Comes a time when the right mind comes to the right topic at the right
time. That happens in the essay that follows from the current Harper’s
magazine. Enjoy (at least from the standpoint of giving concrete, critical form
to what we are watching, dumbstruck, upon the political stage …)
DON THE REALTOR
The Rise of Trump
By Martin Amis, Harper’s August 2016
Discussed in this essay:
Trump: The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz. Ballantine
Books. 384 pages. $16.99.
Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, by Donald Trump. Threshold
Editions. 208 pages. $25.
Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone
unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end. I mean his sanity: what
is the prognosis for his mental health, given the challenges that lie ahead? We
should bear in mind, at this point, that the phrase “Power corrupts” isn’t just
a metaphor.
There have been one or two speculative
attempts to get Donald to hold still on the couch. Both Ted Cruz and Bernie
Sanders have called him a “pathological liar,” but so have many less partial
observers. They then go on to ask: Is his lying merely compulsive, or is he an
outright mythomaniac, constitutionally unable to distinguish non-truth from
truth — rather like those “horrible human beings,” journalists (or at
least spiteful, low-echelon journalists), who, Trump claims, “have no concept
of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ ”? PolitiFact has ascertained
that Donald’s mendacity rate is just over 90 percent; so the man who is forever
saying that he “tells it like it is” turns out to be nearly always telling it
like it isn’t.
Cynics will already be saying that these
two “diseases” — chronic dishonesty and acute vaingloriousness — are
simply par for the course. In recent years the G.O.P. has more or less adopted
the quasi slogan “There is no downside to lying” (itself a clear and indeed
“performative” tall tale: how can you debauch truth, and debauch language,
without cost?). And such voices would also argue that a laughably bloated sense
of self is a prerequisite, a sine qua non, for anyone aspiring to public
office. Well, we’ll see. President Trump won’t get away with too much
pathological lying in the Oval Office and the Situation Room. But we may be
sure that his pathological narcissism, his poor old N.P.D., will become
unrecognizably florid and fulminant once alloyed with what Maxim Gorky —
referring to its effects on his friend Lenin — called “the filthy venom”
of prepotence. Even Lenin confessed that it “makes one’s head spin.”
Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the
written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald
Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.”
But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with
their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s
“reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every
single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative,
and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls
his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The
Art of the Deal (1987) andCrippled America (2015). I
suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving
at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think
Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever
Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and
Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can
report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has
undergone an atrocious decline.
Insofar as it is a memoir, The Art of the Deal resembles
a rags-to-riches story from which the rags have been tastefully excised.
Donald’s dad, Fred C. Trump, did the rags bit, becoming the man of the house at
the age of eleven (Donald’s grandfather was “a hard liver and a hard drinker”);
so it was Fred, toiling away in the outer boroughs, who shined shoes, delivered
fruit, and hauled lumber. Even at sixteen, though, Trump Sr. was starting to
get ahead, “building prefabricated garages for fifty dollars apiece.”
By the time Donald appeared, Fred was a
grand master of what we would now call affordable housing; and little Donald
was his father’s sidekick as together they toured the sites, checking up on
builders, suppliers, and contractors, and intimidating penniless tenants when
they fell behind on the rent. But “I had loftier dreams and visions,” Trump
writes. Not for him the little redbrick boxes, nor yet the “three-story Colonials,
Tudors, and Victorians” that Fred went on to erect. In the early 1970s,
fortified by that “small loan” from his father ($1 million), Donald strode
across the Brooklyn Bridge and started to traffic in unaffordable housing:
skyscrapers.
If you have ever wondered what it’s like, being a young and
avaricious teetotal German-American philistine on the make in Manhattan, then
your curiosity will be quenched by The Art of the Deal. One of
the drawbacks of phenomenal success, Trump ruefully notes, “is that jealousy
and envy inevitably follow” (“I categorize [such people] as life’s losers”);
but the present reader, at least, felt a gorgeous serenity when contemplating
Trump’s average day. Nonnavigable permits, floor-area ratios, zoning approvals,rezoning
approvals (“involving a dozen city and state agencies, as well as local
community groups”), land-rights and air-rights purchases, property-tax
abatements, handouts to politicians (“very standard and accepted”), and, if
push came to shove (“I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely
necessary”), coerced evictions.
On the other hand, think of all the
exceptional human beings he is working with. Alan “Ace” Greenberg, CEO of Bear
Stearns; Ivan Boesky, crooked arbitrageur; Arthur Sonnenblick, “one of the
city’s leading brokers”; Stephen Wynn, Vegas hotelier; Adnan Khashoggi, “Saudi
billionaire” (and arms dealer); and Paul Patay, “the number-one
food-and-beverage man in Atlantic City.” And on top of all this there’s Barron
Hilton, “born wealthy and bred to be an aristocrat,” and “a member of what I
call the Lucky Sperm Club.” (An ugly formulation, that: I respectfully advise
Mr. Trump to settle on a more demotic alternative — the Lucky Scum Club,
say.)
