New Yorkers living in and who once resided in the Metropolitan Area know Donald Trump too well. For worse, he’s one of us. However, the farther west and south one travels, the short-fingered vulgarian somehow morphs into a worthy figure.

What better demonstrates the concept of “two Americas”?

When he began his 2016 jihad to soil the Oval Office, thousands of working New Yorkers had been screwed over by him. Either through individuals being stiffed by his organization or firms having to settle for pennies on the dollar in order to spare themselves much greater losses should they have resorted to litigation.

There’s doubtlessly a vast number of New Yorkers who’ve learned second- and third- hand from family, friends, and acquaintances of damages and ruins the vile pig has left in his foul wake. People, television viewers especially, beyond the Metropolitan Area only “know” the Convicted First Felon through his TV show.

During deceiving hours on TV, the classless huckster came across as competent and capable. He did so thanks to the miracle of editing, dubbing, and retakes. Tarnished as he already was, the shifty six-times bankrupt would swoop in on his show as a business white knight who sought comparable boardroom types to sit at his sinister side.

In real life, he was inept as an entrepreneur. What product bearing his rancid name hasn’t coughed its last and gone belly up? Who loses money operating casinos? Had he been an incubator, the crude eggs within never would’ve hatched.

But as has been stated in different forums about better figures, he came across good on TV. Despite it being manure, his substance was image. As it remains.

Prominent executives, real ones whose firms manufacture items, not financiers who have built fortunes by shoving piles of shares around desks, rightly regard the Convicted First Felon as a joke. They find him clownish. Even the less thieving Masters of the Universe keep him as far away as possible.

It is laughable, no, sad, that Trump’s thickest support fill the ranks of people who work. Blue collar types who’ve deluded themselves into believing they see something of themselves in him.

How badly beguiled they are.

Donald Trump sees nothing of himself in them, therefore he sees nothing wrong with exploiting them. With him there is just grabbing, taking.

His appeal, and, yes, he does have appeal, is in speaking aloud what those Americans who can be regarded as “low information” think. He addresses their resentments and grievances. In other words, he shifts the onus of their failure to advance alongside “the others.”

In America there’s never been a shortage of “others.” The first great wave of immigration started shifting reevaluations of our populaces. Fortunately for those arrivals who bore the initial brunt, there was a following wave of “wretched poor” from elsewhere to stigmatize. This was a sequential process in America, where established immigrants or second-generation Americans could belittle the next boatloads of disembarking new arrivals.

Of course, these were Europeans, Northern, Southern, Eastern, who paid their dues as inferiors to prior immigrants. Excluded altogether from the pecking order were Asians and Mexicans. At least they were seen as people for the most part.

No. Since the beginning of New World colonialism, blacks and the indigenous were barely deigned humans. Even after the Civil War, even after Native Americans finally gained citizenship in 1924. Wonder how we’ll commemorate the second event.

Emancipated blacks received citizenship through the 13th and 14th Amendments. Only about six decades later were descendants of the continent’s original inhabitants declared “Americans.” And depending who’s doing the observation, even that’s kind of iffy.

Present-day disparagement of “others” stems from far deeper insecurities than the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then, worries of the new group being so hungry for work their presence would undercut wages. Indeed, while racial and ethnic stresses have from time to time tested the American mosaic, continued employment, livable compensation, possible replacement proved to be the past eras’ greatest challenges.

Facing enough desperation to sustain oneself, there was always the fear someone new, someone unfamiliar, someone different, would supplant that current workforce by taking less pay. So, post-colonial America has always borne something of an anti-immigrant strain. In fact, in our past there have been politicians, political organizations who’ve campaigned against immigration. Especially the “wrong kind” of immigrants.

Sound familiar?

Today a cartoon circulates which encapsules the modern version of the threat described above. Three figures sit at a table in the panel. On the right, an Anglo male. Let us presume him a blue-collar worker. In the middle, some corporate type. On the left, a brown complected man. Before each sits a plate. On the Anglo’s plate, a single cookie. On the suit’s plate, a mountainous pile of cookies. The third man’s plate is empty.

