The America We Deserve
Shiflett, Dave & Trump, Donald J.
Trump's No Chump The America We Deserve Donald J. Trump with Dave Shiflett Renaissance Books /286 pages /$z4.95 REVIEWED BY Dave S h i f l e t t Editors' note: No, your eyes aren't...
...Though friendly with trade unions, Mr...
...But there are many other great chapters...
...Reconciling himself to his daughter Margaret's unsuitable marriage, he wrote to a friend, "She wants children & that is a thing I can't decently provide for her...
...105 pp., Seivn Hardcover, $14.95 For all 23 volumes of the Collected Works of G.K...
...fellow New Yorkers had asked him to consider running for that city's mayorship, or for governor...
...He has gone to great lengths attempting to technically clear war criminals...
...There is the preposterous heartache of"Bella Fleace Gives a Party," in which an old dear who has come into some money decides to host a ball that everyone will talk about for years to come...
...It's not for everyone...
...Illustrated...
...Yes, the man who praises Hitler for being "steeped in the history of Europe" accuses Jews who are steeped in their history of engaging in "group fantasies of martyrdom...
...The most likely candidate for that focus is the Reform Party, the invention of another billionaire, Ross Perot, whose eccentricities bar him from carrying the organization forward (Trump did not put it this way, but no doubt believes it...
...he sensibly asks...
...Trump's only hurdle to the party's nomination is P.J...
...He would like Oprah to be his running mate...
...They're scared to talk straight because they're afraid it will cost them votes," says Mr...
...He had some hopes and fears about America, and the suspicion that he was at least as competent to head the government as Clinton...
...Quite the contrary...
...Trump warns, North Korea could expect some live-ammo discipline...
...He argues that the gas chambers at Hitler's Treblinka could not have actually killed Jews...
...And so this most independent of men is courting a nation increasingly populated by political individualists...
...Trump found he held commanding leads in vital areas: money, name recognition (or, as it is more properly called, celebrity), youth, a mailing list of 6. 5 million people, and chicks so beautiful they could raise the sap in a piano leg...
...Trump does have some political heroes, especially New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani...
...Trump posed a sensible question: Why not give this plurality a focus for its energies...
...The Times piece was especially brilliant, in this reviewer's estimation: Under his presidency, Mr...
...Trump has completely avoided this phenomenon...
...Trump does not disdain the finest fruits of the American dream...
...And in this case, put a rich guy in...
...Among other things, President Trump would: _9 Extradite Fidel Castro to the United States and put him in the dock on charges of terrorism and murder...
...Trump has unleashed op-ed pieces (also of high literary merit) in the Wall Street ]ourhal and the Los Angeles Times in which he lunged directly for Buchanan's quaking wattles...
...They seemed to be only individual habits...
...There is the zany inanity of "Cruise," a series of letters and postcards in which a fluff-brained young woman recounts a giddy round of shipboard romances...
...In fact, it can be rightly said that we have written the book on Trump--and in this reviewer's opinion it's a pretty good read...
...Trump, who is universally recognized as America's premier Alpha Male...
...Trump's No Chump The America We Deserve Donald J. Trump with Dave Shiflett Renaissance Books /286 pages /$z4.95 REVIEWED BY Dave S h i f l e t t Editors' note: No, your eyes aren't deceiving you: This review is indeed written by the writer who co-wrote the book under review...
...BROWN OF THE CHURCH OF ROME A unique collection of ten of the best of Chesterton's famous Fr...
...his superior officers were not amused, apprehensive perhaps that the soldiers would realize just who, in the absence of sheep, would serve as the sheep...
...The new volume is of considerable heft, comprising thirty-nine stories, among them seven he wrote while a student at Oxford, and six more he wrote while just a pup...
...he examines, usually with something like a smile on his face, the pitiable wriggling of people who thought they could glide through life unscathed, only to get stepped on, hard...
...270 pp, Sewn Softcover, $12.95 PLATITUDES U A deluxe cloth f^simile edi tion of Chesterton's personal copy of Holbrook Jackson's 1911 book of platitudes with Chesterton's original handwritten responses to each platitude...
...His relentless antipathy toward ALGIS VALIUNas is a writer living in Florida...
...Chesterton, visit the Ignatius Press website at www.ignatius.com Also by Joseph Pearce THE ANNOTATED THURSDAY Martin Gardner Gardner provides a thorough introduction, extensive footnotes and GKC's illustrations with the complete text of Chesterton's famous novel The Man Wlw Was Thursday...
