Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  The Election

  The final, definitive scam for the millennial generation is the election of an open con artist to the presidency in 2016. Donald Trump is a lifelong scammer, out and proud and seemingly unstoppable. For decades before he entered politics, he peddled a magnificently fraudulent narrative about himself as a straight-talking, self-made, vaguely populist billionaire, and the fact that the lie was always in plain sight became a central part of his appeal. In his 1987 ghostwritten business book The Art of the Deal, Trump—surrounded then, as now, with an aura of cheap skyscraper glitz—coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” which he called a “very effective form of promotion.” Flogging the book on Late Night with David Letterman, he refused to clarify the actual extent of his net worth. In 1992, he made a cameo in Home Alone 2, giving Macaulay Culkin directions while standing in the Plaza Hotel lobby, surrounded by marble columns and crystal chandeliers. (This was a condition of filming at a Trump hotel: you were required to write him a walk-on part.) That same year, he went bankrupt for the second time. In 2004, the year of his third bankruptcy, he started hosting The Apprentice, in which he, the brilliant businessman, got to fire people on TV. It was a gigantic hit.

  But Trump’s con artistry runs much deeper than false advertising. He has always wrung out his profits through exploitation and abuse. In the seventies, he was sued by Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice after crafting policies to keep black people out of his housing projects. In 1980, he hired two hundred undocumented Polish immigrants to clear the ground for Trump Tower, putting them to work without gloves or hard hats, and sometimes having them sleep on-site. In 1981, he bought a building on Central Park South, hoping to convert rent-controlled apartments into luxury condos; when the tenants wouldn’t leave, he issued illegal eviction notices, cut off their heat and hot water, and placed newspaper ads offering to house the homeless in the building. He has a long history of stiffing his waiters, his construction workers, his plumbers, his chauffeurs. He once rented out his name to a couple of scammers named Irene and Mike Milin, who ran the Trump Institute, a “wealth-creation workshop” that plagiarized its materials and declared bankruptcy in 2008. He spent tens of thousands of dollars buying his own books to inflate sales numbers. His charitable foundation, which has given almost no money to charity, has repeatedly been found in violation of laws against self-dealing. The approach is hideous even when rendered in miniature: in 1997, Trump played principal for the day at a Bronx elementary school where the chess team was trying to raise $5,000 to go to a tournament. After publicly handing them a fake million-dollar bill and taking photos, he later sent them $200 in the mail.

  Prior to his presidential career, Trump’s most appalling scam was Trump University, the scheme in which he promised to teach people his get-rich-quick real estate secrets. As soon as the company was operational, in 2005, the New York attorney general’s office sent a notification that Trump University, which falsely advertised itself as a “graduate program,” was breaking the law. The company changed its branding slightly and continued on its merry way of persuading people to pay $1,500 to attend three-day seminars, which promised invaluable tricks of the trade but actually delivered trips to Home Depot, basic drivel about time-shares, and sales pitches for the real Trump University programs, which would cost them as much as $35,000 up front. In one of the eventual class-action lawsuits, a former salesman testified:

  While Trump University claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could….Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.

  Three days before his inauguration, Trump paid out $25 million to settle fraud claims related to Trump University. The order came from Gonzalo Curiel, a judge who Trump suggested had overseen an unfair trial for reasons of personal bias—Curiel was Mexican, he noted, and so must hold a grudge against him because he was planning to build a wall.

  As president, Trump receives his daily briefings on large note cards printed with information reduced to, as a White House aide put it, “See Jane Run” diction. He became president despite not really wanting to be president, and as the fumes of our young but rapidly sundowning country propelled him to the Oval Office, he made dozens of outlandish empty promises along the way. He promised to prosecute Hillary Clinton, to drop Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane without a parachute, to make Nabisco produce Oreos in America, to make Apple produce iPhones in America, to bring back all the jobs to America, to get rid of gun-free zones in schools, to give everyone who killed a police officer the death penalty, to deport all the undocumented immigrants, to spy on mosques, to defund Planned Parenthood, to “take care of women,” to get rid of Obamacare, to get rid of the EPA, to make everyone say “Merry Christmas,” to build an “artistically beautiful” wall between the United States and Mexico that would be the “greatest wall that you’ve ever seen,” to make Mexico pay for that wall, and—funniest of all, sort of—to never take a vacation as president. (In his first 500 days in office, he golfed 122 times.) He did all this out of a sort of demented, maniacal salesman’s instinct, grabbing rough handfuls of all the things that half-secretly thrilled his base most—violence, dominance, the disowning of the social contract—and tossing them at crowds that roared and roared. When the map started turning red on election night and the dread Times meter swung in the opposite direction, I got a nauseating flash-forward to what it might be like, at the end of Trump’s presidency, with immigrant families ripped apart, Muslims shut out of the country, refugees denied shelter, trans people stripped of the protections they had just barely begun to come into, poor children with no healthcare, disabled kids without aid, low-income women who couldn’t access life-saving abortions—what it might be like when people who subconsciously don’t think any of that stuff is personally too important start to say, as I’m sure they will, that the Trump era really wasn’t all that bad. All politicians are crooks. What’s the difference? Why not lend him our country until tomorrow, when everything is already crumbling, and anyway we have so little idea what tomorrow will bring? And here one of the most soul-crushing things about the Trump era reveals itself: to get through it with any psychological stability—to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss—a person’s best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself. As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.

