Questions of Upbringing

Stories About A Bad Man

Like many writers of his literary generation, novelist Anthony Powell decided in his twenties to try his hand at screenwriting. This led him into a tedious apprenticeship writing scenarios for third-rate “quota pictures” that the British government required Hollywood to produce on the outskirts of London as a precondition for importing money-making movies into the United Kingdom. One evening, Powell got a ride home from Tommy Phipps, another old Etonian, three-quarters American, who owned a ramshackle car.

At a construction site on the Great West Road the highway narrowed sharply, and suddenly three high-powered cars, “of considerable size” bore down on them from the opposite direction. Phipps reached for the gear shift as they sped toward what looked like an inevitable collision.

“This,” Phipps said, “is just going to be a question of upbringing.”

Fifteen years later, Powell used that phrase as the title for the first book in his masterpiece, the twelve-volume roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve often muttered it under my breath as I hauled myself to my feet to begin some hopeless cross-examination.

How Can You Defend Those People?

The first upbringing under examination this morning is my own. I’ve often wondered whether it has left me strangely deficient in my capacity to project moral disapproval.

During my last year in Northwestern’s law school, I was admitted to an experimental full-time clinical program at Georgetown, defending misdemeanor clients in D.C. courts. This was lucky. No classes or exams; just clients. Most misdemeanors were jury-triable in the District in those days, and the U.S. Attorney’s office prosecuted all the local criminal cases. Because the AUSA’s took their work (and themselves) very seriously, lots of cases got tried. So, when I did my first round of job interviews later that year, I’d had some experience. In one session, Martin Erdmann, the legendary head of New York Legal Aid’s criminal trials division—he’d been censured for calling New York Appellate Division judges “whores who became madams” in a Life magazine interview—began by asking me how I could defend those people.

“I know the right answer to that,” I said, “And I can give it to you if you want, but the fact is, it just doesn’t bother me.” That was true. And it was enough for Marty Erdmann. He offered me a job on the spot.

But although that was good enough for Marty Erdmann, the subsequent 50 years have proved that it isn’t good enough for anyone else. Like most defenders, I’ve been interrogated on this issue by questioners of all races, creeds, ages, regions, shapes, sizes, social ranks, family connections, and political leanings. Not one of them has ever been satisfied with my reply, even when I ventured the extended political, ethical, sociological, and constitutional rationalizations that I didn’t waste on Erdmann. Only legal colleagues vary from this routine, and many of them don’t vary very far. (You never know when “How can you defend these people?” or “How can you still defend these people?” might pop up over drinks.)

Which Brings Me to Donald Trump.

I’ve represented many people who have done horrific things. We always get along. After mulling this issue for a few years now, I’m confident that if Donald Trump turned up on some Monday’s lock-up list and was assigned to me, I would shrug and represent him too. I would anticipate extensive whining, lying, ingratitude, blaming, and dire threats of referral to the Bar’s disciplinary functionaries for insufficiently emulating Roy Cohn, but those are traditional features of the defenders’ territory—predictable efforts of terrified clients who are under agonizing pressure. Things could be different in degree with Trump, but not different in kind, and nothing I’d complain about.

But like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, “After boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.”

Carraway saw Gatsby’s life as “an unbroken series of successful gestures;” Trump’s life has been an unbroken series of unsuccessful gestures. Even holding the presidency has only amplified the display of egregious offenses against taste, ethics, law, decency, women, veterans, elders, and rising generations.

Accepting a court assignment to Donald Trump would be easy for me, but having anything to do with him outside that narrow professional context would be intolerable. Agreeing to have him hire me, for example, is unthinkable. Join me for dinner? Vote for him? Have kids’ futures influenced by him? Nod quietly while someone else apologizes for him? In the language of our native city, “Fehgeddaboutit.”

What am I saying about me?

