FELONIOUS MUNK

THE CRIMINAL WIZARDRY OF DONALD TRUMP WAS ALWAYS A VULGAR SHAM

(Above: Frank Morgan, who played the two conmen, the Wizard and Professor Marvel, in The Wizard of Oz, dancing with Edward G. Robinson, who played a lot of criminals but was far from a tough guy.)

I woke up this morning determined to put the finishing touches on the 6th chapter of the novel I am writing in installments here since I have let too much time elapse between this one and Chapter Five. I have a lot to do today - my last day in Paris this year after what is becoming my annual two months settling here in this life lived as a pilgrimage now - but I did have that on my morning to-do list having done a lot of my packing last night. But then the Trump verdict arrived last night as I was packing and he was found guilty on all 34 of the felony counts against him. I tend to steer clear of politics in this column and keep that kind of writing over on social media, that technological bivouac of bifurcated camps that once was regarded as left and right but is now better described as those who have fumbled into fascism and those of us who now must be its foes, hence the term “bivouac” I pointedly used to make the point since a kind of war footing has always been called upon when fighting fascists on foreign soil and we are confused by how to fight it as it grinds down Americans on the ground where the country’s constitutional republic was constructed with the hopes of keeping the outlines of a democracy in place.

The conundrum with Trump - a popinjay with a Potemkin business, a performer on a reality show which was itself faux and frivolous in its performative cruelty (“You’re fired!”) - is that he is a shallow, unserious person who inspires others to be as shallow and unserious as he is. That is one of the things that most appalls me about all this, how deeply unserious his voters take the presidency. It’s all a reality show to them. America, to them, is a silly game with a game show host being played by Trump yet again. He’s an entertainer, a moldy Uncle Miltie, to use a moldy reference for Milton Berle who was America’s first major television star. And yet fascism - the construct with which Trump has cynically utilized to politicize and enhance his television celebrity based on the con of his being a great businessman - is a deadly serious business as is the criminality that has always underlaid his underhanded elan.

Part of his allure for his followers to whom he gives agency for their own bigotries and cruelties and darkness and lack of decency that they no longer have to hide away because he flaunts his own as a conduit for them is that he always gets away with it - whether the it is all those characteristics or the skirting of the law. But now he hasn’t. I think that even more than his now being a felon is what will be his undoing. He finally hasn't gotten away with it. He’s been held to account like any other person. He’s not Supercon anymore. Last night when he predictably got his munk on after the verdict and was spewing forth his scripted fascistic lies about “the other” and law-and-order after being found feloniously to have broken the law himself, there was a sad sack quality to the usual stroppiness. The bluster was strained.

That is why I don’t buy into the narrative of this verdict making him stronger politically. I think it weakens him because it flies in the face of his own narrative of being untouchable and above the law, The Great Transgressor who shows you how to get away with transgressions yourself. The verdict has put the lie to his narrative, the ur-lie of all his lies. I am always amazed by how he is able to con not just his followers but also so many of those who oppose him and are appalled by him because they too buy into his narrative of his own strength. I never have. He’s a loser who continues to lose. I have never been conned by him.

Indeed, he and I sort of rose side-by-side in the Manhattan of the 1980s and 1990s. I have led a peripheral life just outside the frame of fame. My career at Vanity Fair where I wrote 24 cover stories during my many years there was, in fact, about framing fame itself. I understand celebrity. It was my journalistic beat, my bivouac where I hunkered down and obeyed my orders. I have been around a lot of sleazy and uncouth celebrated people in my time. But there were only two people who could make me leave a room with their vulgar unsavory aesthetically displeasing presence: Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. There was the stench of disrepute about them. I’d sometimes joke I had to leave because I couldn’t stomach the smell of sulfur that trailed them.

I have written over on social media about the time he attended the Vanity Fair Oscar party after Graydon Carter, the magazine’s then Editor in Chief who coined the phrase “The Short-Fingered Vulgarian” for him during his earlier tenure as head of Spy magazine, relented and allowed him to attend after Trump requested an invitation year after year. He arrived with Melania and they were rather shunned and ostracized during the party - which perhaps was why Graydon relented, knowing they would be and it could be witnessed. At one point I found myself in a booth at Morton’s with the two of them, Trump and his moll, and my instinct - as they plopped down and I smelled the sulfur through Melania’s perfume - was to get up and leave. But I thought, hell,I was there first and I’d just ignore their presence if not exactly shun them. This was in the main room after the party had moved back into the tented area after dinner. I had sat there to have a moment to myself and get away from the hubbub. I have no idea why they had. Maybe it was because they got tired of being dissed. After Charlize Theron and Renée Zellweger came in that year carrying their Oscars they had just won and I, having written two recent Vanity Fair cover stories on them, got up to give them a hug before they headed back into the tent to celebrate with their actual friends, Trump looked over at me after I had plopped back down in the booth myself and said, “Who the fuck are you?” I looked right back at him, “Who the fuck are you?” I repeated and then used it as my exit line to follow Charlize and Renee back into the tent.

But I’ve always known who Trump is. He was mentored by the amoral mob lawyer and Joseph McCarthy acolyte Roy Cohn to lie and to cheat and to fetishize power in fascistic ways. He’s a disordered malignant narcissistic. A sociopath. A performer. A crook. A lowlife. A loser. He’ll lose again.