Article originally published in the Staten Island Advance on May 4, 1989. Full article text provided by Newspapers.com below.
“When Donald Trump talks… The good thing about being Donald Trump is that he can say anything he wants, in acqui,sitions, in architecture or in full-page advertisements in major metropolitan newspapers. The bad thing about being Donald Trump is that once he says it, it’s there for all the world to see. Mr. Trump’s visceral exhortation for capital punishment published this week in several citywide newspapers is an example.
He may think his statement is extraordinary, but he said nothing that your basic barstool bigmouth couldn’t formulate after a dozen beers. 6 Essentially, he vented his spleen, pouring forth a lot of bile not only at the criminals, but, •by some trick of mind known only to Mr. Trump, at the mayor of New York as well. It seemed to escape the celebrated tycoon *that the attack in Central Park, vicious and brutal as it was, was not a crime punishable by death in any case and that those arrested for the ,crime had not even been tried. Reading it, you got the feeling that i if Donald Trump ruled the world, as he often seems to think he should, he’d be meting out summary justice left and right, ^ never mind all that constitutional nonsense.
When the barstool bigmouth spouts this kind of stuff, he gets heard by the poor souls unlucky enough to share a bar with him. When Donald Trump spouts it, he gets heard by a whole city. Ironically, there are many people who believe that the kind of in-your-face, I’m-rich-andyou’re-not attitude so celebrated in this wealthobsessed city is behind the violence of the poor on the rich. No one typifies that selfaggrandizing mentality more than Mr. Trump.
No doubt many angry and frustrated people feel the same way Mr. Trump does. In fact, we all do at some point as we consider the vicious nature of some crimes. But he talks about raw vengeance – about becoming just as vicious as the criminals in making people pay – as a legitimate expression of justice. The law, fortunately for us all, is cool and dispassionate.
Unfortunate and demogogic as his words were, we’re glad Mr. Trump, for one, was able to get it off his chest and be heard by everyone. We’re also glad that he has nothing to do with making our laws.”
