‘Golden Age’? How About ‘Gilded Age II’?

Humorist Calvin Trillin, taking note of the fashionably attired friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, referred to the festivities surrounding the 1981 Presidential inauguration as “The Night of the Minks.”

Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”

Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a golden age for America begins right now.”

Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter “g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct word was “Gilded.”

You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that period.

Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”

Much like our time, the innovations in technology and finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators, and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their wealth and influence.

Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”

So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.

Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously, but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several financial cliffs in the early 1990s.

If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune, they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the government regulations from which they beg relief.

What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”

Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.

They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall, breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.

With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.

Neither, as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.

Late last week, having already royally ticked off transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report. 

Now, Mini-Me is consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D. Vance, into the political stratosphere.

Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.

Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.

The hat was really expansive. Could she have been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.

Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power, but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission Accomplished.

“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The Financial Times this past weekend.

As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House, why can’t I?”

Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.

(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The Gilded Age.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Best Man,’ on a Candidate’s Missing Wife)

Sue Ellen Gamadge [played by Ann Sothern, far right]: [to William Russell, played by Henry Fonda, center] “We want to see a lot more of your wife—a great deal more. You know, there are still people who don't trust the English.”

Dick Jensen [played by Kevin McCarthy]: “Mrs. Russell was sick during the primaries.”

Sue Ellen: “Yes, yes, yes. I know. But she has to be at your side at all times. She must seem to be advising you. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm not having a wife and trying to be funny all at the same time, too. Great harm.”— The Best Man (1964), screenplay by Gore Vidal, based on his play, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Gore Vidal’s political satire has lost little if any of its sting, six decades after he wrote it. The setting—the smoked-fill rooms at a convention that will determine a party’s candidate—may have lost its importance, but his Broadway play and adaptation are at heart about power and its use in smashmouth politics.

And, even though we now—courtesy of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump— have Presidents who’ve been divorced, voters are still awfully curious about candidates’ spouses.

Which brings us to William Russell’s wife Alice in The Best Man.

The actress who played Alice on Broadway, Leora Dana, was American, as were the actresses who took on the role in 21^st century revivals: Michael Learned, Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd. So perhaps that line about “the English” above was made to account for the casting of the admittedly marvelous Margaret Leighton (pictured far left) when the play became a movie.

But, as a student of history, Vidal would probably have been struck by the irony of a foreign-born First Lady. For the first two and a quarter centuries after the founding of the republic, there had only been one such spouse: Louisa Johnson Adams, born in—yes, England.

Then came Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s second wife from Eastern Europe. (Perhaps he might want to reconsider his position on imports?)

For the longest time, I thought Louisa Adams underwent some of the worst experiences of any First Lady as the marital and political partner of John Quincy Adams, a notably frosty fellow who suffered bouts of depression.

After being largely ignored in the White House by her husband, Louisa became something of a recluse and worked on an unpublished autobiography whose title signals her misery: Adventures of a Nobody.

But I’m afraid that the Slovenian-born Melania has—well, trumped her. Ms. Trump has been largely AWOL as her husband plotted his return to the White House (her appearance with him at the Al Smith Dinner being a curious and rare exception), and her memoir, Melania, has just been published.

There is one line from The Best Man, flung out by Leighton, that First Ladies Adams and Trump wish they could have said to their husbands, I’m sure: “I’ve had twenty years of nonsense, of being a good sport.”

At least Mrs. Adams, however, never had to read about her husband’s affair with an adult-film actress conducted during her own pregnancy, sexual misconduct accusations by dozens of other women, and even a civil court jury finding that he’d sexually abused and defamed one of them.

What does the Slovenian Sphinx think of all this? Publicly, nothing. Privately, if she’s ever had a chance to watch The Best Man, I bet she snorts at Ann Sothern’s line about “seeming to advise” the candidate—but nods vigorously at Leighton’s “twenty years of nonsense.”

Trump: The Sultan of Stamina????

