Trump's Racism Caused Him To Push To Sell Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is 5,328 square miles with a population of 3.2 million (Americans). Greenland is melting but the area is 836,300 square miles with around 56,000 people, less than the 70,000 who live in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico's 7th largest city. Greenland's biggest town, Nuuk, has 18,000 people. There are 140 Americans station in Greenland at the Thule Air Base.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor is getting really famous. The video above is an interview he did with Hallie Jackson on MSNBC yesterday. It's worth watching the whole thing but at the 5:15 point he said "One time before we went down, [Trump] told us, not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland, because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor."

Taylor said Trump wasn't joking. He said that Trump "expressed deep animus towards the Puerto Rican people behind scenes. These are people who were recovering from the worst disaster of their lifetime. He is their president. He should be standing by them, not trying to sell them off to a foreign country."

Alan Grayson, who grew up in the Bronx, in an area that has more Puerto Ricans than anyplace else in the continental U.S. and then went on to represent the Orlando area, which has one of the continental U.S.' biggest Puerto Rican populations said he feel "the feeling is mutual. I’m sure that Puerto Ricans would love to trade Donald Trump for the Queen of England, Pope Francis, or even Muammar Qaddafi’s corpse. To say that Donald Trump is a racist is like saying that Serena Williams is a tennis player."

I think anyone who knows anything about Trump from his pre-White House days, knows he's always been a bigot with an animus towards Puerto Ricans, especially working class Puerto Ricans. The first time the young Trump made it into the legitimate newspapers was as the result of the federal government suing him and his father for illegally discriminating against Puerto Rican families in a building development they used federal funds to develop. That's around the time Woody Guthrie, one other tenants in Brooklyn rode this song about Trump, Sr.





Progressive Jared West is the official Democratic candidate running to replace Trumpist Sam Killebrew in the Winter Haven-Haines City-Davenport area of Polk County (HD-41). He wasn't happy about hearing what Trump said about Puerto Ricans. "It is absolutely deplorable Trump said that," he told me this morning, "but are we really surprised? Puerto Rico has been through a lot lately, and he’s done nothing but mock them and ignore them. Puerto Rican people are Americans, and my district has one of the highest concentrations of Puerto Rican’s in Florida. Many of them came over after the natural disasters. Today, when I’m elected, and forever, I stand with all people and especially Puerto Ricans to denounce this awful hate filled rhetoric. We will see you in November Donald Trump, and you will be answering for these comments."

Bob Lynch is the Democratic Party candidate for the Miami-Dade state House seat held by GOP wig wig Daniel Perez, a knee-jerk Trumpist, with no interest in working families other than during election season. Lynch has a very different perspective. This morning he told me that "It is unclear why Miles seems surprised as to the extent of Trump’s depravity and lack of humanity. He willingly went to work for a man that announced his presidency by declaring our Latino neighbors to be rapists, thugs, and killers. We have people that are still living without electricity and running water in Puerto Rico because of the agency Miles continued to work for, despite his shamelessly self-serving newfound conscience. Trump, Kitstjen Nielsen, and Miles Taylor are all personally responsible for thousands of needless deaths in Puerto Rico as well as thousands of Latino families destroyed after being separated by ICE. Miles should have resigned and immediately gone to Congress the day it was proposed to keep children in cages. Congress should also haul him, Nielsen, and everyone else who committed crimes against humanity at Trump’s behest in for non-stop hearings between now and November. A redemption tour because he sees grifters like the Lincoln Project getting rich is not something the media should be feeding into. Donald Trump doesn’t consider Puerto Rican’s to be Americans nor does he believe other Latinos should be given basic human rights. Miles Taylor could have done something to stop it and chose to do nothing. November is way too late for his victims."

Here's the version of the same Woody Guthrie song, the one I've been listening to for the last few years-- and performed by Ryan Harvey, Ani DeFranco and Tom Morello:

Trump Has Been Demonstrably Racist For His Whole Life. Does That Mean His Supporters Are Too?

The chart above is from a new Civiqs poll of Trump's favorable/unfavorable ratings by race. Its disappointing that 54% of white people have a positive opinion and surprising that 6% of African Americans do. But, for me the most shocking number is that 27% of Latinos have a favorable opinion of this sack of shit. How is that possible? Who are those 27%? They can't all be old and hate-filled racist Castro-era Cubans. I mean that might be 6 or 7%, not 27%. Ever hear the Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump?" This is a recoded version by Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello:





Guthrie was a resident of the Trump project Beach Haven down the street from where my childhood girlfriend lived. Guthrie hated everything about it-- especially the racism.

