Fred Trump's Young Herr... A Racist? How Could It Be?

Yesterday, in his Washington Post column, Greg Sargent wrote that ever since Señor Trumpanzee "launched his candidacy by declaring Mexicans to be 'rapists,' Trump's public racism has often included two additional important elements: an adamant refusal to apologize for it in the face of outrage, and an equally adamant denial that the offending language was racist in any way. Central to Trump’s racism-- and more broadly to Trumpism writ large-- is not just the content of the racism itself. It’s also that he’s asserting the right to engage in public displays of racism without it being called out for what it is."

And he's dragging the Republican Party into the open pit sewer with him. Even the Republicans who have "condemned" his demented racist barrage against AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, have used words and phrases that show what they are really made of:

• Fred Upton (R-MI): "both sides"
• Susan Brooks (R-IN): "ALL...need to raise their level of civility"
• John Katko (R-NY): "vehemently criticized lawmakers on the far left"
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY): "strongly disagree w/ the tactics of the far left socialist Squad"

More typical was Long Island Trump supporter Lee Zeldin who wound up, like Lindsey Graham, denouncing the same 4 women of color for what he called a "blame America first mentality." But speaking of Long Island, another suburban swing-district member, this one a Democrat, Tom Suozzi-- vice chair of the Trump-oriented Problem Solvers Caucus-- just came back from a tour, not with Pence, of the concentration camps on the border. Watch this clip from Morning Joe, where he said he wants to be made an honorary member of "The Squad." Trump has united all the Democrats; too bad the Republicans are so much more reconciled to racism, xenophobia and bigotry than any Democrat. Tom did well-- now everybody in Congress in following Tom's idea to ask for membership in The Squad!




Even genuinely horrible New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer, the single worst Democrat in Congress, couldn't quite bring himself to countenancing Trump's vile tweets:

So why are Republicans being such dicks about this? For one thing, Trump's racism polls well with Republicans-- although not so much with normal people. Trump has given left behind Republicans the OK to embrace racism-- and they have... in droves, even if some if them are too obtuse to realize it. Trump's net approval among Republicans rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, after his racist attack on four Democratic female lawmakers. His support among Democrats and Independents has dropped and his overall approval/disapproval remains at 41-55%. Steve Benen tried answering that dick question for the MaddowBlog yesterday (before the House voted). He began by quoting Eugene Robinson: "'Trump is a racist' does not exactly qualify as breaking news. But the silence from prominent Republicans is staggering-- and telling. It amounts to collaboration-- perhaps 'collusion' is a better word-- with the president’s assault on diversity and pluralism. In the coming campaign, you will hear Republican candidates at every level claim to be colorblind and embrace all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity. Do not believe them. Their failure to speak out now tells us everything we need to know about their true feelings."

Members like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had an opportunity to stand up for core principles such as decency and respect, but by all appearances, they were simply too afraid to lead.

Their reticence served as a painful reminder: it really is Donald Trump’s party now.

In practice, Trump operates from the assumption that the key to electoral victory is maximizing racial resentments and reaping the benefits of some Americans’ worst and most divisive instincts. In effect, the president sees value in ripping the country apart, confident that he and people like him will be left with the biggest chunk.

Greg Sargent raised a related point yesterday that stood out for me:

As Jacob T. Levy observes, Trump’s repetition of racist and white nationalist tropes is laying waste to the norm, recently observed in both parties, according to which elites signal to white voters (at least nominally) that they should be better than our history.

In so doing, Levy notes, Trump is “changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican.” He’s changing their expectations of how Republican politicians should behave.

In that context, the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to condemn Trump’s latest racism becomes a lot more significant.

Quite right. It’s certainly true that many Republican leaders and high-profile members are afraid, not just of Trump’s ire-- note the president’s recent hysterics in response to Paul Ryan’s modest rebukes-- but of his followers and their expectations.

Party officials who believed they’d help set the party’s direction in the Trump era now realize that power is in the hands of one man: a hapless amateur whose rhetoric on race is too often indistinguishable from the angry, racist drunk at the end of the bar.

Republicans aware of their party’s demographic challenges-- the party is increasingly dependent on older white voters, in a nation that’s becoming increasingly diverse-- no doubt realize that Trump is making a risky electoral bet. But instead of pushing for a smarter strategy, most GOP leaders have effectively surrendered and accepted defeat.

The first time Trump was ever in the newspapers, it was because he had broken the law by refusing to rent apartments to people of color in buildings his father had financed with loans from the government that stipulated no racial discrimination would be tolerated. Did you listen to that song in the video up top? That's Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello performing the long-lost Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump." Guthrie had been a tenant at the notorious Beach Haven property in Brooklyn, a cesspool of racism back in the 1950s-- and the reason he wrote the song.

Fred Trump gave gave his son a lot of money and a lot of knowledge about building and selling. But, apparently, that isn't all he taught his young Herr. In 2016, before Trump won the GOP nomination, Will Kaufman wrote a piece for Quartz that shows the Trumpf family through the eyes of one of America's greatest songwriters: Woody Guthrie really did not like Donald Trump's racist dad. In December 1950, Guthrie rented an apartment from the Trumps.

Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, affordable public housing had become an urgent priority.

For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.

When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”

Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of $3.7 million.

What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing”-- or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects-- a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

...For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing-- both public and private-- out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project...

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees-- strangers in their own strange land-- Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is sadly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God don't
know much
about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps-- father and son alike-- might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser?” And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for "Old Man Trump."

We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.

More cheeseburgers, please by Chip Prosser

Now, imagine this: some people are just finding out Trump is a full-fledged racist this week... for the first time. Really! In fact... remember The Mooch? I do believe he's known Trump for decades and was, very briefly, even White House communication director for him. He says he's afraid Trumpanzee may be turning into a racist. "I don’t think the president is a racist. But here’s the thing, if you continue to say and act in that manner, then we all have to look at him and say, OK, well, maybe you weren’t a racist, but now you’re turning into one." Mooch, what's the cut-off point? How many times exactly?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

One day Trump says his father was born in Germany. He wasn't. The next day he says we shouldn't invest in power supplied by wind because "windmills cause cancer." Every other day, he encourages chemical corporations to increase the dumping of chemicals into our water supplies while extolling the healthful benefits of "clean" coal. Sure, it's believable that Trump's father was born in Germany, just as it would be all too believable to think that Trump's father slept in a Nazi uniform until the day he died, but, Fred Trump was born in the Bronx. Little Donnie probably even had flannel pajamas with a nice swastika pattern. Would it surprise you if he still does?

Trump's claim about windmills was even too loonie for his two Republican nut job Senators from Iowa, a state that has a lot of wind farms. Of course, they're no doubt pushing to the front of the line to partake in some side cash from wind power companies. Trump could have said lots of things about wind farms, like he did when the proposal for a giant wind farm within view of his Scottish golf course first came up. That's gotta be a big reason for his negative fixation on windmills; not in my backyard! He even says that the power cuts out when the wind slows down. He's Bizarro World Donnie Quixote, tilting at windmills.

But, windmills cause cancer? That's real special. He even says it's the noise they make. How long before he's claiming that they speak to him in critical tones?

Trump has sex with porn stars and who knows what else, and he's worried about windmills being detrimental to his health? For years, I have thought that Trump's brain is being eaten away by syphilis. It seems to fit. His mental grasp on anything is more shaky than a 9.9 earthquake. It's getting worse by the day. I'd love to know how many times a day he looks at Melania and Kellyanne and asks them "Who are you and what are you doing here?" Only his titanic ego prevents him from asking the same question when he peers into a mirror.

Drink a nice tall glass of kerosene, Donnie. And strike a match.

Is It Really Surprising To Anyone That Trump And Family Engaged In Outright Fraud For Decades?

After today's blockbuster investigative report on Trump's life of crime by the not-so-failing NY Times, CNBC reported that the New York state tax department is investigating the shocking revelations that are being read around the world.

