Trump says he likes to build beautiful things, and not for the money. Yes, he really said that. Pinocchio’s wooden nose just erected a good 12 inches.
Trump also likes shiny towers with his name emblazoned on them. More than any other rich plutocrat in recent memory he insists on a very public display of his genetic inheritance. Actually, he may stand unmatched for personal public display during the entire 240 years America has been a country.
Not just shiny towers, but gold covered, gold themed, gold embellished, and gold enhanced shiny towers. One of his very proudest is New York’s Trump Tower, his first glorious eponymous creation dedicated in 1983. **
Trump’s primary thrust is the erection and accumulation of enormous towers. Sooner or later, everything Trump comes down to Golden Piles. Real Estate, Buildings, Money, Golf Courses, Beautiful Women, Stuff.
Listen to Piles of Money in Song
Trump has a very big pile of money, billions of it, to hear him talk about it. That is why he is so qualified to be President, that talent for making money, because it shows he has the superior temperament and smarts.
Piles of Gold in Trump Friendly Real Estate Format
What has he done with his money?
Charity in America
Americans, rich and poor alike, but especially those in the middle class, are a generous people. The average Joe and Mary contribute about 3% of their cash readies to charitable causes every year, year after year, not counting their charitable volunteer time donations. For the very richest, like the billionaires among us, this often becomes a gift from their net worth, particularly as they age. In truth, since their huge assets usually grow in value just by being there, regardless of their annual income, this level of giving surprisingly often doesn’t reduce their actual wealth to any meaningful degree, allowing them to continue to continuously donate without loss of wealth.
The merely excessively rich may be somewhat less generous with their assets, as they may be less comfortable with their good fortune, or more fearful of some serious adverse economic events. However, even the skin flints among the truly wealthy give about 1% of their wealth to charitable causes each year.
That is not to say they always do it anonymously or solely in private as the Good Book advises. They may endow public facilities, or museums, or colleges. Or cultural institutions like the symphony, or theater, or ballet, or music festivals. Or health clinics or medical research programs. Or scholarship funds for needy students or academic high achievers. Or build parks, or libraries.
The richest Americans for more than 200 years have generously donated and placed their names on prime cultural and public spirited properties, while building and funding them for posterity. Think Carnegie***, Rockefeller, Duke, Whitney, Pulitzer, Folger, and Smithson, among the Pantheon of benefactors.
Andrew Carnegie, American Philanthropist and Very Very Tough Businessman
Not just 1,000 Points of Light available to citizens of ordinary means, but charitable supernovas of light and warmth, in the best sense.
One might almost say it is common for real billionaires come to a point in life where they feel a moral and spiritual obligation to give back at least a fraction of the blessings they have received in our country. Folks like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, and the young Mark Zuckerberg, come to mind, to name only a few . These rich people are fierce business competitors, and wildly successful in their business ventures, as evidenced by their enormous personal wealth accumulation. Each of them is, in fact, worth many Trump sized piles of money.
The Trump Tower of Generosity (as of 2016)
Where is the Trump Gallery of Fine Arts?
Where is the Trump Symphony Orchestra?
Where is the Trump School of Business?
Where is the Trump Hospital for Cancer Research?
Where is the Trump Museum of New York Architectural History?
Where is the Trump Clinic for Veteran’s Health Issues?
Where is the Trump Initiative for Public Heath?
Where is the Trump Academy for Gifted Children?
Where is the Trump Institute for Social Science Research?
Where is the Trump School of Public Policy?
Where is Trump Field?
Where is the Trump Pubic Natatorium?
Where is the Trump NYC Summer Sports League?
Where is the Trump Business Library?
Where is the Trump Inner City Golf Championship?
It should be pretty obvious by now that Trump is not a self-reflective person, has no great interest in scholarly study or learning, no particular love of art and music, and no deep commitment to halting a health scourge. No one is asking him to do the scientific lab work, play the piano, sing an opera, paint a masterpiece, or perform an archeological dig.
