By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
July 31, 2023
Of
course, Donald Trump has a valet problem. How could it be
otherwise?
As
Hunter S. Thompson observed in a different Palm Beach-related scandal many
years ago—the infamous Pulitzer divorce case—“The servant problem is the
Achilles’ heel of the rich. That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable
problem the rich have never solved—how to live in peace with the servants.
Sooner or later, the maid has to come in the bedroom, and if you’re only paying
her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the
time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from
talking.”
The
people with whom Trump surrounds himself are … not the “best people,” as he
promised. (But if you are surprised that Trump has failed to keep a promise,
you should have asked Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump, or Mrs. Trump, for that
matter, or maybe Stormy Daniels.) The list is one that a novelist would blush
to invent: Mike Pence, the pious fraud who did Trump’s bidding right up until
the moment doing so stopped serving his interests and now presents himself as
the second coming of St. Francis; Rudy Giuliani, the knee-walking grifter who
still remembers enough law that he already has stipulated the falsehood
of his stolen-election nonsense—that swill is fine for the slavering proles in the Fox News audience,
but even Giuliani wouldn’t try to defend it in court; Roger Stone, literally the kind of cuckold he
likes to accuse others of being metaphorically; etc. And now Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, is
facing the prospect of time in a federal penitentiary after what reports
describe as a truly clownish cloak-and-dagger affair involving “shush” emojis, sneaking through the
hedges at Mar-a-Lago,
and roping another minion into a scheme to destroy evidence when he did not have
the technical chops to get the job done himself. These putzes make the White
House Plumbers of Watergate infamy look like the Count of Monte Cristo crossed
with Professor Moriarty. Criminal masterminds, they ain’t.
Miles
Taylor, former chief of staff at Homeland Security, recently told a podcast
that part of his job was dumbing down security briefings for the
“incandescently stupid” president.
This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president
about what his options are is something Trump literally can’t read. … And so I
had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like,
“Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.” And then bullet by bullet, I
summed up this highly classified memo into Trump’s sort of bombastic language
because it was the only way he was gonna understand. I mean, I literally said
in there, “You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call
us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan
forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.” I mean, it was
that dumb and that’s how you had to talk to him.
Some of
you will know Taylor as “Anonymous,” author of a famous New York Times essay. He eventually quit the
administration (when it was more convenient for him to do so), but do you know
what he didn’t do? He didn’t say, “Mr. President, you are not smart enough to
have this job, and you can’t even read a proper briefing. One of us has to go,
and I imagine it will be me, but this needed to be said.” Now, this was a guy
who plainly loathes Trump and what Trump stands for, and he stuck it out
through what must have been some pretty humiliating service (one does get the
feeling that he is getting the word out about that idiotic memo before someone
else draws attention to it), and, that being the case, how likely do you think
it is that somebody who wants to serve in the Trump
administration—somebody who, for whatever perverse reason, admires the man and
his moronically vicious/viciously moronic style of politics—is going to set him
straight about anything? I have friends and colleagues who served in the administration
in senior roles, and they typically defend that decision (assuming they haven’t
gone all-in on Trump cultism) in terms of damage control, making the best out
of a bad situation, giving good advice to the bumbling amateur in the Oval
Office and the collection of miscreants, subordinate con-men, and incompetents
surrounding him. But actually standing up to the guy? No, as far as I can tell,
none of them ever did that.
To a man
like Trump, everybody is a servant. Even his current wife is, in effect, a former
employee, having been part of the Trump Model Management stable before her
marriage to the man with his name on the door. That’s one of the reasons Trump
has such a hard time getting—and keeping—good help. Rex Tillerson wasn’t the
secretary of state—he was just another valet, one of many. He knew
what Trump was—“a f—–g moron,” in his own words—but he took the
job. Some people in Trump’s orbit are happy to be treated as servants—there was
never such a servile creature as Sean Hannity—but that isn’t how you get
first-rate Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, or generals. One of the reasons
for Trump’s failure as a president—and one of the reasons for his current legal
troubles—is that anybody around him who had the brains and the guts to say,
“Hey, dummy, you can’t do that!” got fired before he could explain things to
the game-show host with whom the people of this country entrusted the nuclear
codes for four long years.
And that
is why my money is on the actual valet to be Trump’s undoing. Trump is too
cheap to buy the loyalty of a servant (he will only rent it) and he isn’t
really the kind of goon he aspires to be—he inspires more contempt and pity
than genuine fear.
But
you’ll notice that every time he fired some uppity underling who wasn’t with
the program, four more popped up begging for the job. Sure, they are reliably
incompetent, dishonest, and morally repugnant, but there are a lot of them, and
the servile temperament is simply born into some people. As Hunter Thompson
once wrote of the denizens of the grimy edges of Palm Beach: “These are
servants and suckfish, and they don’t really matter in the real Palm Beach, except
when they have to testify.”
