Could the Billion-Dollar Loser actually be a lower life form than (shudder) Roy Cohn? Tony Kushner thinks maybe so

On NPR's This Week in Politics yesterday, we heard playwright Tony Kushner talking from London with NPR's David Furst about the link between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.

by Ken

Probably I haven't been paying close enough attention -- and goodness knows, I've tried my hardest to pay as little attention as possible to this whole election thing -- but in all my years of forced Trump-watching, I've managed to miss the link between the Billion-Dollar Loser and his (and his dear old dad's) onetime lawyer, Roy Cohn. But as soon as you think of that rabid legal attack dog imparting his, er, wisdom, to the Younger Donald, and something sure clicks. And especially now that we see the older and scummier Donald as a full-time politician. (I see now that in June the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow and Shawn Boburg took an extensive look into the Donald-and-Roy connection in a piece headlined "The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear.")

And when you think about Roy Cohn, who in the land of the living would you be most likely to think of next? If you said playwright Tony Kushner, who made the dying-of-AIDS Roy Cohn a major character in his epic play Angels in America, then you're thinking in the same groove as NPR's This Week in Politics, which yesterday shared a phone interview that David Furst did with Kushner from London. Here's how the Cohn-Trump and Cohn-Kushner connections are established on WNYC's program page for This Week in Politics:

In just about any introduction for Roy Cohn, you find the word 'infamous' within the first sentence or two. He was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the senator's Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. Instrumental in the trial that led to Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg’s executions.  Attorney to mafia bosses. Eventually disbarred for misconduct in 1986.

And in the 1970s and 80s, he was Donald trump's lawyer. Many say, his mentor.

Roy Cohn appears as one of the characters in Angels in America, Tony Kushner's award-winning play and miniseries about New York during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.

This week, playwright Tony Kushner joins host David Furst to talk about Cohn, Trump and the 2016 race. Kushner is in London, where he's working on his new show, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.

Now Kushner isn't exactly a fan of Roy Cohn, but he feels a connection to him and his story, which is how he came to put Cohn in Angels in America. At the time of Cohn's death, a closeted gay man felled by AIDS, Kushner was uncomfortable with the homophobic glee in the response of some of Cohn's longtime enemies, and thought the story at least called for some looking into.

Kushner specifies in the interview that he has to be careful to distinguish the real Roy Cohn from the character he created in the play, but he carefully notes that he devoured every source he could find on the subject, and in the interview he surprises David Kurtz at the outset by saying that no, he doesn't see a copy of Roy Cohn in Donald Trump.


TONY SAYS: "IT SEEMS WEIRD TO SAY THIS,
BUT I THINK MAYBE ROY WAS A FINER PERSON"

What? Tony thinks Donald Trump doesn't measure up to the likes of Roy Cohn?


"No, AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer," a belligerent Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) insists in response to the diagnosis his doctor (James Cromwell) is trying to deliver, in Mike Nichols's HBO production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

Here's Tony K:

I felt, in reading about [Roy Cohn], and I read everything I could get my hands on, that there was something coherent in his core, that he was -- for all of his maliciousness and his ruthlessness and his destructiveness, in the case of the Rosenbergs' execution (he frequently bragged about forcing the judge to send Ethel Rosenberg to death; his malevolence crossed over into judicial murder) -- so he's a very bad person.

But one thing that impressed me was that from the day McCarthy drank himself to death to the day Roy Cohn died, he never abandoned the memory of Joe McCarthy. He defended it; he defended what McCarthy had done; he defended McCarthy himself, as a wonderful person. In reading what Roy wrote about him, and he wrote a lot about him, it seemed to me that this was somebody who actually was capable of loving someone else, and maintaining that love, even when it became very unfashionable to do so.

Which speaks to a kind of character consistency in Roy that I see no evidence of whatsoever in Donald Trump, who seems to me to be a profoundly disloyal person who's so entirely interested in himself to the exclusion of all else, who lives in a world of delusion that's entirely created by his titanic, monstrous narcissism, that loyalty to other people, which requires a kind of object constancy, is completely out of the question.

So he seems to me really nothing like Roy in that sense. It seems weird to say this, but I think Roy was maybe a finer person than Donald Trump.

