At Trump Tower, presidential kitsch and caboodle

By Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times News Service

Friday, Dec. 2, 2016 | 1:02 a.m.

NEW YORK — In his cowboy hat and boots and strategically slung guitar, the Naked Cowboy has been a fixture in Times Square for decades, posing under the neon with visitors for donations. But these days, in his spangled underwear and little else, he can be found farther north: at the Midtown Manhattan home of another outsize New York character, Donald Trump.

Nearly nude as usual, the cowboy in recent weeks has posed with potential Cabinet members in the lobby, sung original ditties alongside top advisers and watched the numbers of his social media followers — and sales of Naked Cowboy Oysters — tick steadily up.

Other characters to rival the mogul turned reality television star turned novice politician revolve around Trump Tower. The president-elect has spent the better part of his transition in his penthouse aerie. A parade of personalities come to protest, celebrate and even earn a living in the shadow of the 58-story tower. Some come to express their pain at Trump’s language and dismay at each of his Cabinet picks as they cross the pink marble lobby.

Others are entrepreneurs with wares to sell. They capitalize on the glut of tourists and seek publicity from the captive audience of journalists behind security cordons. A few, like the Cowboy, seem drawn by something else: Trump’s unlikely success story, which they hope to duplicate.

“When he won, it really gave me new faith in American and human potential to do something that no one could ever do,” said Robert John Burck, the Cowboy. On a recent afternoon he sat on a banquette in Trump Bar in Trump Tower explaining what had drawn him to the building every day for nearly three months. He wore a silky U.S.-flag print dressing gown over briefs stamped with the word “Trump.”

“I want to be a New York City icon and have my own apartment on the roof, on the top floor — who wouldn’t!” said Burck, 45, adding that he had read all of Trump’s books. A waiter, unbidden, handed him a drink in a highball glass. “It’s beautiful,” Burck said. “It’s the symbol of America and success!”

On Monday, Burck, who over the years has franchised his Cowboy brand and become the eponymous spokesman for a line of oysters, took on another role: as a scantily clad participant in political intrigue. Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, bumped into Burck and one of his colleagues near the lobby’s golden elevators. In a video taken of the encounter, she leans over and whispers to them. Suddenly, Burck bursts into extemporaneous song. In crude language, he criticizes Mitt Romney, a leading contender for secretary of state, whom Conway has disparaged for his attacks on Trump during the Republican primary campaign. Conway laughs.

Other notes of protest are quieter. As dignitaries and curiosity-seekers roamed the lobby, one man stood in a corner, reading aloud from “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, as a friend recorded a Facebook Live video. The man, Jeff Bergman, an art dealer from Westchester County who works near Trump Tower, has spent his recent lunch hours protesting Trump’s election by offering his version of a daily teach-in. He began this week reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, “Night,” and plans to come every day until Trump’s inauguration.

“Rather than holding a placard and yelling outside,” Bergman said in an interview, “I’m genuinely trying to have conversations with people who are trying to live in a country that has elected a game show host as president.”

The lobby, though guarded with dogs, a magnetometer and heavily armed police officers, is still open to the public. On Tuesday, few people were stopped (though the Naked Cowboy was detained while police looked inside his guitar, which he fills with his cash tips).

“I feel empowered,” Bergman said of standing so close to the president-elect’s home, “but I also feel disgusted in a lot of ways when I stand there. I feel wrapped in the sort of overwhelming wealth, the brass and the gold and the marble.”

For Loren Spivack, a consultant turned conservative writer and commentator, the crowded sidewalks outside the building are a stop on a book tour of sorts. “His home is more accessible than I think any previous president’s home has ever been,” said Spivack, who sells parody picture books criticizing liberals. “Crawford, Texas, and Kennebunkport, Maine, you couldn’t get anywhere near where the Bushes lived.”

It is also good for sales of his Dr. Seuss-style books, like “The Gorax,” a parody of Al Gore based on “The Lorax.” A “Cat in the Hat” riff featuring President Barack Obama as the cat has sold 25,000 copies at $24.99 a copy over the past five years, he said. The atmosphere inside and outside the tower “causes people to think politically,” Spivack said, “as opposed to in front of the Rockefeller Christmas tree, where I can promote them as gifts, but I am a fish out of water.”

On the same sidewalk, most nights, he is joined by a man wearing a plush hat shaped like an emoji representing feces. The man, Paul Rossen, 55, does a brisk business from the other side of the political aisle: pins denouncing Trump. The most popular features the slogan “Dump Trump” and depicts Trump’s head in the form of droppings. Rossen, who also runs a comedy club, sells the pins, which cost him 75 cents to make, for $5 each.

Rossen said that “sales have gone dramatically up” since the election. The pins have augmented his income — he declined to say by how much, but he said he could quit his job and live on the button proceeds — and satisfied his desire to protest. “I’m very passionate about it,” he said, as a tourist beside him took a break from staring up at the tower and stopped to buy a pin. “And money is money.”