What Donald Trump calls the most famous escalator in the world is not the grand one that descends from an upper mezzanine to the lobby of the tower he named after himself.
“Everybody thinks it’s that one,” a security guard said on Friday afternoon, exactly 8 years after Trump descended to a waiting mass of news cameras and announced he was running for president.
The misapprehension is understandable. The more impressive conveyance would be in better keeping with all that has happened since. One imbecile from Queens went on to change the whole country.
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The guard directed a visitor’s attention to a lesser escalator that goes from the lobby to the food court below. The two-story indoor waterfall wall is without water as it undergoes repairs.
“Pardon Our Appearance,” read a sign at its foot.
The escalator itself was unchanged. And to ride down it was to recall the moment when Trump stepped from and smiled into the lens as a few dozen people cheered.
“Wow. Woah. That is some group of people. Thousands!” he exclaimed, telling a lie such as had long made him a joke in his hometown.
How could you take a guy seriously when the elevator buttons in this same building skip 10 numbers because it is only 58 stories, not 68, as he says? And to make it all the more ridiculous, some of the supposed “thousands” were actors earning $50 by answering a casting call for “not a traditional ‘background job’… to wear t-shirts and carry signs and help cheer him in support of his announcement.”
And it was bad enough that he had once taken out a full page newspaper ad calling for the execution of the Central Park 5, who have since been exonerated. Here he was at his big announcement saying Mexico was sending rapists across our southern border.
But everybody in 2015 who thought he could not possibly win failed to take due note that Hillary Clinton made several visits to the Hamptons that summer, and none to Wisconsin. Trump himself voiced surprise at his victory.
“Do you believe this shit?” he asked a buddy from Queens who called him the morning after the election.
To now ride the escalator from the food court back up to the lobby was to ascend from what transpired in 2015 to whatever might happen in the rest of 2023 and beyond. If we had been unable to foresee eight years ago that he would actually get elected, how can we accurately anticipate what’s next? How will the indictments he now faces in New York and Florida play out? Will he also face charges in Georgia? Will he finally be held accountable? Or will those prosecutions catapult him back into the White House for a second, even more chaotic and lawless term? Will the divisions in the country reach a breaking point?
One of the few people who did accurately predict the 2016 election was Lou Nascone, who owns a window tinting business in Bayville, New Jersey, and was among the handful of unpaid everyday folks who attended the announcement. His crew had worked in Trump casinos in Atlantic City and somebody offered him a ticket to the Trump Tower announcement.
“I wanted to go and listen to what he had to say,” Nascone recalled. “I was just tired the way everything is. It seems like every politician's a crook.”
Nascone was surprised by the diversity of the crowd, not imagining that some of them were actors.
“I looked around, there was every race, creed, and color person there,” he recalled. “Everybody was cheering for him. And I was like, ‘This guy's gonna win.’”
He reported that his business fared well during the Trump years and his customers had seemed equally happy with the economy. He said that things have taken a downturn since Biden was elected and customers complain that everything is too expensive. He seemed open to the Republican narrative that minimizes the classified documents case.
“I don't understand how everything is going the way it is, but it seems you have other people doing other stuff and they get a slap on the wrist and it's okay to do that,” he said. “You know, I'm sure that [Trump] didn't pack the boxes and carry the boxes. I've, I've never, never seen him actually carry stuff. But who knows how this stuff got there and whether it's such a big deal.”
He went on, “There's so much other stuff on other people, but it's like, ‘Don't look over there. There's nothing over there.’ But over here it's major, you know, let's put him in prison for life.”
Two actors who were apparently paid to attend the 2015 announcement were named in a complaint filed by the American Democracy Legal Fund with the Federal Election Commission. An Instagram photo of the two of them in Trump Tower showed them wearing white Make America Great Again T-shirts. One of them was holding a sign reading “Make America Stronger.” Neither responded to an interview request from The Daily Beast on the eighth anniversary. An association with a Trump fraud is apparently one kind of publicity actors are liable to eschew.
Friday marked the start of the long Juneteenth weekend, and the sidewalks surrounding the tower were crowded with tourists. But few ventured into the lobby, and fewer still took the free ride down the world’s most famous escalator.
For a time in the late morning, there was nobody in sight in the food court save for a security guard and a woman who stood behind the counter with the candies and ice cream offered by Trump Sweets. There was a hush absent even of the usually continual splashing of the water wall. And you could almost imagine that Trump's time was passing. If he has such a loyal following, why weren't parents taking their kids there to see and actually ride a bit of history?
But people had underestimated him in that very space eight years ago. And when you rode back up to the lobby, you gazed out at the street and remembered that he once said he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him.
The question that followed you from the lobby out into the bustle of everyday life was, “What the hell is next?”
