Donald Trump Jr., Sub-Master of the Universe - Matt Bai
Matt Bai
National Political Columnist
Yahoo NewsJuly 13, 2017
The most emblematic novel of the 1980s, Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” was published 30 years ago this October. It’s often been called a satire, but if you grew up in or around New York during that time, as I did, the fractured metropolis of Wolfe’s imagining wasn’t far-fetched. It was basically the 5 o’clock news with the names changed.
If you didn’t read the novel or see the disappointing film with Tom Hanks (and, I admit, it’s been quite a while since I read it, too), here’s the basic recap. Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader, a “Master of the Universe” as it existed in the Reagan years, who, along with his mistress, gets lost in the Bronx one night and ends up running over an African-American kid before speeding away.
What follows is a classic conflagration involving hardened city cops, breathless tabloid reporters and cynical civil rights leaders, among others. The Master of the Universe escapes jail but is ultimately laid low and stripped of his net worth, while the cold engine of capitalism revs on.
In its essence, “Bonfire” owed much to the greatest of New York novels, “The Great Gatsby”; like F. Scott Fitzgerald writing in the 1920s, Wolfe depicted “careless people” living in a cocoon of social presumption, inured to consequence and indifferent to the catastrophes left in their wake. Both novelists employed the traffic accident as a useful metaphor for recklessness, and both explored the connection, in their own times, between fraudulence and wealth. And in Wolfe’s time, no one embodied that connection better or more brazenly than Donald Trump.
During the years in which Wolfe was serializing “Bonfire” in Rolling Stone, culminating in its publication in 1987, Trump was building a casino empire in Atlantic City, financed largely by junk bonds and mountainous debt. He bought a USFL football team and pasted his name on a fleet of commercial jets.
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