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

The first time Trump made it into the newspapers was when he was caught by the Feds violating the law about discriminating against Blacks and Puerto Ricans seeking to rent apartments there. A little background: Post-WWII Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loans and subsidies for urban apartments, for which Trump's neo-Nazi/KKK father, Fred Trump availed himself, came with a stipulation: no racial discrimination allowed. The Trumps made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them. In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie's death, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published an exposé about the Trumpanzee real estate empire, devoting 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.”

Just last week, a team of reporters from The Atlantic noted that "The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in the New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. 'They are absolutely ridiculous,' Trump said of the charges. 'We have never discriminated, and we never would.'" So... his very first appearance in The Times was a lie.

In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior-- from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for the New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of “birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to the Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Although no one else may, Señor Trumpanzee, according to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, "considers himself a branding wizard, but he is vexed by a branding crisis of his own: how to shed the label of 'racist.' As the campaign takes shape about 15 months before voters render a verdict on his presidency, Trump’s Democratic challengers are marking him a racist, and a few have gone so far as to designate him a white supremacist. Throughout his career as a real estate magnate, a celebrity provocateur and a politician, Mr Trump has recoiled from being called the r-word, even though some of his actions and words have been plainly racist. Following a month in which he levelled racist attacks on four congresswomen of colour, maligned majority-black Baltimore as a "rat and rodent infested mess" and saw his anti-immigrant rhetoric parroted in an alleged mass shooter's statement, the risk for Mr Trump is that the pejorative that has long dogged him becomes defining."

Being called a racist has led Trump in recent days to lash out-- in tweets and in public comments-- behavior his advisers and allies explain as the natural reaction of anyone who does not consider himself a racist but is accused of being one.

"For them to throw out the race word again-- racist, racist, racist," Mr Trump told reporters Friday as he departed the White House for a week-long vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. "They call anybody a racist when they run out of cards."

The president views the characterisation largely through the lens of politics, said one close adviser, explaining that Trump feels the charges of racism are just another attempt to discredit him-- not unlike, he believes, the more than a dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or the Russia investigation.

Many of his supporters see it the same way. "At first, they tried to use Russia, and that didn't work," said Don Byrd of Newton, Iowa. "Now it's all about race-- 'He's a racist. He's this. He's that.'"

Democrats have engaged in semantic manoeuverings about just how racist they think the president is. While former congressman Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said without hesitation that the president is a white supremacist, former Vice President Joe Biden stopped short.

"Why are you so hooked on that?" Mr Biden told reporters last week in Iowa. "You just want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I'm not everybody else. I'm Joe Biden... He is encouraging white supremacists. You can determine what that means."

Biden might not what to go there because his 5 decades in politics makes it clear that he may not be as racist as Trump, but that he certainly used racism as a tool right from the start... even if he backed off once Obama picked him to be VP. When Trump calls himself "the least racist person anywhere in the world"-- despite his racist history-- he is signaling that if Biden is the Democratic nominee (God forbid), he will fight fire with fire when it comes to racism.

"The Discovery" Revisited 2019... with apologies to Norman Rockwell by Nancy Ohanian

Trump's sensitivity about the racist sobriquet dates back decades. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who has known Trump and tangled with him for many years, said the president has long understood that being called "the r-word" would damage his casino and hotel businesses and, now, his political standing.

"At one level, you're super sensitive about the r-word, and on another level, you buy ads on the Central Park Five," he said.

Mr Sharpton recalled that, at the height of the birtherism debate, Mr Trump sought to persuade him to stop calling him out for his lies about Mr Obama's birthplace on his MSNBC show by inviting him to a meeting at Trump Tower.

"I'm not a racist," he recalled Mr Trump adamantly insisting.

The two men argued and Mr Sharpton responded, "I'm not calling you a racist, but what you are doing is racist."

Mr Sharpton continued to attack Trump on air.

Some people who have worked for Trump say the president is less concerned about the moral significance of being called a racist but focuses instead on the bottom-line implications.

"The guy sends out blatantly racist tweets," former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said. "White supremacist. Racist. Those labels are bad for business... It means a reduction in the colours of people who want to vote for you. He's upset about it because it's bad for business."