The Pulitzer-bait report from David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner has been described as "exhaustive" and "thorough." Imagine what Mueller's office is going to have! They wrote that Señor Trumpanzee "has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s" and that he "participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents." Surprised? Shocked? Still wondering how Hillary could have lost to this buffoon? He "won" the election "proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his racist KKK father "provided almost no financial help." The Times investigation, "based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records," reveals that Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day."

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

...The Times’ findings raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his income tax returns, breaking with decades of practice by past presidents. According to tax experts, it is unlikely that Mr. Trump would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for helping his parents evade taxes, because the acts happened too long ago and are past the statute of limitations. There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud.

What emerges from this body of evidence is a financial biography of the 45th president fundamentally at odds with the story Mr. Trump has sold in his books, his TV shows and his political life. In Mr. Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free of his father’s “tiny” outer-borough operation and parlayed a single $1 million loan from his father (“I had to pay him back with interest!”) into a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos, airlines and golf courses the world over. In Mr. Trump’s version, it was always his guts and gumption that overcame setbacks. Fred Trump was simply a cheerleader.

“I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times.

...Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children. He made Donald not just his salaried employee but also his property manager, landlord, banker and consultant. He gave him loan after loan, many never repaid. He provided money for his car, money for his employees, money to buy stocks, money for his first Manhattan offices and money to renovate those offices. He gave him three trust funds. He gave him shares in multiple partnerships. He gave him $10,000 Christmas checks. He gave him laundry revenue from his buildings.

Much of his giving was structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal. Although Fred Trump became wealthy with help from federal housing subsidies, he insisted that it was manifestly unfair for the government to tax his fortune as it passed to his children. When he was in his 80s and beginning to slide into dementia, evading gift and estate taxes became a family affair, with Donald Trump playing a crucial role, interviews and newly obtained documents show.

The line between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion is often murky, and it is constantly being stretched by inventive tax lawyers. There is no shortage of clever tax avoidance tricks that have been blessed by either the courts or the I.R.S. itself. The richest Americans almost never pay anything close to full freight. But tax experts briefed on The Times’s findings said the Trumps appeared to have done more than exploit legal loopholes. They said the conduct described here represented a pattern of deception and obfuscation, particularly about the value of Fred Trump’s real estate, that repeatedly prevented the I.R.S. from taxing large transfers of wealth to his children.

“The theme I see here through all of this is valuations: They play around with valuations in extreme ways,” said Lee-Ford Tritt, a University of Florida law professor and a leading expert in gift and estate tax law. “There are dramatic fluctuations depending on their purpose.”

The manipulation of values to evade taxes was central to one of the most important financial events in Donald Trump’s life. In an episode never before revealed, Mr. Trump and his siblings gained ownership of most of their father’s empire on Nov. 22, 1997, a year and a half before Fred Trump’s death. Critical to the complex transaction was the value put on the real estate. The lower its value, the lower the gift taxes. The Trumps dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by submitting tax returns that grossly undervalued the properties, claiming they were worth just $41.4 million.

The same set of buildings would be sold off over the next decade for more than 16 times that amount.



The most overt fraud was All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company formed by the Trump family in 1992. All County’s ostensible purpose was to be the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. It did no such thing, records and interviews show. Instead All County siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners-- Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin. Fred Trump then used the padded All County receipts to justify bigger rent increases for thousands of tenants.

Our three intrepid reporters, Russ, Susanne and David, also penned a less mind-boggling and complex 11 Takeaways From The Times’ Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth... a kind of Cliff's Notes version.

1- The Trumps’ tax maneuvers show a pattern of deception, tax experts say.

The line between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion is often murky, and there is no shortage of clever tax-avoidance tricks that have been blessed by either the courts or the Internal Revenue Service itself; the wealthiest Americans rarely pay anything close to full freight. The Trumps’ tax maneuvers met with little resistance from the I.R.S., The Times found.

But tax experts briefed on The Times’ findings said the Trumps appeared to have done more than exploit legal loopholes. They said the conduct described here represented a pattern of deception and obfuscation that repeatedly prevented the I.R.S. from taxing large transfers of wealth to Fred Trump’s children.




2- Donald Trump began reaping wealth from his father’s real estate empire as a toddler.

In Donald Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free from his father’s “tiny” Brooklyn and Queens real estate operation and built a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos and golf courses the world over.

But The Times’ investigation makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply entwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth. By age 3, he was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. In his 40s and 50s, he was receiving more than $5 million a year.

There was a clear pattern to this largess: When his son began expensive new projects, Fred Trump increased his help. In the late 1970s, when Donald Trump crossed the river into the glittering precincts of Manhattan-- converting the old Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal into a Grand Hyatt-- his father opened a spigot of loans. When he made his first forays into Atlantic City casinos a few years later, his father devised a plan to sharply increase the flow of aid.

3- That ‘small loan’ of $1 million was actually at least $60.7 million-- much of it never repaid.

In Mr. Trump’s books and TV shows and on the campaign trail, a central trope of his self-mythology has been that, as he began building his own empire, the only financial help he got from his father was a $1 million loan. Not only that: “I had to pay him back with interest.”

In fact, The Times found, Fred Trump lent his son at least $60.7 million, or $140 million in today’s dollars. Much of it was never repaid, records show.

4- Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another.

As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust-- Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, the Atlantic City casinos. But as he careened from one financial disaster to another, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased their payouts.

Between 1989 and 1992, four of the entities that Fred Trump created paid his son today’s equivalent of $8.3 million. And when Donald Trump pleaded with bankers for an emergency line of credit, he used as collateral the stake his father had given him in a group of apartment buildings.

Tax records also reveal that at the peak of Mr. Trump’s financial distress, in 1990, his father extracted an extraordinary sum-- nearly $50 million-- from his empire. While The Times could find no evidence that Fred Trump made any significant debt payments, charitable donations or personal expenditures, there are indications that he wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be.

That was what happened at Trump’s Castle casino, where an $18.4 million bond payment was due in December 1990. Fred Trump dispatched a trusted bookkeeper to Atlantic City with checks to buy $3.5 million in casino chips without placing a bet. With this ruse-- an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming laws, resulting in a $65,000 civil penalty-- Donald Trump narrowly avoided defaulting on his bonds.

5-The Trumps turned an $11 million loan debt into a legally questionable tax write-off.

By 1987, Donald Trump’s loan debt to his father had grown to at least $11 million. Had Fred Trump simply forgiven the debt, his son would have owed millions in income taxes. They found another solution-- one that appears to constitute both an unreported multimillion-dollar gift and an illegal tax write-off.

That December, records show, Fred Trump spent $15.5 million to buy a 7.5 percent stake in Trump Palace, his son’s condo tower rising on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four years later, tax returns and financial statements show, Fred Trump sold that stake for just $10,000. The buyer, other documents indicate, was his son.

According to tax experts, with Trump Palace condos selling briskly, selling shares worth $15.5 million to your son for a mere sliver of that would constitute a multimillion-dollar gift under I.R.S. rules. But Fred Trump’s tax returns show no such gift to Donald Trump. What they do reveal is that he used the transaction to declare an enormous tax write-off. That appears to violate federal tax law that prohibits deducting any loss from the sale or exchange of property between family members.

In all, Fred Trump dodged roughly $8 million in gift taxes and $5 million in income taxes on the transaction.

6- Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire.

All told, The Times documented 295 distinct streams of revenue Fred Trump created over five decades to channel wealth to his son.

But the partnership between Donald Trump and his father was about more than the pursuit, and the preservation, of riches. They were also confederates in a more ambitious project: creating the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. If Fred Trump was the silent partner, helping finance the accouterments of wealth, it was Donald Trump who spun them into a seductive narrative.

Emblematic of this dynamic is Trump Tower, the talisman of privilege that established Donald Trump as a player in New York. Fred Trump’s money helped build it. His son recognized and exploited its iconic power as the primary stage for both “The Apprentice” and his presidential campaign.

7- Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, setting off a family reckoning.

In December 1990, Donald Trump sent his father a document that left him both angered and alarmed. It was a codicil seeking to make a variety of changes to Fred Trump’s will. Among them: strengthening provisions that made Donald Trump sole executor of his estate. But amid Mr. Trump’s financial shambles-- it was the month of the $3.5 million Trump’s Castle rescue-- Fred Trump feared that the document potentially put his life’s work at risk, that his son might use the empire as collateral to save his own failing businesses, according to depositions given years later during a family dispute.