Then you have the social life. A
sustaining can of tomato juice for lunch (“I rarely go out, because mostly,
it’s a waste of time”); a minimum of parties (“Frankly, I’m not too big on
parties, because I can’t stand small talk”); and an absolute minimum of hanging
about in cocktail bars (“I don’t drink, and I’m not very big on sitting
around”). But of course there are treats and sprees. Take the dinners. A dinner
at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with John Cardinal O’Connor and his “top bishops and
priests.” A dinner, chaired by Trump, for the Police Athletic League. A visit
to Trenton “to attend a retirement dinner for a member of the New Jersey Casino
Control Commission.”
It is thus exhaustively established that Trump has a superhuman
tolerance for boredom. What are his other commercial strengths? Nerve;
tenacity; patience; an unembarrassable pushiness (indulgently known as
chutzpah); a shrewd aversion to staking his own money; the aforementioned
readiness, at a pinch, to play the villain; the ability to be “a screamer when
I want to be” (but not when he senses that “screaming would
only scare them off”); and the determination to “fight when I feel I’m being
screwed.” Above all, perhaps, his antennae are very sensitive to weakness.
Looking to buy an old hotel in Midtown, Trump rejects the Biltmore, the
Barclay, and the Roosevelt as being “at least moderately successful,” and goes
instead for the “only one in real trouble,” the Commodore, which he can pitch
as “a loser hotel in a decaying neighborhood” and so flatten the price.
Similarly, his long and apparently hopeless campaign to get Bonwit Teller,
store and building, suddenly takes fire when he learns that its parent company
has started “to experience very serious financial problems.” And he gets Bonwit
Teller. Perhaps that’s the defining asset: a crocodilian nose for inert and
preferably moribund prey.
Trump can sense when an entity is no
longer strong enough or lithe enough to evade predation. He did it with that
white elephant, the Grand Old Party, whose salaried employers never saw him
coming, even when he was there, and whose ruins he now bestrides. The question
is, Can he do it with American democracy?
And so we turn to Crippled America: How to Make America
Great Again, a bestseller so recent that it includes a dig at Megyn
Kelly. But first a word about the cover.
“Some readers,” writes Trump sternly in his opening sentence,
“may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry
and so mean looking.” Only the other day, he “had some beautiful pictures
taken” — pictures like the one that bedizens The Art of the Deal —
in which he “looked like a very nice person”; and Trump’s family implored him
to pick one of those. But no. He wanted to look like a very sour person to
reflect the “anger and unhappiness that I feel.” And there he is in HD color,
hammily scowling out from under an omelet of makeup and tanning cream (and from
under the little woodland creature that sleeps on his head).
Harper’s readers
will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the
declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken
sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His
written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt
something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as
content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem
relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth
saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is
being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally,
this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but
can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she
is?
Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest
in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump
has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I
don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has
already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page
ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89
he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say
exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve
to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find
anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our
Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:
In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office
Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got
the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted
to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability
to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four
reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really
great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number
four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even
exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from
the beginning.
That’s
the way the country should be run.
Before we turn to the naked
manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable
planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a
jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly
desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making
tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the
nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to
start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he
would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort
it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the
White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In
business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he
writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there —
big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line
about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word
paragraph, “Period.”
But by now the one-word paragraph has
taken up long-term residence in Trump’s prose:
People say I don’t provide specific
policies. . . . I know that’s not the way the professional
politicians do it. . . . But there’s nobody like me.
Nobody.
Or:
I have proven everybody wrong.
EVERYBODY!
If we agree that referring to yourself
in the third person is not usually a sign of psychological well-being, how do
we assess the following?
Donald Trump builds buildings.
Donald Trump develops magnificent golf courses.
Donald Trump makes investments that create jobs.
And
Donald Trump creates jobs for legal immigrants and all Americans.
Well, Martin Amis thinks, for a start, that the author of Crippled
America is a lot crazier than the author of The Art of the
Deal.
Martin Amis is aware that Crippled America was
published on November 3, 2015, at which point only a couple of blatant
no-hopers had quit that crowded field.
Martin Amis is sure that Crippled America, if
updated by Trump the nominee, would be dramatically crazier.
And Martin Amis concludes that after a
couple of days of pomp and circumstance in the White House, Trump’s brain would
be nothing more than a bog of testosterone.
Emotionally primitive and intellectually barbaric, the Trump
manifesto would be a reasonably good sick joke — if it weren’t for one
deeply disturbing observation, which occurs on page 163. Every now and again
Americans feel the need to exalt and heroize an ignoramus. After Joe the Plumber,
here is Don the Realtor — a “very successful” realtor, who, it is
superstitiously hoped, can apply the shark-and-vulture practices of big
business to the sphere of world statesmanship. I will italicize Trump’s key
sentence: after he announced his candidacy, “A lot of people tried very hard to
paint a bleak picture of what would happen.” New paragraph: “Then the
American people spoke.” We remember the bitter witticism about democracy:
“The people have spoken. The bastards.”
