Who can Stop Trump's Bullet Train... and A Fab Party in a London Time Capsule
Why does America have to lurch between such extremes? From the Democrats’ suffocating liberal pieties to the marauding rampage of gorillas in the mist…. If Teddy Roosevelt advocated the negotiation style of “speak softly and carry a big stick,” we now have Trump’s “shake an iron club and wield an inflated penis.”
It was painful to see the bafflement on the mild face of Denmark's foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen on Saturday as he scolded the Trump administration. “Many accusations and many allegations have been made,” he said, regarding the scathing Trump/Vance critiques of Denmark's stewardship of Greenland. “But let me be completely honest: we do not appreciate the tone in which it is being delivered. This is not how you speak to your close allies.” Apparently it is. And the really puzzling thing is that, in this case, the bluster is so unnecessary. How successful would anyone in the business world be if their opening gambit was “Hi, asshole. Sell me your company or I will send my goons to talk to your mother”? I guess that’s what the young Donald learned at the knee of Fred Trump. The net result is that Greenland's tiny population of 56,000 has turned into the French Resistance on ice.
Unable to sleep the other night, I turned on the TV and found myself bizarrely hooked on the movie Unstoppable, a 2010 heart-pounder about a massive runaway train that leaves its Pennsylvania rail yard loaded with toxic chemicals. (All the roaring and clanking fully deserved its Oscar nom for sound editing.) The challenge of bringing the charging metal death wagon under control falls to an underappreciated veteran engineer played by Denzel Washington and a young conductor played by Chris Pine, who, natch, always underperformed until this crisis tests him.
Craven, neutered Republican lawmakers, are you watching? Who can we turn to to bestraddle the roof of the hurtling Trump train? Anne Applebaum, the brilliant expert on autocrats, noted on Morning Joe that even dictators like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan move more slowly than Trump, deploying the“boiling frog” strategy to dismantle the pillars of civil society. The difference is that the velocity of the Trump locomotive has been ramped up by the demonic effectiveness and galaxy-sized fortune of his co-driver Elon Musk.
Anyone with doubts about where Trump’s smashing of civil institutions and judicial norms is going should should watch Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday interview on CNN with the Russian presidential adviser Aleksander Dugin, known as “Putin’s Rasputin. ” He reassuringly told Fareed that Russia is similar to America under President Trump. “We have a different United States: not the stronghold and headquarters of globalism but the kind of sovereign national state, global power with traditional values,” he said. “So … we have discovered many points that are common for … Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia,” the hirsute philosopher concluded. Nostrovia!
Our manic president’s most recent delusion – actually a ploy to redirect the press from Signalgate - is that he could get himself a third term if he ran as JD Vance’s vice president, and then Vance obligingly resigns. Perhaps Trump hasn’t noticed that his bearded, baby-faced, shape-shifting MAGA heir has the snake eyes of a natural assassin. There is no way he would ever vacate the Oval Office once Usha’s and his kids’ pictures are sitting on the Resolute Desk. That’s the moment when the Constitution suddenly becomes useful. Trumpeting the 25th amendment, Vance will ensure his presidential patron is carried out by the Secret Service, with his legs kicking.
A ray of hope for MAGA disenchantment is that Trump, now so intoxicated with power, has forgotten that inflation was a critical plank in his demolishing of Joe Biden. “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices,” he said on Meet the Press, reprising his thought voiced last month in a speech at New York’s Economic Club, “We may have, short term, a little pain.” We? Who’s we? Not he and the billionaire Mar-a-Lago circle who in private have never cared a toss about the economic hardship of Americans conned into voting for a false messiah. “I’ve heard economists talk about the apocalypse, and I’ve heard economists say it won’t have an impact,” said Republican Senator John Kennedy. “…. The problem is that in the long run, we’re all dead. So the short run matters.”
Will Liberation Day on April 2 be the pivot moment when a Republican Denzel Washington climbs into the cab of the careening chaos train and grabs control of the wheel?
Time Travel in London
It can become a bad habit at this moment in life to only celebrate friends at memorial services, so I hopped on a Virgin flight to London over the weekend to toast the 75th birthday of Miles Chapman, the editor who was one of the crucial turn-around factors in my editorship of both Tatler and Vanity Fair. It was the 27-year-old Miles, formerly toiling in the copy department of our snooty competitor Harpers & Queen, who arrived as Tatler employee #2 and taught me the difference between a bunch of articles with a staple through them and that distinctive, special artifact of publishing, a sophisticated glossy magazine. With his navy blue hair and acerbic intolerance of the dull or the down-market, Miles became the one-man style arbiter, copy chief, headline supremo, caption connoisseur, grammar pedant, and overall tone police who gave Tatler’s pages their unique voice. He came up with such deathless throw-away lines as the mantra printed on Tatler’s spine: “The magazine that bites the hand that reads it.” When, in January 1984, I made a panicky call from New York to ask him to cross the Atlantic and help me enliven the then-moribund pages of Vanity Fair, he was in the Madison Avenue office by the following weekend, jazzing up the contents page. He stayed for four years, crafting witty come-hither headlines, irreverent blurbs, and sizzling teasers that gave the new Vanity Fair instant lift-off.
More than four decades later, Miles is living with the travails of Parkinson’s, but he is sustained by the true love he found with his civil partner, then husband, of 19 years, the sculptor and designer Bouke de Vries. He co-hosted the birthday dinner with the philanthropists Guy Weston and Ina Sarikhani Sandmann at Fortnum & Mason.
The room was a time capsule of boho gay London in the early 80s: the iconic milliner Stephen Jones, whose wildly imaginative hats were the dernier cri of catwalks from John Galliano to Vivienne Westwood, still spry at 71 in an angled Peaky Blinders cap; Andrew Logan, the attenuated, droll 79-year-old sculptor and jewelry maker, leaping around in a sparkling orange tunic and embroidered Turkish tarboosh; the ineffably haute interior designer and lethal wag Nicky Haslam whispering unspeakable royal indiscretions in my right ear; and Zandra Rhodes, the multi-colored fashion legend, still with her trademark spiky fuschia hair. Most of the chatter was about the thrilling awfulness of Trump and his coterie. “My God, the sheer horror of that woman Marjorie Taylor Greene, with her hatchet face and fright-wig hair,” exclaimed a veteran fashion scribe Tim Blanks, who is addicted to American politics. “Did you see how rude she was to that reporter from Sky? She actually said, ‘Where are you from?’ She actually said, ‘I don't give a crap about your opinion!’ ”
In those Vanity Fair years in the 80s, when Miles and I worked joyfully together, the scourge of AIDS - Miles used to call it the Terror - decimated so many taste leaders of culture and fashion and literature and music. This was a room full of survivors. I couldn’t help but reflect that there was something renegade and brave about the old gay fashion world of London, before it went mainstream. All those present at this epic party were in the vanguard of it, our treasured DayGlo warriors for flair.
I’d really like to hear more about your DayGlo warriors. Thanks for another great read.
Unspeakable royal indiscretions, you say? Do tell!