Fred Trump rebuffed the maneuver, refusing to sign the codicil. But the episode prompted a family reckoning: Fred Trump was aging and ailing. Without speedy intervention, he could die leaving a vast estate-- not just his real estate empire, but also tens of millions of dollars in cash-- vulnerable to the 55 percent inheritance tax.

So with Donald Trump playing a central role, the family formulated a plan that included unorthodox tax strategies that experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent.

8- The Trumps created a company that siphoned cash from the empire.

The first major component was creating a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. On paper, All County was Fred Trump’s purchasing agent, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. But All County was, in fact, a company only on paper, records and interviews show-- a vehicle to siphon cash from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions in markups, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners-- Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin.

Lee-Ford Tritt, a leading expert in gift and estate tax law at the University in Florida, said the Trumps’ use of All County was “highly suspicious” and could constitute criminal tax fraud. “It certainly looks like a disguised gift,” he said.

All County also had an insidious downside for Fred Trump’s tenants. He used the padded invoices to justify higher rent increases in rent-regulated buildings, records show. Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, disputed The Times’ reporting: “Should The Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.”

9- The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by grossly undervaluing the assets they would pass on.

With the cash flowing out of Fred Trump’s empire, the Trumps began transferring ownership of the lion’s share of the empire itself to Donald Trump and his siblings. The vehicle they created to do that was a special kind of trust called a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT.



The purpose of a GRAT is to pass wealth across generations without paying the 55 percent estate tax. The Trump parents did have to pay gift taxes based on one crucial number: the market value of Fred Trump’s empire. But The Times found evidence that they dodged hundreds of millions of dollars in gift taxes by submitting tax returns that grossly undervalued the assets placed in two GRATs, one for each parent.

Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return claimed that the 25 apartment complexes and other properties in the trusts were worth just $41.4 million. The implausibility of this claim would be made plain in 2004, when banks valued that same real estate at nearly $900 million.

“They play around with valuations in extreme ways,” said Mr. Tritt, the tax law expert, who was briefed on The Times’s findings. “There are dramatic fluctuations depending on their purpose.”

Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, said: “All estate matters were handled by licensed attorneys, licensed C.P.A.’s and licensed real estate appraisers who followed all laws and rules strictly.”

10- After Fred Trump’s death, his empire’s most valuable asset was an I.O.U. from Donald Trump.

When Fred Trump died in June 1999 at the age of 93, the vast bulk of his empire was nowhere to be found in his estate-- testament to the success of the tax strategies devised by the Trumps in the early 1990s. The single largest item included in his estate tax return was a $10.3 million I.O.U. from Donald Trump, money his son appears to have borrowed the year before he died. As for the remnants of empire left in Fred Trump’s estate, the tax return cited appraisals that once again grossly understated their market values.

As their father’s executors, Donald, Maryanne and Robert Trump were legally responsible for the accuracy of his estate tax return. They were obligated not only to give the I.R.S. a complete accounting of the value of his estate’s assets, but also to disclose all the taxable gifts he had made during his lifetime. If they knew anything was wrong and failed to reveal it, tax experts said, they could be in violation of tax law.

Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, defended the tax returns filed by the Trumps. “The returns and tax positions that The Times now attacks were examined in real time by the relevant taxing authorities,” he said. “These matters have now been closed for more than a decade.”

11- Donald Trump got a windfall when the empire was sold. But he may have left money on the table.

In 2003, once again in financial trouble, Donald Trump began engineering the sale of the empire Fred Trump had hoped would never leave the family. The sale, completed in 2004, brought him his biggest payday ever from his father: His cut was $177.3 million, or $236.2 million in today’s dollars. But as it turned out, banks at the time valued the empire at hundreds of millions more than the sale price. Donald Trump, master dealmaker, had sold low.

Is Trump doing the same kinds of shenanigans to funnel money to Fuck-Up, Jr., Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany and Barron? Or the grandchildren? Don't bet against it-- and don't bet that it won't be uncovered. At least wait to see next year when the Democrats are in charge of the House and they subpoena his tax returns. Hey... who knows, maybe he'll resign rather than show them.

Feel sorry for "Miss Mitch" McConnell? Huh? Well, maybe if he's standing in the path of the Falling Anvil of Orange

If Looks Could Kill Dept.: Naturally in the above photo it's the World's Blowsiest Blowhard bloviating, while Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, er, sits silently by -- of course it could be that he's just thinking about the fun of going home to the company of Transportation Sec'y Mrs. Miss Mitch. (Note: If you have a suitably Photoshoppish imagination, feel free to visualize Miss Mitch with a hatchet buried in that odious head. Either odious head, actually.)

by Ken

Miss Mitch is one of the last people on the planet I would normally expect to be sticking up for. Nevertheless, that's kinda what I found myself doing the other day.

It all started when I noticed this link in a DailyKos roundup:

NYT: Trump yelled at McConnell for not protecting him from Russia investigations

That's not when I found myself feeling sorry, kinda, for Miss Mitch. Not yet. Oh, I suppose I was commiserating with him, kinda, but mostly I found myself seeing Trump, and maybe even kinda sorta feeling sorry, or something, for a poor horrendously damaged boy buried under infinite layers of crud. I dashed off an e-note I to the gang, in which I took care to note first:

I've never bothered to inform myself about our Donald's family history, since I've never wanted to know any more about those hateful people. I've always wanted to know LESS about them -- really, as little as possible. Just hoping they would all go away and I wouldn't have to think about them any more.

So I was surprised when The Donald not long ago rambled publicly about his druggie brother Fred. Then today I noticed this link in a DailyKos e-mail.

"Suddenly," I went on to explain:

this image of Trump yelling at McConnell gave me an image of Little Donnie growing up being persistently abused verbally by Big Fred. In the pictures of Fred I've seen he looks like a total wienie, but even the wimpiest guy wouldn't have much trouble bullying his kid for at least a certain number of years. And then, just maybe, there's a fleeting image of Little Donnie being abused who-knows-how by Young Fred.

I realize this isn't a deep thought, and of course merely a speculation rather than a fact. And even if it were an established fac, it wouldn't be an especially surprising one, since we know that men who engage in domestic abuse are overwhelmingly likely to have been victims of abuse. Still, for me something clicked into place here.

This is pure thumb-sucking, of course. I have no inside knowledge, no particular expertise, just a heap of instincts piled on by grizzled experience -- activated, I suppose, by some morbid curiosity as to how a human mind becomes this perverted.

Some of the response, though, targeted Miss Mitch, and included some skepticism about a possibly staged feud between these two pillars of the revered, harmoniously functioning U.S. federal government. What follows is a somewhat cleaned-up version of my reply. Again, it's all pure thumb-sucking.

A SOMEWHAT CLEANED-UP AND REJIGGERED
AND AMPLIFIED VERSION OF WHAT I WROTE

It's all so preposterous and unbelievable, I'm pretty much speechless. [Okay, the "pretty much speechless" part proved a faulty prediction. Is anyone really surprised? -- Ed.]

I don't have much trouble, though, believing that Trump is screwing with Miss Mitch, partly because showing people who think they're hot stuff that he can screw with them to his heart's content is one of the things he most loves to do and partly because, as people are noting, the Trump Faithful are so clueless that at least on the surface -- which is as far as Trump sees, and as we know he doesn't see that very well -- it looks like a winning face-saving strategy to trick them into believing that it's McConnell and Ryan who've betrayed them and not their messiah.

In my understanding of the situation, Miss Mitch surely understands exactly what Our Leader is doing to him but can't see a play for himself. Miss M, since achieving real power, has taken pride in being a pragmatist, working in the trenches with a good deal of success to make reality align with his wishes and goals. Then along comes Trump, who simply doesn't acknowledge reality, and Mitchie's whole history leaves him bereft of tools with which to counter.

