A Short History of the Trump Family

[Era Might]

Highly recommend this article.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family

Nobody in New York buys Trump’s humbug that he’s a reincarnation of the original rags-to-riches hero out of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, a Gilded Age tale of pluck and the Protestant Ethic that lifts an urchin to respectability through a business career and churchgoing. In a 1990 interview Trump boasted to Playboy that ‘the working man likes me because he knows I worked hard and didn’t inherit what I’ve built. Hey, I made it myself; I have a right to do what I want with it.’ Trump, the heir with the urchin’s manners, has undergone no moral transformation. The rapacious spirit of his formative Manhattan period – the world of The Bonfire of the Vanities, with its scandal-driven media, unscrupulous race hustlers and politically ambitious district attorneys – is still with him. But he also still lives in the shadow of the fictional character who became the symbol of the Roaring Twenties.

‘What preyed on Gatsby,’ the narrator asks himself in Fitzgerald’s novel, ‘what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams?’ The fabulously wealthy Gatsby takes a mansion on Long Island, holds extravagant parties drawing the swells from Manhattan, and appears to be the effortless maestro of the scene. He has willed himself into being. Gatsby is actually Jay Gatz, a poor boy from the plains, in romantic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the upper-class object of his desire, who once rejected him. He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for whom, as for Tom and Daisy, there are no consequences for ‘smashing things up’. Trump is Tom Buchanan farcically playing Gatsby. Gatsby might have appreciated the audacity, but would have avoided the shabbiness. Both Gatsby and Trump, however, are characters enthralled by the possibility of recapturing the past and reshaping it as they imagine it should have been.

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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 swindlerism, 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.’