Optical Delusions

Trump has shown again he can distract us from ominous reality with the parade of glitz to which America has become addicted.

Can the world just stop for a bit? Do I have to care about the collapse of the German government too? Can I stay under the quilt to await the fallout from Ukraine’s assassination of a top Russian general with a scooter bomb in the heart of Moscow? Can I believe for just a few weeks that HTS is a righteous avenging force liberating Syria from the horrors of Assad, not a scary, repressive band of jihadi terrorists? I’d rather not know, please, until after Jan 1.

World War III may be Topic A in Europe and the Middle East but, here in America, all eyes are on Mar-a-Lago, the capital of Gloat. Trump has shown again he can distract us from the ominous reality brewing all over the map with the parade of glitz to which America has become terminally addicted. We first learned that in 2016 at the Republican Convention when the whole camera-ready Trump clan was disgorged from the plane with his name on it and streamed across the tarmac, the Trump women with their long legs, short skirts, and glossy, highlighted Fox News hair, the big-shouldered loudness of Trump in his tomato tie. Ever since, liberals have been yelling that Trump is a braggart, a charlatan, a bankruptcy-spawning loser whom they could skewer with felonies, impeachments, and the latest daily outrage.

But to hardscrabble male voters of every ethnicity, nothing looks more like success than Trump’s phallic golden tower in Manhattan, the brace of fantasy luxury hotels, and the 114-room Palm Beach Versailles with its gold-plated crests, multi-chandeliered Donald J. Trump ballroom, and 27-hole golf course. And who could look and sound more like a leader than an assassination survivor with a raised fist, a bloody ear, and an instantaneous bellow of “fight, fight, fight?”

Post-election, Trump knows how to keep the story lines fresh. He has shrewdly updated and upgraded from yesteryear’s cheesy entourage of My Pillow Guy and Rudy Giuliani (Even Don Jr. has revamped his image, switching out his former arm candy—screeching, duvet-lipped Kimberly Guilfoyle, whom Trump obligingly shot out of a cannon towards the U.S. embassy in Athens—for a svelte, blonde Palm Beach socialite.) This time around, Trump has corralled the cool factor of Silicon Valley that thrills the younger manosphere who idolize his new consigliere Elon Musk. One by one, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai have streamed to Mar-a- Lago to kiss his ring. I doubt Trump understands the first thing about crypto but he can smell a scammy way to turn a buck a mile away. He’s shrewd enough to endorse any manifestation of wealth and ensure that the world sees wealth endorsing him. The picture that said it all this week was the looming figure of Trump behind the squirming, pint- sized figure of Japanese SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the podium announcing plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S. It was almost as if Trump were holding Masayoshi up by the scruff of his neck with his legs kicking when the president-elect said, "I'm going to ask him right now, will you make it $200 billion?”

The Dems’ New Year’s resolution should be to realize how deeply the aesthetics of power have changed in America. A broad majority of the electorate gets off on all this gilt-encrusted bravado. As Democrats search forlornly for a new spear carrier, they need to address the meretricious matter of style and presentation in which they fall so hopelessly short. The Democratic Party establishment doesn't seem to grasp this. Next time around, they need to stay away from a leader drawn from the same old cadre of room-emptying Beltway stiffs and make the primary factor (in both senses) a big-time telegenic personality, someone relatably vulgar who also displays the other qualities needed to strangle any loudmouthed MAGA heir in its crib: fearless intellectual dexterity, non-judgy integrity, and an ability to throw lightning bolts. Think Rahm Emanuel’s brain and pugilism with Mark Wahlberg’s abs and pecs.

Widows on the Prowl

The onslaught of holiday parties only makes me miss more than ever the matchless company of my husband and soulmate for four exuberant decades, the swashbuckling British newspaper editor Sir Harry Evans. In 2002, he was voted best newspaper editor of all time by his peers. (“What took them so long?” he wondered.) Now that he’s been gone for four years, friends have started to urge me with sly supportive smiles to “put myself out there” and find a romantic replacement. The trouble is, I honestly cannot think of anyone but Harry—a man who shared so many of my passions, my idiosyncrasies, and my absolute indifference to domestic life—who would be able to put up with me and always find me irresistible.

During the weeks in Manhattan, we lived in the full-flash intensity of the media arena, vibrating with a succession of salons and book parties at our apartment on East 57th Street. (Harry called his dinner jacket his “working clothes.”) But alone on winter weekends at our house in Quogue, we pulled up the drawbridge and vanished into our cocoon. As I ran through my magazine editorships and wrote my books, while Harry served as ringmaster of Random House and penned best-selling histories, the sounds of industry that emanated from our back-to-back studies—the whir of fax machines, the tap-tap of keyboards, the phone calls wrangling writers—were the music of our marriage.

