In 1929, Marjorie Merriweather Post threw a party in her Florida home. To entertain her guests, she summoned the amalgamated three-ring power of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The show featured clowns, trapeze artists and what was confidently claimed to be the “world’s smallest mule”.
When Marjorie Merriweather Post died in 1973, she left this home that once had thrown parties with the world’s smallest mule to the US Government. Her idea was that it would become a Winter White House, a retreat for the leader of the free world.
The president at the time, Richard Nixon, preferred his friend Bebe Rebozo’s home further down the Florida coast. The next Democratic president Jimmy Carter wasn’t a natural fit for a house which had been decorated with gold bathroom fixtures as Marjorie Merriweather Post felt they were “easier to clean”, along with a dining room which copied in part Rome’s Palazzo Chigi.
So the house remained vacant and in 1981, the US Government returned it to the family of Marjorie Merriweather Post. The Post Foundation immediately began the process of looking for a buyer for the estate called Mar-a-Lago. Four years later, a property developer called Donald Trump bought the house and, eventually, after he was elected president of the United States a year ago this week, it became, as Marjorie Merriweather Post had hoped, the Winter White House.
Mar-a-Lago has delivered on Post’s ambition but it is more than a Winter White House, it has become a character in the chaos of the Trump presidency.
It is the place where Trump discussed North Korea’s ballistic missile test over dinner with the Japanese prime minister while other guests hung around and members of Mar-a-Lago posted pictures with the man who carries the president’s nuclear football.
In September, the Department of Justice responded to a court order to provide the identity of all visitors to Mar-a-Lago since Trump became president by releasing a list with 22 names on it, all of them members of staff for Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The relevant watchdog groups expressed their dismay and noted it was in keeping with the secrecy surrounding Trump’s presidency. But what would have been a scandal for another president quickly evaporated for Trump, disappearing into the next distraction, the next circus, the next appearance by the world’s smallest mule.
If many didn’t live in fear, if Trump didn’t threaten the world, then the circus would be entertaining. If we weren’t also wondering when this man will get us all killed, it would be possible to sit back and enjoy Trump saying Puerto Rico with a Spanish accent, all the time assuming that manner which suggests he believes he is accomplishing something magnificent at this moment in time.
A year ago, America rejected the alternative and chose this anarchy. Those who believed there would be a distinction between Trump the candidate and President Trump were being optimistic.
He tweets the same way, he acts as irresponsibly, he reacts to slights as he has done his whole adult life, which seems simply to be an extension of his adolescence. It’s almost as if when you elect a childish 70-year-old narcissist as president he will act as you would expect a childish 70-year-old narcissist to act if they were elected president.
If integrity is only being true to yourself, then Donald Trump hasn’t disappointed. He has done what he has always done and he isn’t going to change now.
A 1990 profile of Trump in Vanity Fair talked about his love of a deal and quoted a rival’s assessment. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra – a kind of moral larceny – in it.”
The election contained this key ingredient, this sense of shock and awe, as people reeled as they considered the consequences.
It was said this time last year that his voters had been ignored and misunderstood. A year on, who they voted for is far more important than why they voted. And he will betray those voters too in the end.
There was no great secret in how he got elected. In the aftermath of his victory, some said there had been an inability to understand why people had voted for Trump. But it can’t be that hard to understand why people will vote for someone who preys on their fears without shame or restraint. At a period in time when there are more people who are fearful and angry, they will vote for those who shamelessly work on those fears, without reason or accountability.
Those who believed he said all he did simply to woo the electorate had a point, but the wooing of them was done for reasons more profound than simply getting their votes.
What was more important for a narcissist like Trump was what the electorate did for him. The rest – the actual presidency – could be seen as something of an irritant. Winning might have been important, but the prize might have come as a shock to him and Trump has retreated to these campaign rallies when he needed a hit of the pure stuff.
If he had lost, he could have summoned this crowd at will, setting up a presidency in exile, maybe at Mar-a-Lago, which would have had the advantage over the actual presidency of not having to concern itself with the drudgery of administration.
That version of the presidency would have suited him better. That version, where it would have been someone else’s problem that healthcare turns out to be so complicated, would have left him to focus on the feeding of his narcissism.
Instead, he is stuck with the real thing and he has to feed this need as best he can. Having heard the roar from the crowds who turned out to hear him in 2016, he couldn’t abandon them now. He couldn’t turn his back on his voters, not because of what he had promised them, but because what they promised him, how they made him feel.
He couldn’t change when he became president because he still had the deep need to be right, the cousin of his profound and spectacular self-absorption which can see him ignore his wife as he gets out of his limo or drive across a green in his golf buggy because that’s simply what he wants to do.
He has become, as Jon Stewart predicted, America’s first openly asshole president.
And this trumps everything. He may well be a fascist, a sexist and a racist who is frustrated by the vast bureaucracy he now theoretically commands, but, above all else, he will be remembered as one of history’s greatest assholes.
The moral larceny is evident in all he does. It is not enough for Trump to win, the other guy must lose and we must know who has won and who has lost.
Trump’s presidency might be defined by his connections to Russia, a story which won’t go away because it seems to involve every aspect of his personality and which may turn out to be so damaging to him because he engaged with people who take even more from a deal than Trump does.
The year has been marked by his comic attempts to insist he’s winning when he’s losing, but that might be a deal which defeats him.
Russia has offered the most sustained point of attack. There was a time when some felt he would be defeated by his inexactitudes but that was a profound misreading of the situation. Those who felt they could fact check him out of the White House have lost heart. They have realised that, when you are promoting a circus, nobody cares that there might actually be a smaller mule somewhere in remote Peru. They are here to see the world’s smallest mule. Donald Trump always understood that and the presidency of the United States wasn’t going to change him. Instead he has turned it into his circus. Despite the increasingly stiff competition, this may be the most disturbing fact of all.