The corporate type in suit and tie looks at and speaks to the Anglo. The cartoon’s caption reads, “That guy wants to steal your cookie.”

Fright through misdirection. Yes, that’s how easy it is.

The Convicted First Felon and his MAGA fools have only revived a trait that’s as American as rhubarb pie. But it’s nastier now because as diverse as America has become, we all should know better. We do. But again, dormant as a more progressive country rendered it, that same progress has provoked Anglo male disenchantment over the last 40 years.

Instead of being made further aware of the obvious, that groups once suppressed by habit, codes, disposition, law, the previously denied were increasingly free to pursue then fulfill American dreams. Rather than see a changed playing field then adjust accordingly, longtime unchallenged Anglo males had been continually misled to believe undeserved advantages alone vaulted inferior people ahead of them.

This is how “affirmative action” got slandered into becoming “quotas.” Here’s affirmative action: for the longest non-Anglos, no matter how qualified, no matter how overqualified, were routinely blocked from attaining sought-for opportunities. All affirmative action did was drop the barriers. No. The unqualified weren’t also permitted to pass.

Black or brown faces weren’t just stuck in posts to recompense the past.

However, disgruntled Anglos refused believing those they’ve always held inferior could somehow make those cuts which elevated them. Even today, non-Anglos, women, must often prove themselves several times better than the sought-after position requires. Whereas mediocre Anglo men still rise in single bounds.

That is not an exaggeration. That is not an invention. That remains real life.

More so than when Barack Obama ran for president, Kamala Harris’ substitution for Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in this election cycle has ramped up a nauseating tendency among a certain segment of white voters. The dodge of “we don’t know enough about him/her.” It’s frequently cited by professed undecided white voters. Often, it’s the default response of white voters who’d know it would be wrong to state what they hold true: “I have suspicions of the candidate because he/she is black.”

This and the picayune questions. As if the “stranger” is some kind of exotic creature. The kind of queries no Anglo in a similar pursuit would face.

See it as blacks do – both are just devious ways of openly presenting unfounded qualms about the candidate’s complexion. Doubly so because Kamala Harris is a black woman.

By comparison, Obama had it easy being “the first.” One, he was a man. Two, in John McCain Obama faced a decent and dignified opponent. When racial ignorance emerged from the Republican electorate, McCain smothered rather than encouraged it.

How unlike the walking talking mass of insecurities opposing Kamala Harris.

Although her entry as a presidential candidate was unusual, the vice president has a public service record which can be examined and discussed. One wishes the same could’ve been said about her opponent, purportedly a businessman. What isn’t he hiding? In 2016, he provided the meagerest answers regarding pertinent subjects which could’ve then better determined his fitness for the presidency.

Now, who doesn’t know all about him?

Even today, the Chief Thief continues erecting hurdles to exhaust or stymie public investigation into his commercial and financial affairs. It’s not about mere curiosity. It’s about whether there are any possible conflicts between his private interests and those of the people he may again serve.

Indeed, we the people deserve to know in these contentions, whose concerns will take precedence with Donald Trump. Ours or his? We never learned this during his 2016 campaign. Nor throughout his bleak term. Neither again, when he ran for reelection in 2020. This silence continues in 2024.

Let us suppose his is the worst example of white privilege – the kind that may ultimately enrich him to the detriment of the United States.

Right-wing media, racial provocateurs, and their barking head radio handmaidens, aided and viciously abetted through funding by reactionary – reactionary, not conservative – organizations displeased with an America which looks more and more like our nation, have disinterred then reenergized fallacies that America is a “white man’s land.”

That is the message expulsed in every vulgar Bund/neo-Nazi/klan rally speech given by Don the Con. Both sides hear his appeal. MAGA deplorables approve because he spews what they think but are too fearful to speak. Real Americans are aghast at such naked calls for divisiveness.

