by Joshua Cohen
Now, having returned to the city—to what AC’s Chamber of Commerce used to call “America’s Playground” and now calls, with depressing deprecation, “the Entertainment Capital of the Jersey Shore”—I found that my feelings had flipped. What I’d been conditioned to regard as a madcap, hedonistic outlier of a place, an utterly, even excessively incomparable place, now struck me as not exceptional at all, but emblematic, not merely of the rest of the state but of the rest of the country off whose coast it floats. The city of my youth had seemed like a flounder in summer, that bastard flatfish that local fishermen call a fluke. AC 2016, however, was coming to seem like America’s bowrider: what captains call the dolphins that swim in front of their boats, riding the wake off their bows as if heralds.
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I FIRST NOTICED THIS SEA CHANGE last fall, when a certain type of red-faced, overweight, whatcha-gonna-do-about-it New Jersey/New York male commandeered our national politics. Both Donald Trump and Chris Christie were talked about in my family constantly—Trump since before I was even in utero, and Christie since George W. Bush appointed him U.S. attorney for New Jersey in 2001, and especially since he became governor in 2010. But it was only after suffering through their schoolyard-bully penis contests during the 2016 Republican primaries that I began to recognize how similar they were, how alike in personality and in unctuous, disingenuous style. If I hadn’t detected their toxic resemblance before, it was only because they’d been menacing different playgrounds: Trump having always been nominally private sector, brandishing the better, or just more recognizable, brand; Christie having always been nominally public sector, an elected official who must be held to higher standards. The ongoing SEC and congressional and New Jersey state investigations into Christie’s alleged misappropriation of Port Authority monies, his allegedly having made federal emergency-relief funds available to Jersey cities affected by Hurricane Sandy contingent on city-government support of unrelated state-government initiatives, and, finally, his allegedly having ordered the George Washington Bridge closed as an act of political retaliation against the mayor of Fort Lee—and so snarling a major artery from Manhattan—will likely continue beyond the conclusion of his term in 2018. Jersey’s governor has always been such an unmitigated prick that what stunned me most last spring wasn’t Trump’s emergence as the GOP front-runner, but Christie’s dutiful dropping-out and endorsing him—his assuming a role, even after Trump passed him over for VP, halfway between that of a catamite butler and a henchman capo, the butt of Trump’s insulting fat jokes and the fetcher of his milkshakes and fries.
The Republican primary debates marked the televised degeneration of their friendship—or whatever a friendship can mean in politics—which began only in 2002, when Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, then a Philadelphia-based judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, nominated to that position by Bill Clinton, introduced her brother to the governor. The Christies were invited to Trump’s third wedding, to Melania; the Trumps were invited to Christie’s first inauguration. A year into Christie’s first term, and six years after the State of New Jersey had started to pursue collection of the almost $30 million in back taxes owed by Trump’s casinos, the state suddenly reversed course and settled for $5 million. Trump contributed an exceedingly modest share of the money he saved to the restoration of New Jersey’s historic gubernatorial residence, Drumthwacket. New Jersey’s near-miraculous tax forgiveness must be understood in the same way as its governor’s near-miraculous abjection: Neither are demonstrations of Trump’s master outmaneuvering, but rather of Christie’s cravenness. Christie will do anything to win, or be on the winning team. If he can’t be president, or VP, he’ll plump for chief of staff, or attorney general, or even just settle for a monogrammed-T swag bag with a Trump hat, Trump Steaks, Trump Wine. Christie’s not only inept, he’s also running out of options: There isn’t much of his party left to knock around. Politics (budget meetings in the statehouse in Trenton) used to be distinct from entertainment (The Celebrity Apprentice in syndication), but no more. Christie seems jealous of Trump, not just of his financial success or his nomination but of how well and recklessly Trump, as a former/current reality-TV star, can lie. Christie has always just ignored, withheld, or fastidiously obfuscated. Trump, by contrast, can’t afford not to be blatant or audacious in his untruths, so as to keep earning free airtime from the cable networks and radio stations whose ratings and ad revenues increase—blatantly, audaciously—in correspondence.
