By now, a vast amount of time and energy has been spent examining all the ways in which Donald Trump is bad for America and the world. There is a voluminous anti-Trump literature, consisting of dozens of books and innumerable newspaper and magazine articles; here at Current Affairs, we’ve contributed to it ourselves on many occasions. You can find every flavor of anti-Trump argument somewhere in print. Trump is bad because he’s a predatory misogynist, says one writer. Trump is bad because he’s a raving Islamophobe, says another. Or perhaps Trump is bad because he lies a lot, or because he’s a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t really know much about the economy, or because his speeches resemble those of a cult leader. All true, and all important. But there’s an underrated aspect of Trump’s manifold awfulness, one the liberal press has mostly neglected. Along with the rest of it, Trump is a noxious, corrupting influence on this country because he’s a landlord, and they’re all like that.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the world of commercial real estate and landlording created Donald Trump as we know him today. In fact, the Trumps have been landlords for longer than Donald himself has been alive. As journalist Gwenda Blair writes in The Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire, it all started with his grandfather, Friedrich Trump. A German immigrant, Friedrich made his fortune running saloons and brothels in Canada during the Yukon Gold Rush before transitioning his business into more conventional New York real estate in the early 1900s. His son Fred continued in the same profession, and he was notorious for “overstating the cost of improvements he made to rent-stabilized units, allowing him to raise rents,” ordering his maintenance workers to mix their own cockroach spray rather than calling a real exterminator, “adding a bucket of water to every bucket of paint in order to stretch it,” and many other corner-cutting and price-gouging practices. He was also profoundly racist against African American tenants, to the extent that the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie felt compelled to write a song about one of his Brooklyn apartment complexes:

Beach Haven ain't my home!

No, I just can't pay this rent!

My money's down the drain,

And my soul is badly bent!

Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower

Where no black folks come to roam,

No, no, Old Man Trump!

Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

The rest of the Trump story is fairly well-known, and scathingly depicted in Ali Abbasi’s biopic The Apprentice. The young Donald Trump started off as a henchman for his father, hiring lawyers to fight a legal case over the Trumps’ alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act, before the infamous “small loan of a million dollars” from Fred (really more like $60.7 million) enabled Donald’s debut as a landlord in his own right. Like his father and grandfather before him, Trump became enormously rich despite doing little actual work. His job, like that of any landlord, was simply to own things and watch the money roll in. He spent decades grabbing as much of other people’s wages through rent as he possibly could, cheating the workers who built and maintained his properties, and abusing and harassing any tenant who inconvenienced him. In turn, he’s used his ill-gotten riches to become a reality TV star, then a national political figure—and now, he’s everyone’s problem. So in a very direct sense, it’s the real-estate industry and landlords as a class who have inflicted him on America. 

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that when Trump became president he immediately started making decisions that helped his fellow landlords and harmed people who needed a place to live. In his first term, he enacted generous tax breaks that allowed most residential landlords to deduct as much as 20 percent of their rental income from their taxes, while simultaneously raising rents and adding work requirements for people on government housing assistance. In his second term, he’s upping the ante. Among other things, he’s already axed a $1 billion program to maintain buildings used for affordable housing, cut the funding for organizations that enforce the Fair Housing Act—Fred would be proud!—and is attempting to fire half of the workers in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And it’s only April of his first year back in office. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s idea of good housing policy is to claim that “immigration is driving housing costs through the roof” and the solution is mass deportation. Both housing and immigration experts disagree with him on that, pointing out that immigrants help build a lot of homes and apartments as well as occupying them. Like the claim that they’re eating your cats, blaming immigrants for the housing crisis is a devious lie. Instead, millions of people are struggling to pay their rent because landlords keep raising it. In the last few years, several major corporate landlords have even been sued by the Biden-era Department of Justice for colluding with each other to jack up housing prices and make themselves even richer. But Trump’s agenda seeks to blame the victims, dividing renters along demographic lines and allowing profit-seeking landlords to escape blame. It’s class warfare, and if you’re one of the roughly 100 million people who rent in this country, Donald Trump is fighting against you. 

It’s deeper than this, though. Beyond housing policy, Trump’s background as a landlord informs the way he sees the world, and it explains why he’s currently trying to take ownership of various parts of it. Just look at the way he talks about “owning” Gaza. This February, Trump described the Palestinian territory as “a big real estate site,” insisting that “the United States is going to own it and we’ll slowly—very slowly, we’re in no rush—develop it.” On other occasions he’s said that “I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future.” He’s even shared AI-generated videos of himself and Benjamin Netanyahu relaxing at a “Trump Gaza” resort, which presumably resembles the “Riviera of the Middle East” he’d like to build on the site. Never mind that Gaza is a place where 2.1 million people live, and have lived for centuries, despite the ongoing efforts of the Israeli military to destroy their homes and deny them even food and water. All that matters to Trump is getting possession of the land itself. His son-in-law Jared Kushner is a landlord, too—one with a reputation for mistreating his low-income tenants in Baltimore—and he’s described Gaza as “waterfront property [that] could be very valuable.” If they ever do create a “Trump Gaza” development, it would make an equally repellent companion to “Trump Heights,” the illegal Israeli settlement in Syria’s Golan Heights that Netanyahu unveiled in 2019. It came complete with a huge golden sign bearing Trump’s name, and soon after the ceremony, Trump made a tweet thanking Netanyahu for the “great honor.” Apparently he’s never met a crooked development project he didn’t like. 

