I know nothing

Donald Trump’s lamentable lack of recollection, recalled by the late, great Tom Robbins

In the Molière play Le Malade imaginaire, as translated by the English dramatist Miles Malleson, Argan, the patient of the title, is at one point presented with his doctor and his doctor’s son, who is destined to take over the doctor’s practice in due course. The doctor reassures Argan: “In his head is nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever, with which one could take exception.” The humour is of course the idea that the words from with which onward are superfluous. The doctor is a quack, and so is his son.

The joke is so perennial as to have formed a central repeating theme of the television sit-com Hogan’s Heroes, in which John Banner, in the role of Sergeant Schultz, when faced with a situation of which he preferred to be ignorant, would insist, “I know nussinck, nussinck! Absolutely nussinck!” And that was enough to satisfy both Sergeant Schultz and Colonel Hogan.

So, one is left in a quandary as to whether, when confronted with certain facts and events that have a fairly large bearing on him, Donald Trump’s habit of frequently professing not to know anything about them is a reflection of the vacuity of the mind of the doctor’s son in Le Malade imaginaire or the outright denials of Sergeant Schultz, or even a reflection of the cocoon, the bubble of sycophancy in which Mr Trump exists. The trouble is, if he lives now in a bubble of sycophancy, what explains his lack of recollection in times gone by?

He was recently asked by a journalist to comment on taco. Not the Mexican cornbread delicacy but an acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. Mr Trump said he hadn’t heard it before, and he didn’t think it was very nice—a reprimand of sorts to the journalist in question. But the journalist in question had only raised the question because she’d heard the phrase was common parlance on Wall Street. Either it was common parlance that had not reached the ears of the subject in question, or the subject in question was playing dumb. Anyway, he readily denied he chickens out when faced with opposition to his tariff decrees.

Mr Trump avowed last year, during the election campaign, that Project 2025 was a work of which he knew nothing. Project 2025 is, in fact, the blueprint for what Trump’s administration is doing right now and it beggars belief that, as recently as a year ago, he knew nothing of it.

Mr Trump has been not knowing things for a lot longer time than just since last year, however. In a 2016 piece by the recently deceased Marshall Project reporter Tom Robbins (entitled Trump and the mob), Robbins relates the almost inevitable dealings that Trump needed to have with the mob in New York in the 1980s and 90s, given the mob’s tight control over the construction business. But he also mentions areas in which Trump had mob connections that were less inevitable, such as one Joseph Weichselbaum:

The builder had few reservations as well about his dealings with another allegedly mob-tied businessman with a problematic background who ran a helicopter service ferrying high-rollers to Trump’s casinos. The businessman, Joseph Weichselbaum, was living in an apartment in Trump Plaza, another of the tycoon’s East Side high-rises, when he pleaded guilty to federal charges of cocaine smuggling in 1986. The men were close enough that Trump agreed to accept part of the rent as helicopter service in barter. Weichselbaum also maintained Trump’s own private helicopter. And when Weichselbaum faced sentencing, Trump provided a letter to the court endorsing his friend as “conscientious, forthright and diligent.” Weichselbaum received a three-year sentence and came home to reside in an even posher pad at Trump Tower, where his girlfriend had managed to buy two combined apartments. When Trump was asked in 1990 by casino officials about his letter to the judge on Weichselbaum’s behalf, the casino mogul could not recall having written it.

In connection with Trump’s operation of casinos in Atlantic City, he made a great deal of money from a high-rolling loser called Robert LiButti, for whom Trump not only complied with whims, such as ensuring no Blacks or women served the tables that LiButti was gambling at, but also plied him with gifts, that included a Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari, which led to Trump’s casino being fined heavily. LiButti was finally barred from Atlantic City altogether based on wiretap evidence of conversations with Trump, in which he advised Trump on how to run casinos.

But when a reporter asked Trump about his biggest high-stakes gambler, the casino mogul answered, “I wouldn’t know him if he was standing in front of me.”

The outright denial is an astonishingly powerful act of disarmament. A case of he says, she says. Either the press and public have a mendacious tendency to create fantasy tales about Mr Trump, or he is very, very forgetful, or perhaps he recognises the turpitude with which he has acted and subconsciously pushes recollections of such events and people to the very farthest reaches of his memory, where they remain in a state of not being able to be recalled.

Here is Mr Trump in a picture from that article, in front of his new Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 1990, where he already seems to have adopted the habit of fight, fight, fighting, if he can possibly recall the moment, that is.