Now that I’m solo, I wonder what other people do in their free time. After so long holed up in the word factory with Harry, I don’t have a clue who the neighbors are in Quogue. Harry never cared that I can’t cook. Nor could he. We were always too engrossed in discussing the day’s headlines to notice that we were dining, yet again, on a stuffed baked potato. Returning home after Park Avenue parties, he would crash around the kitchen, making himself sardines on toast and regaling me with the best gossip or the most preposterous highlights from his own circuit of the revelers. I have come to realize that our blissful, singular focus on writing and editing has made me eccentric. What, for instance, is a hobby?

Forays to dinner parties in the Hamptons this summer yielded age-appropriate geezers who bang on about their golf swings and congregate together with booming, bald-headed laughter. Couples talk about their elaborate travel plans, doing inconceivable things like motoring through Loire Valley vineyards or taking extended treks to see a pile of ruins in Tibet. Holidays with Harry were usually helter-skelter, last-minute trips to overpriced Caribbean resorts with an inconvenient layover somewhere that neither of us had noticed on the travel agenda.

I realize I have forgotten—and can't really be bothered to relearn—how to feign the eye-batting fascination that is the sine qua non of romantic appeal to late-stage widowers.

I am also a realist. I can’t help but note there’s a pileup around me of surgically enhanced, widowed blondes. The Times obituary page unleashes a new one every day: power wives who once swirled through Manhattan drawing rooms on the arm of some titan and now prowl affluent, Viagra-circuit cocktail receptions at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are battle-tested and battle-ready with one senses, unlike me, an infinite capacity and willingness to adapt. Captious, hostessy, and primed for action, they seem undaunted at the prospect of being jumped on for one last inning. Meanwhile, I stubbornly miss the shared silence of weekends with Harry, when there was nothing more erotic than our work.

My 2024 Person of the Year

At a time when media outlets are rushing to name heroes of the year, let's not forget Apple Daily owner Jimmy Lai, who is facing life imprisonment thanks to the Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong simply for the crime of committing journalism. (I was stunned to read that there are now 1,800 political prisoners in Hong Kong—more than Russia!—and this is in a country with a population of just 7.4 million.) With a fortune made in the fast fashion business and a British passport, the 77-year-old Lai could easily have watched the erosion of Hong Kong’s human rights from a Mayfair townhouse, but instead he chose to stay and face inevitable arrest. The billionaire publisher of Hong Kong’s now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper has been in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison for almost four years, ostensibly for violating Hong Kong’s farcical national security laws, imposed on the former British colony by the freedom-crushing overlords in Beijing. During his eighteenth day of testimony on Monday in a West Kowloon court, he said that Apple Daily stood “on the right side of history.” In a 2020 interview, he told the New York Times, “I believe in the media. By delivering information, you’re actually delivering freedom.”

What I didn’t know until I read Mark L. Clifford’s gripping new biography, The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic, is what an innovative publisher Lai was. There was nothing portentous about the editorial ethos of Apple Daily. It was a rip-snorting tabloid that combined controversial opinions, hard-hitting investigative reporting, and paparazzi scoops. He put his journalists and photographers on scooters to cover the high-low waterfront of Hong Kong’s teeming democracy. Clifford tells us how one enterprising Apple Daily reporter jumped into the back seat of a criminal's getaway vehicle being chased by the cops to get first dibs on the story.

Lai was hands-on in every sense: column writer, promoter, and fearless protector of his team. He was a peerless marketer. His ad salesmen celebrated a new order by blasting a horn mounted on the office wall. But Lai’s increasing commitment to the pro-democracy movement gradually took precedence over commercial success. The Chinese crack-down in 2019 changed the mission of Apple Daily, to a single-minded campaign for civil liberties and turned the paper into Hong Kong’s most respected source of truth.

I love this guy, Jimmy Lai. His heroic stand against Chinese authoritarianism may result in his never leaving his cockroach-infested prison cell again. But my profound hope is that he is not only freed but comes to live in the U.S. and buys the Washington Post. I’d be a cub reporter for him in a heartbeat.

Hit-You-Up Moment

If you are looking for a friction-free, last-minute holiday gift, please consider a fistful of Fresh Hell paid gift subscriptions for a paltry $50 a year. I would be abidingly grateful. In 2025, I will be launching weekly chats with paying subscribers, who have already inundated me with such smart and entertaining feedback that I would like to bring us all together to yak about the latest post and give me ideas for others.

Happy holidays! You’ll hear from me again in the new year on Jan 7. In the meantime, warm wishes and enjoy the news tune-out. I will be hunkered down by the fire in Quogue with the family and the world’s most beguiling English bulldog. See you in ‘25!