Free Trump and Me by Mark Singer

are rapists, not all Muslims are terrorists!” received a police escort to the exit, Trump said, “He looks like an Elvis impersonator. That’s strange because the Elvis impersonators loved Donald Trump.” He claimed that “on women’s issues and health issues there will be nobody better than Donald Trump.” This last load of chutzpah from the itchy-Twitter-(short)-fingered author of: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
    Here was an ostensible aspiring leader of the free world whose transparent anxieties about the adequacy of his genitalia dominated more than one news cycle. Watching the televised debate the first time Trump
went there,
I laughed, then winced. Nineteen years earlier, recounting the unraveling of his first marriage, his adultery with his future-second-ex-wife Marla Maples, and its attendant
New York Post
headline BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD , I wrote that “an acquaintance of Marla’s blabbed about Donald’s swordsmanship.” Or so the
Post
had reported, but
what had I been thinking?
Yikes. No such thing had happened. The only plausible blabber was Donald himself.
Plus ça change
.
    The other pretenders to the Republican nomination, mostly a woefully ineffectual bunch, were reduced to alternating incredulity and strangulated dudgeon. I sympathized. Sort of. Much of the Fourth Estate, meanwhile, first by not taking Trump seriously, and then by
taking
him seriously, assumed roles as his witless enablers. For months, Trump played them like suckers at a sideshow. The more airtime and ink they gave him, the more he vilified them. No matter how much invective he showered, goading the rabble to hurl abuse at the unfortunate hostages in the media enclosure, the cameras kept running. At moments, the spectacle was disturbing to the point of unwatchability. On the distant sideline (specifically, my living room sofa), my shaming secret was that I couldn’t look away.
    • • •
    The novelty of the Trump campaign extended to its slogan, “Make America Great Again!” This was a direct lift from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “Let’s Make America Great Again,” but Trump brandished it with an unambiguous nativist bite. In no time, the decoders rendered it “Make America White Again!,” a formulation suggesting that Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration absolutism, for instance, expressed a yearning for an ethnically cleansed U.S.A.—manifest destiny by other means. I don’t see it that way. Trump-branded buildings, long regarded as safe havens for foreign flight capital, have always been popular with super-luxury-inclined multinational non-Caucasian plutocrats. (Among them, no doubt, a fair representation of Third World kleptocrats.)
    As Trump drew closer to clinching the nomination, his recently hired political strategist, Paul Manafort, embarked upon an improbable effort to make him appear more presidential. Or, failing that, perhaps less Donald-like. Using the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, as window dressing, he delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address, reading from a prepared text for only the second time in his campaign. Its isolationist overtones (“ ‘America first’ will be the overriding theme of my administration”) didn’t square with his penchant for off-the-cuff warmongering: “You know the thing I’ll be great at that people aren’t thinking? And I do very well at it. Military. I am the toughest guy. I will rebuild our military. It will be so strong, and so powerful, and so great.”
    Challenged by Chris Matthews to assure “the whole world” that he would never consider using nuclear weapons
in
Europe,
Trump replied, “I—I’m not going to take it off the table.”
    His strategy for defeating ISIS? “I would bomb the shit out of them. I would just bomb those suckers.”
    Because Trump was Trump, little was made of his history of dodging the draft. A high number in the 1969 draft lottery would have helped