Economics
for English Majors
In a
column about congestion pricing in New York City, Paul Krugman of the New
York Times writes: “Now, nobody is suggesting a ban on
driving into Manhattan.” When you read in the Times that “nobody is
suggesting x,” then you can be sure that progressives are on the
verge of proposing that we mandate x. It took about five minutes to
go from “nobody is talking about gay marriage” to “bake that gay-wedding cake,
peon, or we’ll seize your assets.”
In fact,
people have been talking about a ban on driving in Manhattan since Dwight
Eisenhower was in the White House. “We propose the banning of all cars from
Manhattan Island, except buses, small taxis, vehicles for essential services
(doctor, police, sanitation, vans, etc.), and the trucking used in light
industry,” Dissent magazine wrote way back in 1961. Professor
Krugman’s Times colleague Fahrad Manjoo has suggested banning private cars
from Manhattan.
Manjoo was inspired by the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism’s proposal,
forthrightly described as “banning private cars from Manhattan.” There’s more:
“It’s time to ban cars from Manhattan,” James Nevius writes in Curbed.
The Guardian has considered the question sympathetically, as
has Business Insider, commentators you can read at Y
Combinator and Reddit, Crain’s, etc. I suppose it is possible that
all of these are nobodies in Professor Krugman’s estimate, but, from my point
of view, it looks like a whole lot of nobodies are suggesting a ban on driving
into Manhattan.
Professor
Krugman advocates a less radical path, adding a fee and letting people respond
to economic incentives.
Is
either proposal a good policy?
Professor
Krugman, who used to be a first-rate economist before he became a third-rate
newspaper columnist, touches on the economic questions only lightly, instead
throwing the red meat that readers have come to expect of the Times’s
op-ed pages, arguing that the soundness of the policy is so strongly endorsed
by the experts that the only explanation for its not being implemented is
“sabotage” on the part of affluent suburbanites Times readers
should hate. New York Times class warfare is a very funny kind
of class warfare—class warfare sponsored by Cartier!—but, there you have it:
Might a congestion charge have some undesirable side effects, like increased truck traffic in
the Bronx? Policies always do — but given the sheer size of the costs one
inflicts by driving into Manhattan, it’s inconceivable that these would
undermine the basic case. Should New Jersey be getting some revenue from the
fees? Maybe, although hundreds of thousands of New Jersey residents
commute into New York by train or bus, and these commuters would gain from
reduced congestion after they arrive.
What’s really striking is how few people stand to benefit from New
Jersey’s attempt to block or delay congestion charges. Fewer than 60,000 New Jersey residents, out of a
state labor force of almost five million,
commute into New York City by car. They are also, as it happens, relatively
affluent, with a median annual income of more than $100,000, relatively well
able to handle the extra cost. For this, New Jersey is trying to sabotage
crucial policy in a neighboring state?
Truck
traffic in the Bronx is a real issue—it already is a real issue and has been
for a long time, and it is becoming more of an issue every day as people of the
sort who subscribe to the New York Times move into shiny new
buildings in Manhattan-adjacent Bronx neighborhoods such as Mott Haven. Also,
the Bronx is a place where real people live and work—the toll scheme would
function, at least in part, as a pollution-transfer plan, sparing the city’s central business
district while dumping the externalities on outlying areas. Assuming that these outer-borough
types matter in the great human calculus as much as the ones who reside in
Manhattan do and given that the effects on their neighborhoods is unknown at
this time, scarcely having entered into the thinking of such commentators as
Professor Krugman, it is not precisely “inconceivable that these would
undermine the basic case” for a congestion fee. If we are interested in the
long-term health of the city, then we probably should consider the fact that
most of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in New York are outside of
Manhattan.
Congestion
fees—and outright prohibitions on private vehicles—are policies that have been
implemented with limited success in some very specific contexts. London is one
of the most famous cases. Its congestion fee does seem to have reduced traffic
by about10 percent—though the exact size of the effect remains hotly
contested—while unintended consequences (including reduced sales at some London
department stores, for example) have been significant. The original program was
going to—all together now!—“pay for itself,” with the collections farmed out to
a contractor that would turn a profit on the system, sharing some of the
proceeds with the city of London. That failed in more or less the way you would
expect, and now the system is run on a nonprofit basis and run pretty poorly,
with about 26 percent of congestion charges going uncollected and rampant
fraud. It does produce a dividend, but a modest one. Are we all sure New York
City will do much better, because it is so famous worldwide for the excellence
of its municipal administration? More successful models can be found in the
places you would expect it: Singapore, which has used congestion pricing since
the 1970s, and Stockholm, where the usual Swedish bureaucratic competency keeps
things orderly.
