Before my flabby, almost flatulent words about Donald Trump were out of my mouth, I knew Bill Maher was going to beat the crap out of me for saying them.
This was November 6, 2015. To alter a soon-to-be cliché, I had been taking Trump literally but not seriously and figured the Republicans would do what they always did: poll crazy but nominate boring. But now I found myself on Maher’s HBO show, hopelessly lost in a Trump story. I had mentioned that I’d first met him in 1984 and had since run into him in the hallways of NBC as well as the lobby of the apartment building that bore his name where I owned a condo. I had observed that—contrary to this hybrid of Huey Long, Mussolini, and Buzz Windrip that seemed to inhabit Trump’s body during the campaign—the conversations were low-key, rational, pleasant each time I had talked to him. Even accounting for the likelihood that he was sucking up to me because you don’t want an unhappy condo owner with a public profile, these conversations were, stunningly, about me and not him. He had even written me a fan letter at ESPN.
I was confessing to Maher of having been conned.
I could not stop the self-incrimination. Even though I managed to express the point that the two personalities—Benito Trumpolini and Eddie Trump-Haskell—were both incredibly convincing and the longer he used them both, the less it mattered which was the “real” Trump, I knew Bill; after all, we’d originally run into each other in college in 1978—and within seconds we were arguing, with him calling me a “corporate sellout” at a juncture in my life when all the corporations in the history of the world had paid me about $100 in total. Now, thirty-seven years later, Maher was going to call me a lot worse than a corporate sellout.
Only, he didn’t.
He completely agreed with me.
He couldn’t have agreed more with me and my assessment of Trump’s in-person non-Mussolinism had he said, “Golly gumption, Keith, you’re right, he was super neato pleasant!”
That was my Trumpian tipping point.
I was born with a pretty solid bullshit detector, honed by twenty years covering sports for a living and nearly twenty more after that covering politics and news and sports, often all at the same time. But Bill’s bullshit detector was so much better than mine that it was weaponized—and somehow even he had been taken in by Trump. If you see the video of my appearance that night on Bill’s show you’ll notice a little tic in my left eye as it registers in my head: Trump was able to fool Maher?
When I walked off his stage that night, the thoughts came as fast and as loud as any I had ever had. It wasn’t implausible that Trump had conned me. But Trump had conned Maher? Those aren’t two integrated personalities Trump wears interchangeably like different penis-draping ties. These are manifestations of acute mental illness. Trump isn’t just a scam artist and he isn’t merely a reincarnated P. T. Barnum. This is a psychopath. This is a clear and present danger. Soylent Green is people. They’re after you, they’re after all of us, our wives, our children, everyone! They’re here already! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell! You’re gonna need a bigger boat!
I’ll spare you the full details of the process that ten months later led to my election-year commentary series that was supposed to keep the car alarm bleating and help my old nemesis Hillary Clinton seal her victory. Besides me, there was one other guy who was asking the question “Why isn’t Olbermann doing commentaries about this?” and he was Geoff Gagnon, the articles editor at GQ magazine. At our first meeting about doing a series we called it The Closer because we were still beholden to pre-11/8 thinking that all Hillary needed was somebody to close the deal for her.
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When the perfect Russian storm hit and the nightmare came to life on Election Day, Geoff and I, and GQ’s video executive producer, Dorenna Newton, and photographer-editor Peter Calvin and Noel Howard and Luke Leifeste and the rest of the crew talked for literally a couple of minutes about shutting the thing down. And then we all said: To hell with that, so what if this will be used against us in court, after two months of this guy we aren’t going to get a trial—and we renamed the series The Resistance and persisted.
The commentary scripts were not designed as a narrative of the closing stages of the campaign and the opening months of this Ray Bradbury Funhouse Mirror of a presidency. But when I read them in order, it was shocking to me how they formed themselves into one. It’s like digesting a diary rescued from the Titanic and actually finding yourself hoping against your better judgment that this time the damn boat won’t hit the damn iceberg.
I’d love to say I planned it that way, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s been noted anywhere, but views for each commentary began to rival, then surpass, the high-water-mark ratings of cable news—the total audience for the series eventually exceeded 300 million. I never got a dime out of the videos—I asked GQ only for a few charitable contributions in my name and some (much-needed) fashion help. I hoped all along that the project would be put out of business because the grown-ups would ultimately stop this lunatic from being elected, or from being confirmed by the Electoral College, or from being sworn in, or from not being removed by the fourth clause of the Twenty-fifth Amendment the first time he showed he was crazier than Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, and Ted Cruz put together.
Tragically, there weren’t any grown-ups, only opportunists who were too busy leveraging Trump’s election to their own advantage for political power or ratings or for paying off mortgages. Crazy old John Brown hastened the coming Civil War and said the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away but with blood. I don’t think we’re nearly at that point—yet—but I’m just as confident as he was, that the crimes of this self-absorbed land will never be purged away but with everything from Lexuses to the repossession of personal freedoms.
This may seem like an odd point to make here, but bear with me for a moment. By marriage and adoption, I’m Mike Tyson’s distant cousin (he was adopted by his first trainer and manager, Cus D’Amato; D’Amato’s late niece Gerry was my uncle’s wife). Thirty years ago, Trump—who was then involved in the boxing-promotion business because of his casino venues—and the infamous promoter Don King squeezed Cus’s protégé trainer Kevin Rooney and other D’Amato disciples out of Tyson’s coterie. They also told Mike—forgive me, cousin Mike—that he was the champ now and he no longer had to do the things that Cus and Kevin used to insist he do. You know, like taking the cocktail of medications that kept him surprisingly stable and unexpectedly kind and even sweet-hearted but harshed his buzz, or sticking to a diet, or training, or not attacking people, or not giving away $200,000 cars to strangers. King and Trump came into a situation that was seemingly permanently under control, disabled the brakes and busted the headlights and painted over the speed-limit signs, and within a few years, Tyson was in prison, convicted of rape.
The point of this book is to chronicle how Trump managed to get America to choose him to do to our country what Trump helped do to my cousin Mike. These commentaries are about what Trump’s mixture of illness, hucksterism, amorality, and manipulative cunning has done to the United States, so I won’t belabor you with some long meta-analysis right here. But I will say that I suspect you’ll reach the same kind of conclusion I did after reading all these scripts at once. Trump’s immeasurable ego and his “Wheeee! The Rules Don’t Apply to Meeeeee!” attitude (which mirrors the bravado of the opioid abuser—plus whatever else is wrong with him) found a partner in that less than half of the electorate that ultimately doesn’t give a shit about anybody they don’t know personally (and not a lot of people they do know personally, either).
Trump gives them permission to ignore whatever principles they might have. Trump gives them permission to believe that laws and invoices and religions apply only to others. Trump gives even the lower-incomed among them confirmation that they can act with vengeance against the less fortunate because he’s going to make his “fans” rich. Trump gives them the right to dispute facts. Trump gives them the right to ignore warnings. Trump gives them the right to hate. Trump gives them the right to stop doing what other people and common sense and common decency tell them to do. Trump gives them the right to say, “We don’t have to have any more black people or women running this country.” Trump gives them the right to do what he does when he’s caught lying, stealing, obstructing, or selling out the country: just make up a cover story, the wilder the better—the rubes will believe it. Trump gives them the right to be stupid and goddamned proud of it.
Just remember as you read, that this can be fixed whenever we will it. We who have seen him for what he is, and fought him and the driving-morally-drunk America still cheering him, are not some fringe group scuttling in the darkness.
We are the majority.
Let’s act like it.