...Even his stories about being lifted offthe ground by disciplinarian schoolteachers pulling his ears were offered, and received, as stories of the perils of childhood in general rather than of a childhood spent in Germany...
...A model apologetic for today's readers...
...His uncle, an MIT professor, foresaw the day of miniaturized weapons...
...I miss you every hour...
...Murdoch's Beltway Standard goes so far as to call Trump a chump--on its front page...
...In fact, as any reader will be forced to admit, the book shows Mr...
...In direct contradiction to the strutting John McCain and Bradley, he insists that Americans be allowed to donate as much as they wish to political candidates, so long as all donations are made public the same day...
...He rightly points out that most members of the "leadership class" refuse to discuss the bio-threat...
...Trump would discuss the ups and downs of his fabled life...
...If so, he might do well in urban areas...
...Sometimes he would revel in his own brazen offensiveness...
...his correspondent or listener is meant to demand...
...This puts him at considerable odds with the more "serious" candidates, whose rhetorical support for education is not reflected in the workings of their own minds...
...More crucially, he is free of the highly offensive preening found in Bradley's Life on the Run: More probably, I wanted to keep my experience of basketball pure, as innocent and unpolluted by commercialism as possible...
...Yet the Reform Party is at a crucial juncture...
...What distinguishes him from major party candidates, however, is his willingness to suggest that the good times may soon come to an end--not only economically, but in matters of war and peace...
...Trump memorably puts it, Bradley fled to Jersey "with his well-worn tail between his legs...
...The competition shall be trashed ,~ due time...
...Reviewing his assets, Mr...
...and the answer is always, I can and I will, with pleasure...
...is outraged...
...In his uninhibited distaste for Jews and blacks, he cannot be bothered even to be funny, and his lavish contempt is mostly just con...
...tro, Kim, Bradley, Buchanan, or Lenora Fulani...
...Trump also dismisses the niceties of our stale political discourse, preferring instead to practice the politics of personal destruction-at least if your name happens to be GasReading a book by Albert Gore, for instance, has much the same effect as sniffing glue...
...She makes the most extravagant preparations, but the only guests who show up are a pair of snobs she pointedly did not invite...
...Trump is too wise and principled to seek NEA support...
...As Mr...
...Trump, by contrast, chose wisely and currently enjoys assets of some $5 billion...
...Trump wins...
...I felt about the court, the ball, and playing, the way people feel about friends...
...He has a framed Renoir in his private jetliner...
...Also during the war, while his wife was housebound in the country with nursery duties and another pregnancy, he issued a macabre invitation to join him in the big city: "If by any chance my ehildren should die, do come to London...
...Trump, who has promised that, if elected, he will serve only one term...
...Trump, this hack sometimes refers to himself in the third person...
...That may have little appeal to a national audience, yet his defense of the mayor's policies allows him to take a strong law-and-order position which plays well except among "photo-op moralists" and "moral streakers...
...He poses the question 66 February 2 0 o o _9 The American Spectator ORTHODOXY Among Chesterton's many works, Orthodox}/ stands out as the most scintillating synthesis of his philosophy and deeply religious faith...
...Always the Loved One The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh Little, Brown ~536pages /$29.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas T he English novelist, biographer, and travel writer Evelyn Waugh (19o3-1966) was one of the funniest men who ever lived, and he could wring a laugh out of anything: The more solemn or sacrosanct the object of fun, the better...
...Having his way with most known varieties of foolishness, he commands an array of tones from gleeful loathing to rueful amusement...
...His children were a source of endless amusement...
...Trump suddenly took on a faraway look while recalling a warning his uncle had given him while Mr...
...Trump, though also of Northern European descent, is nonetheless quite clean in this regard...
...He is, as he said in an early draft of The America We Deserve, "the American dream, supersized version...
...He spies dark clouds approaching, including an economic downturn, perhaps of a severe nature...
...the story has the irresistible momentum of a well-told joke, and the punch line will make even ter68 Fe b r u a r y 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator...
...So, what is the Trump vision...
...Trump was still a boy...
...The men would laugh uproariously...
...Puffy, at this writing, is in the jug on a weapons charge...
...But first, in the service of history,.it is ~ . ~ im~an~-'t'0 chroni- J how Trump's latest book, The America Wet Deserve, came into i F ' being...
...Donald J. Trump, the nation's most flamboyant billionaire, has deeply alarmed the political class by threatening to wade into its most...
...But why go for peanuts when the presidency, brought to a low state by Bill Clinton, is on the block...
