New York
Sleight of hand, the magician’s trick of distraction and fascination is the basic operating procedure of a nascent dictatorship in Washington led by a one-time reality TV performer and convicted felon with sweaty dreams of becoming a man the world has never seen before: the ruling monarch of America.
The would-be king is not intelligent, but he is single-minded.
And sufficiently cunning to take his cues from a competent magician’s patter whilst misdirecting his audience. As when, classically, the sleight of hand artist places a vigorously shuffled deck of cards on the table before his wide-eyed audience, nice folks out for the night and anxious for some baffling entertainment. The patter begins—
“Notice how my hands are completely empty,” says the magician. He smiles and invites a nice young volunteer lady from the audience, “Look and see for yourself!”
She confirms that the deck was properly shuffled, and that the magician’s hands are unencumbered.
“Please allow me a personal question, Miss,” says the magician. He then asks her, “Have you ever known a sweet boy named Jack?”
She blushes, and says, “Actually…yes. Jack was his name.”
“And did your Jack have a twin?”
“Actually…I don’t know.”
“Supposing he did. Does your Jack have a mother who is a twin?”
“I don’t…I mean, how should I know?”
“And the boys’ father? Did he or does he, too, have a twin brother?”
The blushing young lady looks as if she needs to sit down.
The magician turns to his larger audience and says, triumphantly, “Well now, let us see…”
He invites his young volunteer to reveal the top six cards. She flips over two Jacks, two Queens, and two Kings.
•
My late grandfather performed this trick for me when I was a lad in short pants. “That trick,” he told me, “is about as old as back when Jesus was walking around the desert in sandals.”
I loved my grandfather, even though he refused to tell me the secret of how to pull off a classic of misdirection. Which to paraphrase the title of a famous book authored by the dreamer of royal dreams is the art of the deal proffered by a man who would be king: Look over here at what I’m doing while I’m doing this other business over there; let me entertain you as I not only cut legal corners but demolish them; come and adore me.
Inane as the deal sounds—who would agree to such a bargain?—the cunning convict in Washington is serious, in an amusing way, of course, for he has learned that people will somehow trust that a clown is harmless. In the waning days of February, as he sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office of the White House, the president of the United States of America directed his press office to release an A.I. image of himself, above a comical caption—
•
International agreements on the release of prisoners require a negotiation process, though it need not be lengthy if the heavier-handed party has a warm spot for some sorry individual at issue. Take someone soon to face trial on charges of misogynistic sexual abuse, for instance.
Donald Trump, the precedent-setting president, put the prestige of his office on the line (as he so often does) in advocating for a pair of Americans caught up in a particularly nasty predicament in Romania: The brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, arrested two years ago by Romanian police with allegedly forming a criminal gang for the purpose of exploiting and trafficking women of that country, wished very much to return to America.
As Mr. Trump’s White House press minions dazzled the news media with an A.I. clown act, the Romanian authorities were somehow induced to liberate the Tate boys—who were put aboard a hush-hush flight to Florida on February 27that delivered the accused to an airport not far from Mr. Trump’s golf resort and home at the sprawling mansion called Mar-a-Lago.
Background:
• The alpha brother, Andrew Tate, is a prominent supporter of Mr. Trump’s political ambitions and the very model of a modern misogynist, as self-expressed on social media. In one Tik Tok video, he acted out how he’d find retribution if a woman with whom he was involved cheated on him.
“It’s bang out the machete, boom her in the face and grip her by the neck,” he enthused. “Shut up, bitch.”
According to police in Bucharest, Mr. Tate and his brother lured a Florida woman to Romania—identified as “Jane Doe” in legal papers— for sexual trafficking purposes. Ms. Doe escaped and sought police protection as prosecutors in Romania brought thirty-five more alleged victims forward in the case of sex trafficking (including the alleged rape of a minor) and money laundering. Mr. Trump’s son, Donald Jr., called the Tate brothers’ years of alternating incarceration and house confinement in Romania an “absolute insanity.” No doubt they were, or will be fêted at Mar-a-Lago.
One of the Tate brothers’ lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, now works in the Trump White House as liaison to the Department of Justice.
• As for Mr. Trump, president and candidate for king, he stands credibly accused of rape and sexual misconduct by some twenty women, with legal actions held in abeyance until after his presidential term.
Prior to his winning the election of November 2024, Mr. Trump was convicted in May in a New York state court on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments made in connection with his allegedly Las Vegas hotel room liaison with porn movie queen Stormy Daniels at a time when his wife, Melania, was in New York recovering after the birth of their son Barron.
One year prior, a federal court in New York found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll by allegedly slamming her against a wall inside the changing room of a department store clothing section and jamming his fingers into her vagina, actions he denied by way of libeling Ms. Carroll. A jury awarded the plaintiff $5 million (€4.8 million).
Look over here at what I’m doing while I’m doing this other business over there…
•
—FOTOS: commons.wikimedia.org
A TRIO OF TRUMP TUTORS
from left: Roy Cohn, John Gotti, Steve Bannon
To the extent he accepts wise and/or wiseguy) counsel beyond his golf companions, members of the bar and otherwise, Donald Trump is clearly influenced a three-member board of education, as it were:
• ROY COHN (1927-1986). When Donald met Roy, the future president was a determined New York real estate developer eager to shed his outer borough Queens accent and ethos in order to fit in with the high-living élite of Manhattan. In the lawyer Cohn, the hustler Trump found a shepherd—a Bronx native likewise resentful of the smug regard he generally drew from Manhattan cliques.
As a tutor in business and high society, Mr. Cohn advised then-young Mr. Trump to “attack, counter attack, and never apologize.” As a lawyer, his policy was, “I don’t want to know the law, I want to know who the judge is.”