  In January 2017, Trump held a press conference surrounded by huge, apparently blank stacks of paper. These, he said, were all the documents he had signed to rid himself of conflicts of interest; this was all the paperwork that turned the family business over to his sons. (Naturally, reporters were not allowed to actually examine these papers.) By January 2018, Trump had spent a third of his first year in office at his commercial properties. He had publicly referred to his businesses at least thirty-five times. More than one hundred members of Congress and executive branch officials had visited Trump properties; eleven foreign governments had paid money to Trump companies; political groups had spent $1.2 million at Trump properties. Mar-a-Lago’s revenues spiked by $8 million. Profit is Trump’s end goal, his singular ambition. He won’t fulfill any of his promises—he can’t drop Bowe Bergdahl out of a helicopter, or make Mexico pay for a wall, or bring back the postwar economic boom, or quell the nontraditional idea that women and minorities deserve equal rights—but it doesn’t matter. As long as he’s rich and white and male and bigoted and rapacious, to many people he represents the most quintessentially American form of power a
nd strength. He was elected for the same reason that people buy lottery tickets. It’s not the actual possibility of victory that you pay for; it’s the fleeting vision of victory. “We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” Billy McFarland said, on camera, while he was in the Bahamas filming the video ad for Fyre Fest. The pipe dream is becoming the dominant structure of aspiration, and its end-stage shadows—cruelty, carelessness, nihilism—are following close behind. After all, in becoming party to a scam, we access some of the hideous glory of scamming: we get to see, if not to actually experience, what it might be like to loot the place and emerge unscathed.

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  It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these days has the ability or the time? Everything, not least the physical world itself, is overheating. The “margin of refusal,” as Jenny Odell puts it, is shrinking, and the stakes are getting higher. People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all. And, while we do this—because we do this—the honest avenues keep contracting and dead-ending. There are fewer and fewer options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly defensible way.

  I still believe, at some inalterable level, that I can make it out of here. After all, it only took about seven years of flogging my own selfhood on the internet to get to a place where I could comfortably afford to stop using Amazon to save fifteen minutes and five dollars at a time. I tell myself that these tiny scraps of relief and convenience and advantage will eventually accumulate into something transformative—that one day I will ascend to an echelon where I won’t have to compromise anymore, where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy. We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.

  We Come from Old Virginia

  I wasn’t planning on going to the University of Virginia for college. I applied mostly to schools in New England and California; at the time, having spent twelve years in a cloistered, conservative, religious environment, I wanted to get as far away from Texas as I could. For most of my senior year, I dreamed about living in a mysterious future in which I would wear wool sweaters and write for a newspaper and spend my free time in coffee shops cultivating a rigorous life of the mind. But then my guidance counselor nominated me to compete for a scholarship at UVA, insisting that the school would suit me. In the spring, I flew to Charlottesville for the final round of the scholarship competition, which began with the current scholars taking us to a house party, where I sat on a kitchen counter, drank keg beer, and started to feel the dazzle. It felt like cherry bombs were going off outside in the darkness; a strain of easy, fancy Southernness was in the air. The next day, when I walked through campus, the sun was warm and golden, and the white-columned brick buildings rose into a bluebird sky. The students lounged on the grass, glowing with conventional good looks. West of town, the Blue Ridge Mountains raised the horizon in layers of dusk and navy, and the lacy dogwood trees were flowering on every street. I stepped onto the Lawn, UVA’s centerpiece—a lush, terraced expanse lined with prestigious student rooms and professors’ pavilions—and felt an instantaneous, overpowering longing. At this school, I thought, you would grow like a plant in a greenhouse. This dappled light, the sense of long afternoons and doors propped open and drinks poured for strangers, the grand steps leading up to the Pantheon dome of the Rotunda—this was where I wanted to be.

  Charlottesville sells itself this way, effortlessly, as a sort of honeyed Eden, a college town with Dixie ease and gracefulness but liberal intellectual ideals. UVA’s online guide to Charlottesville opens with an illustration of a hazy golden sunset, the mountains turning purple in the sun’s last flare. “A Place Like No Other,” the illustration states. “This is a place where the world spins as it should,” the narrator in a promotional video says. As UVA’s website informs you, Charlottesville has been named the happiest city in America by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the best college town in America by Travelers Today, and the number-five US community for well-being, according to a Gallup index. The Fiske Guide to Colleges writes that “students nationwide go ga-ga for UVA” and quotes a student who calls Charlottesville “the perfect college town.” Another student observes, “Almost everything here is a tradition.” A comment on UVA’s College Confidential message board reads, “Girls here dress very well and are very physically attractive. The key to get them is alcohol.”