KUSHNER RECOGNIZES TRUMP-STYLE POLITICAL
TACTICS AS "THE QUINTESSENCE OF McCARTHYISM"


This photo was one of those used to accompany an extensive piece that Trump biographer David Cay Johnston wrote for London's Daily Mail in July, "How Trump made the Mob an offer they could not refuse: He might have made a killing building his first skyscraper, but Donald's shrewdest investment was in the MAFIA."

Which is not to say that Kushner doesn't see the Cohn-McCarthy legacy in Trump. Asked about such things as Trump's practice of systematic character assassination of his opponents and his "relentless conspiracy theories," Kushner says, "It makes complete sense that he learned lessons from Roy, who learned lessons from McCarthy, or McCarthy learned lessons from Roy, or the two of them together cooked up this style."

Then Kushner listens to a pair of audio clips: first, McCarthy raving about "Communist infiltration of the CIA" and our nuclear program and God knows what else; then Trump saying, "She's guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it's rigged."

Kushner pronounces this "the quintessence of McCarthyism."

And it has been horrifying but kind of fascinating to watch it happen in real time as opposed to reading about it in the history books. If you say an enormous lie, that you yourself know is a lie, and you just repeat it over and over again, and don't bother to answer any questions about it, and never get yourself in a situation where you're going to have to answer the questions -- I mean, that's where McCarthy made his big misstep, taking on the U.S. armed forces, so soon after World War II, and calling them an organization full of traitors --

and, of course, precipitating the televised hearings that unmasked McCarthy in front of the whole country. This lesson Trump seems to have learned quite well, Kushner suggests, noting that he's "pretty good at avoiding" answering awkward questions.

Mostly he never has to really explain anything, or reconcile any contradictions, and he just repeats whatever lie has popped into his head over and over again, leaving us to simply wonder, "Does he know he's lying now?" And whether the con artist believes his own con is a kind of a mesmerizing question. It's just unfortunately not the question we should be obsessed with in a presidential election.

#

Trump Triumphed Despite Having All Of Roy Cohn’s Debits But None Of His Assets-- Legal Cunning, Brainpower And Loyalty. And Michael Cohen?

Yesterday ABC News reported some financial shenanigans that show one way Señor Trumpanzee has been obstructing justice, using his crooked campaign pay for the defense of his crooked lawyer, Michael Cohen. Do you think Trump would be paying for Cohen's lawyers if Cohen were cooperating with the Justice Department? So far Trump has thrown in nearly a quarter million dollars to keep Cohen from flipping. At the very least that violates campaign finance laws since Cohen has said that he did not have a formal role in the Trump campaign, and it is illegal to spend campaign funds for personal use.

Can Cohen really be that incompetent? Why does Trump even employ him or why did Trump ever employ him? When Trump claimed he hired "only the best people," what was he measuring them against? Himself, of course. Is Trump the best person? Of course not. Trump is the worst person and he hires people like himself, claiming they are-- like himself-- the best. Look at that cabinet! Look at that chaotic White House! Would anyone competent or honorable even work for Trump to begin with?

As for Cohen... Frank Rich wrote an informative piece for New York Magazine that gets to the bottom of why Trump works with Cohen. Simply put... Trump's mobster lawyer, Roy Cohn, is dead, so Trump took a bargain bin version. Cohn was one of the worst characters to land on the public stage in the last century. He and Trump were, of course, drawn each other. Michael Cohen is a Roy Cohn wannabe-- perfect for Trumpanzee.

Roy Cohn, wrote Rich, ended his miserable life as a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man battling AIDS, a real-life Über-villain of America’s 20th century-- "The polestar of human evil; the worst human being who ever lived … the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54." Trump's mentor ("counterpunch viciously, deny everything, stiff your creditors, manipulate the tabloids") and his idea of the best lawyer ("ruthless bullying and profane braggadocio"). Cohn, he wrote, "was supposed to have been washed up in 1954, after he and his superior in witch-hunting, Joe McCarthy, imploded in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy drank himself to death, and Cohn fled Washington a pariah, his brief career in government service in ruins."

How Mafia is THAT?

Rich is fascinated how Cohn both survived and flourished as a Manhattan eminence in the quarter-century between McCarthy and Reagan and calls it "an ellipsis that gnawed at me because the same question applies to Trump. Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank-and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a young man in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected of manslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets-- legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty. (The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what Dan Quayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.) And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concede it, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many of his betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt."

