Note: There's an error, I believe in this piece, where the name, Oliver
Stone, is used instead of Roger Stone.
Miriam
Trump, the Quintessential American
The for-profit Trump University was denounced as a fraud and went out of
business after being hit with lawsuits. (Google Images)
Donald Trump is part of the peculiar breed Herman Melville described in his
novel "The Confidence-Man," in which the main character uses protean
personas, flattery and lies to gain the confidence of his fellow passengers
to fleece them on a Mississippi River steamboat. "Confidence men," as
Melville understood, are an inevitable product of the amorality of
capitalism and the insatiable lust for wealth, power and empire that infects
American society. Trump's narcissism, his celebration of ignorance-which he
like all confidence men confuses with innocence-his megalomania and his lack
of empathy are pathologies nurtured by the American landscape. They embody
the American belief, one that Mark Twain parodied in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," F.
Scott Fitzgerald excoriated in "The Great Gatsby" and William Faulkner
portrayed in the depraved Snopes clan, that it does not matter in the crass
commercialism of American society how you obtain wealth and power. They are
their own justifications.
American culture is built on a willful duplicity, a vision we hold of
ourselves that bears little resemblance to reality. Malcolm Bradbury wrote
"that in America imposture is identity; that values are not beliefs but the
product of occasions; and that social identity is virtually an arbitrary
matter, depending not on character nor an appearance but on the chance
definition of one's nature or colour." We founded the nation on genocide and
slavery, ravage the globe with endless wars and the theft of its resources,
enrich an oligarchic elite at the expense of the citizenry, empower police
to gun down unarmed citizens in the streets, and lock up a quarter of the
world's prison population while wallowing in the supposed moral superiority
of American white supremacy. The more debased the nation becomes, the more
it seeks the reassurance of oily con artists to mask truth with lies.
Trump, like most con artists, is skilled at manufacturing self-serving news
and a fictional persona that feed the magical aura of his celebrity. The
showman P.T. Barnum is the prototype of this strain of Americanism. In the
1830s, he exhibited Joice Heth, an elderly African-American slave who he
claimed was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. When Heth
lost her novelty, Barnum announced that what he had been displaying was a
robot. "The fact is, Joice Heth is not a human being," he wrote to a Boston
newspaper, ". simply a curiously constructed automation, made up of
whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs ingeniously put together and
made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator.
The operator is a ventriloquist." The crowds, which at their height had
collectively paid $1,500 a week (then a huge sum) to see Heth, returned in
droves to see the supposed machine. After Heth died in 1836 at age 79 or 80,
Barnum sold tickets to her autopsy, which was viewed by 1,500 paying
customers.
"[Barnum] began to demonstrate the countless variations he would master in
his numerous publicity campaigns: the quick discovery, the barrage of rapid
and unusual information, the maximum exploitation-all these he utilized
almost immediately," Neil Harris wrote in "Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum."
"It was during Joice Heth's tour that Barnum first realized that an
exhibitor did not have to guarantee truthfulness; all he had to do was
possess probability and invite doubt. The public would be more excited by
controversy than conclusiveness. The only requirement was to keep the issue
alive and in print. Any statement was better than silence."
Barnum, schooled in the wily deceits of Yankee peddlers and salesmen as a
child in Connecticut, also built the first temples to celebrities,
including, in 1841, the American Museum in New York City, which Twain called
"one vast Peanut stand" and said he hoped "some philanthropist" would burn
down. Barnum was the high priest of the polytheistic, secular religion of
Americans and the creator of kitsch as an aesthetic, characteristics that
define Trump. Trump built his own temples to celebrity and to himself, among
them the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City and Trump Towers in various
cities. Trump, like Barnum, understood that celebrities and their relics
function in American culture as totems and magical talismans. He, as did
Barnum, caters to the vulgarity of the mob, elevating the salacious and the
sleazy and claiming it is culture and art.
Confidence men are adept at peddling fictions designed solely to attract
publicity and belittle their opponents. Trump's demand for Barack Obama's
birth certificate or Sen. Elizabeth Warren's DNA test was not designed to
uncover fact, but to belittle and entertain. The release of Obama's birth
certificate and Warren's DNA finding did not puncture the lies. Old lies
were replaced by new ones that again catered to the emotional yearnings of
the mob. The tawdry rumor that Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor
of New York, wore black dress socks when he was having sex with prostitutes
was given currency by the political operative and Trump confidant Roger
Stone, cut from the same lump of clay as Barnum and Trump. "What kind of guy
does it with his socks on?" Stone said to the New York Post.
In a documentary film about Spitzer by Alex Gibney titled "Client 9" Gibney
interviews a prostitute, whose identity remains secret and whose words are
read by an actor, who said she had numerous liaisons with Spitzer and denied
he wore socks while having sex. Because of Stone's comments, however,
Spitzer felt compelled to deny, in Gibney's film and in public, that he wore
socks while having sex with prostitutes. The press had a feeding frenzy.
Stone's lie won by being endlessly repeated.
Stone, in the midst of the self-generated furor, wrote an article on Tucker
Carlson's The Daily Caller website that attacked those who questioned his
assertion:
"
In his largely fictionalized movie, Gibney utilizes an actress to assert
that Spitzer never wore droopy black socks in his romps with prostitutes.
Supposedly the actress is mouthing the denial of a call girl that Gibney
declines to identify by her real name. That's because Gibney has no source
willing to put their name on this lie. Gibney is not a journalist or
filmmaker; he's a left-wing propagandist with the same disregard for facts
as Oliver Stone. Spitzer's black sock fetish was previously confirmed by The
New York Post on April 24, 2008, when an FBI source confirmed the New York
Democrat's passion for knee-high hosiery, which he declined to remove while
engaging in paid-for sex. Gibney ignored this fact in his
well-made-but-false movie.
