When Trump Stole Christmas
A Christmas tree stood on either side of President Trump as he addressed a “Merry Christmas rally” on the night he was impeached.
That is two Christmas trees more than Trump allowed the tenants to place in the lobby of 100 Central Park South, the apartment building he purchased in 1981.
The same Trump who now boasts of bringing back “Merry Christmas” after the so-called guardians of political correctness replaced it with “Happy Holidays” lest non-Christians be offended.
“And did you notice that everybody is saying Merry Christmas again?” he asked the crowd at Wednesday night’s rally in Battle Creek, Michigan. “Did you notice? Saying Merry Christmas.”
The Trump of the early 1980s indicated through his managing agent that he was denying his tenants permission to place a Christmas tree or any other kind of holiday decoration in the lobby to avoid complaints that “Management is seeking to impose one set of religious beliefs on all events in this Building.”
In keeping with his own beliefs, Trump chose the day after Christmas in 1981 to seek the eviction of a tenant named Anderson Clipper on grounds that he had failed to pay his rent in August. Never mind that Clipper had the canceled check and sent a copy to the managing agent.
Clipper presented the check again in court. His attorney called to the stand a building superintendent who had been fired subsequent to Trump’s purchase. The super testified as to the new owner’s intentions.
“They wanted to empty the building,” he said.
The super added that to further that effort, he had been instructed, “No repairs were to be done unless extremely necessary.”
Judge Jay Dankberg ruled in favor of Clipper.
“The court is convinced this landlord engaged in a blatant attempt to force this tenant out of possession through the use of spurious and unnecessary litigation,” the judge said.
While the Christmas tree was not at issue during the hearing, the effort to deny holiday cheer could be seen as part of a larger strategy, the judge observed.
“Clearly this landlord was attempting to create an atmosphere in which tenants would voluntarily relocate,” he said.
To call Trump a Grinch would be unfair to Dr. Seuss's famous avocado-green character. The Grinch simply suffered from having a heart two sizes too small that led him to resent the Christmastime joy of the Whos of Whoville. His heart ended up growing three sizes when he saw their joy was undiminished despite him doing his worst to wreck their holiday.
Trump consistently seemed to have no heart at all. He did not resent Christmas. He just did not want anything that would make his tenants less miserable and therefore less likely to leave.
Trump had been able to purchase the 15-story building at a bargain price for reasons he later spelled out to New York magazine.
“They practically gave it to me because it was losing so much money under rent control,” he was quoted saying.
Trump repeatedly told the press that the 80 apartments in the building were occupied by “people of great wealth” who were taking advantage of rent control and stabilization laws to pay unconscionably low rent. He suggested that their big bucks simply made them whiners.
“Let me tell you something about the rich,” he told a reporter. “They have a very low threshold for pain.”
In fact, 25 percent of the tenants lived on a fixed income of less than $15,000 a year. Many of the occupants were elderly.
“I had all these old ladies, 80 years old,” John Moore, the tenant leader at the time, told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Trump’s intent was to clear out the tenants and demolish the building along with an adjacent hotel he had also purchased. He planned to then erect a huge luxury tower for actual people of great wealth, thereby making himself of even greater wealth.
He further expressed the Trumpian holiday spirit by choosing New Year’s Eve of 1981 to threaten six tenants with eviction. They were given 10 days to undo alterations they had made to their apartments with the approval of the previous owner.
But that was also blocked by the court. Trump was then forced to be more creative. He announced that the sight of poor souls sleeping on benches in Central Park had inspired him to offer the city the free use of a dozen empty apartments in his building to shelter the homeless.
“Beautiful views,” he said of the apartments.
He later told New York magazine, “I’m not going to pretend that it bothered me to imagine the very wealthy people of 100 Central Park South having to live alongside people less fortunate than themselves for a while.”
The city declined the offer. But the International Refugee Committee asked if it could shelter Polish asylum seekers who had supported the Solidarity movement before being driven from their native land. Such folks could not be counted upon to scare tenants into leaving. Trump’s office was quoted saying that the offer of free temporary shelter was only open to “people who live in America now, not refugees.”
Trump continued to peddle the fiction that the building was occupied by “many millionaires.” He filed lawsuits against various tenants and even their lawyer, charging him in federal court with racketeering and seeking $105 million in damages. The suits were tossed out by judges who in rulings accused Trump of engaging in harassment and intimidation.
The following year, Trump again barred the tenants from putting a Christmas tree in the lobby. Moore decided to try again in 1983. He submitted a letter to the managing agent noting that many of the tenants “are old and have nowhere to go for the holidays.”
“This will be their only chance to share in the holiday spirit,” the letter said.
The managing agent responded with a letter essentially saying that in resisting efforts to drive them out, the tenants “made it quite difficult for Management to feel that a relaxed, ‘holiday season spirit’ relationship exists in the building.”
Even so, Trump was prepared to bend. He was getting increasingly bad press about his attempts to clear the building, and both the city and the state were preparing to take action to stop him.
Trump’s managing agent sent the tenants a letter suggesting they might be allowed to have a Christmas tree if they signed legal papers guaranteeing that the tree and any decorations would “comply with applicable governmental regulations.” The tenants would also have to guarantee that the holiday stuff would be promptly removed should any tenant object to them on the grounds that they “infringe upon his or her religious beliefs.”
That from the man who is now our president and tells us he saved the country from political correctness and made it OK to say “Merry Christmas” again.
The tenants back in 1983 had not yet signed the document when an apparent miscommunication with the managing agent caused the building staff to go ahead and put up a tree. Not even Trump was going to take it down once it was there.
