The buck stops there

Every now and then we need someone to tell us what we already know. They remind us of certain obvious home truths that have been staring us in the face all along. They just put it another way. Sometimes they put it very, very well. It’s the soul of great philosophy and great literature.

And sometimes it’s the soul of great biography, too. I can’t tell you how well he puts it in his first book — I haven’t read it yet — but by all accounts Fred Trump III, nephew of Donald Trump, tells us what we already know about Donald Trump in his newly released biography about him. And I need to hear it all again and, I think, so do you.

It’s called, appropriately enough, “All in the Family,” starring the inimical Donald Trump as Archie Bunker, only sans Archie’s endearing accidental humour, sans Archie’s charm, and ultimately sans Archie’s humanity. It’s a reminder that the public-facing Trump is every inch the liar, the bigot, the jerk, the inadequate, vindictive, soulless, stupid coward we always knew he was. And we need to hear it again.

It also traces the origins (or, “oranges,” if you will) of the familiar Trumpian characteristics. “Many of his adult traits — his determination, his short fuse — first displayed themselves in his childhood,” Trump III writes. Over time they ossified, they petrified. “I can’t sum up his early days in a single slogan, but I think I can do it in two: ‘I wanna do what I wanna do’ and also ‘That’s not fair.’”

Ah yes, the Trump go-to position of how unfairly he’s been treated, what an effing martyr he is, how tough factual questions are and how nasty and fake the black woman who asks them is, how he’s another Lincoln only treated far worse, another Christ betrayed by a thousand Judases. Yes, yes, yes, we’ve all seen and heard it a million times.

Now, thanks to Trump III (and with some magnificent assistance earlier from his sister, the wonderful Mary Trump) we get to see what it looked like in the early days. Trump didn’t invent his whiny, man-baby persona for his first run for prez in 2016, he’s always been that way. He’s always been exactly that kind of asshole.

And he’s also always been staggeringly, breathtakingly, heartlessly evil. Fred Trump III is the father of William, who suffers from a lifelong neurological disability, which Fred describes in the book in poignant detail. The self-anointed “billionaire” Donald reluctantly helped with the medical bills. But after a while he got tired of it and stopped. “Maybe you should just let [William] die and move down to Florida,” was Donald Trump’s final, stone-hearted verdict.

But Donald Trump’s most enduring feature is his refusal to take the blame for anything. The only bucks Donald Trump is interested in is the green kind, otherwise the buck stops somewhere else. He has no appetite for taking responsibility for things that have gone wrong, and it still shows.

The Trump we know, the Trump who never loses elections — they’re stolen from him, the Trump who doesn’t lose Americans to Covid-19 — they’re the product of “too much testing,” the Trump who didn’t preside over the worst deficit in history — it was Obama’s fault, is everywhere present throughout the summaries of the book. Since Donald Trump doesn’t make mistakes, his numerous, daily mistakes have to be someone else’s fault. It’s classic narcissism.

Then there’s Trump’s racism. He is candidly pronounced a racist by many who knew him for years. Fred Trump III adds a new story to the canon. In the early 1970s, someone left two gashes in the roof of Donald Trump’s white Cadillac convertible.
“Donald was pissed, boy, was he pissed,” Fred remembers. “‘N******,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the n****** did.’” (When the British newspaper the Guardian broke the news of this particular passage in the book, the Trump campaign issued a boilerplate blanket denial. “Completely fabricated, and total fake news of the highest order,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson. “Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never blah blah blah blah blah.”)

If I can find the time, I’ll read Fred Trump III’s book in total. I look forward to it. But I hasten to add that I don’t need to read books about the law of gravity to know what would happen if I stepped off the roof of a fifty story building.

Yes, Donald Trump isn’t merely the worst president in American history, he is positively the worst PERSON in American history. In “All in the Family,” Fred Trump III, like so many people who knew him, reminds us of that fact. Above all, he reminds us to get to the polls in November and send Donald Trump a message more powerful than any book: he is not wanted by the American people. Or in the immortal words of Oliver Cromwell, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.