Stone, like Trump, understands how to evoke images and emotional responses
to overwhelm reality and replace truth. Such lies and pseudo-events, because
they are so entertaining, are largely immune to deflation. Madison Avenue
advertisers and publicists use the same tactics to saturate the landscape
with skillfully manufactured illusions and false promises. The unmasking of
the deceptions only adds to their allure and power.
An autobiography by Barnum, "Struggles and Triumphs," which was published in
1869, shamelessly details the sleights of hand and deceptions that made him
very, very wealthy. He understood, as he wrote in the autobiography, that
"the public appears disposed to be amused even while they are conscious of
being deceived." This understanding underlies the popularity of
entertainments such as professional wrestling and reality television shows,
along with Fox News, all of which are premised on cons.
Con artists like Barnum, Trump and Stone exploit everyone and everything
around them. When Barnum's prize elephant Jumbo was killed by a train, he
fabricated a story about Jumbo sacrificing himself to save a baby elephant.
He bought another elephant, who he named Alice, and had pictures taken of
her standing next to the stuffed body of her martyred "husband." The
deception was so outrageous and shameless that the public of that day, like
a public that now gorges itself on reports of Spitzer wearing black socks
while having sex with prostitutes, longed to believe it.
In our Barnumesque culture, those who create the most convincing fantasies
in the cycles of nonstop entertainment are lionized. Those who puncture the
fantasies with the prosaic truth are condemned for spoiling the fun. These
pseudo-events and fabrications lift people up out of their daily lives into
an Oz-like world of fantasy. They destroy a civil discourse rooted in
verifiable fact, obliterating any hope of holding back the magical thinking
that lies at the core of all totalitarian societies.
Barnum once asked E.D. Gilman, who had recently returned from the gold
fields in California, to give a talk on prospecting, the wages prospectors
earned, the equipment that was required and the living conditions. "While
doing this," Harris wrote, "he was to pass his hand over a twenty-five pound
lump of gold, implying it was from California. Gilman replied that this
would be humbug, for seven ounces was the largest lump he had ever heard of.
'My dear sir," replied the impresario, 'the bigger the humbug, the better
the people will like it.' "
Thomas Low Nichols in a memoir described an incident when Barnum was in
desperate need of a blackface entertainer after his white singer quit. All
he could find to replace his white singer was a young, talented black boy
who danced and sang. It was impossible for Barnum to present the genuine
article, given the yearning for illusion and his shameless catering to
racial prejudice. Barnum "blacked and wigged" the boy, Harris wrote, so he
would pass for a make-believe African-American, "because the New Yorkers,
who applauded what they supposed a white boy in a blackened face and wooly
wig, would have driven the real negro from the stage and mobbed his
exhibitor."
Trump, in a 2005 promotional video for a scam that made him about $40
million, employs the familiar hyperbole of the con artist in declaring: "At
Trump University, we teach success. That's what it's all about-success. It's
going to happen to you. We're going to have professors and adjunct
professors that are absolutely terrific-terrific people, terrific brains,
successful. We are going to have the best of the best. These are people that
are handpicked by me."
Only there was no university.
"The faux university also did not have professors, not even part-time
adjunct professors, and the 'faculty' (as they were called) were certainly
not 'the best of the best,' " David Cay Johnston writes in "The Making of
Donald Trump." "They were commissioned sales people, many with no experience
in real estate. One managed a fast food joint . two other instructors were
in personal bankruptcy while collecting fees from would-be Trump university
graduates eager to learn how to get rich."
"Among [an] investigator's findings was that students who attended a 'next
level' seminar 'are taught to prey upon homeowners in financial turmoil and
to target foreclosure properties,' " Johnston writes. "They were also
instructed, on the first morning of the three-day course, 'to call their
credit card companies, banks, and mortgage companies and ask for an increase
or extension of credit so that they may finance the 'Gold Elite' package
purchase. Defendant Trump U will even ask attendees to call their bank
during these one-on-one sessions while the [Trump] representative waits. The
primary goal of the 3-day seminar appears to be more high-pressure sales
tactics in an attempt to induce them into purchasing Defendant Trump U's
'Gold Elite' package for $35,000."
Trump's get-rich-quick schemes and seminars, including his books, were a
con. His casinos were a con. His paid speeches on behalf of self-help gurus
such as Tony Robbins were a con. Tales of his sexual prowess, spread by
himself masquerading over the phone as a Trump spokesperson, were a con. His
building projects were a con. Trump even had, Johnston writes, "imaginary
employees." Trump and his kleptocrats and grifters are today triumphant, and
neither democratic norms or simply human decency will inhibit their
pathological lust for more.
Perhaps it was inevitable that this poison would come to dominate our
culture and our politics. It is the triumph of artifice. We live in an age
when the fake, the fraudulent, the fabricated and the theatrical supplant
reality. Trump's manufactured persona was advertised on a reality television
show. He sold this manufactured persona, as his ratings declined and he was
in danger of being taken off the air, to become president. There are legions
of agents, publicists, consultants, scriptwriters, celebrities, television
and movie producers, wardrobe consultants, pollsters and television
personalities dedicated to creating the myriad illusions that saturate the
airwaves with Barnum-like lies. We can no longer tell the difference between
illusion and reality; indeed when a version of reality is not verified on
our electronic screens and by our reality manipulators it does not exist.
The skillful creation of illusion and the manipulation of our emotional
response, actions that profit the elites to our financial and political
detriment, have seeped into religion, education, journalism, politics and
culture. They solidify mob rule and magical thinking. Trump's crass
vulgarity, greed, unchecked hedonism and amorality, along with his worship
of himself, are intrinsic to America, but his ascendancy, and the ascendancy
of the character traits he personifies, represents cultural death.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a