When Donald Trump decided to accuse NFL players protesting police brutality of "disrespecting" the American flag, it wasn't his first turn with using nationalistic jingoism to divide a community against itself for his own benefit. In fact, the case of a 70-foot flagpole he illegally erected at one of his golf courses in 2006 likely served as a dry run for the way he has weaponized the American flag against people of color in his ongoing attack on First Amendment rights.
NPR's Embedded podcast takes us back to the war Trump waged in the mid-aughts against a California city where he was building the new golf course. It will surprise no one to learn that in the process of developing his course on the stunning bluffs of Rancho Palos Verdes along the southern California coast line, Trump did everything from publicly calling a respected attorney an "obnoxious asshole" to telling homeowners with properties lining his links that their houses looked "like shit." Trump also sued the local public school in a dispute over how and when he would pay the district for the land parts of his course occupied.
But it was the dispute over a flag pole he erected against city code, dwarfing everything else in sight, where Trump used patriotism to turn neighbor against neighbor in a cozy town of about 40,000 residents.
Here's an excerpt from the story reported by several NPR journalists:
We're taking a left on a road called Trump National Drive—you're looking out over this completely unobstructed beautiful view of the ocean and of Catalina and there is one thing that sticks up ... the American flag, a 70-foot flag pole. [...]
There's sort of here in Ranchos Pales Verdes an absolutist view—like, nothing over a certain height. Don't block anybody else's views. In the 1980s they passed a law basically that said, if you're going put up anything over a certain height that could conceivably disrupt someone else's view then you have to go to the city and get a permit because people's views are so important to them and so important to the value of their properties.
Now what Donald Trump would say, and has said is, I don't think you need a permit to put up the American flag.
That was his entire argument. Even when he refused to pay the $10,000 fee to have the flag pole assessed by the City Council, he said, "Since when do you have to pay to put up the American flag?" A flag that also happened to be the "size of a studio apartment ... towering 54 feet over the city's 16-foot limit on ‘accessory structures.’"
It sounds simple, but it inflamed people. NPR continues:
Here's how that fight goes... [Trump] turns it into a fight about the very presence American flag and all that it stands for, as he puts it in a letter he sends to the City Council. In public, he says it's about honoring America's veterans. [...] Trump's tactic actually starts to work in Ranchos Pales Verdes because it divides people. Some people are like, well, we can't take down the American flag, it's the American flag. And other people are like, no, Donald Trump has to follow the rules. [...] By the time it gets to City Council people are pretty upset.
At a City Council meeting, then-City Councilmember Tom Long discussed the letters he had received on the issue.
At one end of the spectrum, someone telling me that, how dare I even consider voting to take down the flag and if I did do so, I should be taken out the next morning and shot. And at the other end of the spectrum, I was told that if I voted to keep the flag there, I was voting for lawlessness.
At the same meeting, then-City Council Member Steve Wolowitz:
Then there was a very long letter [...] that this is a litmus test of our patriotism. It reminded me of shades of McCarthyism because we wouldn't pass this writer's test.
Ultimately, the council voted to let Trump keep the flag pole. It was 2006 and Wolowitz still gets blowback for his vote against Trump.
To this day, people will stop me in the community, and they'll say, weren't you the guy who voted against the flag? And I'd take the time to explain to people that local laws, state laws and federal laws are there to protect us, and I can't ignore those.
Just last year, the City Council finally granted Trump a coastal permit for the pole that officially legalized it. He recreated that same flag pole battle in Florida and even across the pond at one of his golf courses in Scotland.
After he won the flag pole dispute in Ranchos Pales Verdes, he also continued to antagonize residents by suing the city and planting hedges and trees along his course that blocked views of the properties he thought looked like dog manure.
Why revisit this? Because it shows once again that Trump is nothing but a bully who's willing to rip society at the seams to get his way. Whatever benefits him is well worth insulting people, turning neighbor against neighbor, inciting discord and leaving scars that last long after he’s probably forgotten that it ever happened.
So when Trump recently turned the peaceful protests of NFL players into a divisive referendum on their patriotism and respect for the nation’s veterans, he's just wielding the same blunt instrument he's wielded before to bludgeon people purely for his gain. No one's sacrifice is too great.
Also, if you like podcasts, check out this season of Embedded, where reporters are digging into Trump’s past business practices to shed light on his presidency.