Op-ed by Charles M. Blow @ NYTimes.com, July 22

Some people are baffled by Donald Trump’s fawning admiration of the world’s strongmen. I am not.

If you know anything about Donald Trump’s formative years in his native New York, you know that this has been part of his life since the beginning.

In particular, he was a young man in the city when the hip-hop cultural movement was born here in the 1970s. He witnessed the birth and ascendancy of hip-hop in the city, the moguls it made, the bravado it brandished.

He liked it, envied it, aped it. He created of it something all his own: He learned to assert white privilege and emulate black power.

There have always been white people like Trump who fetishize black culture — thrill seekers who want to dip their toes into what they view as exotic, but also want to stay dry and removed from it. 

Trump practiced the racism of exceptions: He disdained poor minorities — those who wanted to rent his property; criminal suspects like the Central Park Five, of whom he wrote, “I want to hate,” and whom he wanted to have executed. But he marveled at the exceptional, those who amassed money and power while projecting a counterculture aesthetic and ethos.

He admired the men who learned how to monetize swagger. He has learned from them and applied their lessons to his largely white world. That’s why I think this racist actually believes on some level that he is not a racist. He counts his flirtation with rich black rappers and athletes as proof of his egalitarianism [....]