Trump uses the same language when he talks about his ambitions to buy—or possibly invade—Greenland. As he told interviewers in 2022: “You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” And he’s right: it’s not that different. Trump’s territorial ambitions are often described as imperialist, and they are. But they’re also just the landlord mentality at work. On a fundamental level, he’s thinking about the world the way he used to think about New York City. Back in the 1980s, Trump liked to buy up buildings like the one at 100 Central Park South, then do everything in his power to bully the rent-controlled tenants into leaving so he could raise prices. According to one New York Times writer, he’d use “threats of imminent demolition,” “spurious litigation,” “drastic decreases in essential services,” and even “instructing employees to obtain information about the private lives (and) sex habits of the tenants” as weapons. First ruin everyone’s life, then swoop in and reap the profits when they finally flee. In Gaza, he’s doing something similar to an entire people. First he supplies the bombs for Israel to continue blowing Palestinians’ cities (and bodies) to bits, then he promises to rebuild them into shiny new beachfront developments. In Greenland, he won’t rule out using military force to get his way. The acquisitiveness, common to all landlords who spot a promising new piece of property, is the same as ever. So is the total lack of human empathy. Only the scale has changed. 

Domestically, we can even see Trump’s deportation agenda as an extension of his landlordism. A lot has been written about the way Trump seems to believe he can kick people out of the United States for any reason that springs to his mind, or no reason at all, with little regard for whether it’s legal or constitutional. In the case of student protester Mahmoud Khalil, the State Department admits that Khalil has committed no crime, but is being targeted for removal because of his “beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.” Or with the more recent case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration admits it abducted Garcia by mistake, but refuses to release him from the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador even after being ordered to by the Supreme Court. Looked at in the usual context of constitutional rights and due process, this is outrageous. But understood in the context of Trump as a landlord, it makes perfect sense. After all, what is deportation but eviction on a national scale? 

In the U.S. today, landlords need little reason to kick you out of your home. An unauthorized pet, an allegation that you made too much noise, or simply the fact that you didn’t have enough money to cover an unexpected rent increase will do it. Donald Trump clearly believes that the United States should work the same way. He doesn’t have a concept of citizenship, not really; he has a concept of tenancy. Like with Gaza and Greenland, the language of real estate keeps coming up from figures in his inner circle, like when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this last week:

A student visa is like me inviting you into my home. If you come into my home and put all kinds of crap on my couch, I’m going to kick you out of my house.

The message couldn’t be clearer. For Trump and his allies, the United States isn’t a nation composed of people with inherent rights, but a piece of property, and you exist on it only with Trump’s permission. The opposite, too, is true: Trump recently unveiled a “gold card” with his own face on it, which “gives wealthy foreigners a path to citizenship” in exchange for $5 million. Pay enough rent, and he’ll welcome you into America’s penthouse. 

When Bernie Sanders made his 2020 presidential run, he declared that if he won, he’d govern as an “organizer in chief”—in other words, an ally to labor unions and working people everywhere who fights for things like a higher minimum wage and free college education. By contrast, Donald Trump has made himself the landlord in chief, and he fights for rich property owners and developers like himself. Obviously, his agenda has to be opposed, whether it’s in Gaza or Greenland or right here at home. But it’s not enough to be anti-Trump, because the things that make Trump awful are not unique to him. Trump is only the biggest and most foul example of the American landlord class, and there are many more like him: rich, powerful individuals who share his desire to acquire more and more property, pocket more and more money, and crush anyone and anything that gets in their way. When we hear that rents have risen to record highs in this country, we shouldn’t treat it as a natural phenomenon, like the weather (although that, too, is increasingly being impacted by human activities). Landlords did it, and they’ve driven record numbers of people into homelessness too. They’re also meddling in our politics. They’re lobbying the Supreme Court to kill rent control policies in New York—unsuccessfully, for now—and they’re fighting regulations that would require them to provide air-conditioning even as extreme heat becomes a more deadly threat every summer. They’ve gotten away with too much, for too long. 

If we’re going to have a country worth living in, we’ll need a politics that is not just anti-Trump, but anti-landlord. Right now, one of the most encouraging developments in American politics is the rise of tenant unions, which have already won dramatic court victories against New York slumlords like Jason Korn and forced property firms in Connecticut to come to the negotiating table. In New York City, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has included a rent freeze as an essential part of his policy platform. Over in Australia, Jordie “Purple Pingers” van den Lamb is running an inspiring campaign for Senate on a tenants’ rights platform, calling landlords “property hoarders” who “take advantage of other people’s work.” That’s a perfect description of the rentiers he’s dealing with, and of Donald Trump too. We shouldn’t allow people like Trump and his rich friends to hoard housing, charge whatever extortionate price they want for it, and kick people out by force if they can’t pay. And we definitely shouldn’t let them hold the highest political office in the country and use it to extend their property-seeking exploits to other people’s countries. Housing has to be treated as a universal right and a public good, and the self-determination of smaller nations has to be respected. Trump needs to go, yes—but so does the wealth and power of the landlord class that produced him.