![]() My personal grace period didn’t last long. Regardless of his half-baked policy stances, the race-baiting elements of his kickoff speech, or his obvious love for the sound of his own voice, even Trump had to understand that aspiring to be president of the United States demanded a higher level of seriousness than, say, being a reality TV star. And in spite of my early impressions, I was willing to withhold final judgment around this version of Trump until he had a chance to get his candidacy up and running. Naturally, as with my previous website, among the subjects we covered were matters pertaining to those vying to be the next commander-in-chief. I was now working as the editor-in-chief of a startup military website based in Hollywood founded by a couple of former MTV execs. Trump came back into my scan when he descended the escalator with Melania in June 2015. ![]() Like the average media-consuming American I occasionally watched The Apprentice and scratched my head over his Obama birtherism obsession, but that was about it. and the West Coast while trying to get a clue what my responsibilities were (they had little to do with actually being a writer), I had even less bandwidth to pay attention to what was going on in Trumpland than I’d had while flying Navy jets. ![]() Between flying between my home in metro D.C. By the time my third book was published it was obvious I wasn’t going to be “the next Tom Clancy,” in spite of the blurb on the back cover, so I accepted an offer to take over as the editor of the biggest military website on the internet, which was based in San Francisco. I retired from the Navy in 2002 to focus on my budding career as a novelist, which actually began when my debut was published at the very end of my time on active duty while teaching at the Naval Academy. The biggest threat of extremist violence right now is coming from the rightwing. (I do remember a squadronmate, a New Jersey native who was later an astronaut, characterizing Trump as a “fake millionaire who always says stupid shit” around the time that rumors were spreading of his first imminent bankruptcy.) I didn’t think much about him for the next ten years as I focused on leading sailors and flying airplanes. The quality of the writing went down, and subscribers like me lapsed, and that was the end of my view into the underlying fiction that was the initial phase of the Donald Trump empire. I rolled back to sea duty in another Tomcat squadron aboard an aircraft carrier about the time Graydon Carter left Spy, which, sadly, was the beginning of the end for that magazine. It was Carter who popularized the notion that Trump was physically challenged in terms of the size of his hands, describing him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” and then writing about Trump’s responses that suggested the label had cut deep. ![]() Before he went on to save Vanity Fair, Carter used the pages of Spy to humorously expose the elite’s myths, including those surrounding the still-ascendant Donald Trump. The editor-in-chief, a civil servant who was a successful freelance writer on the side, introduced me to Spy, a brilliantly written satirical monthly helmed by Graydon Carter. I was a Navy lieutenant, a radar intercept officer (think “Goose” in Top Gun), assigned to my first F-14 Tomcat squadron, and the idea of somebody brash and innovative making things happen-in his case, turning worn-out buildings and abandoned lots into skyscraper complexes with fresh vibrancy-had its appeal.Ī few years later, I was on shore duty serving as the editor of Approach, the Navy’s aviation-safety magazine. At that time, I accepted the notion of him in passing. Trump with the publication of Trump: The Art of the Deal in 1987. Like many Americans my age, I first became aware of Donald J. ![]()
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