The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  President Trump Orates in Ohio*

  In considering Donald Trump we should heed the Barry Manilow Law, as promulgated in the 1970s by Clive James. The law runs as follows: everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible, but everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great.

  Trusting in the (alleged) wisdom of crowds, and hoping for an agreeable surprise, I traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, in midsummer—not to attend a Barry Manilow concert but to take my place at a rally held, or thrown (no entrance fee), by President Trump. The Covelli Centre had attained its full capacity: 7,900. And there I stood, surrounded by everyone I didn’t know.

  And there stood Donald Trump, fifty yards away, clapping his hands as he greeted the audience, and running through his repertoire of false smiles. False smiles are the only kind of smiles at his command, because whatever “sense of humor” he might once have laid claim to has long since evaporated, together with its fraternal twin—balance of mind.

  There are only three false smiles: the golf-pro smirk, revealing the golf-champ teeth; the one where he bites down on his sucked-in lower lip (this isn’t a smile so much as an imitation of a regular guy); and, arguably the most dreadful of all, the flat sneer of Ozymandian hauteur that widens out almost from ear to ear, like a comic mask. The eyes, meanwhile, remain utterly unamused.

  Yes, and Eric and Lara were there, and Rick Perry was there, and Anthony Scaramucci was there (judging by his outward form, the Mooch could be on the books of the same high-end gigolo agency that employs Don Jr.), and Melania was there. Trump’s wife, Melania Knauss: my wife, a keen observer of body language, says there’s no doubt at all that Melania hates Donald’s guts. So maybe POTUS brings FLOTUS along to get a kiss and a hug and a feel of her hand, which, by now, is probably the extent of his wants. Some people (including me) believe that Trump’s libido has been ridiculously overblown (not least by the germophobe himself, as self-publicist and locker-room braggart). All we know more or less for sure is that he has done it five times.

  Even at $12,000 per suit or whatever it is, the tailor’s art can do very little with the stubborn slab of DJT. Still, despite his mirthless beams and grins, he is clearly very happy at the Covelli Centre. Here he will get no “mixed reviews,” as he does in the swamp and in the fake-news media. By watching Trump rallies on TV, the crowd has mastered a quartet of trisyllabic chants, which are BUILD THAT WALL, LOCK HER UP, and U-S-A; the fourth is WE LOVE TRUMP, as in WE LOVE TRUMP, WE LOVE TRUMP, WE LOVE TRUMP…

  His strongly approve numbers have recently plunged, from around 30 percent to around 20 percent. But they have risen again, thanks to his slanging match with Kim Jong-un. Trump’s “base” is said to be hovering at around 35 percent. So in Youngstown, let us say, we were seeing how the other third lives—and how it loves.

  I’ll return to the Covelli Centre. But first some more general observations.

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  Hillary Clinton has talked for years of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” This is a contradiction in terms—though not quite as absurd as Trump’s reference to “a global conspiracy” behind the Paris Accord (where the puppeteers were intent on swindling the United States). A “conspiracy” is by definition “secret.” Therefore any talk of a conspiracy that involves more than a handful of actors—or a single dedicated cadre—should be dismissed out of hand. This makes extra-obvious nonsense of the idea of a self-inflicted September 11, with its controlled-demolition crews and Tomahawk-missile operatives, among hundreds of others. Beyond a certain point, human nature being what it is, a secret will be a secret no longer.

  The vast right-wing conspiracy does not exist. What does exist, as Joshua Green vigorously demonstrates in Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, is a broadly dispersed and uncoordinated effort aimed without precision at an unevenly shared goal: defeating the globalist and multiculturalist Hillary Clinton and then (much, much later) promoting the nationalist and white-supremacist Donald Trump. The dramatis personae range from peddlers of anti-Hillary knickknacks (Clinton nutcrackers, bumper stickers saying LIFE’S A BITCH. DON’T VOTE FOR ONE) to a galère of ultra-rich and ultra-perverse donors (some of whom are also ultra-talented), backed up by a cast of clever quacks and charlatans—most notably Steve Bannon.

