“Politician” is a job title, and encompasses everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler. One politician that springs to mind was NYC Mayor, Ed Koch, whom I saw a lot of in the ’80s, at the same time DT was trying to fabricate a rep as something more than Fred Trump’s spoiled kid. Koch had his faults (being gay and closeted probably had something to do with that), but on the whole was a pretty decent, honest guy whose ethical code we New Yorkers approved of.

It was inevitable that as Mayor of a city rebuilding itself after the fiscal disasters of the mid-’70s, he would encounter Old Man Trump’s kid. He would have run across the Father/Son tag team back in 1975, when the Feds got a judgement against them for refusing to rent apartments to black families. Old man Fred was such a well-known racist that songwriter Woody Guthrie, (who wrote “This Land is Your Land,”) also penned a much less uplifting song about him

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project[6]

…and by all accounts, his cosseted son was no better.

Anyway, around the time that DT promised to preserve the facade of Bonwit Tellers, a NYC architectural landmark but (predictably) went back on his word and had the sculptures demolished instead, Koch famously said of him “I wouldn’t believe that guy if his tongue were notarized.” So, that’s one politician’s take on this one.

So no, saying Trump was a politician all those years when he wasn’t doesn’t tell me much about politicians in general, or him in particular.

But it tells me a whole lot about what you’re willing to be OK with.

What would it be like, if you didn’t have to be OK with those things?