...As a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, Mr...
...Trump is also convinced that a deadly biological or chemical attack could put America to its ultimate test: a choice between maintaining its status as a free society and superpower, or giving up some freedoms and betraying allies--especially Israel- in order to avoid further destruction...
...Buchanan, who has infiltrated the Reform camp after suffering a string of ignominious batterings at the hands of Republican primary voters...
...The two major parties are steadily losing public support...
...Trump run...
...As the embodiment of earthly success, he is highly admired by lower-middle class Americans, many of them Hispanic and African American, who continue to admire the guys who have done well in the world...
...When not concerned with matters of state, Mr...
...He dismisses State Department-types who cringe at this bold policy as "Beta Males from Beta Bottom...
...It could be a potent equation...
...9 Present North Korea--"a nation run by a family of certified maniacs"-with an option of either ending its nuclear weapons program or suffering an Israeli-like strike against its weapons facilities...
...DAvE SHIFIY.Tr is a writer in Midlothian, Virginia...
...Trump's hack was earlier interviewed by former Vice President (U.S...
...To no surprise, the book starts out in New York City, with the author perched high in his eponymous skyscraper, scanning the horizon...
...I pressed my physical and emotional life into basketball alone, and it made for a very intense feeling...
...His chosen specialty is the comedy of moral and emotional desolation, of lives lived badly if they are lived at all...
...Trump no doubt cherishes, a mere real estate guy has become the champion of the most serious, and largely unspoken, issues this nation faces...
...Beginning with the origin of man and the various religious attitudes throughout history, Chesterton shows how the fulfillment of man's desires takes place in the person of Christ and in his Church...
...Giving money to like-minded politicians, he argues, is guaranteed by the First Amendment...
...And he has complained that Jews are obsessed with the Holocaust...
...a pretty face, but heavy in the leg...
...Buchanan has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler, whom he has called "an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier and a leader steeped in the history of Europe...
...TAWD is disappointing in a few areas...
...I cared about basketball...
...Gore's embarrassing reliance on high-paid political adviser Naomi Wolf also illustrates another difference with Mr...
...and he was distressed by his own character, maybe even penitent...
...t is here that Mr...
...We give pornographers a free reign, so why don't we do the same for ordinary citizens...
...Trump is a sharp critic of the culture, as one would expect from a guy who knows anybody who's anybody, including Puffy Combs and Oprah...
...His diaries and letters, published some twenty years ago, are a trove of inspired cussedness, but also a record of misery and spleen...
...More to the point, the passage exposes Bradley as yet another intellectual who developed a disdain for materialism after becoming quite comfortable...
...The American Spectator _9 Fe b r ua r y 2 o o o 65 He celebrates the fact that he has shaken the Manna Tree, and as a result his storehouses are full...
...In his inimitable, soaring prose, Chesterton tells of his earthshaking discovery that orthodoxy is the only satisfactory answer to the mystery of life...
...Trump points out that Bradley left the Senate not for the purpose of thinking deep thoughts away from Washington diversions, but only because he knew defeat was certain...
...He is a firm friend of opulence...
...All he needed was someone to help him put his bid to prose...
...This "book within a book" is a rare treasure that reveals a whole new series of inspiring and humorous Chesterton aphorisms...
...How could you...
...Though promoted, by himself and his retinue of toads, as the thinking person's candidate, his 1996 memoir reveals instead a commonplace mind with a literary style to match: Although my step-grandfather had emigrated from Germany at age twelve, and cooked spareribs and sauerkraut every Wednesday, and drank his beer each afternoon at four o'clock, I didn't recognize these things as ethnicity...
...sacred process and buy its most e x a l ~ office--without its permission...
...What's more, it provides the clearest exploration of America's New Politics, which can be understood as the attempt by a highly diverse voter coalition to achieve a thoroughly American purpose: Throw the bums out...
...One must be grateful to Waugh's Roman Catholic faith for enabling him to last as long as he did, and to his publishers for granting him so prosperous a posthumous life...
...His earliest effort, "The Curse of the Horse Race," which he turned out at the age of seven, closes on a note of exemplary violence and didactic severity: "Then Tom drest himself then Tom took Rupert to the puliese court Rupert was hung for killing the pulies man...
...One day," Mr...
...The Reform Party is the only available candidate...
...T AWD will appeal to the established Trump constituency, but also hopes to show the author as worthy of wider support...
...As a public service, I will offer a modest rate reduction after the first 500,000 words...
...Gardner offers exciting new insights into the novel's meaning...
