Donald Trump reached his twenties at a time when the system that rewarded his father's ambition crept to a crawl. Economic crisis swamped global capitalism in the 1970s, crippled the US economy and punished New York City especially hard. Established institutions misfired; old habits failed. Young Donald Trump would not be able to emulate Fred's route to success. Government finance for working- class housing and other public services shrank or ended; private construction trickled. New York City faced a badly depleted economy that desperately needed bolstering by emergency credit. Institutions at all levels were severely tested. The Vietnam war ended in American defeat; the presidency was rocked by resignation. The status quo proved unworkable. As William Butler Yeats had it, things fell apart; the center cracked. Liberal policies that had kept America going and growing across four decades strained to the breaking point. Adaptation and change became unavoidable. Nothing in the new situation, however grave, required reversion to ruder barbaric ways, either at the level of personality or institution. Yet to follow Donald Trump's trajectory in the years of New York City's financial crisis is to see how, in fact, both in terms of his personality and the wider institutional response to crisis, appreciable elements of barbarism and older forms of economic governance came to prevail anew. Donald's swaggering, hectoring style of salesmanship, his bent toward reaching for the heights of country- town equivocation, prevarication, duplicity, and effrontery, matched up well with the emerging new order. The national and global reversion to a system of liberated finance, exploding inequality and gilded age conspicuous consumption all magnified the advantages of Trump's grandiose style. Donald Trump did not so much adapt to the new era as much as he was already fitted to it. He personified its most garish features of salesmanship, excess, profligacy and waste. His personality fit the emerging epoch like a glove.

In what follows we will explore the early rise of Donald Trump. Involved here are vital intersections of personal biography, structural crisis and institutional change.