How Trump Mastered the Art of Telling History His Way – POLITICO

And yet this weeks effort represents a championship game, of sorts, not only an intensification of his efforts since March to recast the narrative of the pandemic but the apex of his lifelong gambit. It is the stiffest test because Trump is not just trying to rewrite the past, or even the very, very recent past, but the actual presentthe ongoing presentof this public health crisis and the attendant economic calamity. The convention itself is happening where its happening and how its happeningmostly D.C., of course, instead of Charlotte or Jacksonville, with videos, virtual fare and next to no crowdsliterally because nearly 180,000 people have died of Covid-19 and another 50,000 or more are predicted to die before November. His reelection hangs on whom voters hold responsible for those numbers.

He must rewrite history because the true past is something thats bad for him, said former GOP consultant Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

He takes his own failures, and he just rewrites what you see in front of your eyes, Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political scientist, told me. This is what hes always done.

It goes way, way back. In 1964, for instance, at the New York Military Academy, he asked a classmate to recount a play in a baseball game.

The bases were loaded, the classmate said. We were losing by three. You hit the ball just over the third basemans head. Neither the third baseman nor the left fielder could get to the ball in time. All four of our runs came in; we won the game.

No, Trump said. Thats not the way it happened. I want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the ballpark! Remember that. I hit it out of the ballpark!

The Art of the Deal in 1987 crafted an indelible portrait of a brash master deal-doera nonfiction work of fiction, in the words of Trump biographer Tim OBrien, that the person who actually wrote it would come to greatly regret. I drastically misused my skills as a writer and storyteller to make Trump sound like the best version of himself, Tony Schwartz told me Wednesday evening.

It was, however, a truer account than the next two Trump books. Surviving at the Top came out in 1990, when he was barely surviving and nowhere near the top, and The Art of the Comeback came out in 1997, when he was no longer mired in the dire financial and reputational straits he was in the first half of that decade but nonetheless diminished and straining to reclaim a certain stratum of celebrity. The comeback wasnt complete until the debut of The Apprentice, in 2004, which pitched him as an omnipotent titan of business, which a not small share of Americans believed, which opened evidently a path to the presidency. In his telling of his life, over and over, again and again, failures arent failures and losses are wins.

Mr. Trump, Chris Wallace of Fox News said in the first Republican debate in the summer of 2015. You talk a lot about how you are the person on this stage to grow the economy. He cited his litany of corporate bankruptcies. Question, sir: With that record, why should we trust you to run the nations business?

I have never gone bankrupt, Trump said. I have never.

Not personally bankrupt.

But your companies have gone bankrupt, Wallace said. Is that the way youd run our country?

Youre living in a world of the make believe, Chris, you want to know the truth. And I had the good sense to leave Atlantic City, Trump said. Ive gotten a lot of credit in the financial pagesseveral years ago I left Atlantic City before it totally cratered, and I made a lot of money in Atlantic City. And Im very proud of it. I want to tell you that. Very, very proud of it.

The crowd that night laughed, clapped and cheered.

And Chris Wallace throws his arms up in the air and moves on to the next thing, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me Wednesday.

We all do, he said. We all do.

While scrutiny, obviously, is higher now than it was ever before, Trumps platform, the implicit legitimacy, the importance and the audience and the attentionall thats higher, of course, than its ever been, too. Hes no longer an avaricious up-and-comer. Hes no longer a reality-TV, catchphrase superstar. Hes the president of the United States. Everything he says, every post that he makes, is magnified a million times more than it ever was, Zelizer said. And its a collective act now, said OBrien, the biographer. The Donald Trump con is now an operating principle for his White House, his family, and everybody around him in the GOP apparatus. Theyve all seen him do it and do it in a way in which any failures can just be denied and recast.

