Economy / The Real Estate Roots of Trumpism and the Coming Clash With Democratic Socialism Trump’s brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York City’s real estate industry. Donald Trump, real estate mogul, poses in the foyer of his home in August 1987 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mamdani’s housing platform in particular aims to curb the outsize power of New York’s real estate sector, the milieu in which Trump rose to prominence in the late 1970s and ’80s. New York’s fiscal crisis had its roots in a series of political-economic shifts that eroded the post–World War II liberal order. Trump’s ascent in New York’s post–fiscal crisis real estate state was inflected by racism, which has long been a structuring force in the real estate sector.