As a human being, Mr. Cohn was a hypocrite. On his death bed, about to leave the world as a victim of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, he denied he was gay—despite years of swanning about the city with his various male lovers.
• JOHN GOTTI (1940-2002). Likewise Queens-born and bred, the mobster John Gotti, il capo di tutti capi of the Gambino organized crime “family” was a habitual movie-goer.
Mr. Gotti and Mr. Trump were contemporaries in the heavily mobbed-up era of New York City construction business, though they never met face to face. Trump’s projects required coöperation from the likes of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and the late Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano. As Big Paulie’s successor, it was John “the Dapper Don” Gotti who allegedly ordered gunsels to whack Mr. Castellano outside a Manhattan steakhouse often frequented by Donald Trump, who, like the Dapper Don, was a rabid fan of the movie “The Godfather,” full of mood and dialogue to match their own.
Art imitating life?
• STEVE BANNON (1953—). Often described as the “most handsome man at the liquor store,” the pudgy and sloppily-dressed Steve Bannon was a short-lived White House political aide during Mr. Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 until his failed reëlection bid in 2020.
Shortly before leaving office, Mr. Trump granted a presidential pardon for Mr. Bannon, who confessed to defrauding millions of dollars from private investors in his boss’s nebulous barrier wall project along the southern border with Mexico.
As a political tactician, Mr. Bannon’s watchword for elective success is a more bumptious methodology than sleight of hand: “Flood the zone with shit.”
To be sure, Mr. Trump has flooded the zone, viz. Haitian immigrants in the U.S. eat their new neighbors’ cats and dogs; women “let you grab their pussies when you’re a star”; drinking bleach is an effective antidote for Covid-19 infection.
Though guided by a respected few, it is fair to say that Donald Trump has help in his version of integrity. According to a Washington friend who must remain nameless, Mr. Trump has been heard more than once calling his presidential circle of sycophants and enforcers “our thing.” Which is English for la cosa nostra, the Sicilian mafia that dates back to the mid-19th century as an association of criminal gangs engaged in racketeering, arbitration of disputes among criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions.
The Sicilian bunch would not seem out of place in Washington, or in Florida where Mr. Trump, a legendary nickname creator, might well call them the Mar-a-Lago mafia.
•
—CNN Television
HE POWER IN FRONT OF THE THRONE
Elon “Jumpin’ Elmo” Musk & Friend
The world’s foremost right-wing oligarch and richest man, said by the business magazine Forbes to be worth $357.5 billion (€343.9 billion), was Elon Reeve Musk—a citizen of South Africa where he was born, Canada where he was raised, and the United States where he arguably holds power on a par with Donald Trump. (Mr. Trump himself would not argue the claim.)
Mr. Musk, who earned the moniker “Jumpin’ Elmo” due to his hyperactive performance on stage during Mr. Trump’s string of partisan rallies last year, was the president’s biggest campaign donor. By far. He invested one quarter of one billion dollars in the effort, small change for effectively buying into the position of de facto co-president of his third country — with its economy valued at $30.337 trillion (€29.23 trillion).
Beyond his payment to play, Mr. Musk is obliged to the occasional smooch upon the pale buttocks of a famously flatulent führer, which he seems not to mind—for now.
Meanwhile, Jumpin’ Elmo is everywhere in Washington nowadays; at Mar-a-Lago, too, where he decamps at his very own cottage on the grounds and rides the greens at shotgun seat of the presidential golf cart driven by Mr. Trump.
Not to be outdone in what appears to be a three-ring testosterone war in the making, the actual vice president of the U.S., the increasingly sad-faced J.D. Vance, leapt at a recent opportunity for attention when Mr. Trump sent him off to Munich to scold the German political establishment, ever so obliquely, for its failure to extend warm welcome to the fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Mr. Musk topped that by suggesting that Germany should “get over its guilt” about the Nazi era, and with a telephone call to the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, offering effusive congratulations for her party’s second-place finish in the recent snap election.
Mr. Trump stayed largely out of the way. Perhaps he was thinking about what happened to Big Paulie back in the day.
•
The hope of all Americans I care to know, and those Trump voters who now finally exhibit buyers’ remorse, Donald Trump will go away some day. He is, after all, one hamburger away from a massive coronary event.
Or perhaps he is at long last as exhausted as the rest of us by his flooding the zone with shit and will drive off into the sunset at the wheel of his golf cart. Or perhaps the éminence grises of his once respectable Republican Party will suddenly grow a collective spine that stands them aright and able to evict the yellow-haired seat moistener from the White House.
—Alas, I understate my contempt horribly.
None of the foregoing is likely to happen. What will happen is immeasurable damage to the nation with a collapse of confidence in government accountability, per the constitutional phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” A collapse courtesy of “our thing.”
Alexander Hamilton, a Caribbean immigrant born in St. Kitts and Nevis at an indeterminate date in the 18th century, and who died in 1804 in a pistol duel across the Hudson River from New York, has unsettling thoughts on the Trump-Musk co-presidency that leaves J.D. Vance in limbo and the American people in awful wonder.
His voice as author of the Federalist Papers, essays instrumental in ratifying the United States Constitution, echoes in our time. For his column in the New York Times of February 28, Jamelle Bouie writes:
“Trump may be working from an expansive theory of executive power, but in delegating so much of his authority to musk…he is both undermining that power and demonstrating Hamilton’s real about the importance of a singular executive.
“Hamilton wrote that ‘plurality in the executive’ tends to ‘conceal faults and destroy responsibility’ we’re seeing play out [in the Trump presidency]. Hamilton says that ‘the multiplication of the executive adds to the difficulty of detection…it often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author.’”