(I like
to imagine how the domestic politics would play in in New York’s version: No
congestion charge if you are driving in to get an abortion, but you’ll pay
double if you work at an investment bank—and if you are a “BIPOC pangender person” New York probably will end up
paying you to drive down Lexington Avenue.)
There
are other things New York City and its partners in the region could do to make
other forms of transportation more attractive: For example, a mass-transit
system in which riders were more likely to arrive on time and less likely to be
murdered or rat-bit would probably do wonders. Indeed, the cynic in me thinks
of these proposals as a means of punishing people who have noticed how badly
the powers that be in New York and environs have run things, in particular
those who have responded by taking matters—and the steering wheel—into their
own hands. That’s a pattern: The conventional public schools fail, so declare
war on charters, private schools, homeschoolers, etc; the police and
prosecutors won’t do their jobs, so blame gun shops and the law-abiding people
who shop there; etc. Fixing transit in and around New York City is a political
nightmare, because it involves many different agencies (the imbeciles who run
the Long Island Railroad and Metro North are not the same imbeciles who run the
subways) and jurisdictions and rivalrous political and economic incentives: The
people who run Stamford, Connecticut, would rather be the place where the
banks are located than
the place where young bankers get on the train to go to work, and the worse
things get on Metro North, the better the case for doing business in Stamford
or Greenwich or wherever. I am not suggesting that the town fathers across
Connecticut are engaged in “sabotage,” to use Professor Krugman’s overwrought
word, but surely the tradeoffs in play affect how they calculate their
priorities.
If you
want fewer cars on the street, then, by all means, make it more expensive to
put cars on the street. (And if you want fewer people to save and invest, raise
taxes on savings and investment. And if you want to reduce the value of work,
raise taxes on work income. Etc.) If it doesn’t reduce traffic, then your fee
wasn’t high enough. You could put a 5,000 percent tax on parking, if you wanted
to. Or you could do what “nobody is talking about” doing, and prohibit cars
from the places you don’t want cars.
But if
you want to make life in New York radically better, fix the dang trains. It’s a
tough one to take on. That’s why I always hope one of these so-called New Right
creeps will get into local and state government—you want to be Mussolini, let’s
first see if you can make the trains run on time.
Elsewhere,
in the Financial Press …
Everything
you ever wanted to know about sex from … the Wall Street Journal. It isn’t as weird as it sounds. But if the Financial Times comes
out with a dating app …
Words
About Words
Yuval Levin
has wise things to say about revolutions. And, more to our purpose here, he
knows what the word “enormity” means, which is something evil, not
something enormous.
There were some Americans who thought the same, at least in the early
stages of the French Revolution. One of them was the principal author of the
Declaration of Independence, so his view certainly has to be taken seriously.
But it’s worth seeing that for all of his zeal for the French Revolution while
it was happening, Thomas Jefferson concluded late in his life, after seeing
what became of the Revolution, that it had gone too far, and that if the king
and the people had reached an arrangement more like the moderate American
regime (or even like the limited monarchy of the British), they could have
averted “those enormities which demoralised the nations of the world, and
destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of its inhabitants.”
Those enormities were a function of the unbounded radicalism of the
revolution itself, and of the fact that they then led to military dictatorship
and the Napoleonic wars. This was not where the American Revolution pointed,
because while the American Revolution sought to ground political life in the
core and fundamental truth that we are all equal under God, it did not take
this truth to require a politics of radical disjuncture.
In
Other Wordiness …
Professor
Krugman talks about “sabotage.” But spare a thought for “cabotage.” You will not find a more amusing
explanation.
Burning
Bright …
In
British-y Englishness, this bit from the BBC about the latest indictments of
Donald Trump gave me an interesting mental image:
Ahead of Mr Nauta’s arrival, Mr de Oliveira is said to have asked a
Mar-a-Lago valet not to tell anyone about the visit because Mr Nauta wanted it
to be a secret.
Prosecutors claim that, when Mr Nauta and Mr de Oliveira met that
evening, they walked around with a torch and pointed at surveillance cameras in
a tunnel near the storage room.
Of
course, as the British speak, a torch is a flashlight.
But it
isn’t impossible to imagine these very stable geniuses walking around with the
flaming kind of torch.
In
Closing
She haunted many a low resort
Near the grimy road of Tottenham Court;
She flitted about the No Man’s Land
From The Rising Sun to The Friend at Hand.
And the postman sighed, as he scratched his head:
“You’d really ha’ thought she’d ought to be dead
And who would ever suppose that that
Was Grizabella, the Glamour Cat!”
“Grizabella, the Glamour Cat”
T. S. Eliot
If you
listen to people explain why they hated the film adaptation of Cats,
in 27 cases out of 30 the answer boils down to the fact that the film is, more
or less, Cats, the infamously inscrutable Broadway sensation that
made a billion and a half dollars and ran for almost two decades but which does
not have much in the way of what you might call a plot. Jennifer Hudson was
fine as Grizabella in the film, and she knows how to handle “Memory,” which is
to Cats what “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” is to Evita—the
main reason most people sit through the show at all. As I wrote when the Cats
film premiered, Hudson was a sensible choice for the role, but there was a
missed casting opportunity for someone who was in many ways—some of them
tragic—born to play that role: Sinéad O’Connor.
O’Connor
knew her way around a big Broadway showstopper, as she showed on her recording
of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” (Madonna does not fare well in the inevitable
comparison between their takes.) The singer Alison Moyet marveled that O’Connor
was “as beautiful as any girl around and never traded on that card,” which is,
of course, not true. In an era in which REM was making baroque and cinematic miniature films inspired
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories, O’Connor’s most famous contribution to the music-video genre consisted
of a sustained close-up of her face. She knew what she looked like. The famous
buzzcut may have been intended as a feminist statement, but it also enhanced
her beauty rather than detracting from it.
O’Connor
was a sort of real-life Grizabella, once a great beauty who fell into reduced
circumstances, ostracized, lonely, hungry to be once again embraced by her
tribe. Grizabella was rejected on moral grounds (the “low resort” of Tottenham
Court is an oblique reference to prostitution) that served, at least in part,
as a cover for the envy her glamor had once inspired—Sinéad O’Connor
certainly knew something about that.
T. S.
Eliot omitted the Grizabella poem from Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats on the grounds that it was “too sad for children.” O’Connor lost
a 17-year-old son to suicide and attempted to kill herself a dozen times before
her death last week. She spent much of the last part of her life making a spectacle
of herself, trying on new identities by the month—lesbian, asexual, radical
splinter Catholic, Muslim—at one point, she was ordained a priest by a rogue
pseudo-Catholic sect and at another point she started going by the Islamic name
Shuhada’ Sadaqat.
She was
from time to time dinged by stupendously ignorant people because her most
famous song, “Nothing Compares 2U,” was Prince’s composition rather than hers.
But “Nothing Compares” was as much her song as Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes”
belonged to Elvis Presley, as did Mike Stoller and Jerry Lieber’s “Hound
Dog,” originally written for Big Mama Thornton. (Nobody seems to have
cared that Luciano Pavarotti didn’t write his own tunes.) O’Connor’s
voice on its own would have been sufficient, but she was a very good writer,
too: How many of her contemporaries could boast of anything to compare to “The
Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Mandinka,” or “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”? Her
politics were daft, naturally, and occasionally vicious, as in her admiration
for the Irish Republican Army. But if you are getting your political views from
pop singers, the problem is with you, and even the sustained moral illiteracy
of the lyrics cannot spoil “Black Boys on Mopeds”—there are many famous
singer-songwriters who never have and never will write anything as fine as
that.
Success,
beauty, money, fame, international celebrity, glamor—none of these offers
protection against the encroachments of time and loss, the slow and repetitious
beatdown of ordinary human sadness. There is a special kind of suffering
reserved for beautiful women, in whom the natural effects of age are treated as
a degradation. A beautiful woman needs a second act—and you can be sure that
the world will do its utmost to deny her that, as though her beauty were the
one fixed point in the universe around which her life must revolve, as though
there is nothing else for her to be. Sinéad O’Connor from time to time got
herself on the right track in her search for shelter in religion and relief in
art, but she seemed to need more than these have to offer—of all the addictions
to break, celebrity may be the hardest. Performers, like politicians, have a
perverse need to be loved by strangers, and while O’Connor was more than
resilient enough to face the world’s scorn and outrage, she was not strong
enough to endure its indifference. The world moved on, and she could not.
I
imagine she would reject that characterization, perhaps in these words:
He thinks I just became famous
And that’s what messed me up
But he’s wrong.
But the
singer isn’t the song, and, in this case, you want to listen to the song even
if you must necessarily take the singer as a cautionary example:
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies.
I will sleep with a clear conscience.
I will sleep in peace.
I do
hope so. Rest in peace, at last.
I like
to imagine O’Connor being greeted in the afterlife by the sainted Pope John
Paul II, who arrived at that far shore no less in need of a Redeemer than she
does. They will, I think, have a good deal to talk about.
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