Oh, So That Happened . . .

I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that Donald Trump — or as he is now known, the 45th President of the United States of America — has invaded mental spaces like few other public figures. Book Club was not immune to this moment, and so we found ourselves reading Wayne Barrett's Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention.

Barrett's work about Trump obviously gained some currency after 2016 and is a good jumping off point for understanding some of the hijinks of Trump's early career. Some of the more unbecoming biographical details that came up in the campaign are covered here (and are maybe even the source?): the less-than-hands-on approach to fatherhood, the lawyering up, for example. But the source material loses a little bit of punch when his post-2015 persona or caricature is so villainous and/or cretin-like. Something interesting that didn't escape anyone who read Trump was how little it really highlighted his boorishness, specifically toward women. In fact, it doesn't really come up at all until the waning pages of the book — like page 441 out of 445 waning. Some posited that it could have been because Barrett is (more accurately "was," since he just passed away) "another old white guy" — i.e., someone for whom sexism and misogyny is not particularly salient. Honestly, that seems like a stretch: as an 80s tabloid kind of person he just seems sort of basically tabloid, of the era.

"Of the era" comes up a lot, at least for me. Barrett himself suggests that as an organizing principle for the book itself: the "why it matters" when it comes to Trump — at least to a reader in the early 1990s, when Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (i.e., the original title of the book) was first published, that Trump's story was the lens to view an entire era of bad deals, bubbly real estate markets and incompetent-negligent banking practices. Which is to say — somewhat to say — that the seediness of Trump's rise and fall necessarily includes mobbed-up entities (who else is building casinos in Atlantic City or pouring concrete in Midtown Manhattan?), corrupt and quasi-corrupt elected officials and whatever other unsavory figures (Roy Cohn, Roger Stone) operated in the New York-New Jersey area between the 1970s and 1990s. It's too easy to point to all of it and instinctively want to turn away. (It's also probably why American Democracy persists in elevating these Eliot Ness prosecutor types to higher office: Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Fucking Cuomo, etc., etc., etc.; sometimes it seems the easiest thing in the world to do is leverage crime fighting to higher office.) So I think you can be forgiven reading Trump and kind of shrugging: as my grandmother used to say, they're all crooks.

In fact, the kind of brilliance of Trump the candidate is exactly this: America is safer — and probably on more solid economic footing — if Donald Trump is not busy overleveraging hometown banks, buying off local councilmembers and clogging up an already overburdened legal system with lawsuits. Instead, we need to deploy his special talents to troll North Korea, bug the crap out of Iran and generally annoying all the bad hombre regimes who don't deserve our best intentions in the first place. Take him out of our mental space and send them to theirs. If you need a one-for-one guide while reading Trump, substitute Iran for the Ed Koch administration, ISIS for unethical tenants' rights lawyers and North Korea for the USFL.

As far as a reading experience, Greatest Show on Earth is, honestly ("honestly" is such a great word to throw around when discussing Trump), a bit of a slog. The tone and scope conjures Robert Caro's The Power Broker, and as such often pulls you deep into the weeds with the subject matter. It's a valiant endeavor: someone somewhere needs to tell the full story of what happens (what happens generally, I suppose) but it's ultimately quixotic. After 300-some-odd pages about the smallest details in the ins and outs of New York-New Jersey crony capitalism, a chapter about Trump's USFL days starts out really promising (the story became a tidy, entertaining 30 For 30) but again loses itself in the weeds of various New York State agencies and authorities. It's not untrue but it's just deadly to get through. (Andrew Cuomo gets a lot of attention in this part, and merits a special mention in Barrett's acknowledgements — in this case, some distress on the author's part that he nailed the future governor's "influence peddling" — perhaps this will come up again should Cuomo decide to challenge the book's subject in 2020.)

One thing I do want to add — and it's only because the publisher brought it up — is that for how many colons the title has, there's very little — really nothing — about "The Reinvention" that was promised in the title. It's an odd feeling to come down to the final pages and still expect to hear something about it. Not blaming Barrett: he spent far too long doing the heavy lifting reporting on someone so mind-numbingly soulless (this 1980s version of Trump); this guy's no Robert Moses even. So he paid his dues. I just expected a tiny bit more than nothing. (An Amazon review I just saw notes this and adds that the "updated introduction" featured prominently on the cover of Trump actually exists in the Kindle version. Not the same.)

In the end, it's interesting — Trump seems both bad and less bad than you think — which is a mind-bending kind of almost maybe post-modern rule of post-Obama America (i.e., the Trump Administration). Reading Trump helps you make more sense of him as an executive: his interviewing Mitt Romney for Secretary of State and appointing John Huntsman to be Russian ambassador (both stalwart anti-Trumpers during the campaign) is directly out of the Trump playbook according to Barrett — over and over Trump would battle enemies and then hire them on.

