Reid - The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.

Im an agent of chaos.

The Joker, from The Dark Knight

T O TRULY UNDERSTAND D ONALD T RUMP, YOU NEED TO HAVE lived in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, when his business and marital escapades were a tabloid staple. Or maybe you just need to have grown up on Batman.

Gotham Citywhich the brooding billionaire Bruce Wayne polices as his vigilante alter egois an exaggerated, dystopian send-up of old New York. Its filled with over-the-top villains who, like Batman, possess no actual superpowers but get by on their cleverness, their ostentatious wealth, and their ability to wreak havoc on the urban landscape.

Donald Trump seems ripped right out of that comic book supervillain universe. With his cantilever hairstyle, weirdly long signature neckties, bizarre syntax, and penchant for slapping his surname on everything hes connected withfrom buildings and golf courses to bottled water, board games, and, for a time, a sham university that promised anyone could learn to be just like The DonaldTrump and the cast of characters surrounding him could fit right in with Joker, Riddler, Penguin, and Lex Luthor.

Trump has existed on the outskirts of American celebrity and popular culture for the life spans of most Americans under the age of forty. He made cameos in movies like Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and on TV shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He sat in the guest chair on The Phil Donahue Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. And he performed mock-fights with World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon on multiple episodes of WrestleMania. (He even pretended to buy WWEs lucrative Monday Night Raw franchise in an elaborate ruse in 2009, which tanked the entertainment companys stock price, prompting Trump to quickly pretend to sell it back for twice the price.)

Despite his history of housing discrimination against black tenants and his full-page ad in the 1980s calling for a group of black and brown teenagers to be put to death for a gang rape they didnt commit, Trump managed to work his way into mainstream popular culture. Early on, he was a tabloid-friendly rogue and celebrity hanger-on, and later, the king of the B-list stars who jockeyed for his approval on The Celebrity Apprentice.

Had he not signed on to the racist birther conspiracy, claiming that Americas first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States, and plunged headfirst into the morass of anti-immigrant xenophobia that helped win him the presidency, the old Donald Trump might have carried on. He may have remained a cultural gadflythat peculiar brand of celebrity whose views on everything from geopolitics to the Oscars are sought out for no particular reason other than that he is famous and quotable.

But Donald Trump did become presidentand so, here we are.

As a candidate, Trump offered Republicans the taste of the celebrity status that Ronald Reagan had given them; something normally reserved for Democrats. Thats what attracted Sam Nunberg, the thirty-eight-year-old political adviser who toiled on Trumps warm-up attempts at presidential runs and on the real presidential deal until he lost a war with Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski and was fired in the summer of 2015. (Nunberg says Lewandowski saw to it that old, racist posts on his Facebook page surfaced; he later apologized for those posts.) And though Nunberg readily says that Trump screwed him, he claims he would vote for him again in 2020, because Trump has delivered on Republican policies and judicial nominations.

I knew our campaign was doing well when I went into a restaurant after he announced, Nunberg said. The TV was on CNN, and he was on, and people were watching. These were people who probably normally wouldnt give a shit. But they were watching him.

Trump wasnt just another politician doing a TV hit. He was an American mogul, an entertainer, Nunberg said. And he wasnt rich from making microchips or selling stocks. It was from building. Construction. It was this image of success; of him being rich and he can make you rich. We were the WWEFox News version of the Obama campaign in the beginning, and I mean that as a compliment. It was aspirational. It was, we can fight the system.

Nunberg was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and nurtured on conservative talk radio, strident support for Israel, and suspicion of the Middle East. After volunteering for Mitt Romneys 2008 campaign, he worked for right-wing lawyer Jay Sekulow during the 2010 fight to prevent the construction of a mosque near the ground zero site of the September 11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan. (He says Trump wrote a bullshit letter at the time, offering to buy the land where the mosque was to be built, but the offer was just a PR stunt.) Nunbergs parents were lawyers, and he became one, too. His father had worked for a law firm that Trump and his father had used for real estate deals. But Nunberg didnt meet Trump in person until he was introduced to him in 2010 by yet another Gotham City character: Roger Stonethe villain with the Richard Nixon tattoo on his back.

I wanted to win a national election and thought Trump could win, Nunberg says of his eagerness to sign on. I thought it was cool that Obama went on the late-night shows. I thought the [John] McCain ad showing Obama speaking to millions of people and showing Paris Hilton and slamming him as a Hollywood celebrity was the dumbest fucking thing Ive ever seen. He said he all but screamed at the time: You just won him millions of votes!

Nunberg thought his party was living in the 1950s. And though Trump was his own version of the Mad Men era, to Nunberg, he was a Mad Man for the twenty-first century. He and Trump share a sensibility he likens to a retired New York City firefighter or cop who mainlines Fox News, plus Rush Limbaugh and Mike Levin on talk radio and thinks to himself, this country has gone to shit, and we need a guy in the White House whos willing to punch a few holes in the wall to make it like it was when I was coming up.

Trump seems like one of them who made it. He grabbed the brass ring and the trophy wives and the all-gold penthouse. Even if his Horatio Alger story was a liehe inherited millions from his dad and never needed to pull himself up by his own bootstrapsTrumps fans appreciated that he was hated by the Chamber of Commerce crowd and the fancy set in Manhattan. They liked that because they felt those elites hated them, too. If Gotham needs a Batman, it also needs a Joker. And Trump was their Joker, sowing chaos on their behalf and taking the whole Injustice League with him to the White House.

The trouble is, he didnt seem to actually want to be president. What he did want was to put on the greatest presidential campaign show of all time.

When he glided down the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce that he was a candidate, wife Melania was smiling and waving silently beside him in a white sleeveless dress with a bare neckline. Neil Youngs Rockin in the Free World was blaring on loudspeakers. Crowds lined up along the upper floor railing, watching the couple descend, hooted and cheered. The woman chosen to introduce him, daughter Ivanka Trump, one floor below and also in white sleeveless, was clapping along to the music, standing beside a makeshift podium in front of a backdrop of blue curtains and a row of huge American flags with gold eagles on top. All the Trump children, from Barron up to Donald Jr., were there, waiting in the wings. Emblazoned on the podium was the campaigns slogan: TRUMP: M AKE A MERICA G REAT A GAIN .