Great Explanations: Donald Trump's Obama-Baiting Gong Show Was All To Sell Condos, Of Course

Posted on Wed, 04-27-2011

We've got no real quarrel with Donald Trump here at New Construction Manhattan. Aesthetically, we might favor Superior Ink or HL23 over the "big gold box" style of the older Trump Manhattan condominiums, but we can certainly see the appeal in new Trump condominiums such as

 

and Trump Place. And while The Donald's shouty, humorless self-promotion and cartoon ego can make him a little tough to take on television, even we have to give it up for Trump Park Avenue, which is one of the more impressive pre-war condo conversions on Park Avenue, and among the elite pre-war condo conversion listings in all of Manhattan. Yes, Trumpian real estate grandiosity . But no, we've got no problem with his luxury condominiums; luxury condominium listings are kind of our thing. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a good laugh at his expense from time to time. This would be one of those times.

As you may or may not have heard (but have probably heard) Donald Trump has recently embarked on a perplexing and hilariously wrongheaded campaign predicated on the idea that Barack Obama -- who as you may or may not have heard, is the President of the United States of America -- was not born in the United States. As can often be the case with Trump, it can be hard to tell what, exactly, his endgame is here, beyond self-promotion -- judged by the nutty standards of "birther" conspiracy theorists, Trump never really seemed to commit himself to being a state-of-the-art birther, opting instead to bark a bunch of sketchily reasoned stuff at whichever news service put a microphone near him. That Trump was wrong about all of this was obvious before the Obama White House went to the trouble of releasing the president's long-form birth certificate on Tuesday. That this manifest and shameful wrongness -- birtherism is not exactly a proud intellectual tradition -- did not and would not embarrass Trump, of course, was also obvious. This is not a man who gets embarrassed, or who turns back once his goofy birther crusade tanks the ratings of his NBC television show. This is Donald Trump we're talking about.

We are, surprisingly, not yet to the laughing-at-Donald part. We are, as you might've guessed by all the NYC condo listings on this site, a Manhattan real estate blog, not a political blog. And Donald Trump, while he plays a cartoonish billionaire on television, is a real estate developer in real life. Which -- and this is the laughing-at-Donald-Trump part -- may well have had something to do with his goofy birther crusade, Trump told the Miami Herald on Wednesday. "Will Trump’s newfound role as right-wing birther prove as attractive?" Herald reporter Douglas Hanks wonders. "'I think it’s been very helpful,’ Trump said Monday, when The Miami Herald asked how presidential politics might influence condo buyers in Trump buildings. 'All they like is winning.'" So: Donald Trump believes that he "won" the argument over Barack Obama's citizenship, and has helped his brand through his quixotic and irresponsible appeal to some very ugly, very silly biases. You can laugh now.

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