The larger confrontation between Trump and the tenants ended after both the city and the state brought legal action against him. He proclaimed himself the victim of a “ploy” as he was ordered to pay each tenant $250,000 and to give them new leases as determined by rent control and stabilization. His wide range of reprehensible tactics as alleged in various documents by the city and state were enumerated in The New York Times:
“Threats of imminent demolition,” “spurious litigation,” “drastic decreases in essential services,” “persistent delay in repairing defective conditions with life-threatening potential,” “instructing employees to obtain information about the private lives (and) sex habits of the tenants,” and “engaging in a psychological tug-of-war to wear the tenants down which has had a deleterious effect upon the health and well-being of said tenants, many of whom are elderly and are particularly vulnerable to defendants’ persistent course of conduct.”
The list did not specifically mention the matter of the Christmas tree, which only gained significance three decades later, during Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency.
At a gathering of the religious right in September of 2015, Trump was booed when he called Sen. Marco Rubio “a clown.” But Trump drew cheers after he held up a Bible and launched into what would become his Christmas spiel.
“The word ‘Christmas’,” he said. “I love Christmas. I love Christmas!... But you see ‘Happy Holidays’ all over! ‘I want to see Christmas. Other people can have their holidays, but Christmas is Christmas. I’m for seeing ‘Merry Christmas.’ Remember the expression ‘Merry Christmas?’ You don't see it anymore. You’re going to see it if I get elected, I can tell you.”
He was president when he tweeted a message on Christmas Eve of 2017.
“People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” he wrote. “I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!”
And on the night of his impeachment, the man who had twice banned his tenants for erecting a Christmas tree stood between two of them at his big “Merry Christmas Rally.”
Trump has always been willing to offer some Christmas cheer as long as it did not impede throwing people out of their homes and made actually wealthy residents happy. His supposed worry about offending non-believers at 100 Central Park South never stopped him from installing a big Christmas tree along with a Santa four blocks away at Trump Tower.
“It’s been a few years,” the present Santa told The Daily Beast on Friday when asked how many holiday seasons he has been there.
A sign was placed at the escalators made famous when Trump descended with Melania to declare his candidacy for president.
“Meet Santa. LINE STARTS HERE,” it read. “Please wait here until one of Santa’s helpers escorts you to the next line! Thank you!”
There were no lines at all at 2:30 p.m. Santa sat on his red throne on the lower level with nary a soul waiting to see him. His black-booted left foot jiggled and he finally stood up and waved with both white gloved hands to the people on the upper level, conveying all the jolliness that could be expected.
But Trump is known in his native city less as the savior of “Merry Christmas” than as exactly the kind of guy who would prohibit his tenants from putting up a Christmas tree because they stood in the way of him making millions more than he already had. How could New York parents in-the-know talk to their kids about naughty and nice while taking them to see Santa in a tower named Trump?
The music system was playing Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song,” and the lyrics were wafting through the lower lobby at 2:40 p.m., as a half-dozen people approached the red velvet ropes that marked off Santa’s realm.
And so I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times
Many ways, Merry Christmas to you...
Only, these were kids from maybe 40 to over 60. They were tourists and there wasn’t an actual youngster among them.
“I’m folding up in 10 minutes,” the guard then announced, checking his watch.
Two more adults came, one an actual resident of New York City name Azzie, who sat in Santa’s lap and gave him a kiss and whispered her Christmas wishes.
“I asked for a private jet and for love,” she told The Daily Beast afterwards.
Just before the guard closed it in anticipation of the 3 p.m. closing time, an actual kid arrived. He was an 11-year-old named Alfie from Argentina. Two more kids, girls aged 6 and 7, from outside Austin, Texas, arrived a few minutes later. The guard let them in and suddenly Christmas could just be Christmas, even there. Not even a practitioner of fake news had the heart to talk politics with these youngsters, who all reported that they still believe in Santa.
Over at 100 Central Park South, a big Christmas tree complete with sparkling white lights and a big red ornament was in the far right corner of the lobby. The uniformed doorman denied a passerby permission to take a picture of it.
“This is a residence, not a hotel,” he said.
The awning announced that the property is now named Trump Parc East. The apartments are condos and the residents include Eric Trump, who combined three apartments into a penthouse. He acquired one of them from his father at such a steep discount that he might have been subject to gift taxes if there had not been ways to avoid them.
The one-time leader of the tenants association that prevailed after a five-year battle is presently living in another state. John Moore was reluctant to voice thoughts about his famously vindictive one-time adversary.
“With this guy being in the office of the president, I won’t go after him again,” Moore said. “I beat him once.”
He said that the struggle between the tenants and Trump had taught him a valuable lesson.
“If I learned anything from it, there are a lot more nice people,” he said. “But there was one…”
He retains an affection for his former comrades in the fight. He was book browsing the other day when he came across one about cooking by Carmel Berman Reingold, a one-time tenant of 100 Central Park South, who died in 2016. He immediately ordered the book.
“She was good,” Moore said. “Her husband, Harry Reingold, was a good guy. We had no really bad people—except the Donald.”
Moore was told that there is a Christmas tree in the lobby at 100 Central Park South this year.
“Oh, nice,” Moore said.
On Wednesday night, Moore took more note of the vote in the House of Representatives than he did of Trump’s Merry Christmas rally and those two trees. The ban on a Christmas tree in a Trump purchase will be forgotten, but not the impeachment.
“He’ll go down with this on his tombstone,” Moore said.
He also said something else.
“Merry Christmas.”
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