"What's past is prologue." — Shakespeare's The Tempest
"What's past is prologue," Antonio tells Sebastian in Act 2 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Inscribed on the National Archive building, the phrase has come to mean that history provides a context for the present.
In this section we'll look to the past, to gain perspective both on Trump and his family, but also the political context that led to our current predicament.
The whirlwind of events of the last several weeks have displaced more familiar political analyses in much popular media. An apparent attempt at assassinating former president Donald Trump on the eve of the Republican convention, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Harris replacing him at the head of the ticket would each have been unusual, striking events individually, but taken together sent commentators and analysts in search of precedents.
Yet amid or in spite of the unusual events, some things quickly reverted to normal. Despite a professed “toning down” of violent language from Republicans, Trump and newly anointed elegiac hillbilly VP candidate JD Vance “doubled down” on violent language, especially that directed at migrants and immigrants. And with that, some things were back to “normal,” at least as far as Republican candidate sound bites were concerned.
What had in the runup to the events of mid-July seemed newly bold right-wing rhetoric pervading Republican party communications has been treated by some commentators as something new. Certainly the January 6, 2021 riot represented a new level of violence in the nation’s capital. To find a precedent for the placement of bombs one must look back to the 1983 bombing of the Senate side of the Capitol building, ostensibly to protest US involvement in Grenada. In its conception and coordination, however, January 6 most closely resembled the so-called Brooks Brothers riot in Miami in 2000, largely coordinated by Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, but including future Trump partisan Roger Stone and others who would become members of the George W. Bush administration. Like the January 6 riot, the goal of the Brooks Brothers riot was to stop a vote-counting process, resorting to violence if necessary.
In his recent book When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz locates the origins of multiple aspects of our current political and cultural environment in events, people, and actions from the 90s. For example: the mythologizing of criminal figures as popular outlaws he associates with legendary mafioso John Gotti; the trend toward political movements that purport to oppose political movements he associates with the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot; the rightward shift of the Republican party he associates with one-time grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, and serial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.
Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" centers around a novel in which, unlike traditional fiction where a character's decision at one point in time forecloses other choices, instead all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously.
Corporate strategist Eric Garland's recent epic twitter thread on the intertwining geopolitical and national events that have led us to the current political crisis has something of a Borgesian quality.
Garland’s long narrative had the effect of a Rorschach test when it was posted on December 11. A representative positive reaction came from Washington Post investigative reporter David Farenthold, who has reported extensively on Trump foundation misdeeds. Farenthold tweeted "Damn, man, this is great writing, using a form that does not lend itself to greatness." Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who has chronicled Trump’s history of business failures, lies, and possible cognitive disorder called Garland’s thread a "MUST read." On the other end of the spectrum, London writer and self-described "PhD candidate in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge," writing in Slate called it, with apparently no ironic intent, the "worst piece of political writing in human history." Garland’s tweetstorm even roused the ire of Gizmodo editor Alana Hope Levinson, although not for its content, but for its format, which she seemed to argue suited a blog better than Twitter. Tellingly, Levinson designated Garland’s content, which was arguably something like "the geopolitical origins of the Trump phenomenon" as "not important." (We should perhaps note that Levinson has fewer than 10% the Twitter followers Garland has.)
It's commonplace to say that if someone is involved with construction in New York City he or she will come in contact with organized crime. According to Pulitzer Prize winning author David Cay Johnson, Trump falls into that category, having hired "mobbed up" firms to build Trump Tower and the Trump Plaza apartment building. A federal investigation concluded that construction of the Trump Plaza building likely involved racketeering.
According to investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, Trump probably met with Genovese family underboss Tony Salerno at the home of Trump's then lawyer, Roy Cohn. Trump had met Cohn in 1973 when Cohn was defending Trump and his father against Department of Justice charges that they were discriminating against blacks in their real estate rentals. By then Cohn, who played a role in the sentencing of the Rosenbergs to death, and was counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Second Red Scare, was consigliere to Salerno as well as Paul Castellano of the Gambino family.
