A Credit to Intelligent Minds

In the days and weeks that followed the collapse of the World Trade Center, I was working the night shift at a small hotel along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I glued myself to the lobby television and met with several guests who were either coming or going from New York and the fields of rural PA. Everyone was trying to help. But no one was quite sure where to start or what to say. So we all talked. And most of us cried, at one point or another, either together or in private.

Yet even while the world was aflame, even while I contemplated the pros and cons of enlisting in the military or not, of trying to do anything at all to support my country, I was personally and selfishly roiled by love. Caught up in the lingering emotions of a relationship I had left behind a few years earlier. The kind of love that involves endless rumination. A constant wondering. A replaying of events. The whole emotion summed up in this unresolved lyric.
“On TV, they were talking about the casualties… and my only question was how you would feel if one of them was me… because the world could be burning, and all I’d be thinking is how are you doing, baby.”

Yes, indeed. I was a twenty-something romantic.

At that time, and under those circumstances, I became a sucker for every starry-eyed, sappy film about people falling in love, people fighting for love, and people searching for love. Enter Jon Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity, a film released about three weeks after September 11. It included two pivotal, iconic scenes on the ice at Wollman Rink in New York City. A property belonging, both then and now, to Mr. Donald J. Trump.

If you forgot this film or never saw it, I won’t bore you with all the loose, improbable ends. But what Serendipity did for me, and I suspect a million other Americans that October, was to paint an almost surreal picture of New York City. A city filmed before the attack. When towers still dominated the skyline. When chilly puffs of air would fill the sidewalks above every breath. A winter wonderland that, in that moment, did not exist. The only real air being clouded in suffocation, dust, and debris.

The history of Wollman Rink, where Jon and Kate filmed those two iconic scenes on the ice, would have been, at the time, largely irrelevant to anyone outside of Central Park. But despite all his boasting and self-promotion, the Wollman Rink is one of the few marks of sincere generosity that adorn the narcissistic life of President Trump. And I mean that in the most favorable way I can.

The Wollman Rink was built in 1949. By the 1970s, it was showing signs of disrepair. The flooring buckled in 1980, which led the city to begin planning more serious renovations that were estimated to take about two years. Unfortunately, by 1987, the city had spent nearly $13 million dollars and appeared nowhere near the end of their renovations. If anything, it looked worse in 1986 than it did in 1980.

Enter Donald Trump.

Having looked down onto the Wollman Rink from his office and home in Trump Tower over all those years of promised restoration, Mr. Trump made the city an offer. He would spend his own money, an estimated $3 million, and get the rink done in four months. He admitted that he knew nothing about how to build a skating rink. But he was tired of the red tape. He was tired of an incompetent city government. And he was open to a new challenge.

“It’s not how many hours you put in,” he once said, “it’s what you get done while you’re working.”

Trump came in earlier and cheaper than his estimate. The rink was done in three months. And he spent a little over $2 million. Never being one to claim modesty, he certainly threw this in the face of city government, but even the New York Times, which he called “one of the most powerful institutions in the world,” was quick to defend his balsy action with four words:

“He made his point.”

And herein lies my point.

The reason Mr. Trump succeeded with the Wollman Rink, and you can verify this story in any number of ways, is that he was willing to listen and learn about the things he knew nothing about. He had the money, but he knew nothing about building a skating rink, so he asked the right people. Trained professionals who not only knew what they were doing, but could inform him about the best way to design and preserve a sheet of ice for the duration of winter. He worked with those more informed, more competent than himself. Certainly he pushed and cajoled the effort to ensure it met his own arbitrary schedule and bottom lines, but he was successful because he himself was not the builder. He was merely the catalyst of coordinated intelligence.

Wollman Rink is a provable calling card for Trump, one of those lasting demonstrations of a time when he addressed the flaws of local government by appealing to the intelligence, efficiency, and ingenuity of competent professionals. And yes, he made his point. Sometimes government bureaucracy sucks. But you still need competent people to get a job done right. And no one does it alone.

Fast forward to the present day.

I, and just about any American, regardless of political stripes, can deal with a narcissist in the White House. Arrogance, bigotry, and hypocrisy have a long and well-documented history at every level of American government, from the lowest levels to the highest office. And some have been more vocal about their ego than others. I may voice my ongoing disdain, believing that the office of the president is deserving of a much better man than the current occupant, but in the end, vanity and misogyny and racism, however brazen, are not impeachable, treasonable, or criminal offenses.

Instead, I take issue, right now, with something else.

Something that cuts to the heart of my own profession.

What I take issue with is the denigration, the disregard, and the depreciation of my peers, those men and women most highly informed of their respective fields, in diplomacy, in national security, in education, in health care, in energy efficiency, in wildlife preservation, in infrastructure planning, in immigration policy, and yes, even those most highly informed in the media. Fixing any issue in our country requires a certain level of trust, a reliance on the knowledge of those who are not instruments or tools of a political party, but the heart and soul of their given areas of investment. To treat each of these men and women with ongoing, paranoid contempt is to dismantle the foundation of a civil society. A society wholly dependent on the trust of its members for one another, the absence of which leaves human interaction to its most savage and uncivilized ends.

I take issue with a US President who appoints and vehemently defends an Education Secretary with no background in education, despite a few hundred thousand educators and school administrators more than equipped to evaluate, lead, and improve national education on the merits of their life long calling.

I take issue with a US President who appoints and vehemently defends any and every administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who has, as a matter of record, fought against the need for environmental protections, despite the existence of many, many professionals trained in the scientific knowledge of what does and does not harm any myriad of environmental conditions, from ponds and rivers to silos and engines, regardless of climate change.

I take issue with a US President who appoints and vehemently defends a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development whose only expertise in the field is to publicly despise the very anti-discrimination laws he was appointed to defend, while any of a few hundred thousand city planners and property attorneys would have gladly accepted the opportunity to serve at the pleasure of the president and the betterment of the people who live in these urban areas.

I take issue with a US President who stands on neutral, European soil, and favors the controversial words of a foreign leader over the apparatus of an overwhelmingly impartial human intelligence gathered by citizens of his own nation under the presumption that every member of that apparatus is incapable of doing their work without bias.

Wollman Rink was, as it turns out, a loud and singular exception. An exception during which this president, as a young developer, believed in and advocated for the most competent people to do the most competent job. When it came to laying down a slab of ice and doing it right, Mr. Trump cared about intelligence. He respected it. He even joked in The Art of the Deal, much to my amusement, that it held no candle to the construction of a skyscraper. Hilarious.

But now that Mr. Trump is responsible for the single most difficult, most all-consuming job in the world, he has no desire to learn what he does not know. And he has no desire to seek those who might know. Even worse, he urges his audience to share in his disdain for intelligence, and knowledge, and competence. All of which is an affront to my profession, to the life I and my peers spend reading, and studying, and learning.

The civilized world is a lot less serendipitous than it once was. Far more planned and predictable. But most of this is a credit to intelligent minds. The creators of the Internet. The innovators of the web. The physicians of our health. The designers of our travel and our modes of transportation. The men and women who stand before our children and educate them in math and science and technology. The information experts who house and preserve and sort through details and documents. Even relationships are largely subject to a swipe left or a swipe right, along with whatever profiles and images we fashion for ourselves. All of this, again, a credit to intelligent minds.

But I take issue with a president who, unlike those who came before him or in a manner he was himself once capable, never concedes that credit. This failure to acknowledge intelligence, to downplay expertise, to speak ill of its very existence, is an attack on every single civilized person who cares about and does well in their profession. And neither I nor you should ever ignore, bow to, or justify that failure.