Inside Trump Tower: Where Barack Obama is referred to as 'Kareem Abdul Obama'

A Donald Trump supporter dressed as Hillary Clinton in handcuffs outside Trump Tower
Reuters
Joy Lo Dico9 November 2016

Trump Tower on 5th Avenue near Central Park is easily identified by the 6ft-high gold letters above that say TRUMP TOWER.

After you’ve pushed through the pro- and anti-Trump placard wavers, you enter a cave of red marble and gold, complete with cascading fountains.

My friend Dee, an editor and New Yorker, and I settled into some scuffed leather armchairs in the Trump Bar, with the mission of talking to supporters who had been lured by the Billionaire Martini or You’re Fired cocktails.

Polls in NYC are odd: according to one in the summer, Trump had picked up a fifth of traditional Democrats, while a similar percentage of Republicans had switched to Hillary.

New York is home to both candidates and they are holding rival election parties in Manhattan tonight, Clinton at the Javits Center, with Trump’s a mile away at the Midtown Hilton.

Although Trump Tower has apartments and offices, as well as his campaign HQ, it is more like a shrine to his ego. Worshipping amid the red marble slabs are three big fellas from Atlanta, Georgia, sitting in the bar with books about Jesus on the table and several beers on the go.

Hillary Clinton v Donald Trump: US Presidential Election

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They love Trump for his business credentials and refer to Obama as “Kareem Abdul Obama, or whatever his name is”. None of the charges against him bother these Southern small businessmen. Doesn’t pay his contractors? They won’t have done the job properly, they reply. His taxes? It’s all legal, he was just offsetting his losses. And what about the women? One of his numerous accusers is Jessica Leeds, who claims Trump groped her on a plane.

“You both are attractive women,” says the bearded one, beaming at Dee and me, as he leans over to squeeze my knee. “But I’m sitting on an airplane and there’s one there that’s got them drooping to here [his hands make the shape of sagging breasts] you think I’m gonna grope that woman when he has the kind of women in his life he has. He’s a class act.”

Dee asks how they feel about Trump marrying an immigrant. The Atlantan rises to defend Donald. “First of all, I stay with my own kind. I don’t go interracial breeding.” Dee puts the question again, the point being that Melania Trump is foreign-born. “She’s Caucasian, though,” he replies.

As I’m glancing around the bar to find a Trump moderate whose message might cross the Atlantic more favourably, another of the group rouses himself, an accountant who ran a gym business which failed.

“Hillary is a lesbian,” he drawls. “That’s why she put up with Bill’s affairs. Their marriage is a political arrangement and a money-making machine. They don’t care about each other. They are just business partners. They sleep in different bedrooms.”

I begin to conclude that this was one of the few bars in New York that these Atlantans would feel comfortable in and that, given Hillary’s probable landslide in her liberal-leaning home state of New York, these guys will be safest on the first plane home. “I hope I haven’t aff-ended you’all,” says the accountant.

However, as Clinton knows, all her loyalists in New York are of limited value. A vote here is not a vote in one of the key swing states that could give her a definitive victory or, alternatively, turn Trump into a global brand.

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