Think back to January 2017, when Mitchie knew he was probably facing two years (at least) of hell, trying to "lead" a majority that had to look completely unleadable, even if the new president behaved sensibly. His "majority," already increasingly hard to deal with in the last Congress, was giving him pretty clear signals that he couldn't count on them for anything if it made the poor dears unhappy, and given the chasm that had opened up in the Republican Party, there were hardly any issues on which he could expect to make 50 of the buggers happy -- let alone find 60 votes where needed.

And then Trump turns out to be . . . TRUMP! All the things Mitchie has spent so many years learning about how the Senate works, and Congress as a whole, and Congress and the president -- it's all out the window, because Trump doesn't care. Fuck reality! Leaving Mitchie in need of some kind of play, any kind of play, and I assume he's discovered that he doesn't have any. By "a play" I mean something, anything, that in some way, shape, or form brings him even the tiniest bit closer to a good outcome for Mitchie -- and there isn't one.

Publicly oppose the president? What does that get him? Except a one-way ticket out of the circles of power. Consult the numerous variants of the proposition: If you try to kill the king, you better make sure he's dead. It's especially true, surely, with this particular imperial wizard.

Do we imagine that Mitchie has forgotten what happened to poor "Sunny John" Boehner, the ex-House speaker, when he merely tried to get the Tea Party crazies in his House GOP conference to be, you know, a little reasonable? Now Mitchie not only has this problem in spades in his conference (after all, his crazies are senators, and each of them knows better than anyone how much more powerful a single senator is than a whole wolfpack of House GOP crazies).

It's not a matter of "policy" as such. Beyond a general far-right agenda, after all, Miss Mitch has no policy, no principles to speak of except what's good for Mitchie. You'd think this might make him just the fellow to deal with Trump, who after all has no principles to speak of except what's good for Donnie, and certainly no policy; he's had so many positions on so many policies that he couldn't keep track of them if he cared. The thing is, though, that "what's good for Donnie" is good only for Donnie and his nearest and dearest. For most everyone else it's a living nightmare.

Take Obamacare repeal-and-replacement. As began to become clear with the dawn of the new administration, Obamacare repeal was going to be a vastly different feat to accomplish than it had appeared in those years when Republicans could ritually vote for repeal, knowing President Obama would veto any such bill. Once Obamacare repeal became a real, live issue, it became clear that it would have been hard enough to manage if all that Mitchie had to deal with was: (a) the House Republican crazies, and (b) the Senate Republican crazies. But Trump showed not the slightest understanding of that process, or seem to feel any more need to than he had any interest in what was actually in any repeal bill.

The one and only thing he cared about was being able to sign a bill that could be called "Obamacare repeal" because of the intense political pressure he felt to not break yet another campaign promise, especially one he'd make such a fetish of promising it to the voters who came to worship him, voters to whom he had lied so persistently and shamelessly. And throughout the process, he did nothing but make it even harder -- whether he was injecting himself into the process or withdrawing from it, lobbing grenades or sulking in his tent, cajoling and hectoring or ignoring and snubbing, everything he did was strategically wrong.

If you're Mitchie, you entered the Obamacare-repeal derby with a legislative position that was impossible, and at every twist and turn Trump did everything in his power to make it harder. At each of those twists and turns Mitchie kept coming up with new stratagems to make the thing doable, and each time Trump managed to make it, if you will, impossibler.

A few months into the Trump presidency, as the Man of Orange made it more and more abundantly clear that yes, this was how he planned to "govern," my sense formed that no, he's not going to be impeached but I also don't see how he serves out his full term. The only course I saw was that eventually enough DC Republicans -- and the people who bankroll them -- might come to come to the realization that the son of a bitch is killing us!!! He's so nuts and so inept that he's going to cost us our positions and whatever finger position we have on the levers of government. At that point the Trump exit I imagined would happen through behind-the-scenes persuasion: having him hear from all the people he trusts that the only way out for Donnie is to get the hell out of that damned White House. This I suspected, and still suspect, may be more possible than it seemed/seems, because by all accounts he's not having the fun time he was expecting.

Which wasn't/isn't an especially glad prospect for me, because it simply leaves us at the mercy of the Unspeakable Pence, who unlike Trump and Mitchie has a whole political agenda he believes deeply in. I've heard people say that a President Unspeakable would occupy the office in a weak position, I think that's nuts. Look how much the Right is accomplishing in Washington changing the nature and structure of the U.S. government even in these times of legislative stasis. Take Trump out of the equation, and I think Pence, in league with all those frothing-at-the-mouth loonies who chair the relevant House and Senate committees, is in a position to set in motion an orgy of legislative craziness.

So yeah, I feel kinda bad for Miss Mitch. It doesn't really matter what exactly the president is yelling at him about. The notion that there's something Mitchie could have done to shield his master from Special Counsel Mueller's investigations is totally nuts to everyone who has even the teeniest-tiniest contact with reality, but that number doesn't include POTUS. It might be suggested that Miss Mitch really doesn't have much to lose at this point, considering that right now the Senate majority leader's powers are pretty much zip, especially if he's going to find himself in the president's crosshairs as designated scapegoat.

Nevertheless, what can Mitchie do? I don't think he can even dare to offer the president a confidential opinion that he'd do well to get going while the going is still good. However incompetent Trump may be at actual constructive achievements, would you want to challenge his ability to make your life a living hell?

PS: IS IT POSSIBLE MUELLER'S INVESTIGATIONS
MAY ACTUALLY PROLONG TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY?

I didn't go into this in my original e-mail, but I've been thinking about it as I reread and tinkered with what I did write.

Remember when I wrote that "I suspected, and still suspect" that persuading Donnie to get the hell out of the White House "may be more possible than it seemed/seems"? Ironically, the apparently growing momentum of Special Counsel Mueller's investigations, with all those grand juries he's had impaneled, may make this persuasion harder, and harder still if Mueller shows signs of having the goods on Donnie.

Donnie, after all, knows why he take the monumental risk of resolutely refusing under any circumstances to release those tax returns. And Donnie surely has a pretty good idea of what looking into his business dealings can turn up. And it's not just the humiliation of being revealed as a lifelong fraud -- far from a master dealmaker and entrepreneur, a bumbling business halfwit who had certain public-relations talents but proceeded to fuck up every deal he touched and would have been a bankrupt and pauper if he hadn't gotten the inspired idea to start courting the world's sleaziest superrich scumbags to keep him afloat in exchange for aiding and abetting their international money-laundering and other fraudulent and/or illegal enterprises.

As desperately as Trump has been trying to sling mud at Special Counsel Mueller and his associates (who include a large number of lawyers and other investigators with a track record of investigating and prosecuting the very kinds of enterprises their current mandate calls for them to get to the bottom of), I can't help feeling that his real terror is that Mueller appears to be -- can you believe it? -- an honest man! And a competent one.

The legal point remains unresolved as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, and nobody has yet pressed the point. An ex-president seems like a whole other president, which could mean that Donnie has a special interest in not being pried out of the White House.

But he has to leave sometime. Doesn't he?


EPiLOGUE: 
NOAH'S VISION FOR THE FATE OF MISS MITCH

I would be remiss if I signed off without sharing Noah's vision of what's to come for our beloved Senate majority leader, shared as we were kicking this around via e-mail. "My version," he ventured, "would have Mitch ending up killing himself but taking out a few people with him at the W.H."

Later he clarified: "Of course my Viking ancestors cry out for the Blood Eagle treatment for all of these lowlifes." And he added this "PS":

According to a new Vanity Fair article, Buffy and Biffy Kushner are very depressed in Washington and feel their self esteem is under assault. I feel soooooo bad for them. It just makes me cry, I tell ya.

Now that's a note I feel utterly comfortable leaving on.

#

Trump Doesn't Read Books, But You Can Learn A Lot About Who He Is If You Do

Judging by all the hubbub over Nordstrom this week, it certainly looks like Trump is incapable of separating himself from his family business. And the congressional Republicans don't appear to have any problem with it at all. At this point, who could be surprised to see Paul Ryan mention something about how he's including an Ivanka trinket with his annual Ayn Rand book Xmas gift box? And yes, that was the actual Kellyanne Con-man (on Fox and on her government salary) illegally urging viewers to "Go buy Ivanka's stuff, is what I would tell you... I'm going to give it a free commercial here, go buy it today." Spicer, of course, said something similar, although I guess Melissa McCarthy could have sneaked into the White House to impersonate him hawking Ivanka's foreign-made apparel, fragrance and jewelry lines.

