Now that it’s over, really over, we can unequivocally ask ourselves the question. The question that produces the answer that if someone had conjured it 10 years ago, you would have laughed directly in their face: President Donald J. Trump.
How did it happen? How did it really happen?
The answer is not found in some Toquevillian study. Nor in political theory about the left-out millions, the Trumpian disenfranchised. Experts like erudite Rick Wilson can opine about accountability in these pages, but it still doesn’t answer the question in its simplest terms.
How did it happen?
And it really is quite simple. Like numbered shell casings on a sidewalk crime scene, the answer is there if we connect the evidence. But first we’ll eliminate some of the usual suspects before we get to the guilty.
We won’t get the answer by examining Dr. Frankenstein to the monster, Fred Trump Sr. No, his effect on the son is too obvious, too mutant. Too easily defined as entrenched in cowardice and racism, which remain the adamantine pilings of his miscreant offspring. Cowardice that has produced a family with not one military veteran in well over 150 years of life on American soil.
Nor by inspecting the mentoring effect of the tiny rodent, Roy Cohn, who died with all the self hate his quotidian reflection could yield whenever he looked in the mirror. Who died in possession of a special gift from his star pupil, diamond cufflinks, that were later proven to be counterfeit. The final remnant of a marriage of lies.
The same goes for Michael Cohen, who must bathe in guilty blood.
And we won’t indict current enablers like Jack Dorsey, so speciously against conspiracy yet who still allowed the coward to perpetrate the malicious lie of Birtherism for so many years with so much impunity. He’s too much of an opportunist to make our list.
Let’s start with the ancient Cindy Adams, whose lies created a bedrock of mistruth that has steeled a coward for almost 50 years. Best athlete. Best dealmaker. Swashbuckler. Swordsman. It goes beyond gossip and selling papers. Compatriot of John Barron, she set the bar for every liar that followed her. Decades of lies produced a malignancy.
There’s Jeff Zucker. Top dog at NBC, he hoisted upon the country “The Apprentice,” a myth of acumen and generosity that the New York business and philanthropic communities who knew the star of the show immediately rejected as fraudulent. But people in Kansas did not and they now had a reason to pay attention to that “business guy” with the “funny wig.” And when his cowardly star spewed the vile lie of Birtherism, he kept him on the air. Zucker is guilty.
As is Mark Burnett. Under the veil of religious zeal, he concealed the coward’s racism and hatred and painted him as a resilient Michaelangelo. This evil genius was able to convince those in the flyover states that counsel on the sale of submarine sandwiches made a reality star qualified presidential material. If he is sitting on taped evidence of the coward’s racism, he is covered in blood. The same goes for any talent, crew or gofer who remains silent, especially the two-faced Omarosa Manigault, who once advocated for genuflection before the cur.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (regular footsie players with the coward at Mar-a-Lago), the suddenly enlightened Donny Deutsch and enriched author Tony Schwartz, among others (Howard Stern, Erin Burnett, Anthony Scaramucci), are bloodstained abettors that should be disavowed, lest it happen again. Tell us what you really know.
Reporters, columnists, producers. Are they really responsible for this monstrosity? Ask yourself where would the coward be if he were the rightful target of a deep dig way back when. Would he have prospered to the depths of always wanting a Congressional Medal of Honor when, in fact, he fought the Vietnam War from the front table of Maxwell’s Plum?
And be warned. Lurking in the fog of hate and alternative facts are the coward’s spawn. No Charlottesville torch will enlighten Jared Kushner or Ivanka. Don Junior and Eric will continue to walk tall with white supremacists.
The plain simple truth and a relentless quest for it is our best defense against them.
Marotta is a filmmaker.