To the extent that one's understanding of what is and isn't racist is forged in his youth, Trump's upbringing may be instructive. One former adviser suggested Trump believes he is more racially tolerant than his father, Fred Trump, who was reported to have been arrested in connection with a 1927 Ku Klux Klan march in New York-- an arrest the president has denied as "nonsense" and "never happened." In the 1970s, Fred and Donald Trump were both sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black renters in their residential properties.

Ms Conway argued the charges of racism against Trump are over the top and that they are likely to help him politically because his voters could think Democratic candidates are unfairly branding them as racists, too, simply for supporting the president.

"When the elite wrist-flickers are out there demeaning and ridiculing his rank-and-file supporters-- those forgotten men and women who aren't chanting at the rallies-- an insult to him is an insult to them and vice versa," Ms Conway said.

Also from Ashley Parker, this time with another Washington Post reporter, Toluse Olorunnipa, is a report about how Trump is dialing up the culture wars as a form of typical right-wing divisiveness to keep the working class from looking at actual policy. "From straws to wind turbines to socially conservative issues, Trump is deliberately amplifying public tensions by seizing on divisive topics to energize his base, according to campaign aides and White House advisers. The president is following much the same strategy that he pursued in 2016-- inserting himself into the issues his supporters are already discussing, and using blunt us-against-them language without regard to nuance or political correctness. As Democrats debate policy, Trump has sought to force his potential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party. While Trump’s campaign aides [including Fox News hosts] have proactively pushed his politically incorrect message with creative and at times tongue-in-cheek marketing, the president has caught some of his advisers off guard by crudely inflaming culture wars on heavier topics such as race, abortion and immigration.

Like much of what Trump does, the strategy of inflaming the culture wars carries significant risks. Democrats say the president is writing off much of the country and giving some of the voters who stayed home in 2016 a reason to vote against him. Some 2020 candidates have specifically sought to portray Trump's constant agitation of political, cultural and racial divisions as too exhausting for the country.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) contrasted her presidential campaign with Trump's by saying that voters want a political message "about lifting people up and not beating them down."

"People are just tired of what we've been seeing," she told reporters earlier this month in Detroit. "It is tiring."

And after two mass shootings earlier this month-- including one authorities believe may have been inspired by anti-immigrant racism-- Democrats say Trump's unwillingness to play the traditional presidential role of national healer and bipartisan problem-solver has been laid bare.

"We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation," former vice president Joe Biden said Wednesday. "And that makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much harder."

Trump disparaged Biden on a day the president had set aside for visiting victims of the shootings that killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.

"Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech," Trump tweeted from Air Force One as he traveled between the grieving communities. "Sooo Boring!"

One more Post piece to thread this needle, this one by Julie Zauzmer about why Evangelicals are still so happy with Trump. She wrote that in 2016 he was overwhelmingly supported by them-- more so than George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney and that now, according to Pew, "almost 70% percent of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s performance in office. They may be stupid, they may be racist, they may be deranged but the Trump Evangelicals say they see is an odds with what normal people see. For them, he's "a president who sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs. A president who’s against abortion and gay rights and who has the economy humming to boot."

A few of them may may chafe at his his blasphemy, but they've all sold their souls to him. Religionist charlatans, commercial Christian frauds, have sold them on Trump and "using coarse language is far from the president’s only behavior that might turn off the religious right. He’s been divorced twice and has faced constant allegations of extramarital affairs. He previously supported abortion rights, and he has stumbled when trying to discuss the specifics of his religious beliefs, once referring to a book in the Bible as 'Two Corinthians' instead of Second Corinthians. Yet to this point, Trump has maintained broad support from evangelicals, including the unwavering backing of some prominent conservative Christian leaders... They agree with his social policies, praise his appointment of conservative judges and extol his commitment to Israel-- often tolerating Trump’s character flaws for the continued advancement of all three."

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?

Cohen And Trump-- The Unbreakable Bond Of Third Rate Scumbags

I have to admit... it's fun to beat up on a puffed up bully like Michael Cohen-- Trump's bargain basement Roy Cohn wannabe. Since childhood, Cohen has been a Mob-connected asshole and his Mob connection helped acquire a once valuable collection of New York and Chicago taxi medallions-- once but no longer. 70% of business travelers now use Uber or Lyft instead of taxis. Taxis now get just 6% of ground transportation. Cohen's 32 leveraged medallions were once worth about a million dollars each. The value is around $160,000 each now-- and falling. In other words, he owes millions of dollars on the medallions.

