Opinion What children know that Donald Trump doesn’t
Lessons from the lunchroom could help the former president understand that sooner or later, outlaw glamour wears off.
New York would’ve been proud. The Big Apple was an inspiration for our school’s hustling brokers. For Gen X kids in the American South, the city’s flashy lifestyle embodied success, from its playboy millionaires in Trump Tower to the hip-hop stars of the outer boroughs turning their music into a multibillion-dollar industry. Its icons swaggered like invincibles, seeming to get away with it all, which made an impression on the schoolyard moguls whose business was literally under the table.
Donald Trump’s best-selling book of the day, “The Art of the Deal,” put a finger on this bad-boy glamour. “Bad publicity is better than no publicity at all,” the ghostwritten maxim went. “Controversy, in short, sells.” That’s certainly how things worked at school. Whenever a student was reprimanded for trading pizza, everyone knew whom to ask next time. I learned my preferred candy guy trafficked in atomic fireballs only when he got busted at school for selling them. I was soon in trouble for buying them, caught red-handed — my fingertips and tongue stained scarlet by the food coloring.
It appears to work in politics, too, at least for Trump. He won the 2016 presidential election after saying and doing things that are usually fatal to one’s political career, such as disparaging prisoners of war and boasting on tape about groping women. Even after minor things — he once ate chain-restaurant pizza with a knife and fork in Times Square and on camera, an unpardonable offense in New York — he was the talk of the town. Controversy not only sold, it elected.
But there should be a line. Chaos results when norms and rules no longer matter. Kids carrying backpacks full of candy and pockets full of money invite mischief. Shady business practices lead to conflicts and corruption. Some things should be disqualifying, if not in the eyes of the law, then in the choices of consumers. And voters.
For a jury of Trump’s peers last week, he crossed that line. But will getting caught and punished simply improve his political fortunes? Or will he get away with it, becoming president again? Trump paid no political penalty for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on U.S. Capitol, despite being impeached (for a second time). A third of Republicans in one survey said the felony convictions make them more likely to vote for him; guilt made no difference to another 56 percent. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July, and days later he is expected to be nominated for a third time at the top of the GOP ticket. Not only has bad publicity proved beneficial for him, Trump has made a political market in the art of getting caught.
Voters will soon have their say. Toxic partisan politics is making a nation complicit in the illicit, willing to excuse all kinds of bad behavior just so one’s preferred candidate wins the election. Trump’s easy victories in the primaries and his lead in some respected polls together suggest that many voters (and thus potentially our system of government) are okay with a twice-impeached former president, freshly convicted of felonies, returning to the White House.
My classmates and I enjoyed recalling the lunchtime trades that landed us more of the world’s best pizza. And how friendships with the cafeteria staff sometimes earned an extra helping on the house. We admired those among us with good business sense and extra money for candy. But the consensus held that bragging about one’s success was bad form. And gloating about being untouchable was a bad omen. It was one thing to be a good dealmaker. It was quite another to make a sucker of someone. Penny-pinching adolescents recognize such distinctions, and a jury of New Yorkers did, too.
In 2016, Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He has proved that he could exploit the birtherism conspiracy — that the first Black president was born in Kenya — to become commander in chief. That he could suggest disinfectant and ultraviolet light might stanch a pandemic and pay no penalty. That he could get caught red-handed, evidence of shady business dealings on his fingertips, and still become the Republican Party’s nearly decade-long standard-bearer.
Trump and the big city remain a world away from my school in the South. To us as kids, the rich and famous who seemed to have it all and got away with it were appealing characters. But now we’re grown up, with a deeper appreciation for the role that juries play in society. In this way, New York still inspires, even if its pizza is second-best.
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