by Mark Singer
Because bankruptcy tribulations and domestic disarray soon got in the way, 1988 would be the last presidential year for a while in which he would contrive a Trump for Emperor charade. He was back at it in 2000 and 2004, and in 2012 he performed an especially ostentatious Prince of Denmark routine before bowing out. That he possessed no core beliefs, no describable political philosophy, and not an iota of curiosity about the practicalities of policy and governance was irrelevant—to Trump, anyway—and seemed not to factor in the decision. He had been variously a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, and a possible candidate for the Reform Party. His intrinsic loyalty? In business, politics, and life he had remained faithful to only one constituent. And a single theme: Trump. Me. Look.
Until June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator in the Trump Tower atrium and, with paid actors wearing MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! T-shirts cheering him on, inaugurated his courageous effort to make Mexican synonymous with rapist and drug smuggler, I never thought he’d take the leap.
• • •
Sensible individuals of sterling repute—Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher—judged Trump’s campaign launch an occasion for celebration. Not a particularly patriotic verdict, but who could blame them. The world’s richest lode of potential satire had just been discovered! For once, I demurred. I have never disapproved of the public ridicule of self-important blowhards. This time, though, I wasn’t in the mood. Only rarely during the Obama era had Trump’s antics yielded satisfying retribution. What appeared to be good for late-night comedy I felt would not be good for the Democrats. (Certainly not for Republicans.) It could not be good for America.*1 It boded ill for humanity.
Otherwise I misread the moment, along with one hundred percent of the commentariat. We knew that Trump would be gone long before the primaries. We got it completely wrong. Before grasping just how mistaken I was about his prospects, I vowed not to jump in. Why write about this extended exhibition of Trumpian autoeroticism when everyone else already was? No need to feed the beast. Better it should starve of neglect.
Over the weeks and months that followed, as Trump spewed taunts, insults, threats, and dog-whistle-free bigotry—expanding his repertoire from Mexicans to the planet’s 1.6 billion Muslims—his poll numbers vindicated his methods. Thousands of real voters with real fears and long festering grievances thronged to his rallies. Among them were manifestly unrepentant haters, but that was not the majority sentiment. These were citizens whose resentment and anger had steeped in the blatant chronic bad faith of their elected representatives. For the time being, Trump would overcome his germophobic dread of waving fields of outstretched paws. With his genius for counterfeit fellow-feeling, he knew exactly which buttons to push and when. (During a midwinter meeting with the editorial board of the Times, he slipped up and gave the game away: “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’—and they go nuts.”*2 Indeed they did.) Trump loomed as an aspirational figure, a pseudo-populist self-proclaimed multi-billionaire whose contempt for the customary protocols of the reviled Washington establishment bound him to his adherents in a mutual intoxication. A cocktail of bogus facts, stirred by fear, naïveté, and an indifference to pragmatic exigencies. A zeal only loosely tethered to reality. “I love the poorly educated!” he crowed. They loved him back.
That he did not sound or behave like a typical politician won him points for authenticity. No one in the congregation seemed to mind—or even register—that an authentic corporeal Donald Trump did not exist. There was only Trump—in the flesh, as it were, a bloated bloviator in a navy suit and bright primary-colored necktie, with a laboriously tended pumpkin-pink coif that grew nowhere in nature. All was artifice. He greeted each assembly with a profession of love, congratulating the crowd for being three times larger than it in fact was. At each subsequent whistle-stop it grew larger yet. Trump held forth with bladder-testing stamina. But what was that coming out of his mouth? A stump speech of rambling self-aggrandizement and tough-talk sound bites: bigness, greatness, getting screwed, getting even, China, Mexico, Japan, the system’s rigged, losing, winning, head-spinning, an endless infomercial about his putative riches and fantastic fabulousness—flowing in intermittently filtered free association.
The bombast spoke plainly of his tactics, if not necessarily of his objectives. I doubted that winning the Republican nomination, let alone winning the general election, could be Trump’s genuine desire. The most logical rationale for his candidacy was the abiding obsession with his ever-metastasizing brand. From the podium he peddled Trump water, Trump wine, and Trump Steaks (an obsolete product). He spoke of himself in the third person: “Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump”; “Missouri just confirmed a victory for Donald Trump”; “Rand Paul is doing so badly he figures he has to go out and attack Trump.” When a protester who repeatedly shouted “Not all Mexicans are rapists, not all Muslims are terrorists!” received a police escort to the exit, Trump said, “He looks like an Elvis impersonator. That’s strange because the Elvis impersonators loved Donald Trump.” He claimed that “on women’s issues and health issues there will be nobody better than Donald Trump.” This last load of chutzpah from the itchy-Twitter-(short)-fingered author of: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
Here was an ostensible aspiring leader of the free world whose transparent anxieties about the adequacy of his genitalia dominated more than one news cycle. Watching the televised debate the first time Trump went there, I laughed, then winced. Nineteen years earlier, recounting the unraveling of his first marriage, his adultery with his future-second-ex-wife Marla Maples, and its attendant New York Post headline BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD, I wrote that “an acquaintance of Marla’s blabbed about Donald’s swordsmanship.” Or so the Post had reported, but what had I been thinking? Yikes. No such thing had happened. The only plausible blabber was Donald himself. Plus ça change.
