What did Donald Trump do today?
He gave graduating West Point seniors some advice.
Decked out in a hot pink tie and campaign baseball hat, Trump gave the commencement address to the graduating class at West Point today. Trump, whose draft-dodging is common knowledge and and who famously called America's war dead "suckers" and "losers,"
nevertheless seems to enjoy speaking to military audiences, where
discipline and protocol mean that he will never have to worry about a
crowd's reaction.
As he does in most speeches, Trump walked the graduates through a litany of grievances he had over his impeachments and criminal convictions. He directly insulted the military leadership that the graduates will be serving under. He said that he—not the military, but he himself—had "defeated ISIS in three weeks." (No part of that is true.) And he let the nation's newest crop of Army officers in on a secret: "We have introduced a thing called drones."
Then, apparently departing from his script, he told this story to the young men and women who will now begin their careers as commissioned Army officers. A video clip can be seen here, and as is often the case with Trump, hearing it is a different kind of experience than reading it.
Momentum is an amazing thing. Keep it going. I tell a story sometimes about a man who was a great, great real estate man. He was a man who was admired for real estate all over the world actually. All over the country. He built Levittown. He started as a man who built one house, then two, then five, then he built 20. He built a thousand. Then he built two thousand and three thousand a year. He got very big. He was great at what he did. You see him all of the country still.
Levittowns. This was a long time ago.
He was the first of the really, really big homebuilders. He became very rich. A very rich man. And then he decided to sell. He was offered a lot of money by a big conglomerate, Golf and Western—Gulf and Western. They saw the money he was making. They gave him a lot of money, tremendous amount of money. More money than he thought he would get. He sold his company and he had nothing to do. We ended up getting a divorce. Found the new wife.
Can you say a trophy wife? It didn't work out too well. That doesn't work out too well, i must tell you. Trophy wives. It made him happy for a little while at least.
He found a new wife. He sold his little boat and got a big yacht. He had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world. He moved to Monte Carlo and led the good life. Time went by and he got bored. Fifteen years later, the company he sold to call him. They said "That housing business is not for us."
You have to understand, when Bill Levitt was hot, he had momentum, he would go to the job sites every night and take up every loose nail. He would pick up every scrap of wood. If there was a bolt or screw lying on the ground, he would pick it up and use it the next day putting together a house. Now he was spoiled and rich. He was really rich. They called and said this is not for us, this business. Would you like to buy it back? We will sell it back to you cheap.
He bought it. He bought it. He thought he made a great deal. He was all excited. It was 15 years later. He lost a lot of momentum. Remember the word momentum.
He lost everything. It just didn't work. I was sitting at a party on Fifth Avenue one night a long time ago. The biggest people in New York, the biggest people in the country were all at that party and saluting each other, how great they were. They were telling each other how great—I'm greater than you. It gives you a headache sometimes. They had all these people telling their own stories about how fantastic—a cocktail party.
I looked over and I was doing well. I was invited to the party so I had to be doing well. I was very, very young. I made a name in real estate.
I looked over at the party, sitting in a corner by himself, nobody talking to him, was Mr. Levitt. He had just gone bankrupt and lost everything. He lost everything. His home, everything. I went over and talked to him. He was in the real estate business and I loved real estate.
I said, "Hello Mr. Levitt, how are you?" He said, "Hello Donald. Nice to meet you." He knew me from being in the business. "How's it going?" "Not well. Really not well as you have probably read. It's been very tough for me." I said, "What happened? Anything you can do?" "No, there is not a thing I can do."
He said, I will never forget, I have lost my momentum. I just didn't have it. I used to have it but I lost my momentum.
It is a story I tell. You have to know when you have momentum. Sometimes, you also have to know when you lost the momentum. Leaving a field sometimes, leaving what you are doing sometimes is okay. You have to have momentum. You have to know that momentum is gone. You have to know when to say it is time to get out.
It's a very sad story. I remember that story so well like it was yesterday.
It's not always bad advice to tell someone to give up when things get difficult, but it's not something West Point cadets hear very much.
There are some curious similarities between William Levitt and Trump. Levitt refused to sell his properties to Black buyers, even after racist tactics like deed covenants and other forms of housing discrimination were illegal. Trump's first appearance in the public record was as the defendant, along with his father, in a racial discrimination lawsuit after he, too, refused to rent to Black tenants. Like Trump, Levitt stole money from his self-named "charity." And as Trump's "trophy wife" reference indicates, they were each married three times, with subsequent marriages to women they had had affairs with during previous marriages.
And—Trump's story is accurate on this point—both lost fortunes in real estate. The chief difference is that Levitt mostly lost his own money, while the money Trump lost came from his inheritance, the taxpayers, or other investors.
It's entirely possible that Levitt and Trump really did meet, although when Trump thinks he can get away with it, he often inserts himself into stories. (For example, he once said he competed at a baseball tryout with Giants star Willie McCovey. But McCovey was seven years older than Trump and was playing in the major leagues by the time Trump was 13.)
It's tradition for the President to shake the hand of every graduate when they preside over commencement at one of the service academies. Trump left immediately after his speech.
Why does this matter?
- Maybe don't tell America's future military leaders to quit when the going gets tough.
