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A few months later, Trump—who didn’t like to use email and was not particularly tech savvy—sent out the first tweet he had typed out for himself on an Android smartphone, thanking an actress for her warm words about him. McConney later compared the moment to the scene in the movie Jurassic Park, when dinosaurs realize they can open doors themselves. In Trump’s case, no longer having to rely on staff meant there was no one to mediate his worst impulses, such as when he targeted the 1950s actress Kim Novak for her plastic surgery, sending her into a deep depression. (After Novak released a statement that accused him of bullying, he apologized privately.)
Confidence Man
Maggie Haberman
tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends. He nods. He gets it. At last, in Perry, I have a friend with whom I can share these deep thoughts, a friend I can tell about the Winchell’s locks in my life. I talk to Perry about playing tennis, despite hating tennis. Hating school, despite enjoying books. Feeling lucky to have Philly, despite his streak of bad luck. Perry listens, patient as Philly, but more involved. Perry doesn’t just talk, then listen, then nod. He converses. He analyzes, strategizes, spit-balls, helps me come up with a plan to make things better. When I tell Perry my problems, they sound jumbled and asinine at first, but Perry has a way of rearranging them, making them sound logical, which feels like the first step to making them solvable. I feel as if I’ve been on a desert island, with no one to talk to but the palm trees, and now a thoughtful, sensitive, like-minded castaway—albeit with a stupid polo player on his shirt—has come stumbling ashore.
Why had he removed himself to this isolated place? There is no doubt that he strongly wished for a certain measure of solitude and an atmosphere of repose and security. He had the habit of meditation; the distractions of life in a large industrial suburb of New York were enemies to sustained analysis and reflection. In Newark, moreover, he was vexed by disputes with thievish landlords; his business ventures were unrewarding; he was often hounded by creditors. As soon as he had found himself with a modest accumulation of capital, his debts paid off and some twenty thousand dollars to the good, he had thought at once of building a place of his own from which he could never be dispossessed. As he told a friend of this period, “the combined work of manufacturing and inventing” taxed even his superhuman energies. Indeed, the two occupations proved irreconcilable; if a new idea struck him he felt it had to be tested at once, with the help of every man and instrument within call. But this could hardly be done in a factory run on a regular time schedule, where his impromptu laboratory work held a minor place.
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