The other pretenders to the Republican nomination, mostly a woefully ineffectual bunch, were reduced to alternating incredulity and strangulated dudgeon. I sympathized. Sort of. Much of the Fourth Estate, meanwhile, first by not taking Trump seriously, and then by taking him seriously, assumed roles as his witless enablers. For months, Trump played them like suckers at a sideshow. The more airtime and ink they gave him, the more he vilified them. No matter how much invective he showered, goading the rabble to hurl abuse at the unfortunate hostages in the media enclosure, the cameras kept running. At moments, the spectacle was disturbing to the point of unwatchability. On the distant sideline (specifically, my living room sofa), my shaming secret was that I couldn’t look away.
• • •
The novelty of the Trump campaign extended to its slogan, “Make America Great Again!” This was a direct lift from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “Let’s Make America Great Again,” but Trump brandished it with an unambiguous nativist bite. In no time, the decoders rendered it “Make America White Again!,” a formulation suggesting that Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration absolutism, for instance, expressed a yearning for an ethnically cleansed U.S.A.—manifest destiny by other means. I don’t see it that way. Trump-branded buildings, long regarded as safe havens for foreign flight capital, have always been popular with super-luxury-inclined multinational non-Caucasian plutocrats. (Among them, no doubt, a fair representation of Third World kleptocrats.)
As Trump drew closer to clinching the nomination, his recently hired political strategist, Paul Manafort, embarked upon an improbable effort to make him appear more presidential. Or, failing that, perhaps less Donald-like. Using the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, as window dressing, he delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address, reading from a prepared text for only the second time in his campaign. Its isolationist overtones (“ ‘America first’ will be the overriding theme of my administration”) didn’t square with his
penchant for off-the-cuff warmongering: “You know the thing I’ll be great at that people aren’t thinking? And I do very well at it. Military. I am the toughest guy. I will rebuild our military. It will be so strong, and so powerful, and so great.”
Challenged by Chris Matthews to assure “the whole world” that he would never consider using nuclear weapons in Europe, Trump replied, “I—I’m not going to take it off the table.”
His strategy for defeating ISIS? “I would bomb the shit out of them. I would just bomb those suckers.”
Because Trump was Trump, little was made of his history of dodging the draft. A high number in the 1969 draft lottery would have helped him avoid military service if he hadn’t already obtained a medical deferment for heel spurs. Asked by a reporter in Iowa which heel had been afflicted, he drew a blank, then said, “You’ll have to look it up.”
As it was, Trump felt that he had already served his country nobly. During his high school years at New York Military Academy, he said, “I always thought I was in the military.”
Did he mean the same military as Senator John McCain—the former U.S. Navy aviator shot down and severely injured during a Vietnam War mission in 1967, followed by six years as a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war, during two of which he was repeatedly beaten and tortured? The same McCain who Trump had disparaged as “not a war hero”?*3
It was unmistakably the same fearless and valiant Trump, who once, while discussing with Howard Stern the risks of sexually transmitted diseases, had observed, “It’s amazing. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary. It’s like Vietnam. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”*4
• • •
Another reliable Trump trope, usually punctuated by a quick headshake, was believe me: “I would build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me…I would have Mexico pay for it. Believe me, they will pay for it….I didn’t come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That’s what politicians do: all talk, no action, believe me…I’ve devoted so much time over my life to Israel, and the other politicians, they can talk but, believe me, they haven’t done what I’ve done.”
This would be easy to gloss over as a trivial rhetorical tic if the speaker had not long since situated himself along a credibility spectrum between highly dubious and are-you-out-of-your-mind? Each iteration of believe me begged the question at the heart of the Trumpian enigma: did he believe himself? In The Art of the Deal, his first best-selling paean to Donald J. Trump, he boasted about his predilection for “truthful hyperbole…an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.” Truthful hyperbole, à la Trump, is not mere oxymoron. Politely put, it’s total horseshit. What started out as a marketing maxim to justify Trump’s carefree dissembling he would eventually leverage into a new variation of the American dream: an artfully fabricated, hermetic, alternate reality.
The night that Trump carried 53 percent of the vote in Indiana and was declared by the chair of the National Republican Committee to be “the presumtive [sic] GOP nominee,” Ted Cruz packed up his reptilian charisma and returned to Texas to begin plotting his resurrection four years hence. As he departed, Trump praised him as “one hell of a competitor…a tough, smart guy.” Trump’s real going-away gift, though, had been delivered that very morning, when he parroted a National Enquirer story suggesting that Cruz’s father had been complicit with Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
By then, Trump had a demonstrated propensity for exploiting epochal national tragedies to suit his purposes. He relished describing having watched “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey—directly across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center—as the twin towers collapsed on 9/11. Jersey City is home to a substantial Arab population. Several news organizations investigated and found zero evidence to support Trump’s fantasy. Politifact.com, the nonpartisan fact-checking project of the Tampa Bay Times, designated the Jersey City whopper its 2015 “Lie of the Year.” When George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, confronted Trump, pointing out that the story had circulated for some time as an Internet canard, he replied, “It was on television. I saw it.” Fact checkers at the Washington Post had awarded him four “Pinocchios.” Trump persisted. It played quite well in the Deep South.
