Trump Talk Betrays the Way We Are

Talking about celebrities is a way of talking about ourselves, or at least our values.

Take the Trumps. In the ‘80s, Donald Trump represented a boyish, open-faced, unabashed, go-for-it love of the Great More, the Eternal Bigger. As a celebrity, he was living proof to Americans that an unexamined life was probably a prerequisite for making money.

To say that the Trumps had it all was something of an understatement, and understatement was not the Trump style. He was the one who renumbered the floors on his Tower to make it 10 stories higher. Don and Ivana had more than $1.7 billion, three children, 345 rooms in all their houses to call their own. They weren’t shy about it.

To some extent, Americans have used the Donald Trumps to air their ambivalence about wealth in a country in which everybody calls themselves middle class. To some, Donald was, as Ivana said before the split, “the people’s billionaire.” To others, he was, as Spy magazine wrote, “the short-fingered vulgarian.”

As for the missus, some saw Ivana as a poor girl from Czechoslovakia who found love, marriage and money in America. Others saw her as the rich lady who considered herself thrifty because she bought $3,000 designer dresses wholesale.

Either way, in a 50-room apartment high above Fifth Avenue, the Trumps seemed wholly removed from the more pedestrian problems of life. They got to glitter and the rest of us got to debate the cost and value of the glitter.

Now they get to suffer, thereby fulfilling the great American hope that money can’t buy happiness. Under the guise of gossip, we can watch the celebrated split as we watched their celebrated lives--at a safe distance.

Add a lot of zeros to the checkbook and this sounds like any marital partnership unraveling, any couple you know revising the story of their marriage with hourly bulletins. Take away the public-relations men and the lawyers and it sounds like our friends pushing us to choose between the Bride’s Side or the Groom’s Side.

Of course, the question this time is whether it’s dreadful to be married to a woman who has her carpet vacuumed before she steps into the room. Or to be hooked up to a man whose social outlook is, “Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” Donald Trump once described his work style this way: “Boom--like a cobra.” In this celeb match, we are asked to choose between the mongoose or the cobra.

Nevertheless, in some way, the media care and maintenance of the Supercelebs, the fascination with their Triumphs and Trials, is the way Americans talk out the mores and morals of society. If future historians want to know what we were like, they’ll go to the People files, not to Foreign Policy. Leave them a note to look under “Trump, Donald and Ivana.”