The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  That was on Tuesday. On Wednesday we gathered to heed the words of Romney’s VP pick, Paul Ron. Now I know that should really be Paul Ryan, but it’s easy to mix him up with Ron Paul: both are antiabortion libertarians who have managed to distill a few predatory slogans from Ayn Rand’s unreadable novel Atlas Shrugged (and if young Paul is blessed with another daughter, he will surely christen her Ayn Ryan—to match Ron’s Rand Paul). Many of us thought that Romney would want someone splashier and more populist on the ticket, Christine O’Donnell, say, or Joe the Plumber. But he went instead for a hard-nut wonk who actually “stands for something.”

  Intriguingly, part of what Ryan stands for will mean electoral defeat in Florida. The whole point of holding the RNC in Tampa was to secure Hillsborough County, a district seen as vital for prevailing in the Sunshine State. But this is also the Seniors’ State. And we know how much the elderly relish the challenge of something new, especially when it concerns their physical survival. They will embrace the chance to redeem those “vouchers” with this or that health-and-pelf consortium—a professional stratum now so frankly gangsterish that it disguises debt collectors as doctors, and fans them out over the emergency rooms of America’s hospitals.

  We will return to Ryan. But first we have to get through Romney. This was the best thing about the Clint Eastwood warm-up: he ignored the red light and mumbled on for an extra seven minutes, sowing panic, as well as excruciation, in the control tower. All we lacked was a live feed to Romney—to Romney’s characteristic smile of pain (that of a man with a very sore shoulder who has just eased his way into a tight tuxedo). Perhaps this partly explains why the nominee remained so opaque and unrelaxed. He never came close to settling the question that all Americans must ask: is Mitt the kind of guy you’d like to have a glass of water with? At this late stage it’s time to remind ourselves of a salient fact. There is only one principle on which Romney has never wavered, and that is his religion.

  He is a crystallized and not an accidental believer. You can see it in his lineless face. Awareness of mortality is in itself aging—it creases the orbits of the eyes, it torments the brow; and Romney has the look of someone who seriously thinks that he will live forever (curiously enough, he also resembles a long-serving porn star). Mitt is a Mormon—though he doesn’t like talking about it. And if I were a Mormon, I wouldn’t like talking about it either. Whatever you might feel about their doctrines, the great monotheisms are sanctioned by the continuities of time: Islam has fifteen centuries behind it, Christianity has twenty, Judaism at least forty. One of the dozens of quackeries that sprang up during the Great Revival, Mormonism was founded on April 6, 1830. The vulgarity and venality—the tar and feathers—of its origins are typical of the era. But there are aspects of its history that might still give us pause.

  The first Prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had eighty-seven wives, of whom the youngest was fourteen. Brigham Young, the second Prophet, was husband to seventy; he also incited a series of murders (to quell intrachurch rivalries). Mormons suffered persecution, and they retaliated—in 1857, for example, they killed 120 men, women, and children (the Mountain Meadows massacre). During the Civil War, the Mormons’ sympathies lay with the South, and unavoidably so, for they, too, dealt in human chattels; as one historian, Hugh Brogan, puts it, “Lincoln might as well have said of polygamy what he said of slavery, that if it was not wrong, nothing was wrong.” Not until 1890 did the church renounce the practice (though it persisted well into living memory); not until 1978 did a further “revelation” disclose that black people were the equals of whites—by which time Mitt Romney was thirty-one years old.

  It may be that the heaviest item in the Mormon baggage is not its moral murk or even its intellectual nullity so much as its hopeless parochialism. “A man with a big heart from a small town,” they called him in Tampa. We don’t question the big heart; but we gravely doubt the big mind. The truth is that Romney, who aspires to lead the free world, looks ridiculous when he’s not in America. How can he bestride the oceans—the Latter-day Saint with the time-proof face, who believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Missouri?

  At the RNC it was Ryan’s oratory, not Romney’s, that inspired the rawest gust of triumphalism. And that rapture, we were told, would remain undiluted by the discovery, the next morning, that the speech was very largely a pack of lies. According to the campaign managers, there is “no penalty,” these days, for political deceit. When planning this race the Republicans envisaged a classic “pincer” strategy: they would buy the election with super-PAC millions, while also stealing it with gerrymandering and voter suppression (an effort that seems to be faltering in the courts). No penalty? Don’t you believe it. Who will perpetually submit to being lied to with a sneer? The effects of dishonesty are cumulative. Undetectable by focus groups or robocalls, they build in the unconscious mind, creating just the kind of unease that will sway the undecided in November.

