Before Trump had gold toilets and a Russian piss tape, before the hairpiece, — hairpiece, not herpes — before signing his name as pubic hair on Epstein’s birthday card, and before America got grabbed en masse by the pussy—he was just another cocky, entitled undergrad in sailor shorts, double-fist dancing down the streets of West Philly with big dreams of fame and fortune and one day getting laid.
That was 1966. The Beatles were still a band, Vietnam was getting bloodier by the week, and Frank Rizzo was making a name for himself by turning Philadelphia into his own personal police state.
Rizzo wasn’t just a cop. He was the cop. A nightstick-swinging, civil rights-crushing, gut-first loudmouth who could’ve walked out of a Scorsese flick if Scorsese had the balls to film him. He once showed up to a Black Panther raid in a tuxedo—because he’d left a dinner party early to go bust some heads. That’s the kind of man Trump probably looked at and thought: That’s what a leader looks like.
Young Trump was slumming it at Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s Ivy League, sure, but in the ‘60s, it was less prestige and more polish for second sons of real estate royalty who couldn’t hack it at Harvard. Trump fit right in—loud, entitled, and utterly indifferent to the unrest around him.
While students protested the draft and burned their B-R-A’s for E-R-A, Trump watched from a distance, detached, already branding himself as above it all. But you can bet your cosplay NFTs he noticed the big man in blue, stomping across the front pages. Rizzo didn’t apologize, didn’t back down, and didn’t give a flying fuck if you called him a fascist—as long as the “white ethnics” loved him. Italians, Irish, Polish—every guy who thought Archie Bunker made some good points. These were Rizzo’s people. And someday, they’d be Trump’s too.
It’s not hard to imagine Trump seeing in Rizzo a blueprint: rule with resentment, win with outrage, weaponize whiteness. Be so loud no one can hear the truth over the static.
It wasn’t just the billy clubs or the press stunts. It was how Rizzo made whiteness feel like a uniform. He took the fear and frustration of working-class white folks—who felt their neighborhoods, jobs, and schools slipping away—and turned it into a badge of honor. He didn’t promise to fix anything; he promised to hurt the people they blamed. Black kids, hippies, homos, anyone who didn’t salute the flag hard enough. It was rage with a zipper, and it played like Springsteen for racists. That’s the real magic trick Trump inherited: not just pandering to white grievance, but elevating it to a moral virtue, as if hate makes you the hero.
Decades later, when Trump came down that gold escalator barking about rapists and walls, it wasn’t new. It was Rizzo redux. Same dog whistle, different circus.
You want to understand Trump? Don’t read Art of the Deal—read the crime blotter in a 1973 Philly newspaper. Trump didn’t invent anything. He’s just a rerun with a better wardrobe budget. Frank Rizzo walked so Donald Trump could goose-step.
And somewhere, in a sweat-stained tuxedo in Hell’s police precinct, Rizzo’s grinning.
—P.
