A New York Times op-ed published the same year that “Back to the Future” was released in theaters shows that neither Donald Trump nor his media critics have evolved in the last three decades.
He’s still cocksure, and they’re still put off by it.
Trump is a “petty” and unserious person, and he is unqualified for “world-sized tasks,” the Times article declared on March 9, 1985.
He is “in the newspapers almost every day for one thing or another,” and he “craves achievement, recognition, respectability and acceptance,” former Times columnist Sydney Schanberg added in his op-ed, titled New York; Doer and Slumlord Both. “Mr. Trump’s other activities and lavish life style get a lot of space in the press, local and national.”
Schanberg, best known for his coverage of the Cambodian civil war, makes his disdain for Trump clear, going so far as to characterize the former reality TV star as a “slumlord.”
But for anyone following the press’ coverage of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, the real moment of déjà vu is located at the end of the Schanberg story.
In the mid-1980s, Trump wanted “to become the nation’s negotiator on arms limitation with the Soviet Union,” the op-ed explains. “He says he’s a master negotiator, and could do a better job on arms talks than ‘the kind of representatives that I have seen in the past.'”
Asked about how hard it would be to become an expert on nuclear technology, Trump said it would be “easy.”
”It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump said. ”I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation.”
For Schanberg, there’s only one takeaway: Trump should probably do some reading, and maybe educate himself a little bit on the subject first. The former Times columnist likely didn’t realize that this advice would go on to be repeated by like-minded media figures long after the Times cancelled his column.
The meteoric rise of Trump’s campaign has riled GOP leaders, and has left members of the press scrambling for an explanation. He’s too flashy, he’s too brash, and he’s too shameless a self-promoter to be taken seriously, media analysts say.
And yet, Trump’s polling numbers continue to rise.
(h/t @mangylover)
