Trump and His Critics

Although the 2004 note from Trump to Kamin on the New York developer's first foray into Chicago (named, of course, Trump International Hotel & Tower) is extremely positive, once Kamin, the Chicago Tribune architecture critic, and Goldberger, architecture critic at Vanity Fair, unleashed some sour words ten years later about Trump's garish sign at the base of his tower, Trump went from nice to nasty. In a middle of the night tweet on 22 June 2014, Trump wrote:

I loved the day Paul Goldberger got fired (or left) as New York Times architecture critic and has since faded into irrelevance. Kamin next!

Trump also said around that time on a morning talk show: "This [fight about the sign] was started by a third-rate architectural critic from the Chicago Tribune who I thought got fired." Now, people might disagree with Kamin from time to time (he's a critic, after all), but he's one of the few architecture critics who has received a Pulitzker Prize. So he's hardly third-rate and neither was he fired; he was at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship at the time. Goldberger is also a Pulitzer recipient, one who left his post at The New York Times to serve as architecture critic at The New Yorker, hardly a demotion. That two-year-old tweet sums up Trump's approach to the presidential race in 2016: attack people who criticize or disagree with you, lie, and make threats.

Kamin's latest column at the Chicago Tribune, "Donald Trump's sycophantic, vitriolic treatment of architecture critics," was published last Friday, two days before the second debate with candidate Hillory Clinton. It was also the same day that, unbeknownst to Kamin, a video from 2005 with Trump boasting of lewd sexual behavior was released to the press. Trump's behavior toward Kamin and Goldberger pales in comparison, but it reveals that everybody is fair game when it comes to Trump's aggression.