The story of Trump’s ascent complicates the equation for those who want to believe that it was exclusively a product of his genius for publicity, or his B-stardom in a long-running reality show in NBC’s prime time, or a vast right-wing conspiracy abetted by deplorable voters like those in Wisconsin who sent McCarthy to the Senate in 1946 and helped Trump take the Electoral College in 2016. Nor is Trump’s New York backstory comforting to those of us in the habit of quarantining the blame for his unlikely victory to Russian and/or Comey’s interference, the ineptitude of the Clinton campaign, the Fox News–Breitbart complex, and the cynical, feckless Vichy Republicans who stood by as Trump subverted every principle they once claimed to have held dear.

There are Vichy Democrats too. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment-- some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn. Like Cohn (a registered Democrat until he died) and Trump (an off-and-on Democrat for years), their enablers were not committed to any party or ideology. Their priority was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity. Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman described what he called the “Roy Cohn Barter and Swap Exchange”: It specialized in “deals, favors, hand washings, and reciprocities of all kinds.” And while Cohn is gone, the exchange never shut down. Its unofficial legislative body is the floating quid pro quo Favor Bank that has always made New York tick at its highest levels, however corruptly, since Tammany Hall. It’s a realm where everyone has his (or her) price, and clout is always valued higher than any civic good. All that matters is the next transaction. Since time immemorial, those who find it unsavory are invariably dismissed as naïve.

The more I’ve looked back at the entanglements of Trump, Cohn, and their overlapping circles and modi operandi, the more I think the crux of their political culture could be best captured if Edward Sorel were to create a raucous mural depicting the Friday night in February 1979 when Cohn celebrated his 52nd birthday at Studio 54. That sprawling midtown Valhalla of the disco era, a nexus for boldface names, omnivorous drug consumption, anonymous sex, and managerial larceny, was owned by Cohn’s clients (and soon-to-be-imprisoned felons) Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The guest list? “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” went the comedian Joey Adams’s oft-repeated joke about Cohn’s soirées. Among the (all-white) Democratic revelers joining Republican and Conservative party leaders at Cohn’s black-tie testimonial were the borough presidents of Queens (Donald Manes), Brooklyn (Howard Golden), and Manhattan (Andrew Stein), not to mention the former Democratic mayor Abe Beame and a bevy of judges, including the chief of the U.S. District Court. The investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who covered the scrum from the sidewalk for the Village Voice, noted that, among the usual Warhol celebrity crowd, politicians, and fixers, was a “surprise” attendee-- “newcomer Chuck Schumer, a ‘reform’ assemblyman from Brooklyn who insisted he was just the date of a gossip columnist.” Also in attendance, less surprisingly, and camera-ready for the paparazzi, was the 32-year-old Trump, who by then had been in Cohn’s orbit for six years.

...A few months after the Studio 54 bacchanal, Morley Safer would front a soft 60 Minutes Cohn profile in which, among other euphemisms, viewers were informed that Cohn had never tied the knot with his oft-rumored fiancée Barbara Walters because “he’s just not the marrying kind.” In its effort to be “balanced,” the piece came off as a free ad for Cohn’s supposed legal wizardry and cast him as something of a victim. (Intriguingly, this 60 Minutes segment cannot be found on YouTube, while a tougher, if tardy, Mike Wallace profile, made as Cohn was dying seven years later, can be [that's it, up top].) By that point, Walters had long since delivered for her platonic fiancé with her first promotional profile of his shiny young protégé for ABC’s 60 Minutes rival 20/20. Titled “The Man Who Has Everything,” it was, in the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio’s description, “wealth pornography.” Among other superlatives, it floated the dubious claim (for the 1970s) that “the Trumps are treated like American royalty.”

For years it’s been a parlor game for Americans to wonder how history might have turned out if someone had stopped Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot JFK. One might be tempted-- just as fruitlessly-- to speculate on what might have happened if more of New York’s elites had intervened back then, nonviolently, to block or seriously challenge Trump’s path to power. They had plenty of provocation and opportunities to do so. Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York’s upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. They could cop out of any moral judgments or actions by rationalizing him as an entertaining con man: a cheesy, cynical, dumbed-down Gatsby who fit the city’s tacky 1980s Gilded Age much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more romantic prototype had the soigné Jazz Age of the 1920s. And so most of those who might have stopped Trump gawked like the rest of us as he scrambled up the city’s ladder, grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down. [Trump and Schumer have to pretend sometimes to be at each other's throats.]