And it's not like Cohen is going to make up for his bankrupt taxi companies with income from his "law practice." He's a laughing stock as an attorney. In fact Rolling Stone's Seth Hettena looked back into Cohen's past practice and it's as completely predictive of his current predicament as you could possible imagine. Cohen met his pre-Trump/pre-Hannity clientele by roaming NYC courthouses "filing lawsuits on behalf of people with little means who were seeking compensation for the injuries they suffered in car collisions. Many personal-injury lawyers make their living this way, but there was something striking about Cohen's cases: Some of the crashes at issue didn't appear to be accidents at all... [but] deliberate, planned car crashes as part of an attempt to cheat insurance companies."

[I]nvestigations by insurers showed that several of Cohen's clients were affiliated with insurance fraud rings that repeatedly staged "accidents." And at least one person Cohen represented was indicted on criminal charges of insurance fraud while the lawsuit he had filed on her behalf was pending. Cohen also did legal work for a medical clinic whose principal was a doctor later convicted of insurance fraud for filing phony medical claims on purported "accident" victims. Taken together, a picture emerges that the personal attorney to the president of the United States was connected to a shadowy underworld of New York insurance fraud, a pervasive problem dominated by Russian organized crime that was costing the state's drivers an estimated $1 billion a year.

...In one case, Cohen filed a bodily injury lawsuit on behalf of a woman named Tara Pizzingrillo, who was a passenger in a car that was struck by a rented vehicle in 1999 in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn. In the 2002 complaint Cohen drafted and filed, Pizzingrillo sued the driver of the rental, Brian McFarland, claiming that she suffered bulging discs, and demanding $1 million from Enterprise Rent-A-Car's parent company, ELRAC Inc.

While the case was making its way through the courts, however, both Pizzingrillo and McFarland were indicted for their roles in a criminal ring that staged accidents using rented U-Haul trucks. Pizzingrillo, McFarland and others took turns renting U-Hauls, and, after obtaining insurance coverage, plowed them into vehicles occupied by friends in order to file bogus injury claims. Damian S. Jackson, who prosecuted the case when he worked at the New York Attorney General's office, did not recall Cohen's lawsuit, but said the events it described were typical of the ring's scheme. "They were basically being crash test dummies in each collision," Jackson says. The U-Haul ring submitted more than $350,000 in fraudulent personal injury claims before they were caught. Both Pizzingrillo and McFarland pleaded guilty to third degree insurance fraud, and Cohen's lawsuit was withdrawn. Pizzingrillo did not respond to a message seeking comment.

I used to live in Sheepshead Bay. It and the surrounding neighborhoods are now Russian Mafia-controlled hellholes-- and, though Brooklyn went overwhelmingly for Clinton (79.7% to 17.9%), these Russian neighborhoods went for Trump. Sheepshead Bay voted 66.75% to 29.47% for Trump. Neighboring Brighton Beach, basically all Russian, went 68.79 to 26.92 for Trump. Avenue U in Brooklyn used to be part of the liberal Democratic heartland; now it's like Moscow-- and filled with crooked people who are not friends of America and who make a living by stealing whatever isn't nailed down-- perfect little Trumpists. Rolling Stone reported that "Not only did Cohen represent clients in staged accidents, but some of his clients may not have been in the vehicle when the phony crash occurred. Another of his clients, a Haitian immigrant named Marie Pierre, was sued by State Farm in 2001, after an investigation determined she was involved in another fraud ring that used stolen identities. "Her account of the accident is [so] completely contradicted by the police report that it must be questioned whether she was present at the event," a lawyer for State Farm wrote. Pierre testified that the black 1988 Chevrolet Caprice she was riding in was being driven by a man; the police report listed the driver as a woman. Pierre identified the driver of the other car involved in the crash as black; he was white. Pierre said the vehicle she was riding in was stopped when it was struck in 1999 on Avenue U in Brooklyn; it was moving."

Basically all of Cohen's clients were crooks. They still are-- just on a higher level.