To me, Trump was always a blusterer, a conniver, a mouth: a cotton-candy-haired clown who crashed the AC party late and left it early and ugly. To my parents and their cadre, the Republican nominee was a more malevolent breed of fraud: a dishonest client and dysfunctional boss. I spent my first weekend in AC persuading my parents to introduce me, or reintroduce me, to their casino friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and spent my first week explaining my presence to many concerned and baffled adults, to people who didn’t recognize me from childhood, to people I didn’t recognize from childhood, and to strangers and all and sundry who’d make the time to talk Trump with me. The word I heard most often in reference to the GOP candidate—from Steven Perskie, the former New Jersey assemblyman and state senator whose original gaming referendum brought casinos to AC in 1976; from Nelson Johnson, the New Jersey superior court judge who wrote the book version of Boardwalk Empire; from Don Guardian, one of the few AC mayors in my lifetime not to have been charged with corruption; from Ibrahim Abdali and his cousin who’d only identify himself as Mohammed, Afghan refugees who sell pipes and bongs and martial-arts weaponry on the Boardwalk—the word I heard most often was “failure.”
Every Trump account I was given in AC described a man so extraordinarily bad at business, or at being anything besides a business celebrity, that he was forced to switch from building casinos to branding casinos with his name, that polysemous pentagrammaton he charged his partners to use and then sued them to remove once the decaying properties became a liability. In the 1980s and ’90s, the casinos with which Trump was associated constituted between a third and a quarter of AC’s gaming industry. The Playboy Hotel and Casino, which was founded in ’81, became the Atlantis in ’84, and went bankrupt in ’85, was acquired by Trump in ’89 and renamed the Trump Regency; he renamed it again as Trump’s World’s Fair in ’96, and it was closed in ’99, and demolished in 2000. Trump Castle, built in cooperation with Hilton in ’85, was rebranded as Trump Marina in ’97, was sold at a loss to Landry’s Inc. in 2011, and is now operated by Landry’s as the Golden Nugget. Trump Plaza, built in cooperation with Harrah’s in ’84, went bankrupt and shuttered in 2014 and now just rots.
And then there’s the Trump Taj Mahal, which Trump built with the help of Resorts International in 1990 on financial footings so shaky and negligent that by the end of the decade he’d racked up more than $3.4 billion in debt, including business (mostly high-interest junk-bond) and personal debt, which he handled by conflating them. By lumping them together under the auspices of a publicly traded company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, he dumped all his burdens onto the backs of his shareholders even as he continued to treat his casino receipts as profits, to be raided and reinvested in development in New York. Even while Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts bled an average of $49 million a year into the late ’90s, even while its share price plummeted from $35 to $0.17 through the early 2000s, Trump himself continued to receive a salary in the millions, not to mention bonuses and the monies his personally held companies made from his publicly traded company leasing office space in Manhattan’s Trump Tower and renting Trump Shuttle helicopters and Trump Airlines airplanes to fly around showroom acts and high rollers. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts finally went bankrupt in 2004, and in its restructuring became Trump Entertainment Resorts, which itself went bankrupt in 2014 and was fire-sold to Icahn Enterprises, whose subsidiary, Tropicana Entertainment Inc., has run the Taj into a $100 million hole. Carl Ic
ahn, the conglomerate’s chairman, was once a wary adversary who now endorses Trump, though he’s declined Trump’s offer to become the next secretary of the treasury: “I am flattered but do not get up early enough in the morning to accept this opportunity.”
On July 1, at the height of the season, the Taj’s unionized employees from UNITE HERE Local 54 went on strike, demanding a wage increase and the reinstatement of health and pension benefits suspended in the transfer of ownership. Negotiations were never scheduled; Icahn and the union couldn’t agree on a venue, let alone an agenda. In early August, Icahn announced that he’d be closing the Taj after Labor Day. And so the fall forecast kept getting grimmer, with the loss of the city’s most prominent casino and more than 2,800 jobs.