It was Democrats in New York who taught both Cohn and Trump that they could buy off politicians and try to get away with anything. Cohn’s father, Al, was a Bronx and then New York State Supreme Court judge. The elder Cohn’s roots in the party’s machine were hardwired into his son: Young Roy figured out how to pull strings to fix a parking ticket for a teacher while still in high school. Trump grew up with a father who had been intertwined with the Brooklyn Democratic machine while building his residential-real-estate empire. By the time the clubhouse hack Beame arrived in City Hall in 1974 after the reform mayoralty of John Lindsay, Fred Trump had known him for 30 years. The new mayor immediately gave both Trumps a license to steal by declaring that “whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.” Never mind, as the Trump biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observed, that Donald Trump didn’t have the financing to snag the real-estate prize he then sought, the properties of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. The Beame deputy mayor Stanley Friedman pushed through an enormous 40-year, $400 million tax abatement-- this at the city’s bankrupt nadir-- and in his waning weeks in office fast-tracked the agency approvals Trump needed to rebuild the decrepit old Commodore Hotel as the Grand Hyatt, his first big deal. Roy Cohn served as the closer: The day after the Beame administration was succeeded by Ed Koch’s in 1978, Friedman was paid off for his Trump handiwork with a new job as a partner in Cohn’s law firm. (It was not enough to save Friedman from federal prison a decade later, when he was convicted in unrelated kickback scandals the year after Cohn’s death.)

Trump’s other major political ally as he erected a new, Manhattan real-estate empire on top of his father’s outer-borough fiefdom was the Democratic governor Hugh Carey. Trump engineered a brazen conflict-of-interest that you’d be tempted to call mind-boggling were its contours not being replicated on a far grander scale within the current White House. In the 1970s, Trump hired as his lobbyist Carey’s chief political fund-raiser, Louise Sunshine, even as he and his father were the second-biggest contributors to Carey’s 1978 reelection campaign (only a Carey brother, an oilman, gave more). “He’ll do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution,” said Trump of Carey. And so he did. Trump was unstoppable, though he kept writing checks to other useful Democrats, including a record $270,000 (for a Board of Estimate election) to the Cohn crony Andrew Stein, who served as Manhattan borough president and then New York City Council president from 1978 to 1994 and “whose varied public performances for Trump were a metaphor for gutter government,” in Wayne Barrett’s estimation. (Stein would years later plead guilty to un-Trump-related tax evasion.) Trump would also give to (among others) Schumer, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo, who took Trump as a client even as his father was governor and Trump was conniving to develop the West Side yards and build a domed football stadium in Queens.

Unlike Trump, Cohn had no interest in building anything. He wanted to tear down institutions and people for fun and profit. To shield him from repercussions, legal or otherwise, he didn’t have just a retinue of politicians from both parties in his pocket but a client list whose breadth was no doubt aspirational to the young Trump — the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the self-described “boss of bosses” Carmine “Lilo” Galante, and the city’s reigning real-estate titans (the Helmsleys, LeFraks, et al.), as well as the Newhouse publishing empire and Studio 54. This coterie either looked the other way or gave Cohn cover during transgression after transgression, some of them proto-Trump financial flimflams in which he looted banks or companies; others involving unpaid bills to creditors as varied as the IRS, Dunhill Tailors, and a local locksmith; still others more sensational. In the late 1960s, Cohn took a loan of $100,000 from a client for whom he negotiated a suspiciously parsimonious divorce settlement from a billionaire, and fought paying it back until the case threatened his law license in the early 1980s. In the 1970s, a Florida court ruled that Cohn had pushed an elderly friend in mental decline, Lewis Rosenstiel, the founder of the Schenley liquor empire, into signing a will that made Cohn a trustee of his estate. It was in 1973, the year he met Trump, that perhaps the most sinister of the Cohn horror stories of his post-McCarthy career unfolded. A yacht leased by a shell company Cohn controlled was sent to sea despite having been judged in dire disrepair by its previous captain. A suspicious fire broke out, the yacht sank, a crew member died, and Cohn collected both legal fees and a back-channel insurance payout.

