The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jelani Cobb
Writer, The New Yorker
Jelani Cobb writes about race, politics and history for The New Yorker. He is also the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on September 5, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Childhood in Queens
What I’d like to understand is the worldview that Donald Trump maybe has in Queens.He’s in a private school that’s not integrated.Help me understand what perspective he would have at that time towards minorities.
When Trump was growing up in Queens, it was among the whitest places in New York City, and it was that way intentionally.There was a great deal of housing segregation, some of which the Trump family was involved in enforcing.But to frame what Queens was like, when Jackie Robinson, the acclaimed Dodger and world-respected athlete, when he bought a home in Queens, there was a cross burned near his property.And there was a kind of informal Jim Crow that was enacted at LaGuardia Airport when there were African American travelers.And the NAACP in Queens was filing lawsuits to try to desegregate, to create communities where African Americans could live.
And there is a dividing line in Queens.Trump grew up in Jamaica Estates, which is elevated topographically and socioeconomically.And if you descended the hill, if you went down the slope, you found yourself in South Jamaica, which was a working-class community.It was where, to the extent that there were Black and Latino communities in Queens, you’re most likely to live in those areas at that point in time.And there was a real kind of dividing line between those two communities.
And, you know, if you think about South Jamaica, it’s interesting, the history.The Cuomos are from actually that general vicinity.Mario Cuomo, the governor’s parents owned a grocery store in that neighborhood, which was a kind of working-class neighborhood on one side.You had Jews and Italians, and on the other side you had African Americans and some Latinos.
And this is where the Trumps were, in an elevated position in Queens.Now, the time period that he grew up in Queens is crucial.There’s pre-1965 and post-1965.In 1965, there’s the Immigration Reform Act, and that is one of the most significant pieces of legislation in 20th-century American history.
The 1965 act greatly liberalized American immigration.You start seeing people come in from all over the world, but particularly Latin America and the Caribbean, and eventually significant populations coming from India, other South Asian counties and so on.
One of the first places you begin to see the demographic changes in the United States that have become such a touch point in American politics, one of the first places that you see that begin to develop is Queens.Part of that is because Kennedy Airport is there.It’s an international airport.People are coming into New York City, and Queens is literally the first place that they arrive.And Queens begins diversifying rapidly.
And in response, you get a wave of nativism that really frames the context that Trump is growing up in.And so when we saw the kind of xenophobic rhetoric that emerged in the 2016 presidential election, that seemed striking or novel or new to people in American politics.But for people of his generation in Queens, they had heard that language all their lives.They had grown up with the kind of allergy to the numbers of people who were coming, and suspicion, and: What religion do you practice?What god do you pray to?What is this strange food that you’re eating?I don’t understand this language that you’re speaking.And you started to see an exodus from Queens, a white exodus from Queens.
When we look at what Queens is now, statistically the most ethnically diverse place in the United States, it began in 1965.And the push against the diversifying of the United States began right there in Queens in 1965 as well.
When the president was about 10, when he was a pretty young boy, certainly a formative age.
When we talk about these changes, this was not something that went unnoticed at the time.For people who watched the show, which was a contemporary of these changes, <i>All in the Family</i>, there was a character, Archie Bunker, who was a working-class white man who lived in Queens, and his bewilderment at the changing world around him and his resentment at the demographic changes happening his neighborhood.One plotline, they had a Black family move in next door, and he didn’t really know how to handle it.
It was not a coincidence that that show was set in Queens in the 1960s-1970s.They were talking about a very real dynamic of resentment, fear, nativism and a kind of racial entitlement that was very much part of the culture in that particular place at that time.
Trump as a Bully
I wonder if you can help me understand, when folks say that Trump is a bully, what are the characteristics of a bully?Does that sound like Trump?
The classic assessment of the bully is a person who is willing to threaten, cajole, insult, humiliate, harass, abuse, as long as the odds are stacked in their own favor.And the kind of inside version of a bully, if you turn a bully inside out, what you find is a coward—the person who is disdainful of fighting when the odds are against them or incapable of summoning courage in a situation where they think that they’ll lose or they don’t have the advantages.
