Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

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.

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.

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.

He became president despite not really wanting to be president,

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.

He did all this out of a sort of demented, maniacal salesman’s instinct, grabbing rough handfuls of all...

secretly thrilled his base most—violence, dominance, the disowning of the social contract—and tossing them at...

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

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

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.

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.

Profit is Trump’s end goal, his singu...

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 and strength.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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

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.

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 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.

me she 100 percent doesn’t want her name in the article.” Erdely replied that she was “up for discussing whether she wants to discuss changing her name, et cetera, but I need to be clear about this. There’s no pulling the plug at this point.” Erdely

In final edits, two all-important disclosures—that Jackie had refused to provide the name of the boy who had taken her to the frat party and that the magazine had not contacted her friends to corroborate her story—disappeared.

Erdely says yes. But the choice is not always between being sincere and untruthful. It’s possible to be both: it’s possible to be sincere and deluded. It’s possible—it’s very easy, in some cases—to believe a statement, a story, that’s a lie.

Her anger was raw, palpable, blooming. It cowed me, and reminded me that most people still find false accusation much more abhorrent than rape.

In the Bible, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, who has been enslaved by her rich husband, and cries rape after Joseph resists her advance. In Greek mythology, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, does the same to Hippolytus. These stories, and the many others like them, are framed as obscene anomalies. Rape itself, though, is sanctioned in the same texts.

In Numbers, Moses commands his army to kill all the men and the nonvirgin women, and save all the virgin women for themselves. In Greek myth, Zeus rapes Antiope, Demeter, Europa, and Leda. Poseidon rapes Medusa. Hades rapes Persephone. For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s, most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm. This extends to UVA, which for many decades expelled students for plagiarism while refusing to consider rape a serious offense.

When, in the late nineties, a student was found guilty of sexually assaulting another student, named Jenny Wilkinson, UVA punished him by adding a letter of reprimand to his record, which could be removed after a year if he completed an assault education program. Because of student privacy laws, Wilkinson could not protest this outcome in public. “In fact, in a crazy twist, I could have faced charges from the university if I had talked about them,”

thirty-eight students had reached out to Dean Eramo to report being sexually assaulted. Only nine of those incidents resulted in formal complaints, and only four resulted in misconduct hearings. And, as at most colleges, those thirty-eight reports were the visible fraction of a vast and unseen iceberg. Though I rarely back away from difficulty, I feel sure that, if I had been traumatically assaulted in college, I wouldn’t have had the courage—or the stamina for the inevitable bureaucratic humiliation—to report.

That fall, a local committee surveyed the local statistics—rape was almost twice as prevalent in the town as in Virginia as a whole—and labeled Charlottesville “rape city” in a widely shared report.

“People are now tired of the rape issue coming up time and again in the news. Well, I’m tired, too; more than you could ever fathom.” She had been raped, she wrote, six weeks before. That year, UVA’s president, Frank Hereford, sent a letter to a Virginia delegate assuring him that there was no rape problem on campus.

He provided ten pieces of evidence that the school was being proactive. Number six was that the student council sold women “alarm devices” at “well below cost.” Number nine was that women were locked inside their dorms at midnight.

“Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”

Syrett writes that fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women”—through using homoerotic hazing rituals to humiliate one another, and through framing sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption by them.”

White fraternities have historically existed for the purpose of solidifying elite male power and entitlement.

Universities have a tendency to overlook fraternity violence in part because fraternities are a significant source of institutional capital. Frats funnel enormous amounts of alumni money back toward universities, and free them from the obligation to provide housing for their most privileged students.

a huge amount of partying at UVA takes place in frat houses, on frat terms. (Due to the Greek system’s dogged adherence to gender traditionalism, sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties at all.)

There is as much individual variance within the Greek system as within any other: I was welcomed into it despite being openly averse to many of its central features, and Andrew, my partner of a decade, lived in his UVA frat house for two years, volunteered at the daycare across the street on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and remains a sweeter, more sincere person than I am. But it’s been well documented that men in fraternities have a higher perpetration rate than college men in general.

The fraternity environment doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly obscures them: every weekend is organized around men giving women alcohol, everyone getting as drunk as possible, hookups as the performative end...

When a white man named Randy Taylor was found guilty of murdering her, his pale, gaunt face was mostly absent from the news. But Matthew—his dark skin, his full lips, his thick locs—was everywhere you looked. Charlottesville’s history of gendered violence and its history of racial violence, long intertwined, were emerging.

In the nineteenth century, black men convicted of rape in Virginia got the death penalty, where white men were imprisoned for ten to twenty years. In the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia citizens became very concerned about the rape of white women—but almost exclusively in cases when the accused were black.

My friend Rachel, the one who rode in Jesse Matthew’s cab just before he killed Morgan Harrington, now sends her own daughters to Venable. The girls are twins, gorgeous and funny and brilliant; Andrew and I are their godparents. Some days I feel crazed with hope and certainty that the world they grow up in will be unrecognizably different. And yet, on the day of the Unite the Right rally, David Duke and his band of white supremacists marched right by Rachel’s house.

After months of investigation, UVA found Frances’s assailant not guilty. He was free to return to campus. (She wrote to me in the fall of her second year—he had, in fact, returned.) The school issued a 127-page report that effectively concludes that she is unreliable. “They painted me as some drunken party girl who was out to flirt, and things got a little out of control, and I was embarrassed and couldn’t handle the consequences,” she told me. I read the entire report, and by the end felt physically debilitated.

In a written statement, her assailant agreed that there was a sexual encounter, and that Frances had physically struggled against him in her attempt to end the encounter.

the unspoken conclusion was that Frances was either lying, or deceiving herself, or rightfully to blame.

The things that defined her selfhood—her verve, her confidence, her eagerness—had been devastated just as they were reaching a peak.