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he took out ads in four New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the state’s death penalty. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” the ad read. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Unlike The Art of the Deal, this ad sounded like it was written by Trump,
of Lee Atwater.
Park Five, who served sentences ranging from six to thirteen years before they were exonerated by DNA evidence.
five sued New York City for malicious prosecution and received a $41 million settlement, Trump refused to apologize for demanding their deaths. Instead, he wheeled
“You have people on both side...
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The unfortunate colt became infected, lost circulation in his forelegs, and would never race. Meanwhile, his owner, having ruined the animal, tried to back out of paying for him. In addition to
racehorsing fiasco,
And then it did. Having insanely overspent on casinos, an airline, and a yacht, the debt-laden mogul was forced by his bankers to agree to humiliating new terms. Just four months after he feared he might catch a serious case of losing from Tyson, the cover of Newsweek featured a photo of a downcast Donald with the headline “Trump: The Fall.” (In
Otherwise, the two shows had much in common. Both series reinvented their stars, who were at career lows, by imbuing them with unearned credibility.
As Keefe reported in The New Yorker, Kwame Jackson, a Harvard MBA who was a contestant on the first season, “was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. ‘Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe.’ ” The flimflam succeeded, in part, because of Burnett’s genius,
like Ronald Reagan, professional wrestlers, and other charlatans and con men—made people want to be fooled.
another member of the class of ’68, asked more than twenty of her classmates if they’d ever encountered Trump in college. “None recalled seeing or meeting him,” she said. But the biggest cloud hanging over Trump might be this: his photo doesn’t appear in the Class of ’68 yearbook. He came out of nowhere!
Florida Man, Representative Matt Gaetz. In December 2020, Gaetz demonstrated his fealty to Donald Trump by getting engaged at Mar-a-Lago to a woman
After Gaetz came under investigation for child sex trafficking, Republicans grew nostalgic for that solid citizen Roy Moore, their 2017 U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama, who picked up teenagers at the mall but was too much of an old-fashioned gentleman to cross state lines with them.
Exhibit A was Mary Miller, a freshman congresswoman from Illinois, who, in remarks at a pro-Trump rally in Washington on the eve of the Capitol insurrection, made an ill-advised reference to the president’s favorite bedside author. “Hitler was right on one thing,” she declared. “He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ ” Call it a
reportedly told his chief of staff John Kelly, “Hitler did a lot of good things.” Her only mistake was saying in public what Trump had said in private. Knowing when and when not to praise Hitler can be tricky.
the summer of 2021, Florida became responsible for a whopping one-fifth of the entire nation’s new COVID-19 cases. If, as many predict, DeSantis runs for president, he has already locked up the endorsements of several major
Most Ginormous Well-Educated Assclown, it’s hard to beat Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford University ’02, Yale Law School ’06). In April 2021, he became the only United States senator to vote against
After that legendary performance, the former U.S. senator John Danforth called his support for Hawley’s Senate bid “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” Since Danforth also backed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, that’s saying something.
Because the Age of Ignorance has repeatedly enacted a dark principle: in the absence of knowledge, violence fills the void. In 1966, Fred Trump created the
Donald Trump would continue his father’s proud tradition of wanton vandalism when he demolished the Bonwit Teller Building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to clear the site for Trump Tower. After saying he’d try to preserve the building’s priceless Art Deco friezes so that they could be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Trump discovered that it would cost $32,000 to remove them intact. As a clever solution to his problem, he had his workmen smash them to bits.
The attack, which became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot, helped secure the presidency for Bush. Citing the halt in the recount, Geller said, “Anybody who says it was unrelated to the intimidation and violence floating around there is not telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes. Violence, fear and physical intimidation affected the outcome of a lawful elections process.” The Republican rioters weren’t done, though. They proceeded to Broward County in the hopes of stopping the count there, too.
Trump continued making such threats as president, issuing dark warnings about spontaneous eruptions of violence that he “wouldn’t lead.” In 2019, as the special counsel Robert Mueller investigated his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, Trump told
can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
love affair with mob violence, the insurrection at the Capitol seems less like an outlier and more like a sequel. But its predictability makes it no less horrifying. When the history of American infamy is written, Trump might...
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Reagan and Trump availed themselves of the same deep bench of sociopathic henchmen, from the corrupt Roy Cohn to the predatory Roger Ailes to the felonious Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. As for Reagan’s “civility and personal grace,” as Peter Wehner put it, which Reagan, exactly, was
The one who used racist dog whistles like “states’ rights” and “welfare queen”?
of student protesters, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s ...
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wished that California’s hungry would con...
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permitted his press secretary to turn AID...
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At a moment when Mike Pence seemed to be losing his mind, Dan Quayle was there to remind him what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
Given the gargantuan proportions of Trump’s mendacity, this is a small point, but Trump didn’t attend Wharton’s highly selective and revered graduate school of business. He attended Wharton’s undergraduate business program, which is far easier to get into and not as prestigious. Shockingly, he hasn’t gone to great lengths to clarify this distinction.
education alone isn’t the answer.
Okay, maybe not me specifically. But people like me—college-educated white people—are most likely to engage in what Hersh calls “political hobbyism.” We think we’re participating in politics, but we’re
There’s a difference between going to a Super Bowl party and playing in the Super Bowl; only those who do the latter affect the outcome of the game.
Changing someone’s mind is one of the hardest things to do in politics—and in life—which is why so many of us prefer to change our profile pictures. But when you change someone’s mind, you start to change the world.
Sometimes false stories are what we want, because they provide our lives with meaning. That’s why so many people are drawn to professional wrestling—not to mention folklore and mythology. In the case of Donald
people’s hunger for a false story helped elect the worst president in U.S. history.