...Exhibit A of the Times’ credulousness is the puffy feature that put him on the media map in 1976. “He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford,” read the lead. At this early date, Trump had only proposed ambitious projects, not built them or closed any of the requisite deals, but the profile christened him “New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter of the mid-1970’s” nonetheless. The article accepted Trump’s word that he was of Swedish descent, “publicity shy,” ranked first in his class at Wharton, made millions in unspecified land deals in California, was worth $200 million, and with his father owned 22,000 apartment units. None of this was remotely true, but the sexy brew of hyperbole and outright fantasy, having been certified by the paper of record, set the tone for much that was to come.

In 1981, for instance, the Times could be found quoting an unnamed “real-estate official” (John Barron, perhaps?) furthering the implausible notion that Prince Charles and Diana were considering the purchase of a 21-room condo in Trump Tower for $5 million-- a useful bit of free false advertising as the development’s condos went on the market for a 1983 opening. A 1984 Times Magazine profile christened Trump “the man of the hour” just as he was embarking on his financially reckless (and ultimately catastrophic) expansion into Atlantic City. Along the way, Trump continued to inflate his net worth. He was so obsessed with the Forbes annual list ranking the wealthiest Americans that he had Cohn muscle the magazine to fix it, a tale recently recounted in full by a former Forbes staffer, Jonathan Greenberg, in the Washington Post. By the 1990s, no less a television personage than ABC’s Diane Sawyer courted an exclusive PrimeTime Live interview with Marla Maples, complete with a best-sex-you-ever-had question, to facilitate the promotion of the Trump brand-- “one of the low points in television journalism history,” in the judgment of the PBS anchor Robert MacNeil. The ultimate result of such fake news retailed by real-news outlets, as Michael D’Antonio would conclude just before Trump’s presidential run, is that “no one in the world of business-- not Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett-- has been as famous for as long.” And one might add: No one as famous in business has been famous for a portfolio of low-rent businesses that included the likes of Trump University and Trump Steaks.

...During his campaign, Trump made a cause out of the corruption intrinsic to pay-for-play political donations like those he used to give. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he claimed, “which is why I alone can fix it.” The second half of that sentence was a lie, but the first was true. As he’d elaborate in pitch-perfect Cohn-speak, he gave to “everybody” because “when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.” At the first Republican presidential debate in August 2015, he fine-tuned his target: “Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice, because I gave.”

He was referring to the fact that either he or his “foundation” gave at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He could have added that between 2002 and 2009, he had also contributed six times to Hillary Clinton’s political war chest. And that he had given Bill Clinton, whom he met with to discuss fund-raising as far back as 1994, free access to his northern-Westchester club, Trump National, and on occasion played golf with him there. Even without that degree of incriminating detail, Trump’s accusation of a quid pro quo stung Hillary Clinton-- so much so that after her defeat, she felt compelled to revisit Trump’s wedding invitation, sort of, in the opening pages of her postelection self-autopsy, What Happened. “He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a senator-- like a lot of big-shot real-estate guys of the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting,” she writes of Trump. “In 2005 he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assume he wanted as much star power as you can get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right.”

Let’s posit that Clinton is telling the truth when she says that she attended the wedding only because “Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend” and she wanted to take in a campy spectacle-- an explanation that clears her of Trump’s charge that his contributions compelled her to turn up. Let’s also give her a pass for choosing not to regurgitate her and Bill’s financial history with Trump. Even so, everything else about this breezy and disingenuous paragraph epitomizes the honor-among-celebrities ethos of the bipartisan New York Establishment that helped Trump get where he was by 2005. To say that Trump was typical of “big-shot real-estate guys of the city” but merely “more flamboyant and self-promoting” is tantamount to saying that Robert Durst was typical of the big-shot real-estate guys in the Durst family but more prone to being accused of murder. The Clintons had to know that there was a more malevolent side to Trump’s so-called flamboyance than his boorishness, vulgar properties, television stardom, tawdry tabloid antics, and even his brazen destruction of bas-relief sculptures he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum when demolishing Bonwit Teller for Trump Tower. None of it was secret. If the Clintons didn’t know, it’s because they didn’t want to know.