Apparently, the Carraway “certain point” arrives for me when reaction (or inaction) regarding Trump says something about me not about Trump—declares something about myself that it turns out I am completely unwilling to state. I don’t want to dignify this. There is nothing elevated or systematic about my line-drawing; it is idiosyncratic and arbitrary. I calmly represent murderers, but to get me to wear a striped tie with a striped shirt you would have to threaten my life, and even that might not work.

The more serious question of upbringing that this leaves pending is whether Trump’s supporters—especially those less lenient than myself—will find themselves pushed beyond Carraway’s “certain point.”

Trump will certainly keep trying to do that just that. The quantity of disgusting conduct Trump will exhibit isn’t in question. He will provide an abundance of challenging moments. That is his way of life: he is a machine that perpetually tests the upbringings of others.

Trump is suing his niece, Mary Trump, for spilling family secrets, but he spends his days (and many late-at-night social media sessions too) corroborating the title of her treatise on his upbringing, Too Much and Never Enough. Trump dares the audience to drink from a firehose. I’ve argued before that Trump lives in torment—he has a Hellhound on his tail, and it is gaining on him. He believes that any restraint or contrition on his part will be fatal. Trump will always need today’s new bizarre act to distract everyone from yesterday’s. The frequency of these poisonous moves will accelerate—soon, he’ll need this afternoon’s breech of rules to distract from this morning’s revelation. Nothing is resolved, and the backlist burgeons.

Meanwhile, the quantity of misconduct also provides a degree of insulation against accountability for the progressively more outrageous quality of the acts involved. Trump benefits from the “normalization of deviance.” Each new transgression moves past the last one, but only slightly. Then, when the most recent violation fails to provoke an explosive reaction it becomes the departure point for the next marginal deviation. Trumpian government in operation provides an example of “practical drift”— the once unthinkable becomes by small increments the new (albeit temporary) normal. Concepts such as “one-too-many” and “gone-too-far” are diluted to the point of irrelevance.

So far, this dizzying quantity of challenges to the tolerance of the well brought up has not been enough to alienate the voters. The lists of Trump’s violations of laws, rules, conventions, and expectations extend over the horizon. He survives, and then he adds another. Trump’s strategy of distraction works. Trump is just being Trump. No big deal.

The Lists and the Stories

But this impunity isn’t permanent. Trump is in jeopardy now, not because the entries on the lists of violations are mounting, but because they are beginning to coalesce into stories.

Think of the public as a jury, and apply the lessons of Pennington’s and Hastie’s classic explanation of jury decision-making.

Our prevailing image of a jury trial—and political competition—depicts the adversary parties dropping counters on a scale. The jury (or electorate) waits until the trial is over and the evidence is in, then it does the weighing. You win if the jury decides you have more pieces of evidence weighed in the balance. On this model of decision-making Trump looks safe, because each of his violations is weighed with a shrug. But Pennington and Hastie showed that the real jury decision process is quite different. The political decision process may be too.

Rather than waiting until the conclusion of the trial and then weighing the data, each juror, from the very beginning of the trial, is processing every new piece of evidence (and of non-evidentiary atmosphere, body language, etc.) filtered through his or her general knowledge and life experiences and trying to fit it into one or another of an array of provisional stories: “Is that phone call evidence of a depraved adulteress?” “Of a battered wife?” This story-testing is constant, inventive, private, and personal. In the end, a juror settles on one story and agrees with the other jurors, or they agree to accept an “either x /or y” resolution during deliberations. Politically, we saw something like this happen with Joe Biden: isolated slips and blunders connected, and the story of drooling senile decline took hold.

The danger for Trump—and it is becoming acute—arises when myriad isolated episodes begin to cohere and to form stories. Some event becomes a bridge between what had been parallel lines of disgusting acts. Suddenly both lines are part of a story. A public evaluating stories is different from a public simply counting sins.

