On Hearing President Trump in Person -- And Not Hating It

Today is a new low for an America that is being dragged through every humiliation, in its re-christening as a thoroughgoing Banana Republic.

I’ve long argued that symbolic degradation of the US is part of the psychological war being waged against us. No President checks his watch multiple times at a military funeral without that act being scripted. No Vice President organically departs from talking points to repeat herself randomly, and to create the trademark “word salads”, devoid of linear meaning, that Vice President Harris produces. That public, symbolic demonstration of meaninglessness at the highest levels of our government, is itself central to the script.

And the abuse of our grand jury process, in the effort underway now to imprison the leading opposition candidate for the Presidency of the United States, is not about the actual grand jury process.

A Georgia Grand Jury handed down an indictment on August 14, 2023, presenting President Trump and his colleagues with felony racketeering and conspiracy charges, among other charges. This drama of President Trump’s indictment now — the fact that he must detour from the campaign trail for appearances before prosecutors, or must divert energy from speech preparation and consulting with campaign staff, to spend time with lawyers to prepare their responses to these charges — is itself the symbolic drama.

Again, speaking as someone who was in the background when both Vice President Gore’s and George Bush Jr’s lawyers were instructed to find ways to locate the votes to get their Principal over the top, and when both campaigns sought to coordinate their efforts closely with grassroots get-out-the-vote organizations and with state level leadership figures on both sides — I am appalled that one accusation presented in the indictment, was that President Trump — essentially tried to do a similar thing.

The description of what is requested for the months ahead should resonate with anyone who has studied the history of show trials: there will be a trial requested for within the next six months — that is, during peak campaign season — and the plan is for all of the defendants are to be tried together.

That’s how Premier Stalin and Chairman Mao presented their show trials and public confessions, in 1936-1938 and in the 1950s, respectively, as well:

“Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis said that all 19 defendants would be tried at the same time and that she would be asking for a trial within the next six months.”

What this is about is not criminality but about the timing of a targeting that demonstrates the subversion of our democracy. The opposition leader, fewer than five months before the Iowa caucuses, is drained of the time, focus and resources to make his case to the American public. He must worry about trying to stay out of jail, even as precious dates are cancelled from the campaign calendar. This is exactly what happens in banana republics. The opposition leader is imprisoned or indicted under inflated charges while he or she is on the campaign trail.

Whatever becomes of this indictment, no future opposition leader will dare to challenge a contested election, as I noted earlier. With the indictment on August 14 2023 of many of President Trump’s colleagues as well (also as in the 1930s and 1950s in the Soviet Union and in China), a precedent has been established that non-legacy, that is, non-”anointed” candidates, will not be able to find help for their campaigns, as speechwriters, lawyers, fundraisers and campaign staffers will fear future lawfare.

Here I disclose that I actually went to hear President Trump in person — last month, at an event in his private Trump National Bedminster Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. I was given the opportunity to attend by a friend, and, while I hesitated, it was only for a moment. No real journalist should give up the chance to hear a former President, and current candidate for that job, in person.

So I agreed, and Brian and I set out.

That experience took me aback as it made me rethink many of my reflexes — reflexes that even I recognize have been engineered by propaganda and repetition, as I too am only human; reflexes engineered in me to make me “hate Donald Trump.”

First of all, the physical setting, to which we arrived a day before the speech, as we were hosted overnight, led me to question some preconceptions. I’d been conditioned to believe that the Trump Inc empire was about poor taste. As I reflected on my cultivated aversion to the man and the brand, I realized that a huge part of the animosity directed at him was a class-based dog whistle system. People “with taste” — that is, the global elite, the liberal elite — “us” — were asked to hate and disdain someone who had been labelled as a “vulgarian” (indeed, a “short-fingered vulgarian”) since the days of Spy magazine.

All of the coverage with which I had been familiar, showcased the apparent crimes of Donald Trump’s bad aesthetic taste. He was a parvenu, was the implication. Not “our kind.”

As a student of Edith Wharton, though, and of New York City social history, I had always been skeptical of this line of attack. For a hundred and fifty years, the New York elite who are already established have been fighting tooth and nail against the generational ascendancy of “new money.” They always revile it.

The old Dutch families fought off the ascendancy of the robber barons, as Wharton documented in her New York Stories, which spanned the years 1891-1934; and then the children of the robber barons, a generation later, sought to fight off the newly minted heirs and heiresses who were the children of sewing machine fortunes and retail and film fortunes — the children of immigrants. That class-driven battle raged right up into the pages of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 Bonfire of the Vanities. Was Donald Trump’s purported bad taste, an actual moral crime? I was never fully persuaded.

But at Bedminster, I was moved, before I even heard the man, by the decisions made by his team, about the physical surroundings. This elegant private club — and you can have your legitimate questions about the very existence of elegant private clubs — was not a monument to ostentation or showy excess. It was, rather, built to remember and celebrate a moment in America in which America was perfect to some people. Everywhere you looked — the rolling laws edged with untouched wilderness, in the heart of New Jersey; the spacious blue swimming pool, ringed with quiet guest rooms; the fountains in classical shapes, and the plantings that provided old-school decoration around them; the clocks that looked straight out of 1915, that studded the outdoors gathering areas; the architecture that invoked a 1920s American vernacular — white clapboard and grey stone; clocktowers overlooking campus-type quads; ivy and tennis courts, and a soft wind blowing — all of it gave me a pang.

I recognized this landscape, these buildings, this moment in the American dream.

This was America between the wars, before the Depression. It was Jay Gatsby’s Long Island — it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision; it was the life for which that writer had always longed. It was the green light at the end of the dock, the future toward which Gatsy was always racing and for which he Fitzgerald himself was always longing; it was the imaginatively perfected, if not real, America that Fitzgerald initially saw: affluent, gorgeous, dreaming, unspoiled.

Now, you can deconstruct that vision all you want. You can point out the lynchings and segregations of the the 1920s; you can point out any number of flaws in our nation at that time. But I recognized this vision — many Ivy League universities were built up at this same time period, using this same romantic iconography — and there are not only crimes in our past, though the crimes are real; there was hope and innocence and idealism for our nation, and for all of our people, in our past too.

Trump’s choices in this miniature world he had created — were not vulgar. They were aspirational, and they encapsulated a memory of an aspirational America. I felt that the physical surroundings, whoever had actually drafted and executed them, helped me to understand his thinking a bit better.

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