Savage profile gives Trump truly short shrift
Slim, slashing memoir gives tycoon little chance to win GOP nomination
Mark Singer has produced the slightest of books here, just 100 pages — most of it consisting of a superb article he wrote for The New Yorker 20 years ago, with a new introduction and coda to reflect the presidential election. A slender basis for a new publication, perhaps, but Trump & Me offers clearer insight into the mind of the presumptive Republican nominee than any of the detailed biographies written over the years.
This is a journalist’s account of the ordeal of spending time with Donald Trump, and it is often very funny indeed, for it turns out that Trump’s elaborately sculpted hair weave is by no means the weirdest thing about him.
Like any true narcissist and mountebank, Trump often talks of himself in the third person. And like some very rich men, he views women as commodities to be traded when marital sentiment turns bearish. When Singer asks him if he confides in anyone during moments of tribulation, he replies: “Nobody, it’s just not my thing.”
So then what, Singer asks, is Trump’s notion of ideal company — well, comes the reply, “a total piece of ass.” Now on the U.S. campaign trail, Trump demands a high wall be built along the border with Mexico, and suggests Muslims be banned from the United States until he has got the Islamist terror thing sorted out.
But these are not “gaffes,” for they do not reveal a concealed truth. Nor are they evidence of a blunt political outsider speaking truth to Washington elites. They are just cynical morsels tossed into the crowd of angry U.S. men (mostly) who are fed up with stagnant wages and immigrants.
Trump lies so routinely that one former New York political figure declared he would not trust a word Trump said even “if his tongue were notarized.”
The man who presents himself as a self-made tycoon in fact inherited a multimillion-dollar New York real estate fortune from his father. The self-styled tough guy was not drafted for the Vietnam War because of a “heel spur.”
Singer is excellent at describing the disturbing strangeness of Trump’s existence, and the precariousness of his assets.
Over the years, Trump has exaggerated his wealth. His emergence from near-bankruptcy in the early 1990s left creditors with $800 million of his bad debts. Most of the properties with his name emblazoned on them are only part-owned by Trump or just operated under licence. This means that much of his empire is, in Singer’s pleasing phrase, no more than Trump-l’oeil.
Among Singer’s minor details is Trump’s claim that Prince Charles and Diana, at the height of their marital turbulence, had put down thousands for membership in an exclusive club at the Trump gin palace in Palm Beach.
But my favourite little detail concerns a Renoir — La Loge — that hangs in Trump’s monstrous 53-room triplex atop Trump Tower with its blue-onyx lavatory and two-storey dining room with ivory frieze — there to be photographed by lifestyle magazines rather than lived in.
Singer assumes the Renoir is original, and Trump himself does nothing to disabuse him. Only later does Singer discover it was a copy, the original hanging in London’s the Courtauld.
The “real scary” notion that Trump could be president, will not happen, of course: The Trump campaign is already showing signs of unravelling, and it is not impossible that party elders will strike to kill him off at the convention in Cleveland. Anyway it is not feasible to run for the White House against U.S. women, Hispanics, Muslims and gays.
As a Republican presidential contender, you can afford one or two useful enemies, but not the whole gamut, because then the numbers simply don’t work. Trump’s campaign is now failing because, as Singer notes, he has “no core beliefs, no describable political philosophy, and not an iota of curiosity about the practicalities of policy or governance.”
Ultimately, you almost feel sorry for the man, with his “suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable burden” and his germophobe’s terror of shaking hands with the great unwashed he claims to represent.