After all, it had been front-page news, including in the Times, when the federal government sued the Trumps under the Fair Housing Act in 1973 for refusing to rent apartments to black applicants (whose paperwork they coded “C” for “colored”). This suit was filed just after Trump had met Cohn, who took on the case and filed a frivolous countersuit demanding $100 million from the government for “defamation.” The Trumps retreated two years later by signing a consent decree-- and soon violated that, too, forcing the Department of Justice to file new complaints of racial discrimination in 1978. The Clintons might have also heard how in 1989 Trump, running amok in a trademark rage, tried to help toss the city into turmoil by taking out a full-page racist ad in the four daily papers demanding a reinstitution of the death penalty for “roving bands of wild criminals” after five black male teenagers were charged (erroneously, as DNA would confirm in 2002) in the rape of a white female Central Park jogger. The Clintons may have even encountered the news, as did most Americans, that Ivana Trump had accused her husband of rape in a sworn divorce deposition uncovered by Harry Hurt III for his 1993 Trump biography.

So to return to Hillary Clinton’s flip rhetorical question: Why not go to the Trump-Melania wedding in 2005? These incidents are just a few of the many reasons why a former president and sitting United States senator with presidential ambitions should not have gone to this particular “fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle” in Palm Beach. But they just couldn’t stop themselves, any more than so many Democratic leaders of a quarter-century earlier couldn’t resist dressing up for Cohn’s fun, gaudy, over-the-top birthday gala at Studio 54. In the bipartisan New York political culture that nurtured Cohn and Trump, the statute of limitations for nearly every crime or outrage lasts about 48 hours. Nothing sticks; even repeated racist bygones can be bygones. Whether Hillary Clinton attended the wedding (Bill showed solely for the reception) because she’d taken Trump’s money, or because she wanted to be in the mix of power and celebrity no matter how tacky, or because she hoped there might be more favors to extract from Trump or someone else in the wedding party, doesn’t matter. Whatever the explanation, the then–New York senator, sitting in a reserved seat in the front row, lent a touch of civic legitimacy to Trump that the other glitzy celebrities on hand could not. He got what he’d paid for. He had written his checks knowing that the Clintons could be counted on not to bite the small hand that fed them-- at least not until their own self-interest was threatened in 2016.

...Some of the rich, connected, and powerful New Yorkers who failed to stand up to Trump before it was too late tried to cover their tracks once the music stopped and he had won the Republican nomination for president. When in April 2016 the Hollywood Reporter called 89 guests who had been at his 2005 wedding to request a comment, it did not receive a single response. One attendee who did speak up during the election year was the novelist Joseph O’Neill, who had attended as the plus-one of an invited Vogue editor. Writing in the New Yorker, he suggested that “a revisionist remembrance” was called for given Trump’s “metamorphosis into a would-be dictator.” A wedding that he had viewed ever since as “an anomalous and trivial item of personal recollection” now struck him “as the stuff of historic testimony,” perhaps to be reviewed “in the spirit of a Hannah Arendt or a Victor Klemperer."

#TrumpSoPoor

Nick Confessore and Rachel Shorey must have mortified notorious braggart and cheapskate Donald J. Trump Monday night with their piece about his broken, broke and tattered presidential campaign-- "the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history, placing both his candidacy and his party in political peril." I wonder if Paul Ryan has picked out the outfits he plans to wear at the convention in Cleveland.

Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.

He has a staff of around 70 people-- compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton-- suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall. And he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday, after concerns among allies and donors about his ability to run a competitive race.

The Trump campaign has not aired a television advertisement since he effectively secured the nomination in May and has not booked any advertising for the summer or fall. Mrs. Clinton and her allies spent nearly $26 million on advertising in June alone, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, pummeling Mr. Trump over his temperament, his statements and his mocking of a disabled reporter. The only sustained reply, aside from Mr. Trump’s gibes at rallies and on Twitter, has come from a pair of groups that spent less than $2 million combined.

Mr. Trump’s fund-raising for May reflects his lag in assembling the core of a national finance team. In the same month that he clinched the Republican nomination, Mr. Trump raised just $3.1 million and was forced to lend himself $2 million to meet costs. Some invitations to Trump fund-raising events have featured the same short list of national Republican finance volunteers regardless of what city the event is held in, suggesting Mr. Trump has had some trouble lining up local co-hosts.

