The Confidence Man Runs Again
Ex-Vice President and once consistent Trump sycophant Mike Pence recently told ABC’s David Muir that then-President Donald Trump “endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building” with his words and actions during the Jan. 6 riot in 2021, reports Politico.com.
That would be news to Donald Trump. The Donald doesn’t take responsibility for anything and never has. “Other than his father, the most important influence on the future president was Roy Cohn,” wrote Maggie Haberman in her book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump,” who taught him how to construct an entire life around proximity to power, avoiding responsibility, and creating artifice through the media.”
Unlike the many recent books about Trump, Haberman connects Donald’s early years with his presidential term and aftermath. Haberman has reported on Trump her entire career and is the only person who could write “Confidence Man.”
It is not a book to read for a blow-by-blow account of his term in office, but her thorough work on Trump’s early years is what sets the book apart from the dozens of other works about the Trump years. The subject’s familiarity with and respect for the author allowed her three interviews at Mar-a-Lago after his term.
During the last interview, Trump told two aides sitting in, “I love being with her, she’s like my psychiatrist.” Upon reflection Haberman understands that everyone is Donald’s psychiatrist. “He works things out in real time in front of all of us.”
Always obsessed with peoples’ appearance, Haberman’s look didn’t impress Trump and he told an aide, “Did you ever notice that her glasses are always smudged?”
Trump and his father admired the powerful New York urban planner Robert Moses, who is generally reviled for destroying New York’s neighborhoods with massive infrastructure projects. “As a schoolboy Donald became known for an aggressive temper and a bullying instinct,” writes Habermann. It’s no wonder he would be influenced by men like his father, Robert Moses and attorney Roy Cohn. Sprinkle in the family’s pastor, Norman Vincent Peale of “The Power of Positive Thinking” fame and you have, what a classmate described as “What Fred [Trump] put into his head was he had to win at all cost and other people don’t matter. Other people he treated like crap.”
A development-agency official, Michael Bailkin, who developed a sort of friendship with Trump, told him, “You’re a very shallow person.” To which Trump replied, “of course. It’s one of my strengths. I never pretend to be anything else.”
While Donald would pursue “a career in the less glamorous, often shady world of New York real estate,” he really wanted to be a movie star (and probably still does), maintaining a lifelong obsession with the movies.
Trump had only a handful of moves he used his entire adult life: the counterattack, the quick lie, the blame shift, misdirection or distraction, outburst of rage, performative anger, the designed-just-for-headlines action or claim, indecisiveness masked by a compensatory lunge, and creating a wedge between advisors.
Trump’s lying was and is legendary. Reporters knew he lied and let his quotes go unchecked, and “Many of his executives, male and female, were exhausted by him, and fascinated by the extent of his lying, and even disgusted by it, but they marveled at his willingness to come up with grand schemes and to try to bend others to his will.”
New York of the 1980s was where Trump was frozen in time: lots of crime, racial tensions, the lionization of Bernhard Goetz who killed four unarmed black teens on the subway, and, the Central Park Jogger assault, which inspired Trump to take out full page ads in every New York newspaper calling for “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
Suddenly, Donald was thrust into the limelight, on TV commenting on race relations. He seriously considered running for office. “From the outset, it was clear that he would incorporate racial paranoia into his public persona and his views of civic life.”
Haberman asked Trump about New York racial politics during her first interview after he left office. In Trumpspeak he said, “Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of.”
This was Trump’s view, “tribal conflict was inevitable,” Haberman summarized.
In 1988 Roger Stone commissioned a survey as to Trump’s appeal with the public, but more importantly, Trump attended the Republican convention in New Orleans. The convention floor mesmerized him. “It was like a giant sporting event, except in honor of one man,” Haberman writes. “This is what I want,” Trump said.
Trump also holds the belief that America started going downhill in the 1960s. He pined for “the feeling of supremacy that this country had in the 1950s, it was a feeling of supremacy, it really was.” Even back in the 1980s Trump ranted, “so many countries are just ripping off America left and right and down the middle, like nobody.” The entire world is like Manhattan real estate and borough politics to Trump, a zero-sum game.
So, starting in 2015, when he would go on and on about making America great again, Trump was and is referring to turning the clock back to the 1950’s. Without the gold standard I assume.
In 1998 Roger Stone again looked to gin up a Donald Trump presidential campaign. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio unearthed the astonishing fact that “just 17.3 percent of voters had no opinion of Trump, and just 2 percent of those questioned had never heard of him.” Ninety-eight percent name recognition is unheard of.
Deep into Habermann’s book Trump moves into the White House, with none of the qualities Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell would like to see in a president, “conviction, temperament, intellectual curiosity, honesty–simply were not there in Trump.” After their first meeting McConnell “observed that Trump had no idea what he believed in.”
Trump had no real interest in governing in 2016 and likely doesn’t now, but he loves the attention and drawing in money from the attention. Despite some party leaders suggesting the former president should step aside, Trump just can’t help himself. And more than a few million Americans will cheer him on, those hoping for a 1950s America. Whatever that was.
