Near the end of his 75-minute Republican National Convention acceptance speech, Donald Trump introduced one of his few policy priorities. If he were to be elected president this November, he promised he would repeal Section 501©(3) of the United States federal tax code. The law stipulates that in order for nonprofit organizations (read: religious institutions) to be absolved from paying taxes they cannot participate in partisan politics. “I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and protect free speech for all Americans,” Trump said.
If you’re not one of the Evangelical Christians to whom Trump was pandering it was easy to miss this small bit of policy. The 1954 tax amendment, championed by then-Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, was passed with little opposition and hasn’t inspired much since its passage — probably because nonprofit organizations do have free speech, just not the unalienable right to be tax-exempt. This was one of the few concrete details that Trump provided about his vision for America’s future, but it was overshadowed by Trump — drowned out by the demonic sounds of bigoted anger and fearmongering for those in the #NeverTrump corner; superseded by what it preceded for the Trumpified. “We can accomplish these great things, and so much else — all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again,” he said. “It is time to show the whole world that America is back — bigger, and better and stronger than ever before.”
Herein lies the generous view of Trump’s appeal. Liberals, myself included, cannot see past Trump’s bigotry, and cannot imagine how anyone who is not a bigot themselves could possibly support someone who unapologetically labels Mexicans killer-rapist-job thieves and women menstruating-bimbo-sex objects. It’s undeniable that Trump has generated much of his support from white patriarchy-loving Americans’ anxieties about a changing America. But the truth is that many American voters, the ones who remain undecided, will, even in a contest as spectacular as this one, make their decision based on more fickle criteria. Such as, Trump is big.
D onald Trump stands six feet two inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. When he speaks publicly he gesticulates with his arms, barely budging his erect torso. At 70 years old, he is thick and, though not particularly athletic-looking, he does have the appearance of a once-linebacker or first baseman.
It is common for presidents — who, lest we forget, have all been male — and other leaders to be tall and to use their height to project confidence and imposing strength. Bill Clinton was notorious for the former, LBJ for the latter. But Trump isn’t subtle about lording his largeness over smaller men. Stand less than six feet tall and criticize Trump and prepare to be labeled “Little” (e.g., “Little Marco” or “Little Michael Bloomberg”). Littleness, in Trump’s framing, is inferior to bigness. To be little is to be weak; to be big is to be strong and, thus, better. Perhaps that is why the rumored littleness of his digits has made him so defensive (“Look at those hands. Are they small hands?”). Or, perhaps he recognizes a presidential race for what it is: a dick-measuring contest (“And there’s no problem ‘there.’ I guarantee it”).
Trump’s blunt articulation of these primal notions of masculine superiority range from funny to repulsive, but the signals he’s sending to the world — that he is bigger and stronger than his competitors — are effective. Approximately two-thirds of all general elections have been won by the taller candidate and no president in the modern era has been shorter than the male average, which is five feet nine inches. One of the sad truths of elections is that voters often make their decisions based on superficial qualities — in addition to height, having a square jaw and intense stare are quite important — and mold their beliefs to fit those of the candidate who most looks the part. Trump won the Republican nomination, in large part, by casting himself as the field’s alpha; his chest has remained puffed in his general election campaign.
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In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama told the story of Brandon Fisher, an entrepreneur from Berlin, Pennsylvania who built a company called Center Rock, which specialized in a new kind of drilling technology. Fisher’s company would ultimately design the drilling equipment used for the rescue of the Chilean miners who were trapped in the San Jose cave mine after an August, 2010 accident. After the rescue, Obama said, “one of [Fisher’s] employees said of the rescue, ‘We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.’” The room applauded and Obama repeated the employee’s words for emphasis. “We do big things,” he said. “From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.”
The terms Obama spoke in — doing big things, dreaming, winning — are ones deeply ingrained in the American mythos. They are the basis of American exceptionalism. The American Dream is not one of simply making it, but one of making it big. Winning big. To articulate this vision of America is perhaps the only ingredient more integral to a presidential candidate’s chances than looking the part. You could probably find a quote from every president referring to America as a land where big dreams are realized.
Trump is not the sort of ordinary person that Obama had in mind during his speech, but Trump has internalized a very similar conception of the American Dream and has been selling that promise for far longer than he has been a candidate for president. So much so that in 2007 he published a self-help book, “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life,” about the importance of thinking big. In it he wrote, “Do you believe that thinking big is reserved for people with money, college degrees, family connections, or even intelligence? That is not true. Anyone can think big. The most important thing is the size of your thinking. How big you think determines how big a success you become.”
Credit where credit’s due: Donald Trump has made a career out of thinking big. (XXL Thinking. Does thinking come in a size XXXL? I don’t know. We’ll call it XXXL. Let’s just say people have told me that Donald Trump thinks very very big. Okay? Believe me.) After inheriting his father’s multi-million dollar real estate company, Trump expanded the company’s operations by buying and branding big buildings, golf courses, hotels, casinos and other recreational facilities — not to mention his largest-of-all personal brand.
