DONALD, MELANIA, and OSCAR
OUR ENCOUNTER AT THE VANITY FAIR OSCAR PARTY (And A Compendium of Trump Items in Spy Magazine)
(Above: Spy’s August 1990 cover. The story predicts Trump’s collapsing fortunes)
Watching the January 6th Committee Hearing this week and the astonishing (but not surprising) testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, I began to think about The Tacky Know-Nothing Fascist Vulgarian, as I have called Trump for the last six years on my social media posts as an allusion to Spy’s decades earlier designation of him at The Short-Fingered Vulgarian. The boorish, sociopathic, tantrum-trimmed behavior to which she testified proves what I have always thought about him and his arrested development. I hope an imminent development in the unfolding narrative is his actual arrest. He must be held to account.
Playing with words as I just did in the previous paragraph calms me when confronted with vulgarity and indecency at their darkest depths with which Trump is capable of displaying them; the play of words helps me order the world in some way - or reorder it from all the disorder in which we seem to live these days, this world bounded by ketchup-splattered walls, which in Hutchinson’s testimony became a conflation of actuality and metaphor as so much of Trump’s disordered narcissistic malignancy does. As I braved more of Hutchinson’s brave testimony, I thought how weighted two words have become in the vernacular of the talking heads on television panels: “mob” and “plot.”
(Above: From Spy’s March 1989 issue and its infamous Separated at Birth feature.
The journalists refer to the insurrectionists as the mob to put, to my mind, a kinder more generic spin on those who stormed the capital and terrorized those inside. But what I also hear when they repeatedly say “mob” is how I have always sensed that Trump was “mobbed-up” to use another vernacular known as newyorkese. His behavior described by Hutchinson sounded like someone who had seen too many mobster movies or been around too many mobster types in real life. He has always run his real estate endeavors as if his business plan were based on how a mafioso would operate. It has become obvious that he even considered those who worked for him in Washington, D.C. his consiglieri no matter what West Wing titles they might have had. Claire McCaskill has called what was happening in the White House as “a crime syndicate” operating out of the Oval Office. She suggested that when he is finally held to account that the prosecution of him will be based on how members of crime syndicates have been tried in court.
I was having lunch today here in New York with a big PR/marketing maven and we agreed we’d like to know who is running the show at the hearings because they are doing just that: putting on a great show. The talking heads have mentioned how important it is to “tell a narrative to the American people.” They repeatedly emphasize the importance of narrative. As a writer, I have long looked on my own life as narrative. Indeed, I think I am a writer because I always have. We watch these hearings the way we watch other television shows. We are waiting to see which way the plot is going to turn. There is lots of talk of plot. But plot is also a verb. And each time they talk about the plot that the committee is telling us, I also think of the plotting that was going on in the Oval Office. This is a plot about plotting a crime by a crime syndicate run by The Tacky Know-Nothing Fascist Vulgarian.
(Above: From the July/August 1994 Spy issue. Another infamous feature was its Celebrity Math column.)
The narrative of Trump’s life and rise in New York paralleled temporally my own life in New York during my coming of age there. We occupied in different ways the world of celebrity in New York City. I am sure there are those who would describe me as tacky or vulgar myself because I’d often find myself in his vicinity. But I would always long to leave a room when he entered it with a whiff of sulfur following in his wake. I’m not joking. I swear sometimes I got a whiff of it because of his nearness to me. No cheap Trump-branded cologne could disguise it and even in its way enhanced it. The hollowness of the man could hollow out a room. It’s hard to explain, but no matter how crowded it was his presence emitted an emptiness.
(Above: One of my favorite Trump mentions in Spy was this addition to its Corrections column in its March 1990 issue after a reader had sent it in from another correction published by The Stanford Daily, the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University and distributed throughout Palo Alto, California.)
During my years as a writer and editor at Vanity Fair, Trump longed to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party even though he and Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s former and now legendary Editor-in-Chief, had a history because Graydon - who always had the guy pegged - ridiculed him mercilessly in Spy magazine when he was its editor. But in 2004, Graydon relented with a bemused gentlemanliness and let Trump come along with his latest wife, Melania.
This is a slightly revised version of what I once wrote on Facebook about the party that night:
(TO READ MY ACCOUNT OF MY ENCOUNTER WITH TRUMP AND MELANIA, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS. )