Murray Kempton Always Had Trump’s Number
Murray Kempton liked almost everyone. The revered New York City reporter chronicled an extraordinary swathe of American politics and culture across seven decades with a shrewd, critical, literary sensibility. His body of work includes a 1955 dispatch from the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers in Mississippi for The Progressive, among nearly twenty other articles that appeared in this magazine during the 1950s. Another of his Progressive articles—an artful takedown of the conservative National Review—is now collected, along with dozens of others, in Going Around: Selected Journalism, which I was privileged to edit for Seven Stories Press.
Despite the force of his reproaches, Kempton was hostage to what the National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., once called “a compassion that is sometimes unruly.” He made his name covering McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement, and believed that taking the side of the victim was “the reporter’s one commanding duty,” as he told a university audience a few years before his death in 1997. His soft spot for unpopular causes and demonized figures—from Mafia dons to members of the American Communist Party—was legendary. One mischievous column in this new book, from 1984, finds Kempton writing in defense of Richard Nixon after the disgraced ex-President’s application for a comfortable apartment on the Upper East Side was denied by the building’s co-op board. Kempton’s case boiled down to this: If you think Nixon is bad, get a load of the pettiness and Machiavellianism of the other people in the building.
Ultimately, though, Kempton’s unruliness was rooted in a belief—sometimes a hope against hope—in social justice and equality. These ideals, he thought, had not necessarily come closer to realization in his lifetime; after all, he had seen their exponents marginalized, blacklisted, beaten, killed before their time, lost in self-delusion, and tragically ignored.
In a column published the day after James Baldwin’s death in 1987, many years after the writer left Harlem for France, Kempton described him as “a moment in the conscience of mankind,” echoing Anatole France’s words at the funeral of his fellow writer Emile Zola in 1902. But in Kempton’s eyes, the state of Harlem in the mid-1980s suggested the terrible possibility that Baldwin’s legacy would prove only a moment: The neighborhood still suffered from poor schooling and decrepit housing. In the throes of the crack epidemic and in the face of Reagan-era white America’s hostility and indifference, Harlem seemed no less neglected to Kempton than it had been nearly twenty-five years earlier when Baldwin wrote his book The Fire Next Time (a part of which was first published in The Progressive). The children of 1960s Harlem, he noted, had been made to repeat the struggles of their parents’ generation.
While Kempton’s elegy for Baldwin is among the most melancholy of the more than ten thousand columns he wrote over the course of his career, it also contains an unexpected, incongruous, and unsettlingly prescient bit of observed human comedy. Kempton noted that incidentally, on the same day that Baldwin died in France, another prominent son of Harlem—the boxing promoter Don King—held a press conference at Donald Trump’s Grand Hyatt hotel to tout the upcoming fight between Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson. Kempton was there, as he liked to be for even the tawdriest media spectacles. King seemed a little bored at his press conference, he wrote, but “reserved his enthusiasm for the outsized portion of his remarks dedicated to a celebration of Donald Trump that closed with a plea that he run for President.”
No further context was tendered here, nor was it required. The mere suggestion of Trump running for President perfectly encapsulated America’s distance from the kind of just accounting of itself that Baldwin had demanded in the sixties—a whimsical piece of evidence that the country remained completely unprepared to address its enduring and distending inequality.
Not so whimsical now.
A conspicuous and foreboding presence in Kempton’s New York, Trump was an exception to his typical goodwill. In the years when Trump was treated by most of the New York press as a tasteless arriviste, local clown, or harmless vulgarian, Kempton detected in his character a powerful immorality that made him magnetic, and therefore dangerous.
Sure, Kempton wrote, Trump was “a presence whose potency has no visible existence beyond the manifestation of the self as celebrity,” and a figure whose brand, he noted on another occasion, might be defined as “cheapness packaged at no end of expense.” But he also felt that there was something really sinister, and redolent of deeper social malodor, in the heart of the man who in 1989 took out full-page ads in four different New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for the since-exonerated Central Park Five.
Kempton and Trump were both consummate New York characters, yet they could not have more disalike in disposition. Trump famously cannot stand “losers” or the taint of losing, despite having lost in many of his enterprises—including, memorably, his first attempt at reelection. Kempton, however, loved losers. For him, to stand in the loser’s aura was to feel the breeze of history.
As the decades of work in Going Around attests, a Murray Kempton column could uphold, defend, or restore its subject’s reputation, whether it be that of a public figure or of someone like Luis Soto, a boy who was plucked from his special education class one day in 1990 and forced without any explanation to fill out a police lineup for a robbery suspect. Kempton drew out his subjects’ dignity wherever he could find it. He awarded the medallion of his sympathy judiciously, but with a sense of civic purpose.
Trump was—is—the opposite. As Kempton wrote in 1989, he “demeans anything he touches, which is any place where he can leave his name permanently engraved and any cause whose sponsors are shameless enough to sell him the privilege.”
Kempton recognized that envy and hatred were the two operative elements of Trump’s appeal. Trump wants others to want to be like him—to want the limitless confidence and wealth he gives the illusion of possessing—and for others to indulge their capacity for hatred alongside him. “Mayor [Ed] Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump said in his paid newspaper ad about the Central Park Five. “I don’t think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.”
Kempton felt that hatred is a very low motivation: You might feel it sometimes, but you shouldn’t want to. “As to hate Donald Trump is to be like him,” he wrote, “so to envy him is to suggest that you wish you were Donald Trump, a lapse from personal dignity entirely at variance with the properties that qualify anger as honorable.”
A bit too high-minded, perhaps, but therein lies Kempton’s insight into the social phenomenon surrounding our 45th and 47th president. If God makes no trash, Kempton thought, then Trump must really be a self-made man. But his power and wickedness lie in what he brings out in others—and what he may threaten to bring out in you.
And, crucially, his emergence as a political figure was a collaborative endeavor. Donald Trump, the president is less a product of Donald Trump, the 1980s real estate mogul than of the bipartisan consensus that has allowed economic inequality and racial injustice to flourish through the decades. A sizable share of the blame, both times, is due to politicians who put their fingers in their ears when the poor and angry spoke, whose defense of cherished liberal institutions extended all the way to the American ghetto.
It was a coincidence that James Baldwin died on the same day that Don King called for a Trump presidency thirty years before it came to pass. But as Kempton foresaw, the events were not exactly unconnected: A line ran from Harlem in the sixties through Central Park in the late eighties, and on to 2016 and 2024.
“In any polity entitled to think itself civilized,” Kempton wrote, “persons with due regard for their breeding would rise up and leave the room politely but definitely whenever the Donald Trumps entered it.” The United States is not that polity, as Baldwin knew and Kempton suspected. And now, there’s no way to leave the room.