This week's London Review of Books will publish a short history of the Trumpanzee family by Sidney Blumenthal. The Clintonista Trump antagonist reminds us that "A week after the inauguration, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Origins of Totalitarianism were number one and number 36 respectively on the US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called 'foul dust' than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people."

Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked in the driveway, guarded by two cast-iron jockeys. Even in Queens, it was a world apart. ‘“Be a killer,”’ Fred Trump, ‘who ruled all of us with a steel will’, told him. Then he said: ‘“You are a king.”’

Trump wasn’t looked down on in Manhattan because he was a parvenu, a dressed-to-kill bridge-and-tunnel bounder from an outer borough... In a constant state of alert and hurt, he victimises others because he burns with the feeling that he is the true victim. Every time his outlandish behaviour turns him into the butt of a joke, especially at the hands of sources associated with New York, from Spy’s jibes to Alec Baldwin’s impersonation on Saturday Night Live, his rage is stoked. Portraying himself as the innocent party he lashes out, a narcissistic reflex but also a tactic he learned from Roy Cohn.

Resentment born of entitlement, of the feeling that he was being treated as an inferior though he knew he was superior, was an inadvertent and inverse link with the lower-middle-class whites who fled Queens and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s for the Long Island suburbs to escape black migration. They went one way and Trump another, but both were repelled by Manhattan’s racial liberalism, which was seen as an insult to and impingement on their own status from those above and below them.

Trump’s loathing and bullying are among the few things he came by honestly: they were part of his inheritance. Fred Trump was arrested for participating in a violent Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; he had Mob ties and flagrantly discriminated against blacks when renting out housing. Woody Guthrie, his most famous tenant, wrote about his landlord in the first literary work on a Trump, ‘Old Man Trump’:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That colour line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project

In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.

In 1988, Spy conducted a national poll [and]... discovered the celebrity’s irreducible base: ‘In terms of level of education, the voters who most favoured a Trump candidacy-- with a 9 per cent rating-- were those whose minds remain uncluttered by any learning beyond junior high school.’

...Trump never fitted the mythology of rugged individualism he mimicked and tried to sell as intrinsic to his brand. Launched as a front and junior partner for the tainted Fred Trump in Manhattan real estate, he had been on gaudy display in New York since he first crossed the Queensboro Bridge with $14 million from his father. ‘My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that’s worth many, many billions of dollars,’ he lied during one of the presidential debates. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he insists that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But, as well as staking him to launch his real-estate career, when the Taj was sinking like Donald’s own private Titanic, Fred Trump rushed to the casino to buy $3.35 million in chips to buoy his flailing child, who used the money to avoid default by making an interest payment he wouldn’t otherwise have had the liquid reserves to meet. A straight loan would have put Fred Trump in the lengthy queue of creditors. With his loan in the form of chips he could redeem it as soon as his son had the capital. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission ruled a year later that Fred Trump had engaged in an illegal loan and that Donald should return it, which would have forced him into instant bankruptcy. The Trumps blithely ignored the finding and instead paid a meagre $65,000 fine, though the manoeuvre failed to save the casino.

But Trump evaded the fate Spy had foreseen for him. His genius was to promote his clownishness, so that the headlines fed to the New York Post consisting of make-believe quotes from his then mistress Marla Maples (‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’) became a PR platform for the licensing of his celebrated name to murky investors from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia who were looking for an American frontman. His salvation was a double play of a con.

The glitzier the gigantic bronze block capitals of his name staring down Fifth Avenue and across Central Park, the more secure New Yorkers felt in their contempt. Trump Hotel was strictly for out-of-towners seeking to be sprinkled with ersatz gold dust. Trump could never escape being a ‘Queens-born casino operator’, as Spy stamped him. But he wasn’t scorned only for his unrelieved vulgarity. The reaction to him wasn’t the antique snobbery Edith Wharton dissected in her society novels, but the worldly perspicacity of New Yorkers high and low. Trump’s quest for respectability only deepened his problems. It wasn’t that he had missed his moment like the passive Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, but that his love was unrequited because New York found him repellent despite his incessantly harassing courtship.

Trump’s reality TV shows, The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, were fantasy projections of his dominance in the city in whose eyes he was obviously not the master of the universe. From 2004 to 2015, he played on TV the persona that he intended Manhattan to worship. Of course, ‘reality’ in Trump’s reality TV wasn’t real. In every episode he acted out dramas of control over submissive contestants seeking his favour, wilting at his denial of it and fawning at his approval. Under Trump, winning was the road to serfdom. The subtext was pathos, not only on the part of the supplicants but also in the boss’s trademark phrase, ‘You’re fired.’ No matter how many people Trump rejected, he couldn’t force his own acceptance.

If there is one subject that has unified discordant New Yorkers over the past five decades, it has been Trump. In 2016, he lost 87 per cent of the vote in Manhattan, and most of those who voted for him probably did so with distaste, casting their loyal Republican votes for a man who for most of his life donated money to Democratic candidates in a Democratic city. (Trump also lost in Queens, carrying only 22 per cent of the vote; in Brooklyn, he won less than 20 per cent; and in the Bronx, about 10 per cent.)

 After the election, Trump’s manic sensitivity to his rebuff by New Yorkers exploded in his id’s unfiltered outlet, his trigger-happy Twitter account. When Vanity Fair headlined a review of his restaurant ‘The Trump Grill Could Be The Worst Restaurant In America’ he fired off an early morning tweet directed at its editor, Graydon Carter, who not coincidentally had been co-editor of Spy. ‘Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity Fair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!’ Immediately, Vanity Fair had its biggest one-day increase in subscriptions. Once again, Trump had foolishly exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!

Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel New Yorkers finally to genuflect. Washington had never held the slightest allure for him-- until now when it is leverage over New York. Even so, Washington is strictly Palookaville, a nowhere town for grown-up student council presidents. There is only one City on a Hill for Trump, the city that doesn’t sleep, where a perpetually wide-awake collective eye fixes its unwavering judgment on him. ‘It’s up to you, New York, New York.’ President Trump in his eyrie is King Kong defying the gaping city below. But in contrast to the original movie, there is no tragic anti-hero: he lacks the giant ape’s sympathy for a beautiful young woman, and it won’t be beauty that kills the beast.

After his nomination for president, Trump talked about his fondest wish: winning New York State. ‘We are going to win this state,’ he proclaimed, adding that he had won the Republican primary there ‘because nobody knows me better than New Yorkers’. Unfortunately for him, New Yorkers did know him. But earlier in the campaign he had expressed another wish. Nothing he said during the campaign more succinctly reflected his furious and damaged narcissism than his dream of committing cold-blooded murder and getting away with it. ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, OK, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?’ The ‘somebody’ he wanted to kill could be any New Yorker. But why did he ask twice if it was ‘OK’? His statement expressed three unconscious desires at once: striking back at New Yorkers; breaking the rules without consequence; and gaining adulation from the fans for whom he can do no wrong. Shooting ‘somebody’ on Fifth Avenue, however, presumably would not win him voters on Fifth Avenue, which is where he lives.

‘We don’t win anymore,’ Trump lamented. His reverent followers took his omnipotent image from his reality show as the reality and his anger as something felt on their behalf. They didn’t understand his inner injury. Rousing the crowds at his rallies to a fever pitch-- ‘knock the crap out of them’-- he encouraged an atmosphere of violence and fear. Watching Trump incite his pitchfork revolt, New Yorkers were merely astounded that others couldn’t recognise his all too familiar stuntmanship. He knew he had to cross the Hudson to find true believers, but the further into Duck Dynasty territory he ventured the more it felt like banishment to Queens. In winning he had not won. He couldn’t get over it. Nothing had changed for him since the interview he gave to Vanity Fair in 1990 in which he said: ‘There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam.’ Trump’s most deeply felt grievance 26 years later wasn’t that he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million-- he dismissed these votes as fraudulent. Less than a month after his election, the president-elect sent out a post-midnight tweet: ‘Just tried watching Saturday Night Live-- unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.’ Getting madder, he accelerated his never-ending attempts to get even. His far-right appointments weren’t so much signs of his ideological commitment as symbols of his retribution.