...[T]he shortfall is leaving Mr. Trump extraordinarily dependent on the Republican National Committee, which has seen record fund-raising this campaign cycle and, long before Mr. Trump even declared his upstart candidacy, had begun investing heavily in a long-range plan to bolster the party’s technical and organizational capacity.

In a first for a major party nominee, Mr. Trump has suggested he will leave the crucial task of field organizing in swing states to the Republican National Committee, which typically relies on the party’s nominee to help fund, direct and staff national Republican political efforts. His decision threatens to leave the party with significant shortfalls of money and manpower: On Monday, the party reported raising $13 million during May, about a third of the money it raised in May 2012, when Mitt Romney led the ticket.

...Allies of Mr. Trump say they believe the tide is already turning. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump will appear at a high-dollar fund-raiser in New York City hosted by some of the most prominent names on Wall Street.

Fund-raisers for Mr. Trump, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal discussions, said they were now hoping to raise up to $500 million in joint efforts with the Republican National Committee, or an average of $100 million a month from June through October. He is now reliably raising between $5 million and $7 million in each city where he raises money, those donors said.

A joint fund-raising effort with Mr. Trump and 11 state Republican parties yielded the Republican National Committee $3 million in just five days at the end of May. Some of the largest checks came from a handful of wealthy Trump supporters who are not party mainstays, suggesting Mr. Trump could tap new sources of campaign money.

But Mr. Romney was also backed by expansive network of deep-pocketed “super PACs” and other outside groups that collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to elect him. This year, the Democrats are leading in outside money. Priorities USA Action, a group focused on advertising in support of Mrs. Clinton, announced on Monday that it had raised $12 million in May and had $52 million on hand-- a huge reserve.

The outside spending effort to help Mr. Trump, by contrast, has been chaotic and underfunded, hampered by a profusion of competing groups, one of which has spent only $1 million so far on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

The most prominent group, Great America, is advised by Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign, and other more seasoned Republican operatives. But it, too, has had difficulty persuading big donors: On Monday, it reported raising just $1.4 million during the month of May.

Fund-raising efforts for Mr. Trump have been hampered by the candidate’s own erratic public comments. He has repeatedly said he will pay for his own campaign even as his volunteers fan out around the country to solicit six-figure checks, confusing allies and potential donors alike.

“Two days ago, he said, ‘I may fund it myself,’” Mr. Rollins said. “Donors are all being cautious about what’s going to happen here.”

And they should be cautious. Trump is a crook, has already funneled GOP money into the pockets of his own companies and to his children and, as Jonathan Mahler pointed out in the NYTimes Monday, Trump learned an awful lot from one of the most notorious political scoundrels of the 20h Century, his deceitful mentor Roy Cohn. When Cohn was Trump's lawyer his "reputation was well established. He had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting consigliere. He had helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for spying and elect Richard M. Nixon president. Then New York’s most feared lawyer, Mr. Cohn had a client list that ran the gamut from the disreputable to the quasi-reputable: Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, Claus von Bulow, George Steinbrenner." He and Trump were a match made in hell.

For Mr. Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, weeks after being disbarred for flagrant ethical violations, Mr. Trump was something of a final project. If Fred Trump got his son’s career started, bringing him into the family business of middle-class rentals in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Cohn ushered him across the river and into Manhattan, introducing him to the social and political elite while ferociously defending him against a growing list of enemies.

Decades later, Mr. Cohn’s influence on Mr. Trump is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid-- the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as brand-- has been a Roy Cohn number on a grand scale. Mr. Trump’s response to the Orlando massacre, with his ominous warnings of a terrorist attack that could wipe out the country and his conspiratorial suggestions of a Muslim fifth column in the United States, seemed to have been ripped straight out of the Cohn playbook.

“I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly,” said Peter Fraser, who as Mr. Cohn’s lover for the last two years of his life spent a great deal of time with Mr. Trump. “That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth-- that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”

For 13 years, the lawyer who had infamously whispered in McCarthy’s ear whispered in Mr. Trump’s. In the process, Mr. Cohn helped deliver some of Mr. Trump’s signature construction deals, sued the National Football League for conspiring against his client and countersued the federal government-- for $100 million-- for damaging the Trump name. One of Mr. Trump’s executives recalled that he kept an 8-by-10-inch photograph of Mr. Cohn in his office desk, pulling it out to intimidate recalcitrant contractors.

