again, he’d probably return as Mr. Trump.”
“Trump did want to be identified with him,” Robert Caro, who wrote the definitive biography of Moses, The Power Broker, told me. “For a time, I used to hear—people would say to me—‘Donald Trump is the next Robert Moses.’ … But I always felt he himself was behind people saying that, if you know what I mean—that he wanted to be the next Robert Moses. And that’s really a terribly revealing thing. Moses, he didn’t let people stand in his way. He targeted—he not only evicted all these people, … he hounded them out like cattle. He targeted poor neighborhoods and particularly poor neighborhoods that were black … and Puerto Rican … because he felt they were the most defenseless against him.”
Caro continued: “To admire him is to say a lot about yourself.”
“Defining power in this age is certainly different than it was 25 years ago,” Trump told the Times in 1985. “Things were done less delicately. You used to be able to bull something through, but power today is much tougher to achieve.” He added, “I’ll say that I don’t think of myself as having power, and yet if I want to do something I seem to be able to get it done.”
And now what he wanted to get done was what he had wanted to get done in the first place. He wanted another shot at a legacy-cementing project on the old Penn Central yards. The mammoth mall. The giant garage. All the apartments and the very tall buildings and the even taller building that would have taken the record from the Sears Tower in Chicago. “New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” Trump said. “And, frankly, so do I,” he added.
He billed it as a potential “tremendous psychological boost to New York.” As important or more, Trump wanted to live in the penthouse, he said to Jerry Nadler, the Brooklyn-born Democrat who has been in Congress since 1992 but at the time was a member of the New York State Assembly representing the Upper West Side. “Above the clouds,” Trump told him.
And he wanted to break ground in 1987, which for a project of this magnitude was tantamount to tomorrow. The opposition that had derailed him before, gathered again at John Jay, gasped at the realization that they were going to have to fight another round against Trump—this time an ascendant, emboldened Trump.
“He gave a schedule of anticipated rapid approval by the city and anticipation of rapid start of construction, which seemed wildly ambitious to those of us who knew about the public process that you’d have to go through,” Steve Robinson, a young architect then who became intimately involved with the neighborhood’s opposition, told me. “But that’s what he said: ‘This is it, and this is when I’m going to get my approvals, and this is when I’m going to start construction.’”
Ruth Messinger, who was the neighborhood’s City Council member at the time, was at the meeting, too. “It was like, ‘I’m sure this is what you want, and here I am, and isn’t this great?’” she said in a recent interview. “Like, ‘I’m an emerging developer, I’m a great person, I can sort of do things that are good for me, and they’re good for everybody else, and here’s what I’m going to do for you.’”
There was no misunderstanding. This was the message Trump meant to convey.
“He was not that interested in anybody telling him that he had to rethink or resize his expectations,” said Capalino, the lobbyist. “He wanted what he wanted. He was confident he could get it.”
“My track record,” Trump said, “is unparalleled.”
***
The timetable wasn’t the only thing that roiled the opposition. There was also what he was proposing: a sun-blotting row of hulking buildings plus the practically phallic tower shooting into the sky. As a piece of architecture, it was “laughable,” in Robinson’s estimation, “almost childlike.”
Paul Goldberger, at the time the architecture critic for the Times, dismissed the plan as “woefully simplistic.” He thought it looked like “rocket ships lined up in bleak open space.”
Carter Wiseman, the critic for New York magazine, knew Trump from an earlier tour of Trump Tower. Trump “kept grabbing my arm, squeezing my arm, and saying, ‘Carter, you’ll appreciate this marble, this marble is quality marble,’” Wiseman told me recently. “And it looked like something that should have been in a men’s room in a whorehouse.” He had described Trump Tower in print as “an anonymous, 68-story shaft.” Now, though, as 1985 flipped to 1986, what Trump wanted to erect on the Upper West Side was no longer cartoonish and gaudy, Wiseman believed, but something more sinister.
“Trump’s vision for the Penn Yards is really based on a very old idea, one made popular in the 1920s—and since then universally discredited in theory and in fact,” Wiseman wrote. “Isolated towers from the fifties and sixties survive in most of the world’s major cities as reminders to planners that this brand of angst-inducing exclusivity is nasty to live with. Hard lessons have shown that the way to make a residential complex work is to create some sense of intimacy, or at least communal identity. But for all the adolescent, outdated striving for bigness, Trump is onto something thoroughly contemporary in the life of eighties New Yorkers. It is fear.”