And one of the dynamics that you saw in New York City, the first kind of recognition of Trump as something outside of being a socialite, somebody in the New York social circle, was the ad that he took out in 1989 against the Central Park Five.And here was a man who was a multimillionaire saying that these young people should be subjected to the death penalty.And he had all the advantages on his side: being white, being wealthy, being politically connected, of having family ties to some of the more powerful families in New York City and really in the country.And he was talking about five relatively poor Black and Latino young men.
We’ve never really seen the opposite of that.One of the things I think that people brought up and raised was the question about military service and why he didn’t choose to go into the war.It fits in the template that people talk about in terms of people’s willingness—the bully being incapable of doing something that might actually cause them physical harm.
It’s an interesting point, because here he is, in military school; he’s got an association that’s comparable to ROTC, but he’s also graduating at a time when the Vietnam War was happening.So there’s also, as you raise, a power dynamic here, a power differential.
Sure.And I think that, quite frankly, he’s always had the advantage of power as a young person, being connected to Fred Trump, being connected to Roy Cohn later in this life, being connected to people who could kind of facilitate his rise through New York City real estate circles.
One of the things I found that was most interesting in 2016 was the consistent throughline of his attacks on people who had distinguished records of public service.The most notable examples were John McCain and John Lewis.They had very different kinds of personal service, very different kinds of exposure to danger and jeopardy on behalf of causes that they believed to be bigger than themselves.But both of them were men who sacrificed, men who were physically harmed as a result of their efforts to uphold what they thought were their responsibilities.
And it didn’t seem to be a coincidence that he, that Donald Trump attacked both of them relentlessly in 2016.Initially he referred to John Lewis’ district as being crime-ridden and insulted him later on, took offense to the fact that John Lewis did not come to his inauguration; insulted John McCain’s service, said that he was not a hero, said that he liked people who did not get shot down.John McCain famously got shot down over Vietnam, was held prisoner for more than five years.
And the way that he responded to both of their deaths seemed to betray that same sort of dynamic.According to reporting, he was resentful of the lowering of the flags in honor of John McCain’s life after his passing.And then one of the things that was noted after John Lewis died was that flags were lowered and then within a very short period of time returned to full mast.And it was taken as a disrespect to Mr. Lewis and his legacy.But it did fit into the template, the same sort of dynamic we saw in his response to John McCain.
I think that when we look at those questions, we find the same sorts of things animating his conflict with other people who are in that same category.
There’s also this framework that’s created at this early age in which there’s something about weakness here and preying on the weak, or at least using others’ weakness to your advantage to triumph.And I wonder if that’s something we’ll see for the rest of his life.
I don’t know.I think one of the things that has not gotten enough attention is the extent to which certainly in his public life Donald Trump resembles Joseph McCarthy.And it’s not surprising.You know, they had a common ally and aide in the form of Roy Cohn.Roy Cohn was famously an aide to Joe McCarthy and a mentor to Donald Trump.But if you were just talking about their behavior, you would be hard-pressed to distinguish the two men: the relentless lying, the relentless bullying, the relentless emphasis upon their personal toughness without any real evidence to back that up.McCarthy did serve in the military, but in a noncombat role, which he relentlessly lied about and said that he was a tail gunner and that he had fought valiantly and bravely on behalf of the country in World War II.And nothing could have been farther from the truth.
You know, Trump has kind of talked about himself in these tough-guy ways, which seem to be almost cribbed from gangster movies or the like.And so the other thing that you saw from the two of them was a relentless refusal to ever admit defeat or error or contrition.I know I sounded very New York when I just said the “erra.”Let me see if I can say that again.
It was wonderful.
I’m from Queens.I’m from Queens.That’s how I know all this stuff about Trump’s Queens.I grew up in South Jamaica, thus literally looking up the hill.
So there’s a similar dynamic between the two of them: the refusal to ever display contrition or admit a mistake, or certainly not apologize for anything that you’d done and that being conflated with weakness.And it has the same sort of effect in terms of having to necessarily double down on your worst behaviors, the worst mistakes that you make, the inability to adapt and become something different because you are committed, because the inability to adapt and become or do anything different, because that would require conceding that you’d made a mistake in the first place.