Many other rich people also lack such performance skills. That doesn’t stop them from recognizing and supporting the very talented among us who do have all those special skills and talents he lacks.
Any Trump public contribution like these would do. Any one or more would be a public spirited foundation for a true personal legacy. None exist as of October 2016.
What of Trump’s Generosity?
At age 70, Trump is certainly on the shady side of his time on earth. Whether he is worth $4 billion or $8 billion or whatever larger number he chooses to make up today, he already has more than enough money, money, money to support himself, all his wives, all his children, their children, and their children’s children, as far as the eye can see, with a few billion left over.
When Trump is called upon to meet his maker (whether he has asked for forgiveness or not), there is at present nothing he will leave behind dedicated to the general good, public service, or community cultural values for his fellow citizens. After all, ordinary members of the public are the source of his immense wealth. Without their willing economic participation and purchase of his services for going on 50 years, he would not live 600 feet atop Manhattan in ostentatious luxury.
Trump has a woefully small charitable foundation (for any person of his considerable means) established 30 years ago. He has given about $6 million dollars in all that time to his own charity. And for almost a decade (since 2008) he has given nothing at all. Not one dime. His charity limps along on the kindness of strangers, while Trump takes credit for the checks he writes with their money, stamped with his name.
The latest stories of his dodgy unregistered foundation being used to pay off Trump’s personal legal debts, or purchase trashy artwork prohibited by rules against self-dealing with charitable monies, or to make mistaken illegal political contributions blamed on Trump’s clerks aside. Trump has essentially abandoned his own foundation since 2008. He was just served this week with a cease and desist order by New York’s Attorney General for running an unregistered foundation, and not performing required certified audits and oversight, which might have prevented these unfortunate (and possibly illegal) charitable lapses from occurring.
Even if Trump is going to play it small ball, he surely wants to do it right in the Trump first-class way, with other people’s money at stake.
He refuses to release his tax returns. The list of donations his campaign provided several months ago to show his charitable largess for the last 5 years consisted primarily of non-cash tax advantaged land gimmicks for property he couldn’t develop, and in-kind ‘gifts’ of free rounds of golf, costing him nothing.
There are a handful (probably 5 or 6) of publicity spattered individual charitable interventions by Trump (cameras rolling for posterity), involving a few tens of thousands of dollars, over 40 years of his adulthood. He doesn’t attend Church regularly, and so doesn’t put a generous $50 bucks in the collection plate on Sundays.
Trump doesn’t give 3% of his annual income or net worth, like regular folks. He doesn’t give 1% of his income or assets like the most cautious members of the American billionaire class he is so desperate to belong to. According to Trump’s latest financial disclosure in 2016 his income was $600 million the previous year. That 1% standard would mean $6 million in charitable gifts for 2015 alone. Or if you use !% of his assets at the overly conservative $5 billion (according to Trump), that would be $50 million in donations in 2015. Right, uh-huh, no way, man.
His charitable generosity is as ephemeral as his very public smile on camera, when the lights are off and no one is looking.
Trump has well and truly earned the crown of America’s Cheapskate Billionaire. He is literally in a class by himself. Put that on a Hat.
What a shame to think a man so blessed with material possessions may leave behind so little of value, having hoarded and squandered billions of dollars for transitory luxury, and no public contribution, but unlimited greed.
Quite a sour legacy.
Barren and empty. Perhaps not quite empty. There is a small pile of ashes in the corner of the Great Tower.
* With apologies to the late Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989), two time Pulitzer prize winner, and one of my favorite American historians. Her works include The Zimmerman Telegram (1958)The Guns of August (1962), Stilwell and the American Experience In China (1971), and A Distant Mirror (1978), among others My distant memory of her book The Proud Tower (1966) inspired the title of this post.
Barbara W. Tuchman, American Historian
Tuchman was a 1933 graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard University), and later a Trustee at Radcliffe. One of four residential towers of Currier House (1970) at Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard College, was named for her.
