America's Most Famous Escalator, a Decade Later

The Atlantic

16-06-2025

America's most famous escalator is a bit of a tourist trap these days. Exactly a decade ago, the gold-rimmed conveyor carried Donald Trump into the basement of his eponymous New York tower and down into the bowels of American politics. His seconds-long descent has lingered in the national memory more vividly than his 45-minute speech that followed, an inflection point so widely cited—try Googling since Trump rode down the golden escalator—that it borders on cliché.
On a recent Monday afternoon, the escalator that launched the MAGA movement carried a steady stream of sight-seeking fans into the atrium of Trump Tower, where they could pay tribute to the president with purchases at Trump Grill (still on the menu: the Southwest Taco Bowl, immortalized in tweet, for $25), the Trump Store, Trump Sweets, and, for slightly less-expensive tchotchkes, a souvenir shop tucked away around the corner. A floor above, the Trump faithful posed in front of a flag-flanked, gold-plated 45 insignia—a historical marker that has yet to be updated for the president's second term.
All that was missing was a plaque commemorating the campaign launch that started it all, which took place 10 years ago today.
Hardly anyone who attended that 2015 event— myself included —thought it would take Trump remotely close to the White House. That he would become, in the estimation of this magazine, 'the most consequential American leader of the 21st century' was utterly unthinkable. Trump had flirted with a presidential campaign multiple times before, passing on a bid each time. Most reporters doubted that he would follow through in 2016; if he did, many presumed, he would quit before he ever had to file the financial-disclosure forms required of a candidate. (In time, Trump would buck the tradition of releasing his tax returns to the public.)
Russell Berman: The 'carnival barker' joins the 2016 race
The Democratic Party, which would later decry Trump as an authoritarian threat to the nation's founding principles, initially spared him any criticism, choosing instead to welcome him to the presidential race and use him as a foil to Republican contenders—such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio—who it believed stood a greater chance of winning. 'He adds some much-needed seriousness that has previously been lacking from the GOP field,' a spokesperson for the Democrats quipped to me at the time, 'and we look forward to hearing more about his ideas for the nation.'
Trump, too, had other things on his mind besides winning. In place of a detailed policy platform, his aides handed reporters a folder containing a document that assessed his net worth at $8.7 billion, a release aimed at confronting widespread doubts that Trump was as rich as he always said he was. (For good measure, the candidate-to-be also devoted a chunk of his speech to the question of his wealth.)
In some ways, that initial event was entirely unlike the mega-rallies that would become Trump's campaign staple. He packed the press—as yet unbranded as 'fake news' or the 'enemy of the people'—in the front and forced his supporters (some of whom were paid to attend) to watch his speech from the floors above.
What's most striking about candidate Trump of June 2015 is how similar he is to President Trump of June 2025. To the pride of his supporters and the chagrin of his opponents, he has changed American politics more in the past decade than it has changed him.
As I noted back then, he opened his campaign with a lie about crowd size. 'Thousands,' he said, exaggerating a turnout that numbered, at most, a couple of hundred people. Countless more falsehoods have followed in the decade since. The preoccupations of that first campaign speech—illegal immigration and foreign trade—remain the focus of his second administration. Trump's most oft-quoted lines from his announcement are from his diatribe against undocumented immigrants. ('When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best,' he said. 'They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.') But the first issue of substance he discussed was trade and included a riff on tariffs. 'When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us,' Trump complained, less than a minute into his remarks.
From the June 2025 issue: 'I run the country and the world'
On display, too, was Trump's vision of himself as a leader who would act on his own, unburdened by constraints imposed by Congress or the courts. (He mentioned neither anywhere in the speech.) At one point, Trump described an imagined scenario in which, as president, he would personally threaten the CEO of Ford with a '35 percent tax' on the sale of every car unless he moved a then-planned factory from Mexico back to the United States. The corporate titan, Trump assured the crowd, would cave quickly. Earlier this spring, the president issued a public warning to Apple's Tim Cook that he would slap a large tariff on any iPhones constructed outside the U.S—a threat nearly identical to the one he'd laid out in his campaign debut.
Trump himself has folded more times than he'd ever admit. He ditched his long-ago pledge to 'drain the swamp' in favor of open profiteering off the presidency. And he's largely abandoned Trump Tower as a base of operations.
During his first campaign, Trump returned to his New York home almost nightly, and after his surprise election in 2016, he conducted most of his interviews with would-be Cabinet secretaries there. Job-seekers and other supplicants, on their way to meetings upstairs, paraded amid reporters staked out in the lobby. For much of Trump's first term and beyond, Trump Tower became a backdrop for press conferences and protests by Democrats—and the occasional pledge of political fealty by Republicans.
But Trump eventually stopped returning to a city that had soured on him. He decamped to warmer climes (politically as well as meteorologically). His resorts in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Bedminster, New Jersey, were far more spacious and easier to secure. Although First Lady Melania Trump and the couple's son, Barron, still spend significant time at Trump Tower, the president does not.
No one was protesting when I visited Trump Tower last week. The visible security presence—a couple of police cruisers and a private guard out front—was not large by New York City standards. In the atrium, however, the president's supporters gave the Trump Organization plenty of business. 'It looks exactly like it does on TV!' marveled Amy Head, a 48-year-old history teacher from Albany, Georgia. Seeing Trump Tower, she said, was a priority for her family's trip to Manhattan, which also included tickets to The Lion King on Broadway and a tour of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. 'We've been supporting him ever since he came down the golden escalator,' Head said of Trump as we stood a few feet away from it. 'And we'll vote for him again, too, if we can.'
In a couple of cases, the praise from Trump fans I spoke with on Monday echoed, down to the word, the comments his supporters (paid or otherwise) made to me a decade ago, when he first launched his campaign at that very spot. 'He's not a politician. He's a businessman,' Nathan Nielsen, a 50-year-old from Utah, explained. 'He doesn't have to do this. He's doing it for us.'
A few minutes later, a guide was ushering a large group of high-school students down the escalator. Was Trump Tower now an official tour stop, I wondered? Not exactly, the guide, Mike Koenig, told me. 'I avoid this place like the plague,' he said. This was simply the nearest (or, at least, the cleanest) public restroom to Central Park.