...It is reported that at least zo rap songs mention Mr...
...take over and the party is totally marginalized...
...Mr...
...Trump quoted him, somebody will be able to detonate a suitcase-sized bomb in Manhattan that will flatten the entire city...
...It does not, for instance, include a centerfold of Mr...
...Chesterton, Pearce presents a major biography of a 20th century literary giant, providing much important information on GKC never before published...
...We are left with a single question: Will Mr...
...The German Americans of my youth were the women in South St...
...Dan Quayle about the possibility of writing Quayle's campaign book...
...Occasionally the phone would ring and Mr...
...Unlike Bradley, Mr...
...1=~_ ~.~ ~ ' T h e ~ J first meeting between the two took place last ~- _9 spring in Mr...
...He is rumored to pack a piece himself, which should go over well in the South and Rocky Mountain West...
...Joseph Pearce 290 pp, Sewn Softcover, $14.95 FR...
...His budding relationship with politics also reflects the workings of a very canny political mind...
...Trump is independent--both of party and of financial worry...
...Trump to be a sensible and erudite fellow...
...Special deluxe hardcover edition of these excellent detective stories with new footnotes and introduction by John Peterson...
...Reading a book by Albert Gore, for instance, has much the same effect as sniffing glue...
...Trump laid out his vision as his hack took furious notes...
...Bradley eventually rectified this shortcoming by marrying a woman whose father held a paid position in the Luftwaffe...
...First and foremost, he desires to re-establish a high literary benchmark for national politicians...
...Trump has also raised alarms in some constituencies with his repeated insistence that he has never drunk a glass of alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or even had a cup of coffee...
...Though not an announced candidate, Mr...
...Trump knows that one never pays a woman for her conversation, but only for her silence...
...His name had been bandied about before...
...His penthouse apartment would make Liberace blush...
...If he stays and fights, however, Mr...
...Indeed, if America begins choosing its presidents according to the quality of the books they produce, Donald Trump will coast into that somewhat smallish white rambler on Pennsylvania Avenue...
...To his credit, Mr...
...As it stands, a plurality of voters consider themselves Independents...
...Nancy Mifford once asked him how he could be a Christian yet be so horrible: "He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible...& anyway would have committed suicide years ago...
...Bill Bradley's output is little better...
...The final chapter in the Trump saga has yet to be written...
...If Mr...
...Who is the most eminent hack writer in America...
...Like Mr...
...In an irony that Mr...
...So what's the deal with Trump...
...Soon enough, one of the great collaborative literary efforts of the modern era was born--the perfect union between a man of high achievement and a hack writer who, according to close friends, would write his own mother's death warrant for a quarter a word...
...Trump is said to have asked his pin-striped aide, Roger Stone...
...Fatally disconsolate, Bella dies the next day, and only afterward is it discovered that she had forgotten one detail: She never mailed the invitations...
...Brown mysteries that emphasize the role of Brown's Catholic faith in helping solve the murders...
...9 Allow the parents of poor children to choose where their children go to school, even if vouchers are spent at religiously affiliated schools...
...Germans were the people who ate the big hot dogs and brewed Busch Bavarian Beer...
...On a trip to Hollywood, he outraged the actor David Niven by referring to his black maid in her presence as "your native bearer...
...Tll make a few calls," the latter is reported to have replied...
...A plurality of voters are now independent of party loyalty...
...I didn't embrace or explore the German side of my family...
...But Trump has a great deal of substance--about $5 billion worth, and says he may be willing to spend $1oo million to convince America that what it really needs is a real estate guy in its top political job...
...The growing number of Independents and refugees from the two major parties indeed need a political focus...
...This is a rich piece of sanctimony from the man once known as "Dollar Bill" because of his enormous contract...
...If this reviewer might offer a personal opinion, merely by running, Mr...
...For many years basketball was my only passion in life...
...temptible...
...536 pp, Sewn Hardcover, $29.95 536 pp, Sewn Softcover, $19.95 TOLKIEN: MAN AND MYTH Joseph Pearce A major new study of J.R.R...
...Playing for money compromised me enough...
...Trump not only wins the Reform Party nomination, but goes directly into the history books as a serious political figure...
...Or, as he puts it, Trump has one financial backer: Trump...
...Trump's stunning girlfriend, Melania Knauss, who makes Jackie Kennedy look like Aunt Bea...
...Louis who scrubbed the front steps of their homes every Saturday morning, occasioning my father to comment, "You can eat a meal offthose Germans' steps, they're so clean...