Cohen's work on behalf of accident victims was, if nothing else, prolific. In Cohen's challenge to the April 9th raid, his attorneys told a Manhattan judge that Cohen had "hundreds of different clients" from 1996 to 2006, when he ran his own private legal practice. "Negligence," which likely included the bodily injury claims filed on behalf of accident victims, then represented 90 percent of his legal work, Cohen said in a unrelated deposition obtained by Rolling Stone. Much of this work consisted of filing private arbitration claims, which are typically not a matter of public record. However, auto insurers dragged Cohen into court nearly 100 times between 1998 and 2003, asking judges to halt numerous claims he had filed for a variety of reasons, including fraud.

It's not clear how the "hundreds of different clients" Cohen represented found him. While many personal injury lawyers take out ads on TV or plaster their faces on highway billboards, Cohen kept a relatively low profile; one of the addresses he used on accident cases was a remote taxi garage in Long Island City, Queens, where he managed a fleet of yellow cabs with his Ukrainian-born business partner, Simon Garber. Investigations from the same period by insurers and the FBI found other lawyers worked within sophisticated insurance-fraud networks that could have been cooked up by Saul Goodman, the ethically compromised lawyer on the hit TV series Breaking Bad, though there is no evidence that Cohen ever knew that any of his clients were involved in these schemes. Some unethical lawyers paid "runners" or "steerers" who staged accidents or monitored the police radio, and then raced to the scene of a crash to drum up business before the ambulance arrived. Neighborhood medical clinics, often established for the sole purpose of billing insurance companies for unnecessary tests and medical services, would refer clients to lawyers in exchange for kickbacks. A 2006 report on auto insurance fraud by the New York Attorney General's office noted that "crooked lawyers are necessary to advance fraudulent lawsuits based on feigned injuries."

Incidentally, Cohen also did legal work for Life Quality Medical P.C., whose principal, according to a ProPublica/WNYC investigation, was Dr. Zhanna Kanevsky. Kanevsky was indicted in 2005 by the New York Attorney General's office on charges of insurance fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records for her role in a fraud ring that was secretly run by a Ukrainian émigré and his wife. According to the indictment, all clinic patients were given three expensive MRI scans, kidney sonograms and nerve testing, and all received the same medical treatment, regardless of injury: physical therapy, chiropractic care and acupuncture treatments several times a week. Kanevsky pleaded guilty and lost her medical license for three years. Cohen, who was the contact attorney for any lawsuits against the clinic, was not implicated in the case. However, an attorney named Albert Rudgayzer was indicted; according to prosecutors, Rudgayzer paid the clinic owners for referring clients and then shared a part of the proceeds from settlements of bodily injury claims. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was ordered to pay about $120,000 in restitution and fines.

Several investigations have also found that Russian organized criminals were behind what turned out to be massive insurance fraud operations. A sprawling investigation in Suffolk County, New York that indicted hundreds of people involved in more than 1,000 phony accidents in the early 2000s was known as "Operation BORIS"-- an acronym for Big Organized Russian Insurance Scam. The frauds have only grown in subsequent years. A 2012 investigation by the FBI found a Russian organized crime ring (which involved three attorneys) was behind a $275 million auto insurance fraud ring, the largest in history. (One of the defendants in that case, Michael Barukhin, moved into a Trump-branded tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida while his case was pending.) "Back in the Soviet days, ripping off the government may have been the single largest industry outside the military in the entire country," says James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, a not-for-profit group funded by insurers. "What developed was an entire generation of hoods with very good criminal skills."

My first knowledge of Trump was when I used to visit my pre-high school girlfriend on Ave Z and Trump worked for his crooked KKK father developing a property nearby. The Trumps were looked at as racist, rich trash by everyone in the neighborhood. No one wanted them around. Woody Guthrie lived in the development, Beach Haven-- and wrote a song about it, "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 color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project...

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

During Sunday night's broadcast of the GRAMMY Awards, former South Carolina Governor and current Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, as you can see above, just couldn't resist reaching for her twitter machine. Ignoramus that she is, she doesn't think politics and music go together. Now, what could have possibly set her off? The answer to that one is that all it took was Hillary Clinton reading a couple of sentences from Michael Wolf's Fire And Fury on the GRAMMY TV show. The fact that, the book is the number one best seller in the known universe, or, as her boss would say, "is getting great ratings, tremendous ratings," no doubt pushed the dagger a littler further in. The uptight little cheerleader for Trump just couldn't take it. And, it wasn't even directed at her, or was it? Maybe just in your mind, Nikki? Is there really something you'd like to tell us?

