UPDATE: It looks as if the films that led to this post are not, in fact, real, and are pieced together from stock footage. I apologise personally for being taken in, but am leaving post up as a memento that we can all get taken in by what we would like to be true. Read more at the Washington Post.
Donald Trump’s father, Fred, briefly considered running for mayor of New York in the late 60s. Here’s a campaign advert he made.
“I suppose he’s more of an uptown type, really.”
H/t Michael Goldfarb
Sidney Blumenthal in the London Review of Books outlines the thinking behind Trump’s plan to stand against Republican NYC mayor John Lindsay in 1969:
“In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.”
Quite.