  When I moved to Charlottesville in 2005, I was sixteen, and nothing about that comment would have seemed off-color to me. I’d spent my whole life in a tiny evangelical school where white male power was the unquestioned default, and UVA’s traditionalism, in matters of gender or anything else, did not immediately register. (In fact, on that first visit, I found it comforting. I wrote approvingly in my journal that the political atmosphere felt “moderate, not extremely liberal.”) Sure, there were boys double-majoring in history and economics who half-jokingly referred to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression,” but this still seemed like a major leap forward from the outright racism I had known. UVA was like a live-action recruitment brochure: everyone was always ostentatiously “finding their people,” carrying stacks of books around green expanses, moving from picnics to day parties in packs of best friends. Classes were just the right kind of difficult; people were sharp, but generally too basic, myself included, to be pretentious. On weekends, students dressed up in sundresses and ties to get drunk at football games, and I liked this air of debauched Southern etiquette, the sweet generic quality of mid-Atlantic preppy life. For four years I cranked out papers at the library; I wrapped myself around a boyfriend; I volunteered and waited tables and sang in an a cappella group and pledged a sorority and sat on my rooftop, smoking spliffs and reading, as the kids at the elementary school across the road shrieked. I graduated in 2009, and afterward didn’t think much about Charlottesville. I had loved my time there easily and automatically. Then, in 2014, Rolling Stone dropped its bomb.

  The feature story, “A Rape on Campus,” written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was, now infamously, a graphic account of a gang rape at Phi Kappa Psi, the UVA fraternity whose white-columned house looms at the top of a big field off Rugby Road. “Sipping from a plastic cup, Jackie grimaced, then discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor,” Erdely began. It was Jackie’s first frat party, and the line sent me into a wormhole. My first frat party had been at Phi Psi, too: I could see myself with messy long hair, wearing flip-flops, overwhelmed by a drinking game and spilling my own cup of punch on the floor. I’d left soon afterward, crossing the train tracks in hopes of finding a better party. In the Rolling Stone story, Jackie was shoved into a pitch-black bedroom, slammed through the glass of a coffee table, pinned down, and beaten. “ ‘Grab its motherfucking leg,’ she heard a voice say. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.” Erdely wrote that Jackie endured “three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her.” One of them hesitated, then shoved a beer bottle into her as the rest of them cheered. After the attack, Jackie ran away from the house, shoeless, with bloodstains on her red dress. She called her friends, who cautioned her against reporting it to the police or the university: “We’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” Later on, Jackie disclosed her assault to UVA dean Nicole Eramo. Then, a year later, she told Eramo that she knew two other women who had been gang-raped at Phi Psi. Both times, according to Erdely, Eramo laid out the options available to Jackie, who declined t
o pursue further action, and the school left it at that. This was unforgivable, Erdely argued, given what the dean had heard.

  There was a precedent at UVA for all of this—both this specific crime and the reality of institutional dismissal. In 1984, a seventeen-year-old UVA freshman named Liz Seccuro was brutally gang-raped at Phi Psi, and, by her account, when she reported the crime, a UVA dean asked her if she’d just had a rough night. In 2005, Seccuro received a traumatic validation of her memory when one of her assailants wrote her an apology letter as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous recovery process. (The school had actually given him her address.) UVA’s cycle of rape and indifference was such, Erdely wrote, that only fourteen people had ever been found guilty of sexual misconduct in the school’s history, that not a single person at UVA had ever been expelled for sexual assault, and that UVA’s fetishized honor code—in which single acts of lying, cheating, or stealing will trigger expulsion—did not consider rape to be a relevant offense. Erdely noted that the school didn’t put Phi Psi under investigation until it learned that she was writing her piece.

  When the Rolling Stone story came out, I had just moved to New York to take a job as the features editor of the feminist site Jezebel. When I got to our dim, brick-walled blog factory in Soho that morning, my coworkers were giving off an odd and heavy silence, reading Erdely’s article on their computer screens. I saw the illustration of Phi Psi and realized what was happening. I sat down in my swivel chair and pulled up the story, feeling the call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house nausea that sets in when the news cycle focuses on something that feels private to you. By the time I finished reading, I was dizzy, thinking about my four years in Charlottesville, what I’d been blind to, what I’d chosen to see and not to see. I pictured my college self, never signing up for a women’s studies class, funneling my waitressing money toward sorority dues. I remembered that, whenever a classmate in one of my seminars prefaced a statement with “As a feminist,” my internal response was “All right, girl, relax.” I had never attended a Take Back the Night march. Though Liz Seccuro had brought her rapist to trial while I was in college—there’s no statute of limitations for rape in Virginia—it had barely crossed my radar at school. (Her rapist was sentenced to eighteen months, ultimately serving six.) I myself had been roofied by a grad student at Georgetown during my first semester at college, while on a weekend trip with a UVA group. Blaming myself for accepting drinks from strangers, and thanking my luck that I’d gotten violently sick shortly after he started touching me, I’d barely talked about the incident, dismissed it as no big deal.