Is Donald Trump the Archie Bunker of Today?
Before Donald Trump ran a campaign on xenophobia and pledges to make America great again, another Queens native who feared the changes happening in America dominated television.
Archie Bunker, the cantankerous patriarch of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, like Trump, was known for spewing anti-immigrant, unabashedly racist screeds on national TV. He told America how it is from the view of his armchair.
WNYC went to the block in Glendale, Queens where Archie Bunker’s house was shot to see how residents there feel about both men.
“Lot of people think, and they don’t verbalize, he verbalizes and so does Trump,” Irene Kessler, who lives in Woodhaven, Queens, said. She supports Trumps views on the economy, but not his recent comments on Muslim.
“He’s saying what I believe the majority of Americans are thinking,” Joe DaSoro, 55, said of Donald Trump.
DaSoro grew up in Ozone Park, but now lives in Huntington, Long Island. He’s a registered Republican, but considers himself a moderate.
“A lot people are stuck on this political correctness, and he’s not, he’s just speaking his mind and being honest about it where the others are being phony,” DaSoro said.
He could be talking about Donald Trump, or Archie Bunker.
“Donald Trump is paralleling Archie Bunker and appealing to people who are simply dismayed by all the change that’s going on — by political correctness and the influx of immigrants from other parts of the world,” said Lance Strate, a professor of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University.
Of course, not everyone in Queens is on board. Linda Morton, 84, from Glendale, thinks Trump is simply a bigot.
“I’m really worried, if he becomes president,” she said. “I really think some of the countries are laughing at us.”
No one knows Archie Bunker better than Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family. Lear believes his creation was more lovable.
“I think Donald Trump is a horse’s ass,” he told WNYC in a recent interview. “A righteous fool. And I’ve always thought of Archie as simply afraid to be on the precipice of the future, progress baffled him.”
In Archie Bunker’s world of the 1970s, young people were having sex out of wedlock, inflation and loss of manufacturing jobs was prevalent, and integration was firmly taking root.
“He wanted to reach back instead of forward,” Lear said. “Blacks moving into the neighbored — ‘my god’ — the rest of it was just simply poor education and badly informed.”
Today, many Trump supporters are upset by gay marriage, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and minorities becoming the majority.
Near the Bunker family home is a Wendy’s where Pat Ryan, 59, a truck driver from Islip, Long Island stopped for lunch. He said it’s hard to support Trump’s recent comments. But, “if he says something outlandish and at the end of the day something is done positively then I would support that.”
He said while Trump may be trying to appeal to blue collar workers like him, Archie Bunker really did speak for them.
“Archie was part of middle America, he was a blue collar worker he got to work every day,” Ryan said. “Donald Trump is basically looking down from the towers. I don’t know if he has a good grasp of what people go through day to day.”
Bonus Quiz–Who said it, Archie Bunker or Donald Trump?
1. “What was the first thing the communists done when they took over Russia? Answer, gun control. Now, there’s a lot of people want to do that to us here in a kind of conspiracy.”
2. “Our world is coming crumbling down.”
3. “What I’m saying is your coloreds is as well known, they run faster, they jump higher, they don’t bruise so easy.”