Currier House Residence Hall (1970) Radcliffe-Harvard
The second master of Currier House (1974-1979) was Professor Barbara Rosencrantz (History of Science), who was one of my professors in graduate school from 1974 until 1976.
The title of The Proud Tower, Tuchman’s 1966 collection of essays is drawn from Edgar Allan Poe poem (1845)
The title of the book is derived from the 1845 Edgar Allan Poe poem “The City in the Sea”. Two lines of the poem are used as the epigraph for the book: “While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.”
Trump might want to pause sometime and ponder his approaching mortality. It might do his immortal soul a little good, Christian, and favorite of the Evangelicals, that he claims to be.
From a Washington Post retrospective book review by Jonathan Yardley in 2009.
Born in 1912 into a prosperous New York family (her father, Maurice Wertheim, was a banker), she worked in various journalistic jobs before publishing her first book, “The Lost British Policy,” in 1938. She married Lester R. Tuchman the following year, and they had three children. Presumably she was preoccupied with child-rearing for some time, as it was not until 1958 that she published “The Zimmerman Telegram,” her third book and the first one to receive wide attention. Then, in 1962, she published “The Guns of August,” and with that she was off and running. She won the first of her two Pulitzer Prizes for it. Seven more books followed before her death in 1989. Two decades after her death, 10 of her 11 books are still in print.
Now those are some historical literary chops, wannabe business book authors.
**I can’t help a but include a small diversion. The height of Trump Tower is another illuminating example of Trump’s loose association with the truth and his mathematically challenged thinking.
Trump still routinely claims the tower is 68 stories in mid-Manhattan. The tower is indeed in midtown. What it is not is 68 stories. Trump’s original plans asked the city zoning authorities for variances and permission to build 63 stories. They said no, and cut his variance request by 5 stories to a maximum of 58.
Trump never likes to lose, even for inconsequential stuff, and he took his simple revenge. He started numbering the floors at 10, magically adding 10 stories to his masterpiece: 16 stories of office space, 38 stories of condos, and 4 floors of mechanicals. A total of 58, just what the city allowed. He trumpeted the total as 68, and many reporters and news casters bought in. Their proof: just look at the numbers on the elevator buttons.
Quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D.).
Trump Tower is, for real, 202 meters (664 feet) high. It is 58 stories of Manhattan concrete and glass covered building pulchritude. A random sampling of news stories and TV accounts will tell you falsely and repeatedly, it is 68 stories tall.
The latest New York City Department of Buildings official Certificate of Occupancy (2003) says Trump Tower is 58 stories. So it is. Google and Wikipedia get it right.
However, the Trump Organization website, and the Trump Tower website, even at this late date (33 years later) peddle this falsehood and insist that the building is 68 stories.
Trump is never speechless or lacking certainty. His magical thinking against all odds:
Does it have 68 floors, as the Trump Organization claims in its marketing materials, or 58, which is the figure listed in databases of tall buildings kept by organizations like the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats?
The height of Trump buildings, as measured in stories, has actually been a point of contention and some media scrutiny for years.
In a 2003 interview with The New York Times, Trump acknowledged that he had skipped 10 numbers when labeling the residential floors of Trump Tower. He said it was justified because the ceilings on the lower floors, which include commercial space and the tower’s grand atrium, were so tall.
“It was all approved,” the now Republican presidential candidate then said. “‘I brought it before the various agencies and got them to agree that I could start the building at Floor 30, because it equated to approximately 300 feet above ground.'”
That same story noted that condominium buyers in other Trump buildings were sometimes required to sign documents acknowledging that their units were on floors lower than the ones listed on elevator buttons.
Trump business and campaign representatives didn’t immediately answer a question about the floor discrepancy.
But the most recent certificate of occupancy posted online by the city Department of Buildings, from 2003, lists the building as 58 stories tall.
