The New York Times is trying to understand the mind of Donald Trump. What makes him tick. How his mind works.
An article published yesterday tried to get an inside look at the man who will most likely be the Republican nominee. To do that, the newspaper reviewed many of the personal letters that Trump has sent over the years. The letters often become coveted souvenirs, so many of them are available to be reviewed.
Trump has used some of the letters to flatter those who agree with him. For example, he sometimes wrote to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, fawning and referring to him as “the greatest mayor that the city’s ever had.”
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the letters were less pleasant. Some of what we’ve been hearing on the campaign trail could have come from these personal letters.
In 2009 Trump wrote to film director Mike Tollins, who made a documentary about the failure of the United States Football League and Trump’s role in it. Trump’s letter blasted Tollins in words that are familiar from the campaign trail. He called the director “extremely dishonest” and “third rate.” With his trademark black sharpie, Trump added a nasty “P.S.You are a loser.”
"P.S. You are a loser," Donald Trump wrote in a 2009 letter to Mike Tollin, a filmmaker https://t.co/2yDqXneUJb pic.twitter.com/uwlTPgGBVI
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2016
Tollin took the sniping in stride, and has the letter framed and posted on his office wall. He thinks it is kind of amusing, saying that people often want to touch it.
More recently, Trump reacted to something that former NBA star Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote in the Washington Post. Abdul Jabbar wrote a very negative article about Trump’s candidacy. He compared Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail to that of Bernie Sanders, saying that the latter showed grace under pressure, but that the former was a bully.
Trump was not happy. He wrote a personal note to the basketball legend, scrawled in black sharpie across the copy of the article:
“Now I know why the press treated you so badly. They couldn’t stand you. The fact is that you don’t have a clue about life and what has to be done to make America great again. Best wishes, Donald Trump”
Kareem was shocked by the note:
“It was such a petty and childish reaction, like a teenage boy responding to being turned down for a date by whining, ‘Well, nobody likes you!’ ”
He went on to compare Trump’s ridiculous behavior to a dog peeing on a tree so he can mark his territory.
When asked if he planned to keep the letter, Abdul Jabbar emphatically said “no.” He said that he crumpled it up into a little ball and used his famous “sky hook” shot to drop it into the wastebasket.
If only we could do the same to its writer.
Here is more from the basketball legend on the wannabe legend Trump.
Featured image via YouTube Screengrab