Then, in 1984, Trump used the fortune he built to buy the New Jersey Generals, a team in the budding United States Football League (USFL). His vision for the team was characteristically Trumpian (read: YUGE). He would attract all the best players with the best money and the most beautiful amenities. And it worked. Trump signed the Cleveland Browns’ MVP quarterback Brian Sipe in his first season, and the team subsequently rebounded from a 6–12 record, going 14–4 in Trump’s first season of ownership. The next year he would draft Heisman-Trophy winner Doug Flutie out of Boston College, and would nearly lure Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor away from the New York Giants.
Trump’s big ego and glamorous lifestyle was part of the appeal for the superstars he courted. These were the traits that, at the beginning, made the USFL glad to have him. But that same big ego and overzealous vision would be the USFL’s undoing. The league’s appeal was predicated on providing football fans with yearlong football. NFL games were played in the autumn through the winter; the USFL season began in the spring and ended in the summer. Given the growth in popularity that American football has seen in the past three decades, the USFL’s business model likely would have been sustainable. Trump, though, did not want steady, sustainable business, however lucrative it might ultimately be, unless it meant being number one. With his sights set on a merger with the NFL, Trump pushed for an autumn-winter schedule that would compete with the NFL’s. “If God wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball,” Trump said as justification.
In 1986, Trump got his way. He convinced his fellow owners to vote 12–2 in favor of a fall schedule. But, in order to compete with the NFL they would have to break the NFL’s chokehold on national TV rights. Instead of playing games that fall, the league found itself in a $1.7 billion Trump-led anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, aiming to, according to an Esquire oral history, either “void the NFL’s TV contracts, force a merger, or provide a game-changing payday.” The trial lasted 42 days, and the jury ultimately ruled in favor of the USFL. However, because the jury also ruled that the league had brought financial squalor upon itself, the USFL was awarded damages of $1, not quite enough to cover their $6 million in legal fees, let alone the $200 million in USFL lost revenue. The USFL would never hold another football game, not in the fall nor the spring.
Of Trump’s unsuccessful football foray, retired Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly would say, “He does everything big, whether it’s big buildings or a presidential candidacy. He always shoots for the stars and usually gets what he wants. Except the NFL.” Kelly’s assessment of Trump would be spot on if he had included more “excepts.” Trump has also notoriously dabbled, unsuccessfully, with an airline, steaks, a game, a magazine, a travel site, a communications company and a university. Though some of these businesses expanded his personal net worth, they are all now defunct, and most left customers broke and unsatisfied.
Perhaps the best illustration of the hollow bigness of Trump’s thinking in action, though, can be seen in the Trump Taj Mahal. Undeterred by his unsuccessful USFL venture, Trump pivoted back to big real estate. He dreamt up a 51-story luxury Atlantic City hotel, opened in 1990. Trump took on enormous debt to bring Vegas-style opulence, in a regal Indian maharajah’s palace-themed package, to Atlantic City. Here was Trump’s “big” vision of the Trump Taj Mahal: white gates, each with three two-ton elephants of cast stone in front, a massive, flowing fountain, $14 million worth of Austrian crystal chandeliers, 12 restaurants, a 5,500-seat arena, doormen dressed in flowing purple robes with feathered turbans, belly dancers in the lobby, a convention center and casino the size of four football fields and Michael Jackson performing on night one.
Sounds spectacular. But it all amounted to, as described in the New York Times’ 1990 review of the Taj’s opening, a “plain building dressed up to within an inch of its life, [The Taj] is relentless — a grim money machine, towering over the bleakness of crumbling Atlantic City. In the end, for all that its glitter promises joy within, behind all that crystal hanging over all those slot machines, there is only bigness, and no more real joy here than on the desolate streets outside.” The Trump Taj was case in point of big not always being beautiful; it was tacky maximalism. Since its opening, the Taj has gone through four bankruptcies, and, in 2015, according to a Health Department memo, it had an awful mouse and bed bug infestation.
Donald Trump has “carried himself in a big way” throughout his presidential campaign and he has talked a big game. But in terms of big ideas, there’s only one that his presidential campaign is predicated upon, one that has separated him from his Republican counterparts: building a wall.
The Great Wall of Trump, as specified in the official 2016 GOP platform, would extend across the entirety of the United States’s southern border, such that it is “sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.” What that means has continuously shifted; the wall’s size seems to depend most on Trump’s mood on a given day. Trump, for instance, decided that the wall would be 10 feet taller after hearing that the last two presidents of Mexico each vowed that Mexico would never pay for a border wall.
The idea underlying the construction of a great (“impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful”) border wall is that the most dire problem 2016 America faces is illegal immigration. Specifically, illegal Mexican immigration — also Islamic refugees, but that’s separate, sort of. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said in his presidential announcement speech last summer. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The issue, for Trump, is not just that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” but that they are taking hard-working Americans’ jobs. Securing the United States’s southern border is part of Trump’s grander strategy of American isolationism — a strategy, it should be noted, that would effectively make America smaller. He also wants to “bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America,” as he said in his RNC nomination speech, without “let[ting] companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.” When framed as the source of drugs, crime, and American job loss, illegal Mexican immigration into the United States can seem like a big problem. But is it?