I think one of the most telling parts of this was when Donald Trump was being interviewed by the evangelical pastor Rick Warren and Warren posed a question to him about whether he prayed and whether he really ever sought forgiveness.And Trump’s response was something to the effect of, he doesn’t do anything wrong, which I think by the standards of Christianity is at least contrary to their theology.
It was very much textbook Trumpian psychology, though.Like, we would not anticipate that person being able to speak with humility about what his own shortcomings were.
Roy Cohn as Mentor to Trump
Let me move on to Roy Cohn, who we started to talk about just a little bit.In 1970s New York, when the city is in economic uncertainty and there’s an upheaval, what effectively draws Donald Trump to Roy Cohn?If Roy Cohn is your mentor that you selected, what is it that you are looking to be taught?
Roy Cohn was the kind of master of the dark arts.And he was the person who helped shape Trump’s approach to life such as we know it.And it’s probably two figures—Fred Trump and Roy Cohn.And the signature things that I think have worked for him and simultaneously really worked against him in many ways come from Roy Cohn.
Cohn was the architect of the idea that truth was a really relative concept and the cynical manipulation of the public.And so, when caught in a lie, one should respond with two additional lies.
The thing [about] Joe McCarthy and his relationship to the press was that McCarthy would lie exponentially knowing that the newspapers could only fact-check arithmetically.And so he would tell a lie, and when confronted about it, he would tell two more.And while you’re tracking those down, he’s up to four.And it would just build this pyramid of mendacity.And that was really kind of taken wholesale from McCarthy to Trump via Roy Cohn.Roy Cohn was the intermediary in that.
And so, when you look at their relationship with the press, they’re practically identical.McCarthy denounced the press.He physically got into a fight, physically assaulted a reporter—much smaller than him, it happened to be, but he physically assaulted a reporter.At the same time he knew that newspapers were his lifeblood, that newspapers were the mechanism by which he could achieve the kind of demagogic standing that he held in American society at that point in time.
The same sort of thing emerged with Donald Trump, especially in 2016—the bile, the contempt, the disdain for media at the same time that he’s raking in tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in free coverage.And so he has this symbiotic relationship with the media.And you wonder if the contempt is an accurate expression of how he feels about media, or if it is just a kind of cynical shtick that he uses in order to gin up more coverage for himself.
And Roy Cohn is really the person who is at the center of that.
Cohn also had different tools of the trade, which are donations, threats, backroom deals, an old version of the city, Tammany Hall kind of vibes to it.I wonder what he teaches Donald Trump about government and about approaching government.
So prior to Roy Cohn, Trump’s real interaction with government was the same sort that other businesspeople had.His family derived a great deal of their wealth from government contracts for housing.And Fred Trump, of course, famously was a very well-connected person politically.But I think what Roy Cohn brought was the idea that the most cynical, dare I say corrupt ideas of the business world were equally applicable to government.
Part of what made Donald Trump seductive as a political figure was that he was telling people they had been misled.And when people feel that they’ve been misled, they become angry.And he was saying, “I’m going to tell you how you’ve been misled.”But he never really offered facts.What he offered was more likely to be cynical interpretations of things that people already knew, because cynicism is his first language.
And Roy Cohn really is responsible for that in some degree, because the idea of government service, the idea of people being attracted to wanting to work on behalf of their country, that’s not the point.The point of government is power, and people do whatever you need to do to obtain power.You use deception; ... you use intimidation; you use all of the tactics that you can find.
What you don’t find, either in McCarthy or in Trump, is an appeal to the idea of doing something on behalf of your country to your own detriment because it’s the right thing to do.And the reason that you don’t hear those kinds of appeals is that they don’t really make sense in that worldview.It is an utterly transactional sense of the world, and “what’s in it for me” is the kind of founding credo.
Roy Cohn is really the reason that Trump is able to make that leap.Now, it doesn’t happen immediately.There’s not like a point where he is molding him like a trainer is for a young boxer he wants to be a champion.But Trump continues to move through the world in that way.
Trump’s Relationship with Advisers
The destroying of rivals, the pushing down of someone so close, it also keeps him in the spotlight, right, because he’s pushing these folks out of the way.But I also wonder if we see this playing out later in the presidency with the way he humiliates, fires advisers and how their relationships sort of blow up.