But ultimately there's this odd feeling you get over the course of reading Trump with this magical dramatic irony you understand (if Barrett had suggested by the end of the book, written in the 1990s, that Trump could in any way be in line to be president only three presidents later, it would be absurd. And yet obviously that's what happened. So to go back and read it to find meaning in part what you alight on is that Donald Trump right now may be in the job best suited to him: DC politics and the two-party system at the federal level seems more than ever to only be about one side or the other winning (and suffice it to say, "winning" is not about "good policy"). Donald Trump more than anything else seems devoted to winning; he'll probably succeed at what he does, as opposed to the politicians who work to maintain the fiction of public service as a thin veneer over the desire to win. If you find this excessively cynical, please explain Andrew Cuomo to me, especially in his battle with Bill de Blasio. And maybe we'll learn something yet about ourselves.

Bully For You!

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes published a heartfelt call to action against "bullying" in yesterday's online version of the Brooklyn Eagle:

We have heard so much about bullying in the media lately. Bullying is intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength. Typically, the behavior is repeated over time. Bullying comes in many forms and occurs daily in our schools, school yards, homes and on the internet.

Hynes goes on to describe various measures his office has taken to address the issue and argues that "If more young people were to take a stand against bullying, then the phenomenon would likely diminish over time."

Hynes wants to "put an end to bullying," which is admirable, but he misses the point. Bullying, as he defines it — "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength" — is kind of a time-honored tactic.

Part of the confusion with his overly broad definition probably comes from the level of stakes; at the school level there is no rational reason for bullying — at least as an adult or a district attorney might see it — but that's only because we don't perceive the value of those stakes. We can look down on a budding sociopath's bullying behavior and see no purpose for it, but except for some extreme cases, the aggressive behavior is an expression of power (even if it's an "imbalance" of power) that is meant to elicit some sort of result.

Maybe I'm overthinking Hynes' op-ed; it does kind of read like someone from his office slapped it together, and his semi-regular "Ask The DA" feature has been going on since January 2007 — there's only so much stuff you can ask a DA, even one representing a place as exciting as Brooklyn. But if we take Hynes' argument seriously — and we should, since we need more sincerity in our reading and less overthinking of "texts" — then his exhortation to put and end to bullying kind of seems a little quixotic*.

Take the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program, for example — avoiding raising a generation of crack users is a good thing, but even that program has mixed results. I have heard it said — this is second-hand and I'm not able to confirm it quickly enough on the web — that the program "works" for younger children but has no effect on older children. That would make sense; pre-adolescents will think whatever you want them to think, especially if a cool dude with a badge and a holster rolls into the classroom.

I imagine the message breaks down when kids do drugs and don't see themselves or their peers immediately turn into crack addicts. I imagine the problem worsens when the program goes after legal products like tobacco or alcohol — there's a disconnect that quickly emerges after watching Tim Lincecum stuff chaw in his maw and then go on to beat Cliff Fucking Lee not once but twice in Lincecum's first World Series. I imagine the problem also worsens when the child sees his parents enjoy a very expensive, very wonderful fifteen-plus-year-old bottle of Barolo for a special occasion. Given these inputs, and given the bizarrely expansive scope of the D.A.R.E. program, it doesn't seem that odd that a D.A.R.E. graduate would go on to try smoking pot as a teenager. It's kind of ridiculous that they keep funding the program as it is. Seriously, how do you "resist pressure" to try an awesome bottle of Barolo? Are you yourself on crack?

Anti-bullying initiatives seem similarly misguided. On the one hand, yes, you want to take a bully by his ears and really slap him around — oops, sorry, that probably can be construed as "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength." But that's the point — boxing a bully's ears is OK inasmuch as we are correct and just in boxing the bully's ears. I guess the better option would be to contact the DA's office to request an anti-bullying workshop. Or maybe just remind the bully that what he is doing is unacceptable behavior.

Like my perceptions of the D.A.R.E. program, I'm sure that underscoring the message to a child that bullying is inherently wrong might work — but only up to a point. That point would probably be when he or she discovers that bullying actually works, especially the sort of bullying that the DA describes: "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength."

Let's stay in Brooklyn for some real-life examples of bullying, or alleged bullying, that proved successful. New York City Councilmember Darlene Mealy's yes vote on term limits is a great place to start:

Some of her colleagues have charged that Ms. Mealy was the subject of a high-pressure effort from either the speaker of the mayor. In fact one Council member reported seeing Ms. Mealy emerge from City Hall late last week in tears, saying that she was the subject of intense pressure.

"They put unbelievable pressure on her in a way that may have been unethical," said City Councilman Charles Barron, who represents an adjoining district to Ms. Mealy in Brooklyn and who was a strong opponent of the mayor's bill.

"She has said that she was under intense, intense pressure," Mr. Barron said. "I think it merits some kind of investigation, to be quite honest."

In an interview, Ms. Mealy was asked whether she had been threatened in any from either City Council speaker Christine C. Quinn or Mr. Bloomberg.

"I don't want to discuss it," she said.

And it would be unfair to pin all the bullying — sorry, "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength" — on just people in City Hall (allegedly):

Immediately after the City Council voted to extend the city's term limit laws, a good deal of attention focused on City Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, a Brooklyn Democrat who raised eyebrows by voting in favor of the bill after publicly opposing it.

Had she been the target of blackmail, many asked, or was she persuaded by some high-pressure tactics?