Trump’s version: pure rubbish.
One standard measure of floor to floor height for skyscrapers (any building over 10 stories tall) is 3.5 meters (11.375 feet) per floor. At 664 feet actual height, using this measure, Trump Tower is 58.37 stories tall. Spot on.
In fact, the respected Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (established 1969) provides detailed formulas for determining building heights and floor numbers. Trump Tower is a mixed use building, including office, retail, and residential space. Trump Tower is in fact one of the examples used in the Council’s detailed explanation of their mixed use formula’s derivation and use.
Ironically, the CTBUH standard mixed use model for 58 stories would put Trump Tower at 219 meters (712 feet) instead of the actual 202 meters (664 feet), a variance of 8.4%. In plain English, the Trump Tower is short and stubby by a factor of 8%, using standard skyscraper methods. So much for the extra high ceilings Trump goes on about. And another few million in his pockets from lowering construction costs by clipping specifications, don’t you know.
Trump Tower is just exactly 58 stories tall in real life. Trust me. If Trump’s pilot ever tried to fly his Boeing 757 private jet using Trump’s version of arithmetic, the plane would wind up landing in the Atlantic Ocean on a return to Newark Airport from a campaign stop elsewhere.
Carnegie Library Washington DC (1903); Dedicated by President Teddy Roosevelt
**One outstanding example of brick and mortar public generosity from a very, very tough businessman (much much richer than Trump will ever be. Inflation adjusted $310 Billion) concerned for the welfare of his country is Andrew Carnegie. He spent $41 million in 1900 US dollars to build 1,679 public libraries.
Carnegie Library Bozeman MT (1903)
This description is from a wonderful, quirky website blog celebrating Library Postcards. I found it a real trip.
Steel baron Andrew Carnegie viewed public libraries as a key agent of self improvement and donated roughly $41 million for the construction of 1,679 public libraries between 1886 and 1917. The Bozeman Classical Revival landmark, one of seventeen Carnegie libraries erected in Montana, was constructed to meet the needs of a growing population and elevate the moral character of the community. Small libraries had existed in Bozeman since 1872, but by 1900 the city’s accommodations were woefully inadequate. To rectify the situation, librarian Bell Chrisman urged the city to seek Carnegie funding. On March 14, 1902, the philanthropist agreed to provide $15,000 for the building in return for “a suitable site” and the city’s pledge of $1,500 yearly support. Despite local controversy, reform-minded citizens located the new facility directly across the street from the town’s red light district in part as an incentive to improve those disreputable surroundings. To this end, architect C. S. Haire designed Bozeman’s library to resemble an ancient temple with a symmetrical Greek cross plan. The elaborate main entrance features Roman Doric columns supporting a formidable triangular pediment. In the shadow of this impressive edifice, the red light district eventually disappeared. The structure served as the community library until 1980 and then was utilized as city offices. In 1998, the building underwent extensive restoration by owners Michael E. Wheat and Michael D. Cok.
St. Louis Central Public Library (1901) Carnegie Funded
Early on in our marriage while I was in graduate school, my wife worked as a Children’s Librarian in the main St. Louis Central Public Library (1901), another Carnegie funded classic.
Carnegie Library Charlotte NC (!903)
Speaking for myself, I just cannot picture Trump presiding at the opening of a significant cultural institution like a Free Pubic Library. He would need Trump “Read a Book” Hats and a bevy of Library Chicks in Glasses and Short Skirts to pull it off. Just kidding. I can’t see him opening a real Library with any kind of props.
Amazingly enough, what should I find in Library Postcards but a picture of the new Maywood (New Jersey) Public Library, the main source of books for me, where I spent hundreds of hours reading and browsing, from ages 6-12. Actually, I spent my time in the old Maywood Public Library building, since this one was not dedicated until 1966, after I had moved away.
New Library Maywood NJ (1966)
Maywood’s library is not an architectural standout. Still, celebrate another American social gem: a free small town public library.