The two men spoke as often as five times a day, toasted each other at birthday parties and spent evenings together at Studio 54.

And Mr. Cohn turned repeatedly to Mr. Trump-- one of a small clutch of people who knew he was gay-- in his hours of need. When a former companion was dying of AIDS, he asked Mr. Trump to find him a place to stay. When he faced disbarment, he summoned Mr. Trump to testify to his character.

Mr. Trump says the two became so close that Mr. Cohn, who had no immediate family, sometimes refused to bill him, insisting he could not charge a friend.

...The two had met not long before at a private disco called Le Club, and instantly hit it off while discussing a nettlesome obstacle for Mr. Trump. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was suing him and his father, accusing them of refusing to rent to black tenants. Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohn that their lawyers were urging them to settle.

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court,’” Mr. Trump later recalled Mr. Cohn advising him.

Mr. Trump did just that, with Mr. Cohn as his lawyer. Not only did Mr. Cohn countersue the government for $100 million, he filed a blistering affidavit on Mr. Trump’s behalf, mocking the case. “The Civil Rights Division did not file a lawsuit,” Mr. Cohn wrote. “It slapped together a piece of paper for use as a press release.” The Trumps ultimately settled the case by agreeing to make apartments available to minority renters, while admitting no wrongdoing.

...Among the many things Mr. Trump learned from Mr. Cohn during these years was the importance of keeping one’s name in the newspapers. Long before Mr. Trump posed as his own spokesman, passing self-serving tidbits to gossip columnists, Mr. Cohn was known to call in stories about himself to reporters.

...He used his connections to help Mr. Trump secure zoning variances and tax abatements critical to the construction of the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the Trump Plaza.

After one Cohn coup, Mr. Trump rewarded him with a pair of diamond-encrusted cuff links and buttons in a Bulgari box.

And if Mr. Cohn did not always feel comfortable charging a friend for his services, Mr. Trump was hardly one to put up a fight.

“Roy said, ‘I’ll leave it to Donald to give me what he thinks is fair,’” Mr. Fraser recalled of one lengthy Trump tax case in particular. “But, of course, Donald didn’t give him anything.”

Some work would have been difficult to bill. For instance, Mr. Cohn lobbied his friends in the Reagan White House to nominate Mr. Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry to the federal bench. (Questioned last year about this, Mr. Trump said his sister “got the appointment totally on her own merit.”)

...In June 1986, Mr. Cohn was disbarred for “unethical,” “unprofessional” and “particularly reprehensible” conduct.

...Fraser inherited all of Mr. Cohn’s possessions: the townhouse, his weekend place in Greenwich, Conn., his Rolls-Royce, his private plane and much more. But the Internal Revenue Service, collecting on Mr. Cohn’s tax debts, confiscated nearly everything.

He did get to keep the cuff links Mr. Trump had given Mr. Cohn. Years later, Mr. Fraser had them appraised; they were knockoffs, he said.

Mr. Fraser soon returned to his native New Zealand, where he now works as a conservationist at the Auckland Zoo. He has not spoken with Mr. Trump since Mr. Cohn’s death, but he has no doubt that if his former lover were still alive, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Trump campaign.

“Having trained or mentored someone who became president,” he said, “that would have been quite exciting for Roy.”

For America... not so much, primarily because the country would suffer grievous economic losses if Trump and the GOP ever got to implement the crap they're running on-- at least according to a report Monday from Moody's. "[T]he nation did not fare particularly well in any scenario of full-on Trumpism, Trump Lite or a more-compromising version of the candidate." After studying Trump's tax and economic proposals, Moody's concluded that "after-inflation income, stock prices and home values would likely decline" and that there "would be the loss of 3.4 million jobs rather than the 6 million increase in employment currently expected." They assert that Trump's proposals would leave the economy in a "lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office." Its report also criticizes his "tax reform that will make America great again," saying that most of the proposed cuts would go to the wealthy and lower- and middle-class homes would be hit hard by job losses."

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.’