Who are they? Paradoxically, the
constituency of America’s foremost Winner is to be found among America’s
losers. White, heterosexual, and male, they have discovered that the prestige
of being white, heterosexual, and male has been inexplicably sapped. At the
same time they imagine that their redemption lies with Trump, Inc., which has
the obvious credentials (“We manage ice-skating rinks, we produce TV shows, we
make leather goods, we create fragrances, and we own beautiful restaurants”) to
turn it around for the non-rich and the non-educated (as well as for the
non-colored, the non-gay, and the non-female).
Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is?
What he is actually telling us is that the residual Republican hankers for a
political contender who knows nothing at all about politics. In 2012, Joe the
Plumber, Joe Wurzelbacher, failed to win his race for the Ninth Congressional
District in Ohio. In 2016, as I write, Donald Trump has odds of nine to four
(and shortening) for the U.S. presidency.
In valediction, two characterological
footnotes.
First, Trump and violence. As we know, he has championed mass
deportations, torture, and murderous collective punishment; and then there are
the bullying incitements at his Nuremberg-like rallies. . . .
When did Trump become a fan of the kinetic? There is nothing substantial on
this question, or on any other, in Crippled America. In The
Art of the Deal he describes one of his rare interventions in the fine
arts: he gave his music teacher a black eye (“because,” Trump bafflingly clarifies,
“I didn’t think he knew anything about music”). But otherwise he comes across
as someone naturally averse to the wet stuff of brutality; the chapter-long
reminiscence entitled “Growing Up” quite convincingly suggests that it was the
father’s rough way of doing things (rent collecting in assault conditions) that
made the son decide to quit the outer boroughs. I think the taste for violence
has come with the taste of real power. It is something new in him — a
recent corruption.
Second, the connected topic — Trump and women. This isn’t
new. This is something old that has recrudesced, an atavism that has “become
raw again.” This is a wound with the scab off. And now he just can’t hold it
in, can he, he just can’t stop himself — out they come, these smoke
signals of aggression. And he is being empirically stupid. The
question you want to ask Trump is clearly not “If you’re so smart, how come you
ain’t rich?”; it is “If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?” Has
something very grave happened to Trump’s I.Q.? He’s been worrying about it,
too, it seems. Responding on the air to David Cameron’s opinion of his ban on
Muslims (“stupid, divisive, and wrong”), Trump touchily (and ploddingly) shot
back: “Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that right now. Just
the opposite.” Don’t you blush for the lavishness of his insecurity? But Trump
is insecurity incarnate — his cornily neon-lit vulgarity (reminding you of
the pinups on Lolita’s bedroom wall: “Goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons
near blued pools”); his desperate garnering of praise (Crippled America quotes
encomia from Travel and Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, BusinessWeek,and Golf
Digest, among many other outlets); his penile pride.
To Democrats at least, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved
with Women in Private,” the detailed analysis in the New York Times (fifty
interviews with “dozens of women”), was a sore disappointment. All we got from
it was Miss Utah’s “Wow, that’s inappropriate” (Donald’s introductory kiss on
the lips). Trump was born in 1946. Almost every reasonably energetic baby
boomer I know, women included, would be utterly destroyed by an equivalent
investigation; we behaved far more deplorably than Trump, and managed it
without the wealth, the planes and penthouses, the ownership of modeling
agencies and beauty pageants. The Times piece, in effect,
“flipped” the narrative: the story, now, is one of exceptional
diffidence — and fastidiousness (obsessive self-cleansing is a trait he
twice owns up to in The Art of the Deal). A gawker, a groper, and a
gloater; but not a lecher. In Trump’s Eros one detects a strong element of
vicariousness. Once again he resembles that Greek antihero: “What you hope / To
lay hold of has no existence. / Look away and what you love is nowhere” (Ted
Hughes, Tales from Ovid).
Trump’s sexual bashfulness is an
interesting surprise. But where, then, does it come from — the rancor, the
contempt, the disgust? It is as if he has never been told (a) that women go to
the bathroom (“Disgusting,” he said of a Clinton toilet break), and (b) that
women lactate (“Disgusting,” he said of a lawyer who had to go and pump milk
for her newborn). Has no one told him (c) that women vote? And I hope he finds
that disgusting too, in November. This race will be the mother of a battle of
the sexes, Donald against Hillary — and against her innumerable sisters at
the ballot box.
Visitors to the United States in an
election year are touched by how seriously Americans take their national
responsibility, how they vacillate and agonize. They very seldom acknowledge
that their responsibility is also global. At an early stage in Trump’s rise,
his altogether exemplary campaign staff decided that any attempt to “normalize”
their candidate would be futile: better, they shruggingly felt (as they
deployed the tautologous house style), to “let Trump be Trump.” As a lover of
America (and as an admirer of the planet), I offer this advice: Don’t shrug.
Don’t stand by and let President Trump be President Trump.
Next: Running for Your Life: Run for Fun
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