He cared deeply about appearances. “Freddy was always very neat, a Beau Brummell,” Sam LeFrak told Weiss. “He had a mustache, and that mustache was always right, perfect.” He was also remorseless. In an interview with Michael D’Antonio, Donald Trump described his father as “very tough” and “very difficult” and someone who “would never let anything go.”
.. Frederick used various accounting measures to collect an extra $15 million in rent (in today’s dollars) from a government housing program, on top of paying himself a large “architect’s fee.” He was hauled before investigating committees on at least two occasions, apparently was arrested at a K.K.K. rally in Queens (though it’s not clear he was a member), got involved in a slush fund scandal with Robert Wagner and faced discrimination allegations.
.. I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.
.. You’d think there would be some sense of embarrassment at having been caught lying so blatantly.
But in his interview with Sean Hannity he appeared incapable of even entertaining any moral consideration. “That’s what we do in business,” the younger Trump said. “If there’s information out there, you want it.”
.. Don Jr. doesn’t seem to possess the internal qualities necessary to consider the possibility that he could have done anything wrong.
That to me is the central takeaway of this week’s revelations. It’s not that the Russia scandal may bring down the administration. It’s that over the past few generations the Trump family has built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.
.. The Trumps have an ethic of loyalty to one another.
.. But beyond that there is no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code. There is just naked capitalism.
.. Their scandals may not build to anything impeachable, but the scandals will never end.
America’s shockingly violent birth
The war that began at Lexington and Concord 14 months before the Declaration of Independence was America’s first civil war. And it had all the messiness and nastiness that always accompany protracted fratricide.
.. The war caused “proportionately more” deaths — from battle, captivity and disease — than any war other than that of 1861-1865. The perhaps 37,000 deaths were about five times more per capita than America lost in World War II. Sixty thousand loyalists became refugees.
.. Taylor’s “American Revolutions ” (2016) hammers home the war’s human costs. A Connecticut critic of the Continental Congress was tarred, carried to a sty and covered with hog’s dung, some of which was forced down his throat. Connecticut loyalists were imprisoned in a copper mine, in darkness 120 feet underground. Georgia patriots knocked a loyalist unconscious, “tied him to a tree, tarred his legs, and set them on fire” and then partially scalped him. Some courts ordered loyalists “branded on the face or cut off their ears” to make them recognizable.
Happy Birthday, America. One Small Suggestion …
They incorporated, in many places word for word, the British Parliament’s Bill of Rights of 1689, a farseeing document that limited the powers of the king and laid out for us the lineaments of what was to be Britain’s enduring (and endearing) constitutional monarchy. But they took a further step — a most egregious and regrettable step
.. During the heat of the Revolutionary War, Americans looked — as nations at war always will — for a name and a face to represent the hated foe. The prime minister, Lord North, would have made a colorless and feeble icon of enmity, and so, perhaps naturally, they settled on the person and character of King George.
.. But in fact, George III was far from a tyrant. He was a constitutional monarch with almost no real political power at all. In nearly 60 years, a reign only recently surpassed in longevity by that of the current Elizabeth, he earned the love and respect of his people for his simplicity, kindness, frugality and diligence. The “farmer king” liked nothing better than to wander among his fields, talking happily to peasants, pigs and princes alike, not a tyrannical thought in his amiable, befuddled old mind.
.. The president was to be the highest citizen in the land, executive head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. That, I submit, was the mistake.
.. If you watched the excellent Netflix series “The Crown,” you will remember those scenes in the first few episodes in which the newly acceded Elizabeth received her prime minister, Winston Churchill. During these weekly audiences, the great political lion had to stand before her, explain the conduct of his administration, outline governmental plans and problems and keep her informed as to the state of the nation before bowing himself backward from the room. Constitutional constraints decreed that she could do no more than “advise and consent.” A powerless monarch
.. Every week, the elected president has to call at Uncle Sam’s mansion, stand before him and explain himself and his administration. Uncle Sam can question him, tell him a story about how another president 20 years back had faced a similar quandary
.. Do you not agree that it would be a very healthy thing for presidents to make such a humble, supplicatory journey every week and be reminded that they serve a bigger idea than power, a nobler entity than a political party or a trending ideology?
.. America has an elected executive, but Britain has an elected executive and something else, too: a head of state who stands above the fray, personifying and representing our nation and its history.
.. Rationally, a monarchy is an absurdity. Of course it is. But we British are not rationalists. We are empiricists and seem always to have been.
.. Looking at 10 Downing Street and the American White House now, I wonder which nation is constitutionally most in danger of allowing a tyrant to arise.
.. My modest proposal on this, America’s great national holiday weekend, is that you choose an Uncle Sam or Aunt Samantha by lottery (which is all the birth of a monarch is) and give this person the powers of a constitutional sovereign, with precedence of state over the elected president.
Americans have always been nice. But is it just a sham?
The paradox of Trump’s insisting on his own niceness even while engaging in distinctly nasty conduct (political and otherwise) has a long history in the United States.
Trump epitomizes the conventional version of American niceness, which assumes that Americans are fundamentally decent and benevolent people with the best of intentions, whose acts of aggression are reluctant and defensive necessities designed to protect us.
.. This is the kind of amiability that obscures the shadowy side of American life.
.. Americans have also historically attempted to transform our niceness into a national attitude rooted in justice and mutual respect by acknowledging American cruelty and using it as an impetus to live up to an ideal of moral integrity based on the courage to tell the truth.
.. Since the 19th century, Americans’ belief in our own niceness has never wavered. Yet even then, American niceness obscured a tendency to refuse accountability for aggression and offense — and even unspeakable cruelty.
.. In 1814, Gen. Andrew Jackson supervised the mutilation of the corpses of more than 800 Creek Native Americans killed at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama during the Creek War. The desecration of the bodies involved cutting off the tip of each Indian’s nose to count the number of victims, and taking long strips of skin from the dead to use as bridle reins.
.. Thus the mistreatment of Indians wasn’t only a political problem but a profound failure on white Americans’ part to live up to their Christian reputation for courtesy, respect and kindness.
.. This same conflict could be seen in the issue of slavery.
.. If kindness were the rule in the master-slave relationship, Douglass argued, then Southern newspapers would not be filled with runaway-slave notices describing branding with irons and scarring from whips.
.. One is based on historical forgetting, on empty gestures and cliches, on refusing to own up to American errors; the other connects niceness with ethics and justice by recognizing Americans’ failures to be the kind people we imagine ourselves to be