Trump has thumped around Manhattan for an epoch like a dinosaur that survived extinction, anachronistic proof of Veblen’s late 19th-century Theory of the Leisure Class, an anthropological examination of the robber barons, published in 1899. Veblen described the tycoons flaunting their conspicuous consumption, their atavistic appropriation of feudal symbols suggesting pre-industrial rank, and their treatment of women as ‘trophies’-- an ‘archaic trait’ that ‘begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture’. The key to understanding these displays was that they established social status as based on the moguls’ distance from actual productive work.

If Trump was a ‘captain of industry’, a phrase Veblen popularised, then the industry was leisure: hotels, casinos, reality TV shows, a beauty pageant and a wrestling federation. More than a century after Veblen, the ultimate representative of the leisure class indulged in an aesthetic of ‘conspicuous waste’ in order to offer himself as an object of envy and magical thinking. ‘There has always been a display of wealth and always will be, until the depression comes, which it always does,’ Trump explained to Playboy. ‘And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life.’ ‘Dynasty,’ he added, ‘did it on TV.’ It was conclusive proof.

Trump wanted his pretences to be accepted at face value as signs of his authenticity, his ostentation as accountability in lieu of tax returns. His recklessness was intended to engender deference, his disorder belief in his power to impose order. The faux aristocrat sought to inspire a faux populism: ‘I love the poorly educated.’ For Veblen, his vulgarity would have been self-defeating in the struggle for reputation, ‘the lower barbarian stages’, undermining any potential image of ‘honorific virtue’. In Veblen’s terms, he never learned to emulate the taste for understated pre-industrial trappings that would enable him to assimilate to the upper class.

His style has been unfailingly kitsch. His penthouse apartment at Trump Tower is museum-like in its curating of exquisitely tacky taste in a faux luxe style: marble floors, walls and columns; Louis XIV chairs with cushions stitched with the Trump coat of arms; gilded lamps, vases and crown mouldings; ceiling murals with scenes from Greek mythology (‘If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,’ he boasted, ‘it would be very much in place in terms of quality’); a large copy of a statue of Eros and Psyche; a fake Renoir; coffee-table books, carefully placed-- the ‘Vogue’ Living Book, the ‘Vanity Fair’ Oscar Night Book and a Muhammad Ali tribute book. ‘The Trump style is “developing-country despot”, rather than European or “evolved American”,’ Peter York wrote in the Times. ‘It doesn’t even try to get things “right”-- “real” antiques, architecturally correct detailing or any of that-- because, as with DC despots, neither the client nor the people he wants to impress care about that.’

Trump’s interest in interior decorating exceeds his interest in paintings. His major acquisitions have been a six-foot-tall portrait of himself done in five minutes by a little-known ‘speed painter’ and another portrait that now hangs over the bar at the Champions Bar and Grill at the Trump National Doral Miami Golf Resort. Both were bought with funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Another portrait of himself in a golden glow as a young man in a tennis sweater hangs at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. He entitled it The Visionary.

He once turned down the chance of owning Andy Warhol’s pictures of Trump Tower. Warhol met the already famous Trump on 22 February 1981 at a birthday party for Roy Cohn. They met again on 24 April at Warhol’s Factory, where they discussed Trump Tower and agreed, Warhol noted in The Andy Warhol Diaries, that ‘I should do a portrait of the building that would hang over the entrance to the residential part.’ Warhol produced ‘a beautiful series of multi-layered paintings in black, silver and gold; some with a sprinkling of Warhol’s glittering diamond dust’, according to the Warhol Museum blog. Warhol’s rendering of Trump Tower was an idealised imagining. The two men met on 5 August at the Factory, where Trump delivered his judgment to the artist. ‘Mr Trump was very upset that it wasn’t colour co-ordinated,’ Warhol wrote. Trump sent his interior decorator ‘to come down with swatches of material so I can do the paintings to match the pinks and oranges. I think Trump’s sort of cheap, though, I get that feeling.’ In the end, Warhol couldn’t satisfy Trump and he never bought the paintings. Warhol’s 15 minutes with Trump were over. He ended up like the other stiffed contractors. They ran into each other once more on 26 February 1983 at another Roy Cohn birthday party. ‘And Ivana Trump was there and she came over and when she saw me she was embarrassed and she said: “Oh, whatever happened to those pictures?”’

‘It is a fact that my buildings are acclaimed and they have lasting power,’ Trump wrote in 2014 in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune to tout his new Trump hotel in the city. At the press conference announcing that he would build Trump Tower, he said loudly to the architect, Der Scutt: ‘Give them the old Trump bullshit. Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, 68 storeys.’ Scutt replied: ‘I don’t lie, Donald.’ Trump’s aesthetic contribution to the design of his buildings has been to tell the architects to make them big and shiny. During the campaign he suggested he was an architectural genius. ‘Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan,’ an interviewer for USA Today reported. ‘He said of her novel The Fountainhead: “It relates to business [and] beauty [and] life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist, who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.’ Roark is an Ubermensch, a towering genius set above the mass of mediocrity. He blows up a building he has designed rather than submit to any modifications, is triumphantly acquitted after defending himself eloquently in court and wins the girl: it’s an adolescent boy’s dream plot, Nietzsche for teenagers [and Paul Ryan]. Trump’s description of the novel reveals no evidence that he has actually read it, but his identification with Roark is consistent with Rand’s exaltation of egoism.

Trump’s self-promotional grandiosity has prompted endless comparisons to P.T. Barnum, the showman and circus operator of the 19th century who was the son of a storekeeper. (A Google search turns up more than 520,000 references to ‘Trump Barnum’.) One of Trump’s advocates, also consumed by his own grandiosity, Newt Gingrich, raised the Barnum cliché in Trump’s defence: it ‘resonates well with the working class’, he said, ‘but not the elite’. The hackneyed comparison is demeaning to Barnum. Unlike Trump, who not only didn’t write the books that carry his name but doesn’t seem to have read them, Barnum wrote a great deal. He was witty; Mark Twain was an admirer. He was also a philanthropist, the founder of the Bridgeport Hospital, and an educator, helping to found and fund Tufts University. Both as a member of the Connecticut state legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport, he was responsible for a host of civic reforms and improvements.

...Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There was John Cody, the boss of Teamsters Local 282, who controlled the cement trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown prince’ of the Philadelphia Mob, who sold Trump the site on which two construction firms owned by Scarfo built the Trump Plaza and Casino. There was Felix Sater, convicted money launderer for the Russian Mafia, Trump’s partner in building the Trump SoHo hotel through the Bayrock Group LLC, which by 2007 had more than $2 billion in Trump licensed projects and by 2014 was no more. There was Tevfik Arif, another Trump partner, Bayrock’s chairman, originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock’s equity financing came from three Kazakh billionaires known as ‘the Trio’, who were reported to be engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other crimes. And so on.

There was no art to these deals. Trump’s relationships with the Mob weren’t just about the quality of cement. In his defence it was said that doing business with the Mob was inescapable in New York, but the truth is that there were prominent developers who crusaded against the sorts of arrangement that Trump routinely made. From beginning to end, whether Cosa Nostra or the Russian Mafia, Trump has been married to the Mob.

...The founding father of what became the Trump Organisation, Frederick Trump, a German immigrant who changed his name from Drumpf, left a substantial legacy of New York real estate and investments that had originated in brothels and bars in the Yukon and the Pacific Northwest. When he died, his son Fred, then 15 years old, assumed his mantle under the stewardship of his mother. His housing business flourished from the 1930s until the early 1950s thanks to his close partnerships with the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine and a steady flow of loans from the Federal Housing Authority. In 1954, he was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Banking Committee, where he was questioned about profit windfalls and inflated costs. From then on he would receive no FHA loans-- which is the reason the Trump Village on Coney Island, among other projects, was greased by his Brooklyn political connections. Also cited in the FHA investigation was Fred Trump’s partner, contractor and financier William ‘Willie’ Tomasello, who according to the federal Organised Crime Task Force was associated with elements of both the Gambino and Genovese families.

