In 1976 the United States celebrated its bicentennial. Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with "DJT" plates while talking on a car phone and making deals. An architect said he 'could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos.' Trump proposed a midtown convention center called the 'Miracle on 34th Street,' promising fountains, pools, a giant movie theatre, half a million square feet of exhibition space, and rooftop solar panels. On July Fourth Tall Ships sailed into New York Harbor, and Trump later presented a similar Capitol-area convention plan, leaving in a huff when resisted. A Smithsonian bicentennial exhibition assembled five thousand objects illustrating migration and American union and disunion.
In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Donald J. Trump, thirty, leonine, and three-piece-suited, was chauffeured around Manhattan by an armed laid-off city cop in a silver Cadillac with "DJT" plates, while talking on his hot-shot car phone and making deals. "He could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos," an architect told the Times. That architect was drawing up plans for a convention center that Trump hoped to build in midtown.
On the Fourth of July of that red-white-and-blue year, the Tall Ships-a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels from more than a dozen countries-sailed into New York Harbor. Three days later, Trump was in Washington, D.C., presenting to the city's redevelopment board his plan to build another gargantuan convention center, this one near the U.S. Capitol. Encountering stiff resistance, according to the Evening Star, a visibly "miffed" Trump left the meeting "in a huff."
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