...257 pages, Seam Hardcover $24.95 himself at the end of his book, and promises an answer in February or March, insisting he will run only if he becomes convinced he can win...
...Of Margaret, his favorite child, he remarked, "Much prettier again after a time of looking like a toad...
...Waugh had a lifelong penchant for telling stories with a lesson, though the instruction is rarely so bald as in his first story...
...Historians of the presidency may be interested to know that Mr...
...although one is saddened as well to think that this time one has most likely seen the last of Waugh...
...Trump, who appears to believe that celebrity may count every bit as much as government service as a vote-getter...
...So enjoy this New Review...
...A captain in the Royal Marines during World War II, he would lecture his men on the obvious advantages of deploying sheep as the first wave of invading forces to hit the beach--land mines, you know...
...Trump's ~ 26th Floor Manhattan -~ office, a Krugerrand's toss from Central Park...
...I didn't give a damn about perfumes, shaving lotions, clothes, or special foods...
...I was immune to the normal profusion of interests that accompany adolescence...
...Trump might be a stealth Mormon, a subsequent investigation found that he is a Mammon guy, but not a Mormon guy...
...Their most notable achievement has been to convert most voters into non-voters...
...Trump warns that under his presidency, North Korea could experience some live-amino discipline...
...Americans gets tiresome too, but does allow for bright flashes of wit: "My book [Brideshead Revisited] has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can't be...
...Trump--had b.eeome convinced that the time might be right for a run at the presidency...
...The age of New Politics demands new approaches...
...A thoroughly de-lightful biography...
...Trump turns his back, Buchanan and his sister (how'd you like to end up in her dungeon...
...270 pp, Sewn Hardcover, $ 11.95 WISDOM AND INNOCENCE Joseph Pearce Through years of meticulous research and access to the literary estate of G.K...
...As he often points out, the so-called experts are wrong all the time, whether the subject is the economy, Communism, or the nature of the electorate...
...Trump's political instincts come into play...
...At his worst, which was not far from his best, he was boorish, petulant, cruel, ofpustular temperament...
...This guy makes Warren Beatty look like a monk," the hack marveled to himself...
...What did I have in common with them--or with my Kroh ancestors, for that matter...
...9 Support the constitutional right to free association, including the right to associate one's money with whomever one desires...
...But the most riveting moment came when Mr...
...Taking money for hawking products demeaned my experience of the game...
...At one point, the name Bianca floated through the office like a gossamerwinged succubus...
...Tolkien's life and writings and his relationships with other great literary writers like C.S Lewis and Chesterton...
...I hope this story will be aleson to you never to bet...
...p resident Trump--now there's a bold concept for this new millennium...
...Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, the most prominent Reform politician, is currently not interested in a presidential bid, and besides is a bit club-footed in the public relations department...
...Operating as liaison to Yugoslavian partisans, he made a running joke of his insistence that Tito was in fact a woman, referring to him as "Auntie...
...Quayle chose another writer, and the rest is well known: He soon ran out of money and his candidacy disintegrated...
...Apparently by late 1998, Trump--from t h t ~ 81 point on, let me ~_9 him Mr...
...In The American Spectator's time-honored tradition of investigative iournalism, we have looked beyond the glitter and gab to get the true picture of the man...
...270 pp, Sewn Softcover, $11.95 THE EVERLASTING MAN Chesterton's greatest masterpiece, this is his view of world history as informed by the Incarnation...
...While it was feared that Mr...
...This proposal, which Trump introduced in a brilliant op-ed in the Miami Herald and restated before cheering survivors of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, has put him in good stead with Cuban Americans...
...Trump is all too familiar with the doctrine of business cycles...
...Other Toadtown analysts, including the Washington Post's fashion writer, insist the man has no substance...
...Every American reader with a taste for Waugh will be tickled to find that, with The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, there is yet again an unlooked-for gift from beyond the grave...
...Thus was born i 64 Fe b r uary 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator what is perhaps the most mesmerizing chapter in TAWD--one in which, among other things, Mr...
...He mocked his son James's stutter...
...He has also staked out a sensible position on gun control: "If the bad guys have them, so should the good guys...
...He is not overly concerned that some dismiss him as a mere real estate guy with a few casinos on the side (and a few wives out to pasture...
...Public discourse in this country doesn't get any uglier than that...
...The major parties, he explained to his hack with a concision worthy of Richard Nixon, are headed toward foreclosure...
...Politics Inc...
Vol. 33 • February 2000 • No. 1