Trump, after all, lived at the top of Trump Tower, high above the sidewalks and the subways, sealed off from the heart of a city he used for personal enrichment but not much else. For Wiseman, the issue wasn’t even so much the “brooding row” of buildings. It was that the development was an “island-upon-an-island,” aggressive in its separation from the city in which it stood.
Trump didn’t disagree. “I don’t want to cater to the community immediately surrounding Television City,” he told the Miami Herald. “I want to build my own thing.”
For many of the citizens of the Upper West Side, too, this was pointedly the most troublesome facet of Trump’s proposal. “He doesn’t give a shit what the zoning is, or what the neighborhood is, or what people think—he’s ready to impose his will,” says Gratz, who once called Trump “the Liberace of development.” So, Gratz, Robinson and a handful of others formed a group to try to stop him. They called it Westpride. They enlisted the help of boldface names who were neighbors—feminist Betty Friedan, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, political commentator Bill Moyers, the novelists Judith Rossner and E.L. Doctorow, and Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses. They held boat cruises and cocktail parties to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. They used the money to hire attorneys and log public records requests. Robinson, who is writing about the experience in a book called Turf War: Stopping Trump on Manhattan’s West Side, expected to be published next year, says they wanted to do more than just “throw rocks and march in the streets.” Throughout the latter half of the ’80s, the membership and fervor of Westpride and like-minded, smart- or small-development organizations soared.
New York Mayor Ed Koch, meanwhile, tangled mightily with Trump. The frequently combustible relationship between two of the biggest, brashest personalities in the biggest, brashest city in America crested on the Upper West Side. “Ed always had this sense that Donald was looking for six quarters for a dollar,” says Capalino, a Koch aide before he lobbied for Trump. Trump “liked to assert that he was going to do this and everybody else was going to go along with it,” says Alair Townsend, one of Koch’s deputy mayors, who led the administration’s negotiations with Trump. “It didn’t happen.” Koch refused to give Trump tax breaks that would have aided his efforts to build Television City; instead, his administration gave them to NBC, which stayed at Rockefeller Center rather than move to Trump’s planned development or over to New Jersey. The administration probably “gave too much,” Koch aide George Arzt told me. “However, it undercut Trump—and he recognized that no longer did he have any plan, and he yelled and screamed about it.”
Trump responded to Koch and the other prongs of this resistance in ways that would be familiar to anyone who watched his presidential campaign, or has paid even cursory attention to his tenure in the White House. He lashed out, sneering at the community activists, considering them a “small group of devout enemies” who didn’t have “enough to do.” He called Koch “a horrible manager” and a “moron,” and said he should resign. “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right,” Koch shot back. “Piggy, piggy, piggy,” the mayor added.
Vitriol wasn’t Trump’s only tactic. He tried to butter up women, many of whom found his overtures eye-rolling and unwelcome. Trump always called Townsend “hon” or “deary,” she told me. “He would consistently call me Ruthie—and there’s no one in America who calls me Ruthie,” Messinger says. “He obviously thought it was cute or seductive or something. I thought it was disgusting and stupid and out of touch.”
In 1987, Trump changed architects—but not his objective. He fired Helmut Jahn, his flashy first pick from Chicago, when he realized Jahn’s gargantuan design would never get green-lighted by the necessary city agencies and boards. And he hired Alex Cooper, acknowledged throughout the city as something like the antithesis of the flashy Jahn. Cooper was respected for his tasteful community-integrated work. For Trump, then, it was a savvy political play—except he remained unwilling to decrease the size or to give up on the world’s tallest building. Cooper’s design was scarcely any smaller than Jahn’s.
“There is absolutely no doubt that it will go through,” he told the Times. “This will be the biggest project in the history of the city,” he said in the magazine Manhattan, inc. And in 1988, Trump changed the name of the prospective development; Television City became Trump City. He did that, he said, “because I’m so happy with the way the job has developed and the tremendous response I’ve gotten.” These fact-free assessments only got bolder after his original start date for construction came and went.
The reality, though, was that he was stuck.
