Are there other examples, around the world, of the Donald Trump phenomenon? I think so.
President Trump’s election was a surprise, an upset, a rejection of the advice of media, academic and financial elites. So, I argued back in October 2016 in a Washington Examiner column, were the victory of Brexit — leaving the European Union — in the United Kingdom in the June 23, 2016, referendum, and the defeat of President Juan Manuel Santos’s peace pact with the FARC guerrillas in Colombia in an Oct. 2, 2016, referendum.
I pointed out that in each country, the capital metropolitan area and the geographic and ethnic fringes voted with the establishment, but were beaten by larger majorities in each nation’s historic heartland. I pointed out that polls showed a similar division in the United States, where the coastal metropolitan areas were solid for Hillary Clinton but the historic heartland voted, decisively it turned out, for Trump.
Here’s another example of how Trump’s victory was presaged by foreign results. A rich man with little or no experience in held public office wins an unexpectedly large victory in a major election. My two examples are Mauricio Macri, who was elected president of Argentina in November 2015, and João Doria, who was elected mayor of São Paulo, the largest municipality in the Western Hemisphere, in October 2016. Both victories represented a partisan turnover, against the neo-Peronist government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and the leftist PT mayor Fernando Haddad in São Paulo.
Curiously, both Macri and Doria have tangential connections to Trump.
According to Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, Macri’s father, Franco Macri, owned the rights to develop the northern part of the Hudson Yards section of Manhattan, west of Lincoln Center, and offered to sell them to Trump in 1984. They met at the Sherry Netherland Hotel — “Macri, his young son and a beautiful interpreter named Chrsitina.” But Macri, described by Trump as “a wonderful and well-meaning man,” decided not to sell but instead agreed to concessions to city and other agencies — “a critical misjudgment from the start: he assumed that in a project as big as the West Side yards, he could afford to absorb nearly any costs and still end up with a huge profit.”
In 1985 Macri, hard pressed to carry on the project, sold his interest to Trump for $100 million. Were two future presidents of their countries present at that meeting in the Sherry Netherland? Not clear: Franco Macri, who is still alive, had more than one son. It would be an interesting question to ask either president some time.
As for the mayor of São Paulo, João Doria is a very rich man whose businesses include a magazine called Caviar Lifestyle. He had never previously held public office but did host a Brazilian TV show called O Apprendiz. (Yes, that means The Apprentice.) A computer search discloses that João Doria interviewed Trump in 1988 for Folha de São Paulo, the largest paper in Brazil.
Trump’s message, for non-lusophone readers, appears to be that any publicity is good and that it’s better to be on the front pages than the inside pages. Doria, who won a first round victory with more than 50 percent against multiple candidates, has been mentioned as a possible candidate for president of Brazil in 2018. Which raises the possibility that the president of the United States could have had contacts with two South American presidents going back 30 years. Who knew?