Music has always made a great match with politics, most likely since humans began to sing. Haley's statement reveals a hole in whatever education she has. It reveals a lack of understanding of how music interfaces with our culture and functions within our society. Politics has always inspired artists to paint, writers to write, and musicians to compose. But, apparently, Nikki feels that music should only be about love (sexless, of course), or maybe nursery rhymes, or, bunnies frolicking in the meadow, or maybe painting a house, or writing instruction manuals for audio and video equipment made in China.

There is one thing I agree with Ms. Haley on, though. When the unsubstantiated rumors recently surfaced that she was having an affair with Señor Trumpanzee, she was quoted as saying that the idea that she was having sex with Trump was, quote "disgusting" and "offensive." I could not agree with Nikki more more. Sex with Trumpanzee couldn't help but be "disgusting" and "offensive."

Maybe Nikki should just stick to other stuff she knows nothing about, like promising to protect Binomo and other countries that don't exist. Meanwhile, I'd like to send her this photo. It seems more appropriate now than ever. It's of a man and his guitar. The man is the great, truly great, Woody Guthrie, a man who focused his art like a laser beam on the evils of people like Nikki Haley. Feel free to tweet this picture to Nikki Haley. It may not make her day, but it sure would have made his. Send it to her fascist boss, too.

Does Trumpanzee Deserve All The Blame For Charlottesville? Or Just Part Of The Blame?

Vanilla ISIS

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin predicted Trumapnzee's excuses for the new realization among some who missed the first decades of Trump as racist that Trump is a racist:

1. I was kidding
2. the fake news is at fault
3. I am the least racist person ever

Democratic pollster Matt Canter added the obvious "my grandchildren are Jews."

On Sunday, the Regime sent some guy, Tom Bossert, some kind of homeland security advisor, to defend Trump on Jake Tapper's CNN show, State of the Union. "The president not only condemned the violence and stood up at a time and a moment when calm was necessary and didn't dignify the names of these groups of people, but rather addressed the fundamental issue." He didn't directly explain why Trump, who grew up in a Nazi household and whose father was arrested as a KKK street brawler at least once, referred to "many sides" being responsible other than just calling out the Nazis and Klan like all responsible leaders have.

Instead there was this kind of drivel: "What you need to focus on is the rest of his statement. The president didn't just call for human beings to respect one another, which is his pragmatist, core fundamental bare minimum, but he called for ideally Americans to love one another, for all of God's children to love one another. That is a fundamental assault on the hatred that we're seeing here."

Nazis and the alt-right in general are happy with Trump's non-condemnation and have been celebrating what they view as his support of what they're doing. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News called it a shameful moral void that leaves America without a leader. He noted that the citronella in the tiki torches from the outdoor patio department at Home Depot "might be great for keeping away flying insects, but it does nothing to deter vermin... "[T]here was," he wrote, "absolutely no mistaking which of the 'many sides of modern American politics was the Bad Side in Charlottesville." Unless you happened to be Donald J. Trump, son of Nazis.

And that was before the unspeakable tragedy that took place early Saturday afternoon, when a 20-year Ohio attendee of this neo-Nazi Woodstock jammed the accelerator pedal of his Dodge Challenger and plowed into a crowd of marchers who had flocked to Charlottesville to protest against fascism. The marchers were the Good Side. This act of blatant terrorism against them created an image-- innocent black and white bodies, flying in the air and flipped upside down in a blur of deadly metal and speed-- that will forever remain as an indelible stain on American history, much like the pictures from a generation past of parking-lot grief at Kent State or naked terror on a dirt roadway in Vietnam. When the shrieking stopped, at least 19 people were hurt and 32-year-old Heather Heyer lay dead on the pavement. (Meanwhile, two Virginia state troopers who had been pressed into duty to monitor the neo-Nazi protests died when their helicopter crashed.) Heyer’s final words on Facebook-- decrying the things that were already taking place in America in 2017-- said that “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

You could speculate whether President Trump-- with his empty and stunningly vacant reaction to the nature of the hatred on display in Charlottesville, first on Twitter and later at a public appearance from his New Jersey golf resort-- has been truly paying attention to what’s been going in this country since he descended down his Trump Tower escalator and America started descending into madness two summers ago. But it’s almost certain that our 45th president knew exactly what he was doing when he failed to denounce white supremacy and Nazism, with his vapid “many sides”-do-it wave of the hand. And our moral vacuum in the Oval Office now creates a moral dilemma for the rest of us.

