Wizards

 I mentioned in a recent blog that, after Trump was hit with the civil fraud judgment in the New York Attorney General's civil case against his businesses, I briefly felt sorry for him. I couldn't help it. As much as I loathe Trump, the size of this liability struck too close to the heart of my own worst financial nightmares for me not to feel a twinge of anxiety on his behalf. The judgment, after all, was close to half a billion dollars in total. And even without any legal analysis of whether it was deserved or not, I felt like this was a fee I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. 

No doubt this was "the wrong kind of pity"—the politically sterile and misdirected kind—as a central character in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh would call it. "Pity the monsters," to quote Robert Lowell—and here, if anywhere, was a case of monster-pitying. But I couldn't see how anyone could be hit with a civil judgment that size and survive it. I was still thinking, you see, in terms of normal people and their finances. I was thinking about it rationally, and asking the kinds of questions I would have to ask if I were in his position: is he going to lose his home? Will he have to sleep in his car? 

I was forgetting that certain people are, to use Nikolai Gogol's term, "wizards." Somehow, mysteriously, they are just not subject to the same financial rules that govern everyone else. No matter how far in debt they seem to be—they somehow find access at the critical moment to some other secret reserve of cash. They engage in magical thinking until the needed financing mysteriously appears. There are people, in short, who are simply able to live indefinitely a lavish, spendthrift existence that normal people cannot afford, and though never actually able to afford it themselves, are somehow never the worse for it. 

As Gogol describes the condition, in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dead Souls: 

"[T]here are such wizards to be found, whose life is an inexplicable riddle. He seems to have spent everything, up to his ears in debt, has no resources anywhere, and the dinner that is being given promises to be the last; and the diners think that by the next day the host will be dragged off to prison. Ten years pass after that—the wizard is still holding out in the world, is up to his ears in debt more than ever, and still gives a dinner in the same way, and everybody thinks it will be the last, and everybody is sure that the next day the host will be dragged off to prison [....] 

Gogol goes on to write that such "wizards" are always saved at the last minute by some unexpected turn of events. "[A]t such moments unexpected help would always come to him from somewhere [.... S]ome unknown lady traveler, chancing to hear his story, would [...] send him a generous donation; or some lawsuit, of which he had never heard, would be won in his favor." And so it has been with Trump. While living seemingly at the end of his rope, year after year—always in debt, always a bankrupt, never paying his bills—the critical, decisive moment of ruination never actually comes. 

The starkest and most obscene illustration of this has surely been the case of Trump's new social media company. Here, if ever there was one, is an illustration of the power of magical thinking. This was alchemy. Trump's legion of cultlike followers took an intrinsically valueless company that has never turned a profit and overnight magicked it into being a multibillion dollar publicly-traded corporation. Trump's half-billion dollar civil fraud judgment, which had sounded so ruinous to me, suddenly pales. What's half a billion dollars when you can pick up four billion overnight? 

No one who is not a wizard should try this at home. Other, normal people, like you and me, still have to pay our bills. We still have to deal with the fact that, if we can't make our payments, the bank will actually foreclose on our home or repossess our car. If a court actually orders us to pay half a billion dollars, we would have to cough up the money or declare bankruptcy, and no legion of financial lemmings will arrive at the crucial moment to squander their life savings on a bogus investment that exists solely to deliver us some much-needed liquidity. The magic only works for some people. 

But such wizards do exist. And, pace Gogol, not only in Russia.