Once More With Feeling: DJT
Katherine Osnos Sanford, my daughter, imagines this scenario:
At the Pearly Gates, the greeter observes, “It says here that in the 1980s, you were responsible for Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.”
“Yes,” I reply, “but I was also the publisher of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.”
“Ok,” says the greeter, “Purgatory.”
As we approach this especially fateful election day, I want to update something that I wrote for NewYorker.com a year ago. It was called “Editing Donald Trump” and described my experience working with Trump on the book that is credited with making him famous enough to one day become President of the United States.
What I’ve said many times when queried is that Trump is the same person I saw all those years ago, only on steroids — and ironically, as we all know, now he really has been on steroids to deal with his coronavirus diagnosis.
Trump (I always wince when I hear him called President) has handled this disease as he has everything else in his life — as just another hurdle to get over. His approach to business, almost all those who get in his orbit, the people of United States of America and even his family are all means to an end of self-glorification. He titled his second book Surviving at the Top even when he was bankrupt and in massive personal debt.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked whether I regret my association with Trump, I would have more than the $750 he paid in federal income taxes in 2017. After all his credited co-author on The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He has even written an audio book called Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump, and Me, an account of anguish over his part in the Trump saga.
Yes, I am well aware that our book made Trump a popular icon. I certainly wish it hadn’t. But I am, by instinct, a reporter, and always have been, and my experience with Trump as his Random House editor gives me the right to assess him in ways others with opinions cannot. In my now considered view, he has turned out to be what he called Vice-Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris the other day: “a monster.”
He has consistently displayed many of the worst characteristics of human behavior — bigotry, corruption, misogyny, mockery, faux rage, demagoguery — and in ways that are more than disturbing, has gotten away with them. In Donald Trump’s mind, he never loses, because he never seems to. In 74 years, he has defied or tried to defy every odd, including baldness which even his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani came to accept.
How does Trump do it? That is like asking anyone who is particularly skilled at something to explain themselves. It is partly instinct, partly nurture, partly determination and accumulated practice. He has become as adept at demagoguery as he was at bamboozling the world into thinking that he was a great businessman. And remember the trope that he had fathered great offspring?
Trump not only deserves to lose on November 3, from all we have learned and is undisputed, he should be indicted, tried and convicted on crimes too numerous to list. In his only trial so far, impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors, he was acquitted.
Trump must realize that a day of reckoning is approaching. He may yet go down in flames but only if the American people, the American establishment and the American judicial system relentlessly go after him until his days in power are truly over.
Don’t bet on it.
I have wondered for some time, what his hold is on so many Americans, not just his followers but the tens of millions of us who have monitored his every move, sending ratings, subscriptions and book sales sky high. We cannot seem to look away. Trump is political pornography, and we know it when we see it. It is too late to say we haven’t.
Our country of 325 million people (he won’t let the census run its full course) includes the complete range of races, genders, personalities, successes, failures and grievances that make up humanity, both a blessing and a curse.
At its edges on the extreme right are people who believe that being an armed terrorist will achieve their violent goals. And then, there are people so desperate, that they take to looting as an expression of rage. How many of these people are there? Certainly, enough to make a difference in how the country looks, especially when their actions are magnified to near obsession.
Next, among us are the many millions on both sides of the political divide who believe that the other side is wrong and dangerous to our way of life. How bizarre is it that the current symbol of cultural associations is whether you are willing to wear a mask? As a child, I had masked men favorites, led by the Lone Ranger and Batman’s Robin (True, their noses weren’t covered).
And then there is what is called, incorrectly, the Silent Majority. These are the people coping with life as it is with views that doubtless run the gamut from rightish to leftish based on their personal situations of work, family, health and entertainment choices, from serious to just fun. The mix of this nation is from the absolute best to the very worst.
Our history is great. Our history is shameful.
On the eve of this election, with the possibility we will have to wait hours in line to cast ballots or worry about whether mail-in vote will actually be counted, the fact remains that we do have a genuine choice about the country’s direction and voting is our ultimate civic privilege.
I will vote for Joe Biden and Harris and Democrats all the way down the ticket. I used to admire many Republicans (for those old enough to remember, Senators Javits, Mathias, Hatfield, John Sherman Cooper, George Aitken and others). The GOP’s craven adherence to Trump has permanently changed that.
Do I regret that Donald Trump is president and could get another term? Yes. Maybe that will shorten my term in purgatory.