  It has to be admitted, meanwhile, that Uncle Sam is highly distinctive, even exotic, in his superstitious reverence for money. In every other country on earth, the Republicans’ one idea so far this century would never be mentioned, let alone tabled, passed, and given a second term. Tax cuts…for the rich? And this plainly indecent policy is already an established failure. According to the Pew Research Center, only 8 percent of ordinary Americans—and only 10 percent of the “upper class”—think the rich are taxed too much. The GOP, moreover, is doomed by demographics. It is simply running out of the white people who form its electoral base; as one of Romney’s strategists conceded, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this.” We know that Republicans refuse to compromise with Democrats. For how long can they refuse to compromise with reality?

  Now compare Tampa to the decisively more attractive words and mentalities coming out of Charlotte, NC. It has not been pleasant, during this last term, to watch the desacralizing, the chastening, and some might say the attritional coarsening of the young president. And the populace has not liked watching it either: the approval rating of Congress is 9 percent (whereas the first lady stands at a Colin Powell–like 66). The violence of Republican rejectionism was vestigially supremacist, just as the love inspired by the Obamas was vestigially abolitionist: the passions that gave rise to 650,000 fratricides do not soon evaporate. Seeming to confirm this, the audience in Tampa looked practically antebellum, while the audience in Charlotte looked just like the future.

  Henry James once said that America is more like a world than a country. And for the last seventy years, the world, the globe, has been shaped by the example, and the gravitational force, of the American idea. It is an epic responsibility. Obama’s least touted virtue is his astonishing self-possession in the face of the planet’s highest office. Think back to the primaries, in which Mitt Romney, at various stages, managed to trail to the likes of Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain. Whenever he did notch up a win, Romney reminded me of Dan Quayle in 1988, tapped for the vice presidency in New Orleans: in the words of Stuart Stevens (now Romney’s chief strategist), “He looked like he just did a gram of coke.” In common with George W. Bush, Romney shows little resistance to what Maxim Gorky (onetime friend of Lenin) called “the filthy venom of power.” Now think back to Obama in Chicago in November 2008: the calmest man in America. Perhaps the calmest man in the world.

  Newsweek 2012

  The Republican Party in 2016: Trump*1

  Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end. I mean his mental health. What is its present condition, and how will it adapt to the challenges that lie ahead? We should bear in mind, I think, that the phrase “power corrupts” isn’t just a metaphor.

  There have been one or two speculative attempts to get Donald to hold still on the couch. Both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have called him a “pathological liar,” but so have many less partial observers. They then go on to ask: is his lying merely compulsi
ve, or is he an outright mythomaniac, constitutionally unable to distinguish nontruth from truth—rather like those “horrible human beings,” journalists (or at least spiteful, low-echelon journalists), who, Trump claims, “have no concept of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ ”? PolitiFact has ascertained that Donald’s mendacity rate is over 90 percent; so the man who is forever saying that he “tells it like it is” turns out to be nearly always telling it like it isn’t.

  With greater resonance, and with more technical garnish (lists of symptoms and giveaways), Trump has been identified as a “pathological narcissist,” a victim, in fact, of narcissistic personality disorder (or NPD). Certainly Trump’s self-approbation goes well beyond everyday egocentricity or solipsism. “My fingers,” he recently explained, “are long and beautiful, as—it has been well documented—are various other parts of my anatomy.” He really does remind you of the original Narcissus, the frigid pretty boy of Greek myth who was mortally smitten by his own reflection. Narcissus is autoerotic; he is self-aroused.

  Cynics will already be saying that these two “diseases,” chronic dishonesty and acute vaingloriousness, are simply par for the course. In recent years the GOP has more or less adopted the quasi slogan “There is no downside to lying” (itself a clear and indeed “performative” tall story: how can you devalue truth, and devalue language, without cost?). And such voices would also argue that a laughably bloated sense of self is a prerequisite, a sine qua non, for anyone aspiring to public office. Well, we’ll see. President Trump won’t get away with too much pathological lying in the Oval Office and the Situation Room. But we may be sure that his pathological narcissism, his poor old NPD, will become unrecognizably florid and fulminant, as he nears the “ultimate aphrodisiac” (H. Kissinger)—namely power.

  Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition by. But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s reluctant micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely profit from his superintendence. By is provisional, and even the epithet books is moot, because Trump always calls his books his “best sellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening best sellers—among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007)—might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the last thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

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  Insofar as it is a memoir, The Art of the Deal resembles a rags-to-riches story from which the rags have been tastefully excised. Donald’s dad, Fred C. Trump, did the rags bit, becoming the man of the house at the age of eleven (Donald’s grandfather was “a hard liver and a hard drinker”); so it was Fred who shined shoes, delivered fruit, and hauled lumber. Even at sixteen, though, Trump Sr. was starting to get ahead, “building prefabricated garages for fifty dollars apiece.”