“Mr. Trump has so far suffered only defeats with Television City,” Goldberger wrote in the Times that year, offering an insight that would be all the more trenchant in the years and decades to come. “It would seem that Mr. Trump does not so much avoid failure as know how to land on his feet and change course so deftly that no one catches on.”
Flummoxed by political headwinds and the disciplined activism of the Upper West Side, Trump shifted his attention to the acquisition of things other people had made rather than creations of his own. In a frenetic, debt-burdened shopping spree, he bought a yacht, the Plaza Hotel, the half-finished structure of a third casino and an airline, the Eastern Airlines Shuttle—which he rebranded as the Trump Shuttle. And he started talking about running for president. He wasn’t really running, not yet, he told Newsweek, “but if I did … I’d win.”
And then the gleam of Trump’s burgeoning empire started to tarnish.
Tabloid bombshells in early 1990 about the breakup of Trump’s first marriage bled into less sensational but even more alarming headlines about his deteriorating financial situation. They appeared everywhere from USA Today and the Wall Street Journal to Businessweek and Forbes. The news jumped to TV. The tenor of the coverage of the fall of Trump was a mixture of voyeuristic fascination and tsk-tsk schadenfreude. “If Donald Trump does become the victim of overweening ambition, that will hardly be a new chapter in human nature,” political analyst Jeff Greenfield said on ABC’s “Nightline.” Trump was, it turned out, more than $3 billion in debt. “Trump was invincible,” Caro told Newsday that June. “Now he’s not, and I think that will help. Too often people used to say that you can’t fight Trump. He’s too big. … But I don’t think he has that invincible image anymore.” It was in this context that his opponents on the Upper West Side presented something they had been working on—an alternate plan for the 76-acre plot, drastically reduced, considerably more in tune with the neighborhood as a whole.
That’s when Trump did something that shocked them.
***
“Trump City,” Capalino said in Newsday in August 1990, “is absolutely central to Donald’s view of how history will judge him—whether or not as one of the 20th century’s greatest urban planners and developers.”
Four months later, though, Trump outright gave up on that goal. His bid for immortality would be replaced by a struggle for survival.
The moment of this massive hinge in his life came early one morning a couple weeks before Christmas. The Upper West Side resistance, 30 or so members, according to Gwenda Blair’s biography, gathered in a conference room of a law firm of a Westpride leader. Their meeting was scheduled for 7 a.m. Trump arrived right on time. His opponents’ alternative idea had been in the newspapers already, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but they wanted to deliver to Trump in person a formal presentation of their plan. It featured a park by the river, smaller, shorter buildings—and no world’s tallest building. And it wasn’t called Trump City but Riverside South.
“He looks at it, and he says, ‘I love it, it’s great.’ He said, ‘I want to build that,’” says Robinson, one of the architects, along with Paul Willen, environmental planner Dan Gutman and others who had devised the alternative.
One question from Trump: “He said, ‘By the way, how many square feet is it?’” Robinson recalls. “And somebody said, ‘Seven million.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘You know what this property cost me?’ And Bruce Simon, who’s one of the most powerful labor lawyers in the country”—one of the founders of Westpride—“said, ‘Donald, what’s your number?’ And Trump said, ‘I’ve got to have at least 11 million, 12 million square feet.’ That’s when Bruce stood up and said, ‘Donald, it was a pleasure to meet you—we really don’t have anything to talk about.’”
At that, though, Trump quickly relented again. “Trump said, ‘Wait, wait—wait a minute,’” Robinson says. “‘Sit down, sit down—let’s talk.’”
And then … “he agreed,” Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society at the time, told me recently.
“It wasn’t much of a negotiation,” Barbara Res, a construction manager on Trump Tower who had returned to work for Trump as a vice president in the early ’90s, told me. “He pretty much gave them what they wanted. Basically, they gave him a plan, and he said, ‘OK.’”
“He had to,” Robinson says. “He was dead in the water.”
“He came to the meeting,” Gutman adds, “and in effect capitulated.”
And that was the end of Trump City. In a news conference at City Hall, they announced this unlikely alliance. “All you folks convinced me to do really what was right,” Trump told them, and everybody else.