In an interview over the weekend, Ms. Mealy spoke for the first time about her decision, insisting that her change of heart was based on a sincere desire to establish better relationships with the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to benefit the constituents of her district in Brownsville.

"This was the best way to build my relationship with the speaker and the mayor," Ms. Mealy said. "And truthfully, I had no relationship with them. I think my district will benefit from my changing my position."

Because the mayor and the speaker had the votes to pass the bill, she said, it served no purpose for her to be a dissenting vote and fracture relationships with the city's two powerful leaders. After all, she reasoned, they might take revenge by cutting programs for her constituents.

"It didn't make sense for my district to be hurt," Ms. Mealy said. "I need to get resources for my district. We're already so low on the totem pole. It's actually pathetic. I felt I was acting in the best interest of my district."

However, several Brooklyn Democrats who have spoken with Ms. Mealy said that the councilwoman, an active member of the Transport Workers Union before joining the Council, was pressured by the union to support the extension of term limits. In exchange, the officials said, the union would be allowed to regain its right to collect dues from members' paychecks automatically.

The union was fined $2.5 million and stripped of what is known as dues check-off as punishment for a strike in December 2005.

Over the weekend, Ms. Mealy did not comment on that assertion, saying only that "there was a lot of pressure from all sides."

Point being, I think it's difficult to dissuade children from exploring expressions of power when there are so many examples of such behavior in the adult world.

Sometimes bullying, or "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength," has an element of "moral clarity" that few would argue with. Even if you question the particulars of Richard Armitage's conversation with Pervez Musharraf's intelligence chief in 2001, the end result looks similar to Darlene Mealy's experience. You can explain the conversation as such:

"I told him in a very straightforward way this was a black-and-white issue for Americans. You were either for us or against us.

"He started to tell me about Pakistan's history. … I said, 'You should communicate with your president and see if you are willing to cooperate with us.'"

He said he told Gen. M that if the answer was yes, they could meet the next day and Armitage would tell him the U.S. requirements. "They will be onerous," he said he told the Pakistani.

"The general came back the next day and said they were willing to go along with us. And I presented to him a list of items Secretary Powell and I had jotted down the night before."

He said several State Department personnel were in the room and heard the exchange, and "no one remembers a military threat. And the cable does not reflect that."

Or it seems that you could interpret that message similar to this:

Musharraf said in an interview to air Sunday on CBS' 60 Minutes that Armitage told a Pakistani official the United States would attack Pakistan if it didn't back the war on terror.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Musharraf said.

Armitage has disputed the language attributed to him but did not deny the message was a strong one.

On September 16, 2001, Pakistan pledged its support to the GWOT (there is a good timeline of this in this .pdf of a Princeton grad student's paper called "United States Diplomacy with Pakistan Following 9/11: A Case Study in Coercive Diplomacy") (the paper also makes the point that "U.S. officials threatened to add Pakistan to a State Department list of seven terrorist-sponsoring nations which would portend the possibility of U.S. force" and "According to one high-ranking official at U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, President Musharraf was told to either abandon support of Taliban or be prepared to be treated like the Taliban" — the underlying message seems the same whether you say either of those things or "Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age").

On September 14, 2001, even the faceless and stoic and facelessly stoic New York Times opinion page wrote approvingly in terms of coercion:

The most effective pressure point on the Taliban should be Pakistan, whose army and intelligence agencies helped it win control five years ago and help sustain it today despite international sanctions. Pakistan, under the control of a military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has until now rebuffed American requests to help secure Mr. bin Laden's arrest. The Bush administration has sharply ratcheted up the pressure on Pakistan this week, as well it should, and Pakistan indicated yesterday that it may cooperate.

Now it's possible that whoever was behind the push for a third term for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt a similar sort of moral clarity. I'm sure they did — or at least I hope they did, because it's much more soothing to believe that people act based on what is just and right versus just wanting to be in control for the sake of being in control of something.

Other successful examples of bullying just spiral downward from there. Family planning. Steve Hindy's experience on the Williamsburg Waterfront of yore. The Death Cheese Club. Stuff soon starts to fold in on itself.

Point being, kids bully each other and it's going to take more than a meek anti-bullying curriculum to unlearn all this modeling they get from adults. Maybe the campaign should be recast as "Don't bully for lame reasons." Or "Don't bully . . . except if you're trying to get President Musharraf on board with the Global War on Terror, in which case let your inner Aaron Sorkin take over and go full Jed Bartlet on his Qumarish ass, because we all want to see a president with the cojones to take control of a situation and save American lives." Or even "Don't bully — unless you're counting critical votes to pass City Council legislation to overturn term limits for less-than-clear reasons." Whatever it is, avoiding "intentional, aggressive behavior that involves an imbalance of power or strength" doesn't seem to cut it. And unless you differentiate between good and bad bullying — whatever that is — it's going to be up to the budding sociopaths and psychopaths to unpack it for themselves.

*A while back I resolved not to use this word until I actually read Don Quixote. I still haven't done that — even though the 2005 Harper Perennial edition is only 992 pages — but it was too much to resist in this context. Plus, it's such a great Scrabble word!