Fred Trump appeared to be grooming Fred Jr to take over his business. But he was a harsh and exigent father and lost patience with his eldest son. Donald, though eight years younger, adopted his father’s attitude to Fred Jr. ‘Donald put Freddy down quite a bit,’ a family friend told the New York Times. ‘Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,’ Robert Trump, the youngest brother, who went to work for the Trump Organisation, reported to Vanity Fair. ‘If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.’ Fred Jr rebelled, first by joining a Jewish fraternity at Lehigh University, and then by giving up on the Trump business and becoming an airline pilot. He literally flew away. But the free spirit of the Trump family fell into alcoholism, crawled back to work on one of his father’s construction crews and died in 1981 at the age of 43. When Fred Trump died in 1999, his will completely cut out Fred Jr’s children. They sued for their share, claiming that the will had been written under ‘undue influence’ from Donald Trump. In retaliation, Donald withdrew payments for the medical care of Fred III, who had cerebral palsy. After extended litigation, a settlement was reached. Donald had learned some lessons from Fred Jr’s demise. ‘Our family environment, the competitiveness, was a negative for Fred,’ he told Playboy.

It wasn’t easy for him being cast in a very tough environment, and I think it played havoc on him … He was the first Trump boy out there, and I subconsciously watched his moves. I saw people really taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep up my guard 100 per cent, whereas he didn’t. He didn’t feel that there was really reason for that, which is a fatal mistake in life. People are too trusting.

While the Trump money had its origins in prostitution and multiplied through ties to clubhouse politics and Mob figures, neither Frederick Trump nor Fred Trump fits the role of Don Vito Corleone. Vito Corleone avoided flamboyance and publicity. He was straitlaced, patient and tactful. He gained power and influence not only through crime and corruption but also by understanding people’s feelings and helping them when they were in trouble. The Don’s bond was not the Trump way.

Fred Jr resembled the middle Corleone brother, Fredo, who is weak and indecisive, and is eventually murdered by his younger brother, Michael, after he assumes control of the family business. Donald was most like the hot-headed Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone, whose impulsiveness results in his assassination by rival gang members at a tollbooth. Donald has raced through many tollbooths, but has survived the hail of gunfire. Though he grabbed hold of the family business, he is not much like Michael Corleone, a war hero, Dartmouth graduate and tragic figure who initially resists the poisoned Corleone chalice. Early on, he tells his Wasp wife he has nothing to do with the sordid business: ‘That’s my family, Kay-- that’s not me.’ But he becomes everything he was determined not to be. His success is to have transformed the Family into a corporation. ‘This is the business we have chosen,’ he is told by Hyman Roth, the Mafia character based on the real-life mob financier Meyer Lansky. Roth also speaks about the scale of the enterprise, ‘bigger than US Steel’, and suggests to Michael that someday he might be able to choose a president.

The member of the Trump family who most resembles Michael Corleone is Ivanka. Her father’s favourite, the ambitious and fashionable Manhattanite presents herself as an advocate of childcare and climate change policies, selling herself as the one hope for decency among the Trumps. While merchandising her dresses, shoes and jewellery she has achieved a degree of social acceptance in the city. She represents Donald’s last chance at respectability, but her precarious image depends finally on repudiation of the father she worships. ‘That’s my family-- that’s not me.’

Roy Cohn, the Mafia lawyer, was more than just the consigliere in Trump’s story. He was Donald’s mentor, his godfather. If Trump received an education beyond his two years at Fordham and as a transfer student at Wharton (‘I’m a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of Finance’), it was from his guide through the circles of the Inferno, who conducted masterclasses in malice. Trump was an apt pupil in aggression. ‘I don’t think I got that from Roy at all,’ Trump told the Washington Post. ‘I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.’ He didn’t really need an education in heartlessness, but he learned the finer points from Cohn. Offering his highest praise, Trump called him ‘a total genius… he brutalised for you.’

Like Trump, Roy Cohn was the pampered son of a politically connected New York family. His father, Albert Cohn, was a major player in the Bronx Democratic Party, an assistant district attorney who was appointed to the division of the New York Supreme Court presiding over the Bronx. Roy Cohn was a child prodigy; he graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of twenty, and was appointed as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York. He promoted himself in his early cases by giving false leaks to the New York World Telegram. He was put in charge of prosecuting communist agents, staging several prominent show trials, including one of 11 Communist Party officials for subversion. In 1951, he took effective control of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of stealing atomic secrets. He pulled strings to appoint both chief prosecutor and judge, then urged the judge to impose the death penalty, though the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was flimsy. Cohn’s tour de force brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who hired him as chief counsel in his Red-hunting investigations. After the Red Scare came the Lavender Scare, when Cohn launched a campaign against homosexuals in government jobs, though he was a closeted homosexual himself.

Cohn opened a law office in New York, taking on such clients as the Mafia kingpins Tony Salerno, Paul Castellano, John Gotti and Carmine ‘The Cigar’ Galante, underboss of the Bonanno crime family-- as well as the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the New York Yankees. He was the city’s supreme fixer. The menacing milieu around him was portrayed in the 1957 noir movie Sweet Smell of Success, about an influential and vicious New York tabloid newspaper columnist called J.J. Hunsecker, modelled on the latter-day Walter Winchell, who operates from a booth at the 21 Club, where he dines with movers and shakers. Hunsecker rules the town, making and wrecking reputations through smears and fear. When he uses a PR agent to destroy his sister’s jazz musician boyfriend, who denounced him for his ‘phony patriotism’, the plot turns nasty.

Donald Trump met Roy Cohn at Le Club, a private New York disco, in 1973, when Trump was 27 and had a serious problem. The Justice Department was suing him and his father for racial discrimination in their building at 100 Central Park South. ‘My view is tell them to go to hell,’ Cohn advised, ‘and fight the thing in court.’ From that moment, Cohn and Trump were inseparable. Cohn recalled that Trump would phone him more than a dozen times a day. With Cohn as their attorney the Trumps filed a countersuit against the federal government for using ‘Gestapo-like tactics’. Their suit was instantly dismissed and two years later the Trumps settled after being forced to sign a decree forbidding them from engaging in discriminatory practices.

Roger Stone, a longtime Cohn protégé who began his political career as a dirty trickster and ‘ratfucker’ for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972, explained the relationship. ‘First of all,’ he told an interviewer, ‘Roy would literally call up and dictate pieces for Page Six [of the New York Post] because Rupert [Murdoch] was a client and because Roy always had good material. So Roy understood the tabloids. Donald, I think, learned the tabloid media, and the media cycle, from Roy.’ Cohn was the sorcerer and Trump the apprentice. ‘Roy was a mentor in terms of the fast track,’ Stone said. ‘I mean, Donald was from Queens, Manhattan’s the fast track. I think, to a certain extent, Donald learned how the world worked from Roy, who was not only a brilliant lawyer, but a brilliant strategist who understood the political system and how to play it like a violin.’ For Trump, Cohn served ‘like a cultural guide to Manhattan’, Stone told the Washington Post. ‘Roy was more than his personal lawyer.’

Cohn took him to the 21 Club, where they held court in Cohn’s reserved red leather booth. He took him to his townhouse on 68th Street, where he lived and conducted his law business, and which was filled with a running crew of attractive young gay men, models, cigar-chomping politicians, gangsters and journalist hangers-on. ‘Roy lived in a matrix of crime and unethical conduct,’ according to his biographer Nicholas von Hoffman. He ‘derived a significant part of his income from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies, the most blatant of which was not paying income tax’.

Cohn initiated Trump into the highlife and lowdown at the hottest club in town, Studio 54. ‘What went on in Studio 54 will never, ever happen again,’ Trump told a journalist much later.

First of all, you didn’t have Aids. You didn’t have the problems you do have now. I saw things happening there that to this day I have never seen again. I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room. Stuff that couldn’t happen today because of problems of death.

