Costanza-Trump: The Long Island Connection

I was entertaining myself the other day watching a well-known TV personality boldly lie, exhibit massive insecurities, and display a stunning lack of empathy for other bipedal lifeforms. I’m not talking about Him, but rather … Seinfeld’s George Costanza.

Oh, you can learn a lot watching old Seinfeld episodes on YouTube!

I’m excited to say I found Don the Con’s doppleganger in a semi-fictional outer-borough schlub who moves to NYC empowered by his own self-importance but riddled with astonishing self-doubt and neuroses — in other words Mr. Costanza, who is himself an exaggerated version of Larry David.

I’m convinced Mr. David is the only one on the planet who can truly shed light on Trump’s dark and crazed psyche — and it wouldn’t surprise me if something like toilet paper is Trump’s Rosebud.

A Little Long Island

There’s another factor that links George Costanza to Donald Trump, and also indirectly to me. There is a uniquely flat, undistinguished, and despairing geographic area due east of Manhattan called Long Island. You may have heard of it even if you’re not from ‘Lawn Guyland’ as the natives say it.

The Trump ancestral home is in Queens, though geographically on Long Island (see map), purists would say it’s not really in the suburbs — Nassau and Suffolk counties — so therefore doesn’t count. I emphatically disagree: the Guyland ethos begins in those Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods wherever…