Before delving into whether illegal Mexican immigrants are actually taking jobs and committing crimes, let’s focus on the frequency with which Mexican people, today, are illegally crossing the US border. There are obvious obstacles to obtaining perfect data on illegal immigration. However, the numbers that are available indicate that to whatever extent undocumented Mexican migration into the United States is a problem, it is a waning one. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the population of undocumented peoples peaked at approximately 12 million in 2008, then fell by a million in 2009, and has since remained at roughly 11 million people. The number of apprehensions at the border is at its lowest point since 1974, and 2014 marked the first time that a majority of those caught were Central Americans, not Mexicans.
Now, if fewer Mexican people were migrating to the United States illegally, but those who were coming were the Mexican Government’s “most unwanted people,” if they were the “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” who Trump describes, there might be reason for concern. But again, the numbers are lacking. And again, what numbers we do have indicate that undocumented Mexican immigrants, like all other immigrant groups, are less likely to commit crimes than naturalized American citizens. A 2007 report from the Immigration Policy Center found that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants.” And a more recent IPC paper noted that “FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48% [among immigrants from 1990 to 2013] — which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.” The crimes that illegal immigrants most often are convicted of are related to, simply, being in the United States illegally.
As far as the United States economy is concerned, undocumented immigrants are playing a significant role. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “about half of the hired workers employed in U.S. crop agriculture were unauthorized, with the overwhelming majority of these workers coming from Mexico.” The idea, though, that illegal Mexican immigrants are taking hardworking Americans’ jobs is misguided. In 2007, agricultural labor economist James S. Holt appeared before Congress and said, “The reality, however, is that if we deported a substantial number of undocumented farm workers, there would be a tremendous labor shortage.” In thinking about how such a labor shortage might impact the economy, consider that in 2009 the National Milk Producers Federation’s projected that retail milk prices would increase by 61 percent without the United States’s immigrant workforce.
Undocumented immigrants, too, are paying into America’s social service funds, and doing so without much return. In 2013, Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, told the New York Times that undocumented workers contribute about $15 billion a year to Social Security through payroll taxes but only take out $1 billion because very few undocumented workers are eligible to receive benefits. At that moment, undocumented workers had contributed as much as $300 billion, or nearly 10 percent, of the $2.7 trillion Social Security Trust Fund. And the point Goss was making was supported by an earlier report by the Congressional Budget Office, which said “over the past two decades, most efforts to estimate the fiscal impact of immigration in the United States have concluded that, in aggregate and over the long term, tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — exceed the cost of the services they use.”
Even though vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions undocumented immigrants make to the United States economy than are adversely affected, and even though undocumented immigrants do not pose a serious crime threat, coming into the United States without proper documentation is illegal. As such, there are legitimate reasons that the United States government should discourage foreign peoples from migrating to the United States without documentation. It is, for instance, unfair to the people attempting to get into the United States through legitimate channels.
And yet for Donald Trump, or any other politician who wants to cease the inflow of Mexican migrants, though it might be intuitive to just build a big ‘ol wall, there is evidence that that is one of the very worst ways to accomplish the stated goal. In 1993 and 1994, U.S. Border Patrol erected literal walls of enforcement in El Paso, Texas and in San Diego, California, at the two busiest U.S.-Mexico border crossings. Simultaneously, Border Patrol diverted migratory flows through the Sonoran Desert, into Arizona, making the journey riskier and costlier. The result was not that Mexican migrants in those areas stopped coming into the United States; rather, migrants came into the United States and didn’t leave. The risks were too great to chance traveling back and forth as many have typically done. From their study of the Cold War border between East and West Germany (“the most heavily fortified in modern history”), the Cato Institute concluded that “there is simply no way for a large, open and democratic country like the United States to construct and maintain perfect border defenses.” Migrants will always find ways to enter the United States, and the more dangerous America makes it, the less likely they are to leave.
So, here’s the skinny on Trump’s one big idea: The motivation for building a wall is misguided; it is part of a vision of a smaller, less inclusive America; it would be incredibly costly; and it probably would backfire. But alas, it is a “big” idea. And herein lies the problem with the generous view of Trump’s appeal. He has demonstrated time and again where the American dream breaks down. Whether Trump is dreaming up a football league, casino, or political personage, the result is always the same: a supersized gold-bedazzled Macy’s Day Parade balloon of his likeness, decadent on the outside, and ultimately full of nothing but hot air (or measly throwbacks to 1950s tax policy). That there is rarely substance beneath the bigness is missed because — Can’t you see that’s BIG?!
Donald Trump has left a long line of people dazzled by his big dreams, and then ultimately disappointed by the lack of quality in the results. Sure, Trump is right that anyone can think big. But the most important thing is not the size of your thinking, as Trump would have you believe. The majority of Americans were not born into tremendous wealth and cannot afford to dream big for bigness sake. Thinking big — as well as acting big and being big — does not somehow entitle Americans to ‘success’ or ‘greatness.’ America’s greatest achievements were not accomplished by simply dreaming big; they took time and hard work, granular, unsexy problem-solving.
Story: Max Cea
Illustrations: Emma Caster-Dudzick and Charles Caster-Dudzick
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