#Pathological fear of the swamp pro#

He brought the lessons of the old Brooklyn and Queens clubhouse to D.C. “Everyone’s sort of shock at Donald Trump is both completely understandable and galling-because he’s been Donald Trump this whole time. “Wayne tracked facts like a coroner looking for poison, and so this is a coroner’s report,” Markey told me. Bound in Without Compromise is some of the most diligent coverage ever of what amounts to the swamp that launched Trump. It traces the shift from mid-century clubhouse backscratching to a shinier but no less corrosive way for dressed-up rogues to get fat off the public till as the city and then the country veered from the operative concept of the commonweal toward something like rich-get-richer or winner-take-all. This collection, more than 300 pages of yeoman prose edited by former Barrett intern Eileen Markey, represents a fraction of Barrett’s life’s work. It was a self-appointed task that kept Barrett busy for the better part of the next 40 years.

He was just all but forced to focus on him, beginning when both were in their early 30s, because his beat was state and municipal corruption and Trump’s deals always seemed to attract the most notorious players.

Barrett’s job certainly wasn’t to cover Trump per se. He looked past the glitz and bore down on the graft. He was the first journalist who took Trump seriously. Barrett, who died the day before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, wrote the seminal profile of Trump-in January of 1979. The recent release of Without Compromise, the anthology of work by the late longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, makes for a timely reminder of this reality.

#Pathological fear of the swamp pro#

Trump’s most comfortable habitat from the get-go was the pay to play and the quid pro quo of the unscrupulous nexus of business and politics. Trump has not only not done that-“The Swamp That Trump Built,” read a recent headline in the New York Times-but it would have gone against every fiber of his being to even try. Trump, facing next week’s Election Day reckoning, got to Washington and the White House by commanding unrivaled amounts of attention and inflaming enduring racial and cultural divides, but also by saying he was going to “ drain the swamp.” That last part was always the most elementally specious pledge. The last time New York was in such straits, in the midst of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, Trump took ample advantage-turning that collective distress into individual opportunity, kick-starting his career as a huckster developer by leveraging the door-opening, safety net-creating clout of not only his father’s vast financial means but also his favor-trading matrix of political connections.

But among the liberal urban enclaves Trump loves to berate as “anarchist” “hellholes,” New York, of course, is a particular fixation.įor those aware in even the most rudimentary ways of Trump’s long-arc plot, the president’s almost gleeful characterization of New York’s Covid-compromised condition is a reminder that this isn’t the first instance he’s attempted to feast on the city’s misfortune. Politically, this is an ongoing effort, more pathological compulsion than actual tactic, to lash back at voters and leaders in blue cities and states across the nation who consider him a cancer and more specifically an active threat to American democracy. “It’s a ghost town,” Donald Trump said of his native New York during the last debate, echoing a phrase he’s been using more and more of late to describe his former home.