Just how beleaguered might White House staffers be feeling these days? Bad enough that Donald Trump is facing a special prosecutor, that he basically admitted to firing James Comey over “the Russia thing” after aides had sworn up and down only 24 hours before that it was all about the FBI director’s handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, or that he’d shared classified information with the Russian ambassador within a day of that firing.

But now, aides have scrambled to explain why Trump had gone from slamming "Islamist extremism"— perpetrated by political movements that implement Islamic law and theology—to "Islamic extremism," a slap at millions of adherents to one of the world’s oldest religions that prior Presidents studiously avoided.

It was entirely understandable, they said. The President was “just an exhausted guy" following his 14-hour journey from Washington, a senior White House official said on a CNN report.

You could practically hear the massive groans from Trump supporters. First, their standard-bearer had been photographed bowing to a Saudi prince—the type of act that Barack Hussein Obama might do. Now, he was sucking wind during his very first time on the diplomatic track—what they’d been to conditioned to expect from Hillary Clinton, a.k.a. Lady Macbeth, Killary, and the Lady Who Got Sick at the 9/11 Memorial Service Because She Had Parkinson's.

Someone I know—not a Trump admirer—said to me not long ago, “I’ve got to hand it to him—he has some energy for someone his age! Hillary would never be able to keep up that pace.”

I don’t care for Mrs. Clinton’s Becky Sharp instincts, but I’ve been kicking myself since this conversation that I didn’t dispute this statement more vigorously at the time. Not only is she far more likely to pore over briefing books than The Donald, but as Secretary of State she maintained a punishing schedule: 956,733 miles, 112 countries and 401 days spent traveling in four years, reports the Washington Post.

Contrast that with Trump. Even when traveling inside the U.S., he has been reluctant to stay in non-Trump accommodations that stint on his preferred creature comforts. When it came time to venture abroad for the first time, the President reportedly strongly urged his aides to shorten the trip from nine days to five, according to a New York Times account.

He was right to be concerned. Trump had only made it to his first stop—only his second day abroad, mind you!—when his staff already was offering the exhaustion excuse. All of this from a man who, as a candidate nearly a year and a half ago, tweeted: “Hillary Clinton doesn't have the strength or stamina to be president. Jeb Bush is a low energy individual, but Hillary is not much better!”

Why slime one opponent when you can slime two?

Mrs. Clinton might not be svelte, but her exercise and yoga regimen compare favorably with her victorious opponent, who discounts the value of jogging (and who, almost certainly, hasn’t meditated for 30 seconds in his life). He is lucky to wear a bright cap when he golfs, as it distracts momentarily from his bulging waistline and prominent rear end when he swings a club, as evidenced in the 

accompanying photo.

The touch of an attractive woman has been known to practically turbocharge some politicians. (See, for instance, the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who appeared mummy-like when making political appearances in his 90s—until, that is, he’d be introduced to a young lady.) 

In the past, that might have applied to Trump. But his luck on this first foreign trip has been considered so abominable that even this didn’t work for him. In their first day as President and First Lady abroad, as he reached out for Melania’s hand, she yanked it away--two days in a row!.

Babe Ruth might have been the Sultan of Swat, but Trump, despite his trip to an Arab country, will not be named the Sultan of Stamina anytime soon. If you want to know the truth, though, I care less about the shape Trump’s in than in the shape he’s going to leave the Presidency and country in when he goes—not a moment too soon.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Imagining President Trump on His First Lady)

“So what do you think of your new first lady? I picked Moronia— what's your name, honey? Melania, right. Great name. I just picked Melania here from a very wide selection of possibilities—not just because the sex is incredible but because this nation wants and deserves a trophy first lady.  When everyone sees our first lady standing next to some other first lady of another country, the wife of a premier or whatever, they’ll want to go to bed with our first lady, not the other one. So the American people no longer have to worry on that score. And if they get tired of her, not a problem, because chances are I’ll be tired of her before they are. And we’ll get a new first lady. Trying to keep North Korea from getting the bomb, maybe that’s a problem. Finding a new first lady? Trust me, not a problem.”—Christopher Buckley, “Trump: The Inaugural," originally published in The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in Buckley’s But Enough About You: Essays (2014)