The Taj’s demise would be chronicled throughout the summer by The New York Times and The Washington Post, in articles framed as analyses of Trump’s finances. These articles, like the leveraged-debt practices they documented, were virtuoso feats, given that they were researched without access to the candidate’s tax returns. But reading the articles induced headaches: All those loans and defaults and shell companies shattered, keeping track of them was like counting the beach, grain by grain.
The main issue I had with this out-of-town finance journalism, however, was that it was finance journalism: None of its unbiased sums could account for Trump’s meanness—that petty, vile villainy that was being described to me when I was casting around for a place to write.
Because my parents had remodeled my old bedroom into the room of dusty, disused exercise equipment, and because AC has no leisurely cafés or bookshop spaces and its public library is open only 9 to 5, I prevailed on my uncle to make me a key to the office of one of his companies, Fishermen’s Energy, a consortium of commercial fishermen who are trying to establish what would be New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm, in AC. The building was the Professional Arts Building, which went up in the 1920s and flaunts it; its windows gave onto Resorts. I moved into the conference room, adjacent to the cubicles of my uncle’s three employees, who, given Jersey’s disinterest in renewable energy, didn’t have much work to do—or to put it positively, had the occasional leisure to talk.
The receptionist, Karen Carpinelli, previously worked for a family-run Atlantic County–based neon-sign firm that found itself working for Trump, who preferred to contract with family-run firms because they were easily abused. Trump consistently failed to pay the full amounts he owed, which forced the sign-makers to inflate their prices: Apparently the totals didn’t matter, only the discounts did, and if Trump paid at all it was usually half of whatever they billed him. Fishermen’s Energy project director Tim Axelsson, who hails from a distinguished fishing family in Cape May, recounted to me how, in 1988, Trump had planned to arrive in AC for the first time in the Trump Princess, a $29 million yacht formerly owned by the Sultan of Brunei and, before him, by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The Princess, however, being one of the largest yachts in the world at the time, was too large to navigate the channel, and so Trump paid to have the channel dredged, which it was, without any impact studies conducted or permits obtained (though the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection did issue a belated stop-work order). Fishermen’s Energy COO and general counsel Paul Gallagher, who prior to working for my uncle served as AC city solicitor, once served as manager of the Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm, whose five inshore wind turbines, situated hard by the inlet, help power the city’s wastewater-treatment plant. When that project went up, Trump made a call: There were five turbines, he said, as if he were counting up the notoriously short fingers on his notoriously small hands, and there were also five letters in his name—did Paul understand? Would the Jersey-Atlantic people be interested in festooning the poles of their turbines with T R U M P? Apparently, Trump would let them do it free of charge. And this was just the lore to be found in a single office—the lore that was dumped on me about five minutes after moving in.
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ALL ALONG THE BOARDWALK, the sun-bleached, tattered banners read DO AC—the city’s latest marketing catchphrase. The Boardwalk was a scrum of such imperatives, with Trumps on every side issuing edicts and diktats, offering bargains. Trumps in toupees and with their guts hanging over their change belts, out on Steel Pier, out on Central Pier, trying to get me to try the ring toss, though the rubber rings always bounce off the rubber bottles, or to try the beanbag pitch, though the lily pads they’re supposed to land on are kept wet and slippery with a shammy. Try Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy, which contains no salt water. Step right up and I’ll guess your weight, or at least I’ll make your wallet lighter. What American literature taught me—what Melville taught me in The Confidence-Man, what Poe taught me in “Diddling,” that imagination or fantasy can be a form of greed, even a uniquely American form—the shills and carny barkers taught me first, at $2 a lesson: I would never win that stuffed elephant.