  Take Robert Mercer. A self-made billionaire who collects machine guns and loves fancy dress, Mercer was gullible enough to promote the congressional candidacy of a certain Arthur Robinson, an Oregon “research chemist” who, in his quest for the key to longevity, amassed “thousands upon thousands of urine samples,” writes Green, “which he froze in vials and stored in massive refrigerators.” Robinson lost, narrowly. After Trump’s election, Mercer’s middle daughter, the very committed Rebekah, pushed to have Robinson appointed as “national science adviser.” That campaign failed too—and by a landslide, one would like to hope.

  Gullible Mercer may be, but he was also sufficiently brilliant to revolutionize computer translation. In the early-middle 1990s this field was in the hands of linguists and grammarians. Mercer and his IBM colleague Peter Brown took an entirely different tack, “relying on a tool called an ‘expectation maximization logarithm’—a tool code breakers would use to find patterns.” The lexicographer scientists scoffed at Mercer’s efforts, but “statistical machine translation” worked—and for every language known to man. It is the basis of Google Translate.

  Reading Devil’s Bargain, you nurse the following suspicion: for every Bill and Melinda Gates there are, in the stratosphere of the 1 percent, a Robert and Rebekah Mercer, looking for trouble and looking for someone like Trump. None of this would’ve mattered much in the days before that judicial masterpiece, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Citizens United is a fringe Republican group of Clinton haters; its president is David Bossie, another busybody and nutter who was taken up by Bannon—and then by Trump, just as he began his “birther” rampage.

  We now go forward to mid-August 2016, with the election twelve weeks away. At this point Clinton’s lead was close to double figures, and Trump was in the middle of what Douglas Brinkley memorably called his “sick meltdown.” So Rebekah Mercer flew by helicopter to the East Hampton estate of Woody Johnson (owner of the New York Jets) for a face-to-face with the Republican nominee. Here is Joshua Green’s version of what happened next:

  Her own family was into Trump for $3.4 million, more if you counted ancillary support such as Breitbart. The RNC, she told him, was days away from cutting him loose and turning its focus to saving the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

  “It’s bad,” Trump admitted.

  “No, it’s not bad—it’s over,” she shot back. “Unless you make a change.”

  …Mercer told Trump that he needed to get rid of Paul Manafort, whose ill-conceived attempt to moderate him into someone acceptable to swing voters had plainly failed. Furthermore, Manafort’s ties to pro-Kremlin autocrats was hurting Trump’s campaign.

  “Bring in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway,” Mercer told him. “I’ve talked to them; they’ll do it.”

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  Bannon and Conway did it, and Trump did it, the American electorate did it, and the rest, embarrassingly, is history. Journalists are a rough-and-ready crowd; but how are historians going to address this tale? Only an extraordinary concatenation of events, they will no doubt begin, could result in the ascendance of a figure so manifestly…We blush for historians, we blush for history, and we blush for Clio, its muse. Discounting, for now, the unmeasurable contribution of James Comey, the man responsible for America’s disgrace and disaster is Stephen Kevin Bannon.

  If Christopher Hitchens were alive today, he would be the leading voice of the Resistance (along with Bernie Sanders). And I don’t think Christopher, in this role, would waste much ammuniton on the barn door of Donald Trump; he would go straight for Bannon, who really is, or was, the “great manipulator” showcased by Time. After
a “kaleidoscopic career”—naval officer, Goldman Sachs trader, earth-science researcher, Hollywood producer, online-gaming mogul, editor of Breitbart News—Bannon looked for a political instrument to help reify his “vision.” At first he was drawn to Sarah Palin (which to some extent gives you the measure of the man); then he saw Trump.