Lots of aspects of our national governance have become something like trash-TV entertainment.And so, if you see the serial exits of people who really have built significant careers in American politics and worked at his White House only to be kicked around and then ejected unceremoniously—I mean, it starts with Reince Preibus, and you’d add Sean Spicer to that list; Anthony Scaramucci, who was also on that list; John Kelly would be on that list.You could kind of go through people who—Gen. Mattis is on that list—the number of people who, independent of him, had their own lives and their own trajectories and then were just kind of chewed up and spat out and humiliated in the course of it, in their interactions with Trump.
And you know, it’s a kind of fairly recognizable pattern.Also Michael Cohen is probably the best example of it, that the people who are close to him have been really discarded at the moment at which they’re no longer useful.
Biden’s Track Record on Race
Let me ask you now about Vice President Biden for just a moment.In 2008, he has this lapse in which he calls candidate Obama the first sort of “mainstream African American who is clean and articulate and bright, nice-looking guy.”What did it signal about Biden’s worldview at the time?
I think when people heard the “clean and articulate” line, there was a wave of eye-rolling, certainly among African Americans.In the coded language of American racial rhetoric, “articulate” is a particular kind of problematic term, because it almost begins with the presumption that this person will be inarticulate and you are pleasantly surprised.But he’s a Harvard law grad and a Columbia University grad.You would generally anticipate this person being well-spoken.
And so when Biden made that statement, it was the kind of well-intentioned but benighted commentary that you expect from people who inhabit environments where there aren’t very many Black people, and the United States Senate has historically been a prime example of that.
This is a senator who’s serving with Strom Thurmond, had served with Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, figures that feel like—
There’s an important point about this.Early in the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden was criticized for his collegial relationship with Strom Thurmond.And that’s not really that surprising.What I mean by that is this: The Senate is an institution that prides itself on collegiality, or historically has prided itself on collegiality that transcended region and ideological disposition and so on.But these were all people of the same general social-economic background, overwhelmingly men, entirely white, and they didn’t have—everything they thought, kind of rising above the fray to find collegial connection with each other, that was facilitated by the fact that many of these issues weren’t going to affect them personally.
And a person who understood that Strom Thurmond had run for president in 1948 on a ticket of segregation—that was the platform; the platform was segregation—a person who was more directly impacted by that would have a hard time putting that to the side and finding this sort of personal rapport with Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or any of the other number of senators you would point to who had similar dispositions.
And so I think it was kind of indicative, not so much of Biden’s character, but of the institution’s and his social position and his background and the time in which he came up in American politics.
What did it tell us about his weakness as a candidate?
I think the reason that that incident was telling and problematic, troubling, was that we inhabit a completely different climate from the one that characterized the United States Senate when Joe Biden at 29 years old was elected to join it.Very different world.There’s an era of social media in which people can talk about their outrage, in which the conversation is not shaped simply by the whims of elite white men in media and politics, but it is a two-way dialogue in which people can talk back.There are many outspoken people in public and private life on the matter of race, as well as in the media, and the kind of capacity for sweeping egregious racism under the rug, that just doesn’t exist anymore.
And so there was a real question.I think people were really wondering whether or not Joe Biden was somebody who was adaptable enough to operate in the context of this particular moment.
Biden as Obama’s Vice President
Just to finish out the Obama story for a moment, when on election night in Grant Park, when Biden is very conscious of Barack Obama having that moment, the country having that moment, waiting a beat, and then later joining him on stage, why do you think he understood the importance of that at that time?Do you think he got it?
I think one of the things about Joe Biden is that you probably don’t stick around as long as he has in American politics without the capacity to be adaptable and to learn quickly in new situations.
Barack Obama created his own context.What I mean by that is that there was no conversation in 2007 or 2006 about, “Oh, the country is just on the precipice of electing a Black person to the presidency.”No one really believed that.There were four people who had that idea, and they all lived in the same household on the South Side of Chicago.
And Obama really molded a context in which that could happen.And Joe Biden certainly, I don’t imagine, in his political career, if he was guesstimating where he would wind up, certainly never suspected that he would be vice president to the first Black president of the United States.