The Boardwalk’s kitsch, the kitsch of Trump’s former properties along the Boardwalk, merely reinforces how retro a mogul the candidate is: a throwback who doesn’t care he’s a throwback, who’s barely aware he is, dressed to impress in a padded Brioni suit and a tie with a scrotum-size knot. After a sham career spent endlessly lauding himself as the last great product of the last great era when our country still made things, when our country still built, he now spends what’s basically his retirement—which he considers America’s retirement, his and its mutual licensing age—wallowing in sentimentality and goading with nostalgia. He’s a magnate brat who in an age of rapid computerized transactions and exponentially unaccountable ethereality didn’t make his name, such as it is, or his fortune, such as it is, on Wall Street, but rather in the old-school outer boroughs, and later in schmancier Midtown, developing what he’d inherited. He deceitfully prides himself on having employed real, tangible workers (including illegal immigrants and Mafia contractors) to build real, tangible things (which tend to have structural insufficiencies and the same black glass that’s used in TV/movie evil-overlord compounds and fascist government architecture throughout the Middle East and Central Asia). Not for Trump any bundling, derivatives, or microtrades—just the anachronistic micromanaging of flamboyant chandeliers and ornate door handles. He’s the steak-n-taters CEO, not an asexual vegan baby of the algorithm revolution.
Making my rounds of the Boardwalk bars, it was eerie: how every person’s take on Trump was the same, or was so precisely contradictory. Locals—especially those who knew the candidate’s business history—vigorously loathed him, while visitors—especially those who knew nothing of that history—were equally passionate in their admiration and praise. “He’s just another billionaire.” “He’s one of us.” “He’s a liar.” “He’s so honest.” Common to the heated speeches of both were the apparent influences of alcohol and fear. Everyone I was meeting seemed drunk on fear: of the candidate, of their country, of themselves.
The ambient scare that Trump has put into the populace, and the way his calculated swoops through the news cycle moderate or exacerbate this emotionalism, regulating it like a professional thrill, reminds me more than anything of gaming: of what it feels like to put my money on the line. It’s as if Trump—this vanity candidate, famous beyond law—is offering all of us a wager: that he can inflame his rhetoric and press his luck without ever pressing it too far—without alienating all women and black and Hispanic voters, and without getting too many Mexicans, or too many Muslims, or even just some white Democrats, beaten up or killed.
This, of course, is the only type of wager that Trump can ever make: a bet against America, counting on our dumbness, counting on our hate. He’d never take a turn at one of the properties he’s owned; he’d never belly up to one of the voting-booth-like slot devices on which his AC businesses were based. Trump, a man addicted to success, and—if his oration is any indication—a man with extremely limited reserves of self-control, can’t ever gamble, because he can’t eve
r lose. I’d bet that Trump is barely even familiar with the table rules, for the simple reason that he doesn’t have to be; all he has to know are the odds to know that he can’t beat them. Having owned the house, he’ll never tempt the house. All he can do is torch it. Which is why Trump won’t lose the election, at least not in the reckoning of his supporters. Even if Clinton is declared the winner, most likely even before Clinton is declared the winner, he’ll allege some sort of conspiracy; he’ll blame someone else; no failure can be his fault. He’ll accuse the game of being rigged—he already has. He’ll indict the nature of the game itself, calling the political process both overregulated and underregulated, prohibitive in cost, inefficient, and just plain evil, and the sad thing is, he’s not wrong.
The saddest thing, though, is that the only place in AC—the only place in America, it seems—where you can go to escape his sped-up diet-pill tics and wiggy tirades is one of his former casinos. Two weeks into its union strike, two weeks before the announcement of its closing, the Taj was a mess of stained carpet, moldy walls, leaky ceilings. Regular maintenance personnel had been replaced by skeleton crews of temp labor, but since the dealers aren’t unionized, the casino was open, and remained so locked down, so focused on keeping me unfocused and yet maximizing my TOD (German for “death,” but also casinoese for “time on device”), that none of its screens carried anything but ads for inoperative buffets and upcoming circus extravaganzas that would have to be canceled. No CNN, not even Fox.