“Maybe truthful to a fault” was how he humbly described himself to a crowd in North Carolina. After a Trump town hall in Wisconsin that aired on CNN, the Huffington Post scrutinized the transcript and counted “71 separate instances in which Trump made a claim that was inaccurate, misleading, or deeply questionable.” This occurred within a single hour, commercial breaks included. On a different occasion, in a less punctilious exercise, I kept a tally of my own during CNN’s broadcast of a multi-candidate town hall in South Carolina. Trump was in peak form. Along with the usual Obamacare-is-dead and build-the-wall blah-blah, I most enjoyed:
“I’m not a bully. No, I’m not a bully at all.”
“I have a great temperament.”
“I think I was really, really a good parent because I put my children above everything.”
“I’m a smart person.”
“We have Caroline Kennedy negotiating car deals and trade deals with…Japan.”
“I get a lot of publicity. I don’t necessarily like it…No, it’s true…You know what, it’s true.”
• • •
It is deeply unfair to say that Trump lies all the time. I would never suggest that he lies when he’s asleep. On the other hand, he famously gets by on only four hours a night. I suspect this might be less a function of requiring very little sleep than of Trump’s agitation at being unable to manipulate his unconscious. Four hours might be as much loss of control as he can tolerate. We’ll never know, and neither will Trump. He told one biographer, “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.” This indicates either extraordinary restraint and self-awareness or an utter lack thereof. Or both.
It might also presage a global very bad something. At moments, I reassure myself that Trump doesn’t truly wish to be President; he just doesn’t want to lose the election. And while it lasts, he wants to savor the sound of his name roared by the multitude after he heaves a chunk of raw sirloin like “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. You bet your ass. In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that.” Win or lose, I wonder how long it will take Trump’s bedrock partisans to grasp that they’ve been played. Trump was barely out of his Wharton School short pants when the Republican Party devised its Southern strategy—exploiting racial and culture war grievances to persuade disaffected working-class white men to vote contrary to their economic self-interests. He didn’t invent the bait-and-switch; he is just its latest, and most enthusiastic, practitioner.
Watching Trump work his base, I’m invariably reminded of the trip we once made to Atlantic City, where he and Vanna White charmed the expectant patrons of the Trump Castle, then the most conspicuously failing of his failing casino properties. Vanna was on hand for a “ceremonial first pull” of a newly installed Wheel of Fortune–themed slot machine—there were thirteen of them—whereupon the star-struck pensioners surged forward to part with that week’s grocery budget. As we headed for the exit, Trump said to me, “This is what we do. What can I tell you?”
Sometime after Election Day, my plan is to write to Trump and, as is my habit, enclose a gift. Right now I’m thinking maybe a book he’s never read before. Alexander Hamilton is bigger than ever—Trump likes big, right?—so The Federalist Papers for sure. While I’m at it, also the Constitution. No matter how busy he is, I expect to hear back. Cannot wait to hear back is really more like it.
Donald, please. Don’t be such a stranger.
* * *
*1 Leslie Moonves, the president and CEO of CBS, let the truth out a while back: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS….This
is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” I keep this unabashed confession in mind whenever I go channel-surfing, lest I be tempted to alight on CBS.
*2 Trump’s admirers were not the only ones going nuts. One noteworthy dissenter was the former El Presidente de Mexico Vicente Fox: “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall!”
*3 This bouquet is unlikely to endure as Trump’s most judicious ad lib. Having inserted his foot in his mouth, he kept chewing until he was up to his kneecap. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
*4 Trump also concurred with Stern’s insight that “every vagina is like a potential land mine.”
My thanks to:
Colleagues at The New Yorker current and former, including Roger Angell, Peter Canby, Cynthia Cotts, Amy Davidson, Bruce Diones, Jeffrey Frank, Ann Goldstein, Mary Norris, Brenda Phipps, David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and Daniel Zalewski.
Tina Brown, for the gift that has kept giving.
For research assistance, Reid Singer (who is like a son to me). Also, Jake Lahut.
At Crown, Tim Duggan and Will Wolfslau.
Ian Frazier, Melissa Harris, John McPhee, Jeffrey Posternak, Jeb Singer, Betsy Singer, Timothy Singer, Paul Mailhot-Singer—each of you knows why.
The many journalists who across the years have assiduously reported about Donald Trump, in the process potentially putting themselves in harm’s way, especially Michael D’Antonio, David Cay Johnston, Timothy O’Brien, and the great Wayne Barrett.
Mark Singer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974. He is the author of Funny Money and Somewhere in America. He lives in New York City.