But it was a mutually beneficial relationship.One of the criticisms of Obama was that he was young, you know.He said that this was fresh, he had new ideas and so on, but people wondered if he was seasoned enough, if he knew enough.He represented this tide of change.
And then he reached back and got this person who was just an embodiment of the United States Senate and its traditions, and a person who had aged into the role of being seen as a kind of statesman figure.And Biden was useful in that regard.I think the two benefited; it was a mutually beneficial relationship.
I think a lot has been made of Biden’s tendency to make gaffes or to say malapropisms or to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, ad libbing in these ways.But there’s certainly—you don’t get to the level of politics that he’s gotten to without having a great deal of savvy.And one of those indicators is the way that he played that moment and seeing Obama, the Obamas come out on stage.
Biden’s Selection of Harris as a Running Mate
OK, so now let me ask you the flip, which is, and then Joe Biden picks Kamala Harris.This is the same man who led the Anita Hill hearings.This is the same man that we’ve been talking about with some of these gaffes on race.How significant is that choice?And what does it reveal about Biden?
To a greater or lesser degree, between Biden’s last presidential run in 2008 and his current run in 2020, the Democratic Party really came to terms with who was their core demographic, who was their base, and every analysis of that pointed to Black women.When you looked at Barack Obama’s two victories in 2008 and 2012, African American women had the highest representation of any demographic in terms of voter turnout, and were key to him being able to win the White House twice and a whole lot of legislative positions—Senate seats, city council seats, mayorships and so on.And they’re looking at this and seeing this again and again.
So on the one side of it, there’s just the plain facts that the Democratic Party is reliant upon Black voters, and specifically Black women voters, if it’s going to win.On the other side of it, Kamala Harris was beneficial for a number of reasons.For one, she criticized him early on, and harshly, which for some in the Biden circle meant that she was untrustworthy.But on the other side of it, it was an opportunity for him to distinguish himself from Donald Trump: “Here is a person with a butterfly ego who has to be praised all the time; I’m the person who has such a mature sense of himself that I actually want to bring the person who’s criticized me most harshly into the fold because I value dissenting opinions.”And that was part of the message that was being sent with Kamala Harris.
In addition to that, I think there are people who remember the Biden of the Anita Hill era, where it seemed to be that the lines of partisanship in those hearings were less significant than the lines of gender.And there’s this array of white men who were asking, treating Anita Hill as kind of a hostile witness in simply attesting to what her experience with sexual harassment had been in Clarence Thomas’ office.I think that helps.
There is another reason that the Kamala Harris pick was savvy, and that is that Joe Biden has been vulnerable to criticism around the 1994 crime bill.Notably, Donald Trump has spoken incessantly about him signing the First Step Act and criminal justice reform into law.And the line of attack that you could almost anticipate was that Trump would say, “I signed the First Step Act, and Joe Biden wrote the 1994 crime bill,” which has now become a much reviled piece of legislation, and has been frequently associated with the rise of mass incarceration.
It doesn’t hurt for Biden to have picked someone who ran for president as a progressive prosecutor, as someone who has been a prosecutor and has talked about the problems and flaws within the system.And of course, Kamala Harris has been criticized for that as well, but in some ways it kind of immunizes Joe Biden.And that was really a kind of politically smart move to make.
And then I think the final point of it was that in an election where the electorate is as polarized as it is, and there are very few people who have no opinion whatsoever of the two men who are running for president, turnout is really important, which is one of the reasons why I think we’ve seen the kind of vitriolic politics of 2020.If you can’t convince new voters to come over to your side, the other thing that you really have to do is make sure that the voters you already have turn out at the polls.
Kamala Harris was significant in that regard.Even if she didn’t bring a single voter to the fold, which she probably brought lots, but even if she didn’t bring a single voter to the polls, she prevented him from losing any voters, or losing the enthusiasm of voters who might have felt slighted if he had picked another person, another candidate, certainly if he had picked a white candidate, whether that person was male or female.
And in the arc of his life and some of these moments we’ve kind of talked about, how does it show how he’s learned, adapted, changed?
I think when you see someone who has a long career in politics, you’re generally looking at someone who’s got at least some capacity to adapt with the times.And it didn’t take a lot of clairvoyance to know that these were the times that really required that he pick someone who had a profile like Kamala Harris’.
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