After Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, the historical novelist Thomas Mallon – a specialist in fiction about US presidents – was asked whether he would write about the new commander in chief. Impossible, Mallon said; Trump lacked the psychological nuance to be a character in a novel. “Trump simply advances, like the Andromeda strain, a case of arrested development that is somehow also metastatic.” Having read hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words about Trump since then (not including tweets), it is hard to disagree. Trump may be shallow, but his narcissism is bottomless.
This information being well-established, why bother to read another long book about Trump? Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man is useful, and worth reading, precisely because it follows Thomas Mallon’s advice and doesn’t try to create grand narrative out of Trump’s psychological motivations. Instead it prioritises relentless and well-sourced reporting of Trump’s actions – his constant, never truly strategic but not quite heedless, progress through fame and wealth (always part pretence, part reality) through to actual TV fame on The Apprentice, where he played the role of a successful businessman, and then actual power.
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If the why of Trump is tedious (grotesquely outsize ego) then the how is more interesting. One answer, as Haberman’s reporting shows, is Trump’s genius for using people. First, his father, Fred, a genuine self-made multimillionaire (and seemingly authoritarian father), who used political connections and money to featherbed his son’s business career, including with cash subsidies at Trump jnr’s most precarious moments. Most notoriously, a Fred Trump representative marched with a briefcase into one of Donald’s teetering Atlantic City casinos paid $3 million in cash for chips that were never used.
After his father came the infamous New York lawyer Roy Cohn, who offered Trump two valuable commodities: combative legal representation and a broader social network in Manhattan. Despite being a mentor and even believing in Trump’s political potential long before he ran for office, as he was dying from Aids, Cohn was quietly ostracised by the younger businessman. Through Cohn he met the cartoonishly villainous political operative Roger Stone, who would become a Trump whisperer and perennial presence in his occasional publicity stunt political ventures, including his flirtation with the presidential nomination of the Reform Party in 2000. Stone would eventually be convicted for various felonies related to the leaking of Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 election, but pardoned by President Trump before serving any prison time.
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So transactional was his relationship with even his closest family that, as this book shows, he was on the verge of firing his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared, via tweet
Also in 1980s New York was an up and coming prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, soon-to-be a mayoral candidate and eventually-to-be disgraced liar for hire, happy to plumb any depth debasing himself for Trump. Giuliani embodies the craziness and humiliation of Trump world more than most. A serious, if highly reactionary, prosecutor-turned-mayor, Giuliani became the leading promulgator of 2020 election conspiracies and Trump’s lead lawyer in the effort to overturn the result. “Go wild, do anything you want. I don’t care,” Trump is quoted as telling him, revealingly.
Giuliani did not need to be told twice, as he set about destroying whatever was left of his own reputation, including with one surreal press conference at a landscape gardening firm in suburban Philadelphia and another one involving leaking hair dye. This book does not spare on detail when it comes to the routine humiliations and performative vulgarity of Trump world. Encountering an odour left by Giuliani in one of the bathrooms on his private jet, the soon-to-be president shouted, loud enough for other campaign aides to hear: “Rudy, that’s f***ing disgusting!”
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Cohn, Stone and Giuliani are three of the most notorious examples of the Trump drama: an endless, grotesque opera with no obvious meaning other than the moment-by-moment gratification of the central protagonist. Haberman reports how often Trump would simply stop in his tracks to soak up rolling news (invariably rolling news about him) that happened to be in his line of sight, sometimes during important meetings. More TVs were installed in the White House than ever before, including in Trump’s bathroom, for the purposes of keeping him in constant touch with all the attention he was receiving. And, that, ultimately was what it all came down to. So overpowering was the craving, he was willing to risk his fragile recovery from Covid (and the health of his secret service agents) to parade his health. So transactional was his relationship with even his closest family that, as this book shows, he was on the verge of firing his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared, via tweet. So titanic was his need to be seen to win that he was willing to fundamentally damage US democracy in order to save face.
I’ve used past verbs in those last few lines, largely in hope that Haberman’s book serves as a guide to four singular years of one Trump president and not a primer for an encore performance.
