Gatsby & Trump (was Re: NP A Trump Theory)

[Atticus Pinecone]

A-are they in cahoots? 

> On Sep 18, 2017, at 5:47 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Letters
> 
> Vol. 39 No. 5 · 2 March 2017
> 
> Sidney Blumenthal (‘a senior adviser to Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001’, as you describe him) neglected to mention one important thing in his piece on the Trump family: the past closeness of the Clintons and Trumps (LRB, 16 February). Bill and Hillary were favoured guests at Trump’s marriage in 2005 to Melania Knauss, going on to join the happy couple at the Palm Beach reception. Trump was a generous donor to the Clinton Foundation and made a substantial financial contribution to Hillary’s Senate and 2008 presidential campaigns. ‘I like him. And I love playing golf with him,’ Bill said of his pal Trump in 2012. According to Blumenthal, Trump’s ascent to the presidency represents ‘the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze …’ A world in which the Clintons gave every impression of feeling at home.
> 
> Harry Harmer
> Eastbourne
> 
> 
>> Am 18.09.2017 um 11:42 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>> 
>> And an involvement into Organized Crime is what they have in common ... 
>> 
>> > ... ‘What preyed on Gatsby,’ the narrator asks himself in Fitzgerald’s novel, ‘what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams?’ The fabulously wealthy Gatsby takes a mansion on Long Island, holds extravagant parties drawing the swells from Manhattan, and appears to be the effortless maestro of the scene. He has willed himself into being. Gatsby is actually Jay Gatz, a poor boy from the plains, in romantic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the upper-class object of his desire, who once rejected him. He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for whom, as for Tom and Daisy, there are no consequences for ‘smashing things up’. Trump is Tom Buchanan farcically playing Gatsby. Gatsby might have appreciated the audacity, but would have avoided the shabbiness. Both Gatsby and Trump, however, are characters enthralled by the possibility of recapturing the past and reshaping it as they imagine it should have been.
>> What Gatsby and Trump also have in common are gangsters. Gatsby’s fortune is secretly derived from his bootlegging partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, a character based on the mobster Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There was John Cody, the boss of Teamsters Local 282, who controlled the cement trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown prince’ of the Philadelphia Mob, who sold Trump the site on which two construction firms owned by Scarfo built the Trump Plaza and Casino. There was Felix Sater, convicted money launderer for the Russian Mafia, Trump’s partner in building the Trump SoHo hotel through the Bayrock Group LLC, which by 2007 had more than $2 billion in Trump licensed projects and by 2014 was no more. There was Tevfik Arif, another Trump partner, Bayrock’s chairman, originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock’s equity financing came from three Kazakh billionaires known as ‘the Trio’, who were reported to be engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other crimes. And so on.
>> 
>> There was no art to these deals. Trump’s relationships with the Mob weren’t just about the quality of cement. In his defence it was said that doing business with the Mob was inescapable in New York, but the truth is that there were prominent developers who crusaded against the sorts of arrangement that Trump routinely made. From beginning to end, whether Cosa Nostra or the Russian Mafia, Trump has been married to the Mob ... <
>> 
>> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family
>>   
>> 
>>> Am 17.09.2017 um 12:54 schrieb ish mailian:
>>> His greater appeal is that he bullies the people nearly every American
>>> openly thinks must be bullied. Most Americans still cling to the myth
>>> of American Exceptionalism. This myth, one whose power is greater than
>>> the American economy and greater than her war machine, has made
>>> America great and dangerous, to herself and to the world, and because
>>> it is in steady decline, nationally and internationally, it is more
>>> dangerous than ever. But it lives and its power should not be
>>> underestimated. For its power is its people and their myth. And Trump
>>> is their grotesque American hero. He is a postmodern Andrew Jackson
>>> and Pt Barnum and Ahab and Gatsby. Lynch him with tar and feathers,
>>> but Starbuck will not take the wheel.
>>> 
> 
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