  Green characterizes Bannon as “a Falstaff in flipflops,” which is physically vivid but in all other respects inapt (in the bluster-and-cowardice department, you could as well call Trump a Falstaff in Brioni threads). Bannon is a recognizable type: the high-IQ cretin, or the Mensa moron. He is very smart and very energetic; what he lacks is even a trace of moral intelligence. And Falstaff had plenty of that: see his great satire on martial “honor” (“He who died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it?”). Although I’m familiar with the Bannon genus, I must admit that his brand of hip, gonzo nihilism strikes me as something quite new. “When she comes into your life,” he said in unalloyed praise of Julia Hahn (one of his underling “Valkyries”), “shit gets fucked up.”

  Despite his studied profanities, Bannon is intellectually pretentious, even grandiose. His supposedly all-consuming autodidacticism hasn’t brought him close to full literacy (“Every morning President Trump tells Reince and I to…”); he is also a cerebral flibbertigibbet—Zen Buddhism, the writings of the French occultist René Guénon and the Italian racial theorist Julius Evola (the latter a Mussolini ally whose ideas gained currency in Nazi Germany). Similarly, his “systematic study of the world’s religions” hasn’t shifted him from the Tridentine Catholicism of his origins.

  The “Tridentine” tag refers to the Latin Eucharistic liturgy used by popery from 1570 to 1964. Both dates are central to the Bannon calendar: the 1960s was when secular liberalism got out of hand (with its promiscuous dope-fueled iconoclasm); correspondingly, Bannon swooned over the policies mooted by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (niece of Marine), saying that her program was “practically French medieval,” and adding, “She’s the future of France.” The Middle Ages lie ahead of us: that’s Bannon. Also featured in this mess are the familiar platitudes about the “clash of civilizations” with Islam. It is not a clash of civilizations; it is a clash of one civilization against a mélange of religious gangsters (very many of them converts). Since September 11, murders committed by white-supremacist vigilantes have more or less kept pace with murders committed by Islamists (the figures are 106 and 119).

  Clearly, Bannon is potentially a very dangerous figure: Trump’s Cheney. This would be the surest way to marginalize the threat: put his face on every available magazine cover, and Trump would soon show him the door. But that, we now know, won’t be necessary. Bannon skillfully maneuvered his vaudevillian dunce into the White House; lacking moral imagination, he didn’t see, or didn’t care, that as soon as he gained power Trump would be instantly corrupted and deranged by it, declaring himself to be “my own strategist” (on top of being “the greatest person in the world”), and would stop listening to anybody at all. Everywhere you look, now, Trump is being called “stupid,” “idiotic,” “unhinged,” and “crazy,” and Paul Krugman is not the only one plainly suggesting that Trump is in the early stages of senile dementia. Imagine his second term…

  Let’s be clear. The GOP’s psychotic break began on election night in 2008 (and the Tea Party coalesced immediately after Obama’s inauguration). Horribile dictu, but about one in three Americans cannot bear to see a black man in the White House. The hysterical blond who occupies it now is the direct consequence of that atavism. As for his tenure, this has always been the question, from day one: when would enough Republicans start putting patrie before party? As Steve Bannon might put it, “How much shit can they eat?”

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  That night in Youngstown, early on, the president rhetorically asked, “Is there anywhere more fun, more exciting, and safer than a Trump rally?” One of the three propositions was true—an astonishing veracity rate for Donald J (“Donald J,” incidentally, was an earlier trisyllabic chant, and one that handily rhymed with “U-S-A”). I found this Trump rally inexpressibly tedious; it stimulated nothing but a leaden incredulity; but it was perfectly safe. There weren’t any people dressed as storm troopers or Imperial Wizards. And during the warm-up, as the Pledge of Allegiance was solemnly intoned and everyone in the stadium got to their feet (most though not all placing a hand on the heart), I remained seated, up in the stands, and continued to write away in a highly suspicious Moleskine notebook. Nobody gave me a first glance, let alone a second.