The Stories Take Over

Watch as the corruption list becomes the extraction story. Until now, confronting a MAGA enthusiast with the news that Trump has taken a payment from the Saudis, maneuvered his kids into a corrupt bitcoin scheme, or organized a pay-to-play Trump Ballroom competition has been like telling a Rolling Stones fan that you saw Keith Richards smoking a joint. These transgressions are part of the fun—middle fingers gleefully aimed by proxy toward the pompous powers-that-be. For many, each grift provides a little vicarious frisson, and the pleasurable confidence that there will be another. The desire to protect Trump from consequences and so protect this source of amusement extends an umbrella of toleration over his liegemen—over Kash Patel, taking his girlfriend on junkets; over Scott Bessant’s dawdling over investment conflicts.

But lately, because of the timely debates over Medicaid cuts and SNAP benefits a formerly parallel theme—depriving the poor and vulnerable of services—has emerged as a story not just of indulgence of the rich but of extraction from the workers to fund that indulgence.

Trump has been incautious about this. When the morning’s news (even on Fox) slots the end of SNAP and Medicaid coverage immediately next to plans for a wildly distended, cartoonish ballroom (of all goddamned things!) the Venn diagram is clear to absolutely everyone. The story is one of the rich looting the already precarious resources of the working poor (not the shiftless welfare Cadillac crowd of legend). SNAP (food stamps) benefits have become necessities for a broad range of low-wage Americans who are working very hard.

Then add to this, Eat-The-Wounded, story the Rigged Game drama. The MAGA public now gets to see it, and to see its third act. Landscapers are snatched from the street by masked ICE agents, drug delivery men are killed by drone strikes, while the lengthening list of donors, plutocrats, political henchmen, and drug kingpins gets pardoned.

Watch as the several streams of Trump’s sexual misconduct, once treated as independent, emerge into a story of rapacious misogyny. When the Access Hollywood confession, the sexual assault in Bergdorf Goodman, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Stormy Daniels denigrations, and the frantic efforts to suppress Jeffrey Epstein’s records each stood alone the harm was limited. But now, they have all been thrown together. Simultaneously, a homogenized cadre of Trumpian women—Melania, Lindsay Halligan, Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem, Alina Habba, Laura Loomer—so alike each other, yet so different from women one knows in everyday life, that it seems at times to represent an entirely new, specialized gender, underlines and nourishes rather than dilutes the tale of female subordination.

For one final example, consider the story of cowardly retreat. There have been individual examples of Trump’s ducking danger and accountability all the way back to his original bone spurs diagnosis. For a long time, these were treated as atomized data points. But, now, they have been gathered into a theme: Trump-always-chickens-out has become the plot summary reduced to an acronym: T.A.C.O. This is bad news for a man whose claim on support from MAGA is that he will champion their cause against the Leave-It-To-Us-We-Went-To-Yale elitists of the Clinton/Obama/Biden era. The story that now emerges, for example, when Trump says Pete Hegseth will decide about the release of war crime videos is not simply one of a man refusing to fight, it is the story of a man hiding behind subordinates—sending them out on limbs he is perfectly willing to saw off if convenient. This not a story of fearlessness; it is one of cynical readiness to throw Hegseth to the wolves. This episode joins groveling before Putin, buckling to Netanyahu’s allies, rescinding tariffs when challenged, as variations on one big story—a story of spineless unreliability.

The Story on the Hill

Recounting the disappointment felt by the original owner of Gatsby’s mansion when his ridiculous mansion failed to impress the public, Nick Carraway observes that, “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” This may provide a clue to the potential impact of Trump’s overreach. John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” message in his “Model of Christian Charity,” twisted by Peggy Noonan and Ronald Reagan into a paradigm of American exceptionalism, was, in reality, and evocation of Americans’ primal fear of exposure and nakedness:

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Himto withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through theworld. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going…”

When the edifice erected on the hill top is a distended, ridiculous ballroom, the MAGA fans are threatened with complicity in fabricating a permanent monument to their own credulousness and stupidity. From the beginning, Americans have wanted to avoid looking like fools. The locals who were bilked by the Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn ran the con men out of town on a rail. As lists of his violations ripen into stories, Donald Trump is courting the same fate. Americans don’t want that story told about themselves.