The failure of fundamental decency was described by the New Yorker journalist Ryan Lizza as “by far the most disgraceful day of Donald Trump’s presidency”-- and, if anything, that was an understatement. Some noted that Trump had seemed more outraged by Nordstrom dropping his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line than by Nazism in the American heartland. First the president with the restless Twitter thumbs said nothing for hours, leaving it for others like the 91-year-old Michigan ex-congressman John Dingell-- “I signed up to fight Nazis 73 years ago and I’ll do it again if I have to”-- to show leadership. Even Melania Trump spoke out before her husband.

Then came the word salad that sounded like randomly generated phases from a Hallmark computer-- reminders that our narcissistic president has never felt a shred of human empathy in his life. (At one point Trump offered his “best regards” to those wounded by the terrorist driver, as if congratulating recent high school graduates.) The president’s vague call “to come together as Americans with love for our nation” that he read aloud at a veterans event in Central Jersey were generic and delivered without passion or conviction. And that was before Trump ad-libbed that the blame for violence was not with “white supremacists” or “Nazis” or “fascists”-- words he would not dare utter-- but with “many sides.”



That was the dog whistle that the cadre of hate-filled white nationalists had clearly been waiting to hear. After Trump’s first insipid tweet, the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer asked on Twitter if the president was denouncing “antifa”-- progressive people such as the murder victim Heyer who march against fascism. The president’s reaction was even praised on the pro-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which noted, correctly, “No condemnation at all.” Indeed, what happened on Saturday was truly remarkable. America had looked to its president for leadership in a time of crisis-- and the president made things worse.

One especially lame moment on Saturday came when Trump called for “a study” of the causes of violence in Charlottesville, as if this had been a shocking out-of-left-field event and not the culmination of years of festering hate. Would Trump’s “study” team enter the corridors of the White House to examine the roles of his white nationalist aides such as Sebastian Gorka, linked to racist and anti-Semitic groups in Hungary, or Steve Bannon, who boasted of creating a vehicle for the “alt-right” (their term, not mine) that descended on Charlottesville through his Breitbart News, or Stephen Miller, the “white nationalist ally” who may have crafted the president’s empty talk this weekend?

Will Trump really create some kind of task force that will talk to the Nazis who showed up in Virginia and who said the reason that white supremacists feel so emboldened-- why they no longer cover their faces in white sheets like the KKK did back in the 1960s-- is the election of Donald Trump as president? Will they interview the former Klan leader David Duke, who told reporters in Charlottesville that their hatefest meant “we are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump“? Will they look into why alleged domestic terrorist James Alex Fields, driver of the death car, told his mother on Ohio he was leaving for a rally that had “something to do with Trump“?

Trump has no real condemnation for the forces that caused the terror at Charlottesville because he is one of the forces that caused the terror at Charlottesville. He not only incubated-- with his hateful rhetoric during his 2016 campaign-- the climate that brought this cancer out into the open, but he even turned up the temperature a couple of degrees on Saturday with his shameful reaction.

It’s impossible to overstate how terrible this last week has been for America. Trump’s leadership fumble on Charlottesville has actually made us forget for a few hours that he has also threatened to launch a nuclear war. Today, we are in completely uncharted waters. There is a total vacuum of moral leadership at the White House, a bottomless pit seemingly devoid even of basic human decency. America has survived civil war, a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office, and various other disasters in the last 241 years, but can we survive without a leader?

The unbearable lightness of Trump is both a crisis and an opportunity for the American people. The vast majority of us who feel the kind of revulsion over Charlottesville that the president of the United States is incapable of feeling need to find new and innovate ways to work together and to enlist new allies-- in every spectrum of our politics, including the sensible wing of Trump’s Republican Party. We need a movement to remove Trump from the presidency and-- before that can realistically happen-- show the world that the vast majority of Americans embrace tolerance and reject hate. It will come from us, because the naysayers from Nov. 9, 2016, had it exactly right. Donald Trump is not my president, or yours.

Or just see the whole sordid, disgraceful episisode as a warning from the Bannon wing of the Regime about what will happen on a far greater scale if there's a move to remove Trump from the presidency.

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.’