by Graydon Carter
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has spent more than 30 years observing Donald Trump’s orange-tinted antics.
November 11, 2016 – vanityfair.com
God, I love this country.
Only in America could a serial bankrupt pass himself off as a successful businessman. (And almost none of those he bankrupted were even regular businesses. They were casinos—where people essentially come to lose their money.)
Only in America could a man who offended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and African-Americans, as well as women, babies, and the handicapped, become the Republican nominee for president.
Only in America could a man for whom truth is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable referring to his opponent as “lying” and “crooked.”
Only in America, a nation built on a history of immigration, could a man who married two immigrants—one of whom is alleged to have worked illegally when she first arrived—run on an anti-immigration platform.
Only in America could a man with a legendary reputation for stiffing small-business owners and wage laborers be able to pass himself off as a champion of the little guy.
Only in America could a man run for the presidency with one of his heralded accomplishments being the fixing of a skating rink in New York’s Central Park, a job the city had bungled for years. (It’s a feat most backyard rink rats in Canada pull off before their 13th birthday.)
Only in America could a man who brags about groping and kissing women without their consent win 53 percent of the vote among white women.
Only in America could a man who avoided the draft—with a deferment for pesky bone spurs on his feet, which somehow did not hinder him from playing tennis—and who insulted war heroes and their families become the commander in chief of the greatest military power on earth.
Only in America could a man who lashed out over the flimsiest of slights become our chief negotiator with the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans.
Only in America could a man whose staff reportedly took away his Twitter account because he couldn’t control himself be given the nuclear codes. (Thank you, President Obama, for pointing out that one.)
Only in America could a man with a negligible record of charitable giving and not a single day’s experience in public life be raised to the highest public office in the land.
Only in America could a man who kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside rule over the second-largest Jewish population in the world.
Only in America could a man whose résumé of failed businesses and alleged sexual harassment is so miserable that he would have trouble finding work at a copy shop be named chief executive of the world’s largest economy.
Only in America could a man who has skirted the law for more than four decades be put in charge of choosing new justices for the nation’s highest court.
Only in America could a man whose foreign-affairs experience consists of negotiating deals for hotels and golf courses—and perhaps arranging for investments by Russians—become the most powerful man on the planet. (And at a very perilous time.)
Only in America could a man who has likely paid no federal taxes for nearly two decades, and who refused to release his tax returns, be put in charge of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service.
Only in America could a man who thinks climate change is a hoax, and something invented by the Chinese, be put in charge of not only the Environmental Protection Agency but also our negotiations with other nations—at the most calamitous environmental period in the earth’s modern history.
Only in America could a man who surrounded himself with political second-raters like Rudolph Giuliani and Chris Christie be put in charge of forming the team to run the next U.S. government.
Only in America could a man who earned the contempt of his Republican rivals for being a con man and a fraud—and who implicated the father of one of his rivals in John F. Kennedy’s assassination—ultimately reap the support of those very same rivals.
Only in America could a man who threatened to throw his opponent in jail and to sue the women who have accused him of sexual harassment, who denigrated the judge who will preside over the trial of his bogus university (because the judge is of Mexican heritage), and who has 75 outstanding lawsuits (including two for fraud) be put in charge of the Justice Department.
Only in America could a man who does not understand the separation of powers, and who has advocated for the use of torture regardless of national and international law, be thought prepared to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Only in America could a man whose primary national exposure was appearing on a reality-TV show become the reality that so much of the world feared.
Do not tell me America is no longer a land of opportunity.