For Willen, the architect, it was stunning—and telling, too. “Not everybody understood what happened, and how remarkable that was,” he told me. “Yet it was somehow characteristic of Donald Trump. The 180-degree turnabout he made revealed something about his audacity and his willingness to … go in any direction at any moment.”
But this flip-flop didn’t play in public as comeuppance for a greedy developer. Quite the opposite. Good-government types lauded the unconventional compromise. And Trump earned plaudits from public officials and mostly glowing headlines for his more conciliatory stance. The optics were not altogether ideal but came nowhere close to egg on the face. Trump biographer Blair called it “a coup.” He went, said Blair, who lived on the Upper West Side at the time, from “being evil developer to being civic-minded guy.”
“Instead of having all these banshees, you know, causing him trouble, now he’s going to be standing in a photograph with the Parks Council, the Municipal Art Society, the National Resources Defense Council,” Barwick says. “All these virtuous people are suddenly on his side.”
“He used them,” Ethel Sheffer, a community board member, told me, “so that he could be standing up there with the good guys.” The key for Trump, though, was this: “They believe,” Sheffer says, “they were using him.”
“He’s a very good deal-maker,” Richard Kahan, who helped broker the agreement between Trump and his former adversaries, told the Times back then. “It’s quite extraordinary that a man can work on a project for four or five years”—longer even than that, counting the ’70s—“and then be able to change direction so quickly and make a brand-new start. Whether he’s doing it out of self-interest or in the public interest, the result is good for everybody.”
And it was in fact good for Trump. The Riverside South coming-together, “his abrupt about-face,” Goldberger wrote in 1991, “hit urban development circles with about the same impact that the news that the Soviet Union had given up on Communism had in political circles. Don’t laugh; there are more similarities between Mr. Trump and the Soviet Union than one might think. After all, the developer and the country are motivated by the same impulse: survival. Mr. Trump knew that it would be a freezing day in August before his own plan could ever win approval and, like any skillful politician, he jumped on the opposition bandwagon so deftly that he made it look like his own.”
“I didn’t surprise anyone as much as I surprised myself,” Trump would say in a subsequent book, The Art of the Comeback. “After I decided to go with the civics, I went around Manhattan telling people this was either the dumbest or the smartest decision I’d ever made in business.”
It was one of the smartest. Because the partnership loosened the logjam and made the proposed project palatable to the politicians who needed to support it—from Messinger, by then the borough president in Manhattan, to Mayor David Dinkins, who had succeeded Koch, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo. And because of what it allowed Trump to do next: find a buyer.
In 1994, Trump and a consortium of Hong Kong businessmen worked out a deal. In essence, they would be the cash, and he would be the face—they would pay $90 million to assume the more than $250 million Trump owed on the property to Chase and other banks, plus approximately $6 million in back taxes, according to the South China Morning Post at the time, and he would keep a 30 percent ownership stake and be responsible for day-to-day permitting and construction. The agreement almost ended just before both sides signed contracts because Trump got angry and “used a string of foul language, including racial epithets regarding Asians,” a lawyer close to the negotiations told American Banker in August of that year. But the Hong Kong businessmen shrugged their shoulders. “Doing business with Mr. Trump is anybody’s guess,” a spokesman for the group said at the time. “We are linked up with Mr. Trump purely because of this piece of land.” It was, in other words, a good enough deal for them to put up with the periodic boorishness of the seller.
It was a good deal for Trump, too, though. He had filed for corporate bankruptcy four times in 1991 and ’92, but the Riverside South sale to the Hong Kong group helped him avoid having to file for personal bankruptcy. By the end of that year, he was being called “the king of comebacks” on CNN. “Trump is definitely back,” Trump said.
“The Hong Kong guys saved him,” says Arzt, the Koch aide.
“It was absolutely essential to him not dying,” Res adds.
And Trump played his prescribed part in the partnership. Construction started in 1997—a decade later than he had predicted. The project was smaller. It wasn’t fully or even mostly his. But his name was on it. “In a way, it is my greatest construction achievement,” he said. And in 1999, in front of Trump Place, he let the magician David Blaine get “buried alive” for a week in a plexiglass coffin. It’s something Houdini wanted to do, Blaine explained, but he died before he could. It was a showy ode to the art of the escape. Reporters swarmed. The lesson Trump would take from the spectacle? “You can do things in your own mind that you don’t think you can do.” Moreover, he let Blaine do the stunt on the site for a reason that was far more obvious. “I did it,” Trump told the New York Post, “because everybody gets to see the buildings.”
