Democrats Want To Run Against Trump Again, Despite Past Lessons

Will the Democrats manage to help re-elect Trump?

By Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch

In 1989, I had a comical but revealing series of encounters with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his palatial mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He had bought the giant house, with 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms, four years earlier without realising that it was directly under the flight path from Palm Beach International Airport. This was undergoing rapid expansion and by the time I met him there were 200 flights a day roaring overhead.

Trump had responded to the devastating noise pollution by trying to make common cause with the less-well-off residents of West Palm Beach, who lived at the end of the runway. As with the plutocrats, they were suffering from the same chronic noise pollution that robbed them of sleep.

I learned about this furious row because I knew a Canadian paper magnate who had bought a house close to Mar-a-Lago at about the same time as Trump. My friend was bitter that the agency that sold him the property had carefully timed his visit for a moment in the afternoon when there were no planes flying directly overhead.