On Monday, then, Patty McCloskey of the gun-waving St. Louis couple of right-wing cancel-culture quasi-fame said Joe Biden wanted to abolish the suburbs, an absurd assertion. Former football player Herschel Walker praised Trump as a team owner when his tenure was a disaster that ended with the destruction of the United States Football League. A doctor from Louisiana commended Trump for his rapid and efficient response to the coronavirus pandemic, and a nurse from West Virginia stated that he recognized the threat this virus presented for all Americans early on, when he dismissed it from the start and often still does.

On Tuesday, Trump staged in the White House a naturalization ceremony for a handful of nonwhite new American citizens, jarring considering his record of anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric about shithole countries. Eric Trump said that Biden wants to defund the police, which isnt true, and that his father had delivered the largest tax cuts in American history, which isnt true, and that promises were made, and promises, for the first time, were kept, which obviously isnt true. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed many others over the past few nights and blamed the devastation of the coronavirus on China and China alone. Then came Kudlow. It was awful, he said. Health and economic impacts were tragic, he said. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere, he said.

Its not Hubert Humphrey in 1968 saying, Well, were getting closer to the end of the Vietnam War, were almost there, which you could argue is spin, or Lyndon Johnson saying that, Princetons Zelizer told me. This is saying: The war is over. Its not happening.

It made a basic statement from Melania Trump at the end of the night sound almost shocking: I want to acknowledge the fact, she said, that since March, our lives have changed

If there is a ledger, Galen told me Wednesday, the 978 lies that everybody else told do not balance out the one truth she managed to sneak in.

And Wednesday? More of the same. Lots more.

Bidens campaign issued a statement characterizing the Republicans convention as malarkey in overdrive, adding: In Trumps version of reality, up is down, and down with the facts.

Donald Trump is an excellent storyteller. Its like were all amazed by his ability to cast himself in the best light possible. And thats kind of what campaigning is, Amanda Carpenter, a former speechwriter for Ted Cruz and the author of Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us, told me. He just does it with staggering audacity.

The question at hand now is whether it can work still. Ive theorized for a while now that his strength in creating the reality that he wants could be punctured by actual reality, Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush aide and the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told me. Most of his scandals and mismanagement of the first three years just didnt really impact the daily life of a lot of folks. That changed with the virus. His management of the virus has in a very real and tangible way negatively impacted peoples lives, and so his skill at creating this fake realitycan it overwhelm the pain that theyve experienced? We dont know the answer to that. I think maybe not.

Polls say hell lose. So do his approval ratings. Miller told me about a recent focus group RVAT did with 10 people in Florida who voted for Trump in 2016 but gave him unfavorable marks of late. They all said something to the effect of: I thought he was this businessman, that he was going to knock heads in Washington, that he was going to shake things upand like, now this virus is happening, and hes not doing anything. Hes not fixing it, Miller said. It wasnt like he had lost all these folks, but they had some real doubts about this bill of goods theyd been sold four years ago, about the problem-solving businessman. The takeaway for Miller? They bought it in 2016. But now?

I don't think it works this time, former John Boehner aide Michael Steel told me, because Covid isnt a distant or abstract issue. Its a daily reality of masks and cold fear and hot Purell and people, especially older Americans, getting sick and dying alone.

Trump doesnt get to do this stuff in a vacuum anymore, said Galen, because Covid has wrecked so much of traditional American life, from family life to schools to college football to pro football to the NBA.

The reality is too dramatic now, Zelizer said, to rewrite it.

I dont think you can write away a pandemic and 16 million unemployed people who are struggling to survive, and if you can, this country is in long-term trouble that extends well beyond Donald Trump, OBrien told me. If he gets away with not being held accountable for these things, then our institutions arent functioning well, and our voters arent getting the information and the education they need to hold their leaders accountable. And thats what the election will be a referendum on.

Not so much on Trump. Or even his coronavirus response.

This election is a referendum on us.

Because weve always had carnies, used car salesmen, con men, divide-and-conquer artists. Trumps rolled them all up into his persona, presidential historian Doug Brinkley told me Wednesday night. And if he gets reelected with us knowing all of this, he said, then he is a reflection of what modern America has become.