***
Today, hardly anybody talks about the buildings. Trump Place is not Trump Tower. It’s not even the Grand Hyatt. Trump Place is just … buildings. One afternoon not long ago, I walked the length of the old Penn Central yards, up, then back. Three of the buildings that once said Trump Place no longer do. Residents angry about his election had the large gold letters removed. A judge in Manhattan recently ruled that people in another one of the buildings could make the same choice. I stood there and squinted in the sun to make out the scantest visible remnants of his name. I considered the obvious metaphor. But it’s not right. Trump’s not fading away. And what Trump got from the Upper West Side was of such significance that it makes this still one of the most important plots of land in his life.
What he got from these 13 blocks wasn’t what he wanted, not even close, not in 1975, not in 1985—but he still got a lot. He got to keep going.
He made a lot of money, too, albeit not as much as he could have. Even so, the coffers filled up, especially after the company he sold to in 1994 sold to another company in 2005—a transaction that gave Trump small but lucrative stakes in a pair of office towers in New York and San Francisco. He publicly derided the deal as not good enough and filed a lawsuit, claiming he could have done better, which a court dismissed as nonsense.
But perhaps most importantly, from Television City and Trump City and Riverside South and Trump Place, he got an education. And the lessons Trump took from his decades of attempting to develop the property, in the indeterminate way he absorbs what he does, were lessons, too, for the people who worked against him, and then with him.
“He took command of the ground,” Barwick says. “The whole posture wasn’t, ‘OK, you’ve got me, I’m going to give in to your will.’ He shared—or pretended to, at least—shared the vision.” And that was after years of demanding, so unyieldingly, so much more. “He turned quickly. He’s capable of turning on a dime.”
Two photos. Top: Trump peers out of a helicopter window and looks at the southern Manhattan skyline, with the Twin Towers in a prominent position. Bottom: The dirty facade of a building after the words “Trump Place” were removed from the exterior after his election to the presidency. | Getty Images
Mogul to President Trump peers out over New York from a helicopter in 1987. After his election, “Trump Place” was stripped from three buildings. | Joe McNally/Getty Images; Peter Foley/Getty Images
“I also think he recognized this was a defeat that he had to turn into a victory, and he enlisted us in a way that did that for him,” Gratz says. “And we went along with it because we knew we could have a major impact.” Someone was going to build there, they decided, and they wanted some say over it. “And that park and those designs and that street grid and all the urban features are there not because he has any clue how to do these things, none, zero, zip—nor does he care—unless he’s forced to. And we forced him.”
What, then, could the “resistance” today learn looking back at Trump’s experience on the Upper West Side?
“You have to find a way to get him over a barrel,” Gutman told me. “You have to back him into a corner or get him over a barrel.”
And what did Trump learn?
“Did he learn from the Television City debacle that he shouldn’t get too big, too fast, too loud? No,” Sexton says. “He put something out that was so big, so fast, so loud, it scared the hell out of people, and they mobilized to oppose it—that was an actual tactical blunder by him. But it doesn’t seem like he learned the lesson of not doing that anymore.”
And why would he have? Ultimately, Sexton says, he wasn’t punished.
“So maybe what he learned,” he says, “is—yeah—think big, talk big, make a big splash. And let the other guys fight to keep up with him.”
On the Upper West Side, Trump was overbearing, tactless and tone-deaf. His proposals were extreme, offensive and ill-conceived. Many of the people who fought him thought they beat him. They prevented him from doing what he actually wanted to do. But those buildings were built. That money was money he made. It’s the Trump paradox: He’s the most successful failer of all time. Because what really happened with what became Trump Place was that he created such a disturbance for so long that his opponents literally did his work, designing his development for him, which saved him, which enabled him to maintain a veneer of credibility, which allowed “The Apprentice” to present him as it did, which let him run for president. The election was an apt capstone. He lost (the popular vote), but he won (the Electoral College). And so, his transactional, bluff-and-bluster, react-to-me life became a candidacy, and now a presidency, that is driving change on a far larger canvas than just the New York skyline.
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