patrick.net

During the years in which Wolfe was serializing “Bonfire” in Rolling Stone, culminating in its publication in 1987, Trump was building a casino empire in Atlantic City, financed largely by junk bonds and mountainous debt. He bought a USFL football team and pasted his name on a fleet of commercial jets.

He bluffed and borrowed his way to celebrity. By the end of the decade, not only was Trump the master of the universe he surveyed from the window of his Fifth Avenue tower, but he had designs on the worlds of entertainment and politics, too. He combined elements of both Gatsby and McCoy — self-invented and self-involved, heedless and highly leveraged.

It was in this New York that Donald Jr. and Eric and Ivanka Trump came of age like young royals out of “Frozen.” (Fitting that their dad built the city a skating rink.) It was here that young Jared Kushner — whose own Master of the Universe father went to a federal lockup for, among other things, trying to seduce his own brother-in-law with a hooker to keep him from testifying about campaign finance violations — busied himself buying up properties as if he were playing Monopoly

But the kids, near as I can tell, never risked a thing or placed a bet. They appear never to have learned anything their dads couldn’t teach them in the warm safety of a penthouse. Their birthrights became the whole of their identities.

Any one of them could have struck out for points west or south, where the postindustrial economy was flowering, where there were new markets to be conquered and untold sums to be amassed. Even the young Kennedys, however aimless and entitled, wandered off to Maryland and Illinois and California, seeking some meaning beyond the name.

Not the Trumps. Not young Kushner. They went right from adolescence to the highest echelon of family businesses, dabbling in pageants and shoes and niche media. They were Sub-Masters of the Universe, eons removed from the Big Bang.

Kushner had no hesitation about jetting off to the Middle East to broker peace among the Arabs and Israelis, when he’s barely qualified to serve as a delegate to the model U.N. Who ever told Jared he wasn’t the smartest guy in the room?

It does not seem to occur to the Trump children — ever — that they have now strayed dangerously beyond the boundaries of their cozy Manhattan kingdom, that what they’re dabbling in now is the impossibly complex business of our national and economic security, not to mention the arcane machinery of politics and law enforcement.

This is what he learned from watching his more dynamic father — that you can lie with impunity. That the rules don’t apply. That the system can always be gamed.

Except that none of this has anything to do with how business gets conducted in the cosseted confines of Trump Tower. It’s no longer about politics or public opinion.

There is only one man whose view on any of this ultimately matters now, and that man’s name is Robert Mueller.

Like Sherman McCoy, the young Trumps find themselves hurled into a pitiless world of lawmen and voracious media, all of whom somehow elude their mastery. Before this bonfire burns out, I’m betting the special counsel is going to know about all the meetings and all the emails, and a lot of very expensive lawyers are going to have a lot of hours to bill.

That’s always the moral of the story: Carelessness comes with a cost.

More: https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-sub-master-universe-090031185.html

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