  By the time Donald appeared, Trump Sr. was a grand master of what we would now call “affordable housing”; and little Donald was his father’s sidekick as together they toured the sites, checking up on builders, suppliers, and contractors, and intimidating penniless tenants when they fell behind on the rent. But “I had loftier dreams and visions,” Trump writes. Not for him the little redbrick boxes, nor yet “the three-story Colonials, Tudors, and Victorians” that Fred went on to erect. In the early 1970s, fortified by that “small loan” from his father ($1 million), Donald strode across the Brooklyn Bridge and started to traffic in unaffordable housing: skyscrapers.

  If you have ever wondered what it’s like, being a young and avaricious teetotal German-American philistine on the make in Manhattan, then your curiosity will be quenched by The Art of the Deal. One of the drawbacks of phenomenal success, Trump ruefully notes, “is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow” (“I categorize [such people] as life’s losers”); but the present reader, at least, felt a gorgeous serenity when contemplating Trump’s average day. Nonnavigable permits, floor area ratios, zoning approvals, rezoning approvals (“involving a dozen city and state agencies, as well as local community groups”), land rights and air rights purchases, tax concessions (“property tax abatements”), handouts to politicians (“very standard and accepted”), and, if push came to shove (“I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely necessary”), coerced evictions.

  On the other hand, think of all the exceptional human beings he is working with. Alan “Ace” Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns; Ivan Boesky, crooked arbitrageur; Arthur Sonnenblick, “one of the city’s leading brokers”; Steve Wynn, Vegas hotelier; Adnan Khashoggi, “Saudi billionaire” (and arms dealer); and Paul Patay, “the number-one food-and-beverage man in Atlantic City.” And on top of all this there’s Barron Hilton, “born wealthy and bred to be an aristocrat,” and “a member of what I call the Lucky Sperm Club.” (An ugly formulation, that: I respectfully advise Mr. Trump to settle on a more demotic synonym—the Lucky Scum Club, say.)

  Then you have the social life. A sustaining can of tomato juice for lunch (“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time”); a minimum of parties (“frankly, I’m not too big on parties, because I can’t stand small talk”); and an absolute minimum of hanging about in cocktail bars (“I don’t drink, and I’m not very big on sitting around”). But of course there are treats and sprees. Take the dinners. A dinner in St. Patrick’s Cathedral with John Cardinal O’Connor and his “top bishops and priests.” A dinner, chaired by Trump, for the Police Athletic League. A visit to Trenton “to attend a retirement dinner for a member of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission.”

  It is thus exhaustively established that Trump has a superhuman tolerance for boredom. What are his other commercial strengths? Nerve, tenacity, patience, an unembarrassable pushiness (“simply” cold-calling the top guy), a shrewd aversion to staking his own money, the aforementioned readiness, at a pinch, to play the villain, the ability to be “a screamer when I need to be” (but not when he feels that “screaming would only scare them off”), and the determination “to fight when I feel I’m being screwed.” Above all, perhaps, his antennae are very sensitive to weakness.

  Looking to buy an old hotel in midtown, Trump rejects the Biltmore, the Barclay, and the Roosevelt as being “at least moderately successful,” and goes instead for “the only one in real trouble,” the Commodore, which he can pitch as “a loser hotel in a decaying neighborhood” and so flatten the price. Similarly, his long and apparently hopeless campaign to get Bonwit Teller, store and building, suddenly takes fire when he learns that its parent company has started “to experience very serious financial problems.” And he gets Bonwit Teller. Perhaps that’s the defining asset: a crocodilian nose for inert and preferably moribund prey.

  Trump can sense when an entity is no longer strong enough or lithe enough to evade predation. He did it with that white elephant the Grand Old Party, whose salaried employers never saw him coming even when he was there, and whose ruins he now bestrides. The question is, Can he do it with American democracy?

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  We now turn to Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, a best seller so recent that it includes a dig at Megyn Kelly. But first a word about the cover.

  “Some readers,” writes Trump sternly in his opening sentence, “may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and so mean looking.” Quite recently he “had some beautiful pictures taken”—pictures like the one that bedizens The Art of the Deal—in which he “looked like a very nice person”; and Trump’s family implored him to pick one o
f those. But no. He wanted to look like a very nasty person to reflect “the anger and unhappiness that I feel.” And there he is in HD color, hammily scowling out from under an omelette of makeup and tanning cream (and from under the little woodland creature that sleeps on his head).

  Readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written or dictated sentences try something subtler: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “what I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at a mind that considers it worth saying—that what was said was what was said. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is?

  Fascinating. And perhaps there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or perhaps not. As well as being for real, Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” Or, to put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “We need someone who understands greatness.” “The fact is that I give people what they need and deserve to hear—and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”: