The only difference, they say, and they recognize that it is important, is the severity of his role: he is the president, not the president of the Trump Organization, but the United States of America, and what is at stake: health and livelihood of the country’s democracy
“The only thing that has changed is that it is doing it on the world stage, and it is reinforced by the powers and the platform offered by the presidency,” biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “We don’t need to believe now that there is something Donald Trump will not do to preserve his own sense of himself. And just for history books, it’s worth cataloging certain incidents, and this is one of them. He is ready to put democracy on the block. “
But Trump has never altered his fundamental MO to match the scale of the moment. He has always put his own interests first, those in the know say, whether it’s a business or a matter of state.
“This is all very consistent with the man I worked with 30 years ago,” Bruce Nobles, the former president of Trump Shuttle, told me. “He is very competitive and he wants to always win, and if he thinks he can’t win, then by definition there must be something wrong with the system, because otherwise he would of course win,” Nobles said. “He believes that, if for some reason he doesn’t get what he wants, it is not his fault, it is another corrupt system that prevents that from happening.”
In 1990, when he owed billions of dollars to his bank lenders, Trump blamed the general economic downturn instead of acknowledging the litany of his own reckless decisions, “saying, ‘Okay, you run the building, you run the debt, you run the airline, you run the Plaza, ” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me. And he made sure their plight was theirs, in a sense failing the system, then distorting the system and then (ab) use the system to survive. “He said, ‘Hey, if I fail, they all fail,'” Marcus said.
“When he was deeply in debt with bank loans that he couldn’t pay,” added O’Brien, the biographer, “he basically said he would blow up the banks and hang them up and walk away from their debts when they needed it.” Let him play ball, so they can rationally get rid of the properties he used to control. And once he realized they needed their participation, he started playing with fire, like all 7-year-olds do. ”
Steven Perskie, chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission from 1990 to 1994, recalled the case in December 1990 in which Trump’s father spent more than $ 3 million on casino chips he did not use, an illegal loan who helped her bullied son. make a payment on past due debt.
“It doesn’t remotely have the profile and political impact of this morning’s tweet, which is a direct attack on our system of government,” Perskie told me. But still, she said, “The connection, or the bond, if you will, is simply your instinctive ability to reinvent reality.”
Reinventing reality in that case meant an assault on the state’s regulatory infrastructure, and in this case cast doubt on the reliability of the nation’s voting system.
“Every failure he has had,” O’Brien told me, “has been attributed to outside forces.”
Only now, of course, is Trump one of the most powerful people on the planet, and one of the most important presidents in history, and it’s not the banks or Atlantic City he’s attacking.
“It is democracy,” O’Brien said.
“You must have empathy for collateral damage to bother you. And he is devoid of empathy. You never think about collateral damage. Just think about how good the mushroom clouds will look. ”
However, at least on Thursday, the response on Capitol Hill and throughout the political world seemed to suggest that Election Day, which the Constitution empowers Congress to establish and therefore can only be changed by Congress, is a pillar of democracy that this president eviscerates the norm. You will not be able to gut. He had been “moving” toward the idea of postponing or poisoning this fall’s elections, biographer Gwenda Blair told me, “but now he’s going full speed.” Republicans, from Mitch McConnell onward, however, essentially said Stop there.
But people who have known and seen Trump, not for five years but parts of five decades, say one thing is for sure. He does not. As predictable as Tuesday’s tweet could have received its behavior patterns in the past, they could and should be seen, too, they said, as a foretaste of what’s to come in the next 96 days and who knows how long after that.
“He is going to keep the rhetoric,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me. “He will for the next three months, and he will talk about this ‘fraudulent’ choice and this ‘fraudulent’ choice. Because he can’t lose in his mind. And that’s how he’s going to cover it if he does.”