  During Trump’s speech there were a few small-scale protests (inarticulate bawling) and the dissidents were quietly led to the exit. Trump has by no means lost his taste for vicarious violence (see his recent incitement to police brutality), but he greeted the ejections with a mild non-drollery and even made a mention of the First Amendment: there was no hot talk of stretchers and bloody noses. The other significant change in his MO concerns the beautiful wall on the southern border. Usually, when the chants of BUILD THAT WALL have at last died down, he asks, “And who’s going to pay for it?” while theatrically cocking an ear. Well, he doesn’t anymore. Because the rejoinder, now, would not be the triumphalist “MEXICO!” or “THEY ARE!” but the rather more muted “AMERICA” or “WE ARE” (and estimates go as high as $25 billion). Otherwise, Donald was a good boy, and never strayed from his teleprompter—neglecting to say, for example, that he was going to fire Jeff Sessions and replace him with someone who would fire Robert Mueller.

  There were the standard untruths (Americans are among the most highly taxed people on earth) and some grotesque distortions (if insurance premiums in Alaska have risen 200 percent under the “nightmare of Obamacare,” why did its senator cast one of the deciding votes against repeal?). Apart from that, though, if you tuned out the content, you would have to say that he seemed occasionally and fleetingly near-presidential. But what’s a president doing at a rally after barely seven months in the White House?

  He comes to these things, they say, for the validation. And he gets it. Validation, and a loyalty that is as wholly impervious to reality as the NRA. About a third of the billion or so guns on the planet (including all the armies’) are in America: so that’s about one each. Gun deaths average 93 per day. I reckon the trigger-and-bullet community would live with 930; but not with 9,300, which would slash the United States census by 25 percent in a single generation.

  To lose his base, Trump would need to preside over something almost as cataclysmic. Turning the office held by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ into a morbidly obese cash cow hasn’t done it. A financial crash (unlikely) could be scapegoated and wouldn’t do it; a fresh sex scandal (barely conceivable) wouldn’t do it. If the chemistry between the “fat kid that’s running North Korea” (in the words of John McCain) and the fat crock that’s running America results in the vaporization of, say, Los Angeles, and if this is followed by an arsenal-clearing response (with all its sequelae): that would do it. Trump is clearly praying for an excuse to wipe North Korea off the map, thereby winning the plaudits of a grateful planet. I hope he’s listening when someone tells him the truth—that the United States would be a pariah for the rest of the century.

  Trump’s 35 percent is otherwise pretty sound. George W. Bush’s base, as he told fellow diners at some million-dollar-a-plate fundraiser, consisted of the super-rich. What does Trump’s base consist of?

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  Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips….These are the numbers. Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents….

  Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late

  The world is accelerating, and the Trump loyalists are idling in neutral, and in constant danger of slipping into reverse gear. Why and how does Trump give them hope? He gives t
hem hope because—sotto voce—he is saying:

  Elite media types tell you you’re stupid and don’t know anything. Well, look at me. I’m stupid too and I don’t know anything either. I think Frederick Douglass [1817–1895] is still alive—and doing a great job, by the way. I think my hero and presidential model Andrew Jackson [1767–1845] was “really angry” about the Civil War [1861–1865]. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? My advisers tell me it was to do with slavery. Why could that one not have been worked out? You know what I say? “Live and let live.” I came up with that phrase a couple of days ago. I thought it was good.

  A guy who works for me, Steve Bannon, once said, “You’re a student of military history,” and when he came to mention it, I realized it was true. Take Napoleon. Now you know Napoleon finished a little bit bad [he lost at least half a million troops in 1812]. And his one problem was he didn’t go to Russia that night—because he was screwing some broad in the City of Lights—and they froze to death [Napoleon was in Russia for six months. Unencumbered by his army, he needed thirteen days to race back to Paris from Minsk]. Maybe I should’ve said that Napoleon needed to start out for Russia that night. Because there was no Air France in those days. And he didn’t have his own jet with NAPOLEON painted on it.