Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally, 5 October 2016, in Las Vegas. John Locher/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.On 16 September, Donald Trump surreally began his non-apology for questioning president Obama’s country of birth with a signature Trumpian sales pitch for his new Washington, DC hotel. This go-to mode, the perpetual booster for brand Trump, is well known to anyone who has watched reality TV over the past decade.
Yet, the brand he has created – the brashly successful real estate mogul, who flirts with nativism, and sings the gospel of success – is not his own. It has a much longer and distinctly American legacy rooted, ironically, not in fear but a bullish optimism about the future. It is a form of boosterism for technology, progress, and the free market. No one practices it as thoroughly and pridefully as real estate developers.
Real estate investment has always had a special place in American politics due to the country’s history of westward expansion outward, closely followed by urban development upward. Cities like Chicago, which changed their economic engine from stockyards to skyscrapers within the decade of the 1890s, embody the dual American narratives of cowboy self-reliance and business acumen. Those who made a fortune in real estate, such as John Jacob Astor, who parlayed a fur trading empire into becoming the most important developer in late nineteenth-century New York, are praised not just as being in the right place at the right time but as visionaries who understood fundamental shifts in the modernising US economy.