Americans should be thankful Vice President Kamala Harris put the Queens mook in his place during their September 10th debate. She prepped. He played golf, probably taking mulligans on every hole.

At the exchange, the vice president spanked him harder than any Moscow hooker ever has.

I know he entered thinking of her dismissively. One, she was a woman. Two, she was a black woman. Her accomplishments were immaterial. Being the kind of man who won’t see beyond the lines or outside the box, he’d already filed her.

If you’re a black person of a certain age, you know what sort of white man Donald Trump is. The kind whose contempt of him exceeds his of you.

Regardless of how simple your name is to pronounce the crook will intentionally mangle it whenever he can. With the vice president, one might’ve reasonably thought the loose marbles between the phony’s ears had migrated into his mouth. But a lot of reactionary Anglo males share this deficiency. That’s some club they have. It must meet in Losers’ Lounge.

The importance of defending our names is one of the lessons I carry from my father. He grew up in the Jim Crow Deep South during the Depression. Inducted before Pearl Harbor, father served the duration in the European Theater. He then would’ve been among the first from the Old World redeployed to the Pacific. Atomic bombs spared him and innumerable other GIs and sailors that. Atomic bombs made us revere Harry Truman in our home.

Not sorry.

I gather after all that living, the least father expected from a mostly ungrateful nation was hearing his name said correctly. This he imposed. Perhaps it started after he was demobbed. Doesn’t matter. By the time I could recognize it, I understood any Anglo man who mispronounced father’s name would be corrected. Not rebuffed. Not rebuked. Simply corrected.

The fellow sitting across from father might’ve seen in him some permutation or “boy” or “George.” Father nevertheless insisted on being addressed properly. No matter how many volleys necessary. He just wanted his name respected, and thus the person it represented.

I reread those last graphs and know generations after mine have no idea what I meant. Which probably explains why they are where they are. Behind.

Therefore, I was glad when Vice President Harris grabbed the initiative at the debate. She crossed the line. He wouldn’t have. She extended her hand. This gesture never would’ve occurred to the pig. Most importantly, when introducing herself (the pair had never met before) she clearly annunciated her name.

Each a power move. Ones from a boss.

From thereon, the liar, cheat, thief, traitor lacked excuse to say “Kamala” incorrectly. But he did. In the debate’s latter stages. Just to insult her. No strategy behind this. Just a cornered animal lashing out.

Know what Christmas present Vladimir Putin’s punk should get for Christmas. Dignity. Just so he’d have some to lose.

In the debate’s aftermath, which in the grifter in chief’s case was damage control, the professionals, the clear-eyed, acknowledged the disaster she’d visited upon him. They would’ve looked like underpaid shills had they aped the MAGA party line.

MAGA, however, his cultists, the dupes who mainlined the Kool Aid, invented all sort of conspiracies to save their flailing failed idol. What interested me most, though, were the MAGAs who cast aspersions against the vice president. They likely seethed beyond boiling as the debacle proceeded.

In a “fair” debate there was no way their champion could crawl away so humbled by one of … them.

To MAGA it was impossible the vice president had risen to prominence without having slept with a slew of powerful men who propelled her career. Again, I read the vice president’s resume. The mental and intellectual elbow grease it needed to compile would’ve broken most MAGAs already bent and thin backs. Her progression has been established through tough bona fides. The daunting kind that would force most MAGAs to beg for mercy.

On social media MAGA knew she’d kicked its herald into 31 flavors. But despite the clear result, disbelief or desire to deny it overwhelmed them. Because if the totem who further incited MAGA’s baseless anguishes with his incessant loud, obscene, absurd pitches instead of allaying them, while also professing he had the answers to what allegedly menaced the deplorables – though to anyone’s knowledge has yet to provide these solutions – if he could rhetorically be hoofed and headed by one of … them, what portended their prospects?

One hopes MAGA is quivering uncontrollably at the early November prospect of an America being helmed in January 2025 by President-elect Kamala Harris.