Cohn greased the skids with favours. ‘I got to know everybody,’ Trump said. Cohn arranged for the Mob to construct Trump’s towers and provide protection against labour trouble. ‘You know how many lawyers in New York represent organised-crime figures? Does that mean we’re not supposed to use them?’ Trump asked. Cohn threatened to sue anyone in Trump’s way to secure leases on properties and city tax abatements. He wrote the prenuptial agreement stipulating that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, would return all gifts in the event of a divorce, and coerced her to sign; Cohn had suggested an associate to serve as her lawyer. (‘I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?’ Trump told his friends, according to Vanity Fair.) And Cohn finagled a federal judgeship for Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry. When anyone resisted Trump’s demands, he waved Cohn’s picture in their face. ‘Would you rather deal with him?’ he would say.

The State of New York disbarred Cohn in 1986 for unethical and unprofessional behaviour described in the judgment as ‘particularly reprehensible’. A month later, he died of Aids, an illness he tried to conceal (he told Trump he had cancer). He was an outrageous racist and self-loathing Jew, freely spewing epithets about ‘niggers’ and ‘kikes’. He was also a self-hating homosexual, who obsessively denounced ‘fags’ and crusaded against gay rights. When he was dying Trump turned away from him, shifting his business to other lawyers. ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,’ Cohn said. ‘Donald pisses ice water.’ Cohn called Trump to ask him to find a room in one of his hotels for Cohn’s former lover and assistant, near death himself from Aids. Trump got him a ‘tacky’ room and sent Cohn the bills. Cohn refused to pay. Trump’s underlings called to evict the dying man. The only surprising part of the story is Cohn’s shock.

Cohn made an afterlife appearance as a major character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, staged in 1993 and produced as a TV miniseries in 2003. Dying of Aids and disbarred, Cohn denies his homosexuality, attempts to hoard an experimental drug, and finds himself in a hospital bed cared for by a nurse who is a drag queen. Ethel Rosenberg hovers as a ghost to haunt him and in his death scene chants the Kaddish as an act of mercy over his unrepentant soul.

At the height of the Cold War, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate laid out a Russian conspiracy to elect a malleable president. Raymond Shaw, a US army sergeant during the Korean War, is captured and brainwashed along with the other members of his unit in Manchuria. His comrades are programmed to testify falsely to his bravery, for which he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. ‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life,’ they all declare. The American war hero is turned into a Russian sleeper agent, groomed to assassinate the presidential nominee at the convention. But Major Ben Marco, a former member of his army unit, breaks through his brainwashing and so instead of murdering the nominee Shaw, shoots his mother, who had been controlling him throughout, along with his idiotic stepfather. Decades later, Condon explained the inspiration for the perverse dynamic between Raymond Shaw and his mother. ‘Raymond’s mother is Roy Cohn, and her husband Johnny is McCarthy. I was fascinated by the very strange relationship between Cohn and the senator. Roy ran McCarthy, totally dominated him.’

What Cohn would have made of Donald Trump’s romance with Vladimir Putin is anybody’s guess. The Red-hunter might have been appalled at his client becoming an agent of influence for the former agent of the KGB. But Cohn might have approved. After he departed, Trump fell and rose, his resurrection partly financed by clandestine loans from Russian banks linked to a state governed on Mafia principles. During the 2016 campaign, Putin appears to have provided assistance to Trump through the Russian intelligence services’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and his political model may serve as something of an inspiration too. Trump’s business has always operated organisationally like a prototypical Mafia, with a tight circle of family, friends and flunkies, bearing little resemblance to a modern corporation. As Masha Gessen put it in the New York Review of Books, borrowing from the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, the ‘post-communist mafia state’ is ‘run like a family by a patriarch who distributes money, power and favours’. Usually, the ‘family’ is ‘built on loyalty, not blood relations, but Trump is bringing his literal family into the White House. By inviting a few hand-picked people into the areas that interest him personally, he may be creating a mafia state within a state.’ He has long been attracted to authoritarianism. In his 1990 interview with Playboy he expressed admiration for the Chinese government’s violent repression of the democracy movement. ‘When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,’ he said. ‘Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak… as being spat on by the rest of the world.’

Talk of a ‘mafia state’ echoes another period’s fears of fascism. In 1935, fascist figures emerged not just in Europe but in America. Father Charles Coughlin held millions of his radio flock in thrall with jeremiads against bankers, liberals and Jews, and enlisted them into his Union for Social Justice. The DuPonts and other wealthy conservatives financed the American Liberty League to campaign against the New Deal as un-American, spending twice as much as the Republican Party. William Randolph Hearst likened Roosevelt to Karl Marx-- ‘imported, autocratic, Asiatic’-- and declared: ‘Whenever you hear a prominent American called a “Fascist”, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.’

It was in this combustible environment that the most celebrated writer of the day, Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize, voiced his sense of imminent catastrophe in the American heartland. Lewis’s previous novels-- Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry and Arrowsmith-- had satirised the hypocritical manners and morals of small-town life. He punctured the suffocating prejudices, mean-spiritedness and crushed idealism in the nativist, isolationist and Prohibitionist America of the Republican-dominated 1920s. His characters were studies in the cultural constraints of the age. There was not a Gatsby among them. Now, his alternative history showed how the people of Main Street might fare in the face of homegrown fascism. In It Can’t Happen Here, it happened here.

FDR loses re-election in 1936, defeated by Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip, ‘a Professional Common Man’, who pledges a return to ‘founding’ principles. He embodies ‘every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man … the Common Man twenty-times magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.’ A tabloid journalist, Lee Sarason, generates a blizzard of propaganda and ghostwrites Windrip’s manifesto, Zero Hour: Over the Top, excerpts from which appear as chapter epigraphs. ‘In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love, and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart Alecks from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New York, & etc.’ ‘Sarason had encouraged Windrip to keep up in the Great World all of the clownishness which … had endeared him to his simple-hearted constituents.’ A radio preacher deploys his League of Forgotten Men behind Windrip. Among Windrip’s ‘camp followers’ are ‘Intellectuals and Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip, for all his clownish swinderlerism, a free vigour which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic system’. President Windrip announces a new ‘Corporatist’ state, suspends civil liberties and sends his militia, the Minute Men, to enforce order. Sarason directs propaganda, telling the masses ‘they were the honoured foundation stones of a new Civilisation … And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more … Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’ Windrip’s policies fail to deliver on his extravagant promises. Dissidents disappear into concentration camps. A New Underground organises against the regime. Sarason stages a coup and installs himself as president. Then his ally, General Dewey Haik, ousts him and invades Mexico to arouse patriotic unity. The country descends into civil war. The end.

The Confidence Man: His Masquerade was the last full-length book Herman Melville published in his lifetime. Moby-Dick had been poorly received and Melville could no longer scrape by on his writing. A flat-out failure, he was about to take a job as a clerk in the New York Customs House. His new book, inspired by a story he read in a newspaper, takes place on April Fool’s Day, when a mysterious stranger boards a Mississippi steamboat named the Fidèle. We are a long way from the Pequod. The confidence man is anything but loyal. He assumes different guises as he works his way through the passengers, from the ‘cosmopolitan’ to the kindly old lady. To one he sells non-existent shares in the Black Rapids Coal Company. He inveigles funds for the imaginary Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum. He hits up others for something he calls ‘the World’s Charity’. From yet another he coaxes money for an investment in ‘a Protean easy chair for invalids’. Whenever any of his dupes baulks he appeals to their sense of confidence, understanding that their weakness is their desire for hope. Written at the nadir of his own hope, Melville masked his bitterness with satirical humour. The reviews of his plotless and oblique work were unkind. He withdrew into the Customs House. In The Raven and the Whale, the critic Perry Miller wrote: ‘The few contemporaries who examined the book were in no position to see it as, whatever else it is, a long farewell to national greatness.’ The only character who escapes the confidence man’s swindle, the only one to lack confidence, is the steamboat’s barber, who refuses to wield his scissors without first being paid, and has hung a large sign in his shop reading: ‘NO TRUST.’