As you likely have heard, a fire on the 50th floor New York City's Trump Tower left one man dead and six firefighters injured this past weekend. This was the second fire in Trump Tower in 2018. Two civilians suffered minor injuries and a firefighter was hurt by debris in a fire on Jan. 8 on the top of the building. There were no sprinklers in either of the apartments where the fires broke out.
Trump's loathing and bullying are among the few things he came by honestly: they were part of his inheritance.
Donald Trump's father Fred was a slum lord in Queens, New York.
Trump inherited Fred's buildings.
Trump, of course, aspired to fame and glory, of high-end property which would raise his profile and make people in the New York social scene admire him, but this apple never fell far from the rotten tree.
As CNN reported, on March 28, 2016: Trump was a nightmare landlord in the 1980's
It began in 1981. Trump bought a 14-story building on prime real estate facing New York City's Central Park.
His plan was to tear down the building and replace it with luxury condos. But first he needed a small band of rent-stabilized tenants out of there.
To succeed, Trump played rough, according to lawsuits filed by the tenants. Renters said he cut heat and hot water, and he imposed tough building rules. Trump even proposed sheltering homeless people in the building.
It went on for five years as Trump fought tenants, real estate lawyers, New York state regulators and city officials.
He fought regulators too in 1999.
After a fire in a residential building in 1999, then-NYCMayor Rudy Giuliani called for the sprinkler legislation, putting him at odds with Trump.
The New York Timesreported that Trump opposed that legislation, claiming that he could not afford to put sprinklers in his buildings. Typical Trump behavior - either claiming he is the “richest of the rich" or claiming poverty.
According to The New York Post, Trump called at least 6 city council members to lobby against the sprinkler rules, and he even put up $5,000 to retire campaign debt of one council member.
In the end, the legislation passed and was signed by Giuliani. But Trump Tower was not required to have sprinklers because the Giuliani grandfathered it. Trump Tower was built 15 years prior to the rules, and Trump never did install sprinklers on the residential floors of the building.
It still has no sprinklers.
And Trump's response to the death of Todd Brassner, who lived in Trump Tower for more than two decades, was, you probably guessed it or saw it: Silence - no condolences to the deceased's friends and family - and Self-congratulations.
All together now - never forget.
Once a slumlord, always a slumlord.
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April 10, 2018
Post Script. 1. The New York City Council is once again taking up the issue of sprinklers in all buildings in NYC. Will Trump tweet to protest this? I suspect not.
2. Donald Trump also inherited his racism from his father. Fred Trump was arrested for participating in a violent Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927.
Here is Vice on Fred Trump and the KKK.
Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, 'Old Man Trump':
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That colour line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project.
This is from Fortune mag,
Here is some of what they report:
in 1973, when the United States Department of Justice went to court with a discrimination complaint against the Trump family business, which rented apartments across Brooklyn and Queens. Coming from the administration of Richard Nixon, who was hardly a civil rights agitator, the complaint was based on an investigation that found four different Trump employees confirming that applicants for leases were screened by race. One rental agent said Trump's father had told him not to rent to blacks and that he actually wanted to reduce the number of African Americans in his buildings. Three doormen said they had been instructed to deflect blacks who came to Trump buildings to apply for apartments.
Though just 26 years old at the time, Donald Trump was already president of the Trump Organization. Rather than work with the government to bring the company into compliance with the law, as the New York apartment king Sam LeFrak had done, Trump retained one of the most notorious lawyers in the country, Roy Cohn, and commence an all-out legal war. Cohn, who had been Joe McCarthy's chief inquisitor during the senator's witch hunt for communists in the government, filed a $410 million lawsuit against the federal government and smeared the justice department attorneys with terms such as "storm troopers" and "Gestapo." Trump complained in the press of "reverse discrimination" and alleged a "nationwide drive" to force landlords to "rent to welfare recipients."
This then is true too - Once a Racist, Always a Racist.
