In John Ganz’s account of the breaking clock of the early 1990s, the woeful era was apparently little more than a prelude to, or the dress rehearsal for, the eventual coming to power of one Donald J. Trump.
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and How America Cracked up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz (420 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).
One wonders what author John Ganz set out to accomplish with this book. Did he seek to explain what he regards as the failure of the Reagan revolution? Or was he out to account for what he regards as the political good fortune of one Bill Clinton? Or was he bent on exposing what he regards as the essential fraudulence of the Ross Perot phenomenon?
Or perhaps it’s all of the above—and more besides. Is this book actually an indictment of the American people—or at least of a significant chunk of us? And is its author ultimately offering his version of political reality, a version that provides room for an explanation for the belated arrival on the political scene of one Donald J. Trump?
Along the way we are introduced to many of the usual “usual suspects” of the early 1990s, especially Clinton and Perot, as well as the politically hapless, often helpless, President George H. W. Bush. Secondary political players of much more than minor prominence in these pages are the likes of Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Jesse Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, and the equally hapless and helpless New York Mayor David Dinkins. If you’re suspecting an NYC tilt to the entire story, you would not be mistaken.
But just who among them are “con men” and/or “conspiracists?” All of them? Or none of them? Who knows. The only actual conspiracist given any prominence is Randy Weaver of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and later of the woods of northern Idaho. He is treated with some sympathy before he becomes a victim of Bill Clinton’s need to establish himself as a law and order man.
Treated with somewhat less sympathy is one Lisa Williamson, daughter of a truck driver who suffered from epilepsy. A star student, she won a scholarship to Cornell University, later interned for a Republican congressman, but ultimately gave herself over to a life of political activism as Sister Souljah. A conspiracy theorist of sorts herself, and one who might also be characterized as a “con woman,” she, too, became a victim of Clinton’s political requirements.
The only out-and-out con man of any prominence in this story is mobster John Gotti. He, too, is treated with some sympathy over the course of the better part of a chapter. But why is he on hand at all? Maybe it’s once again simply the draw of New York City. Or maybe not.
If it’s simply the appeal of the Big Apple, a New York developer of rising prominence might have garnered at least as much attention as Mr. Gotti. After all, Mr. Trump was not exactly a shy and retiring figure as early as the early nineties. For that matter, he might even have qualified as a con man as well, if not exactly a conspiracist.
To be sure, a youngish Mr. Trump does not go unmentioned in these pages. Early on, he is caught “ranting” about the rising level of Japanese investments in the American economy. Later, he benefited from having “feasted on the decaying hulk of the city.” “Less predator than avenger or parasite,” Trump’s empire had collapsed by 1992, a victim more of his own “prodigality” than the recession in the city’s real estate market.
Prodigality! What a terrific word, and Mr. Ganz is nothing if not a wordsmith. In fact, he might even qualify as a con man of sorts himself. Perhaps it is as such that he chooses to resurrect one Donald J. Trump right at the very end of his tale. And perhaps that resurrection explains the prior attention given to John Gotti.
The scene is this: Dealing with multiple bankruptcies, Trump is seeking to convince a once-world-famous architect to redesign the facade of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Now eighty-six, architect Philip Johnson as a young man had fallen under the influence of an “American fascist” by the name of Lawrence Dennis. So influenced, he would quit his job with New York’s Museum of Modern Art to get a glimpse of Huey Long’s Louisiana and maybe even become the Kingfish’s “minister of fine arts.”
As Ganz revives the scene, Joseph Alsop of the New York Herald Tribune reported on Johnson’s adventure with “a bit of a smirk.” The young architect told Alsop that “all you need is faith, courage, and loyalty. If you have them, you’ll get things done.” Now Ganz has Johnson telling Trump that the “terrible thing today” is that the “Dillinger and Capone gangs are the only groups that have got courage.”
Of course, by the 1990s the Dillinger and Capone gangs were long gone. But no worries—at least not for John Ganz for whom John Gotti is still on hand. And no worries for Philip Johnson either, because for him the example of the “courage” of Dillinger and Capone is still within his reach, and nothing “beyond that nothing is needed, not even consistency.” Besides, the “only necessary consistency is consistency of feeling.”
And a consistency of feeling can be a key to political success, whether it is exhibited by the messenger of those feelings or between messenger and follower—or both. It may even be necessary for the success of a political demagogue, especially a populist demagogue.
According to Ganz’s retelling, Johnson’s running commentary had followed on the heels of having had to listen to Trump “rant and rave” during their limo ride to Atlantic City. Did such ranting and raving bother Johnson? Not really. Instead it prompted him to tell Trump that he would make a “good mafioso.” To which Trump replied “one of the greatest.”
And so ends the John Ganz account of the breaking clock of the early 1990s. In its entirety, that woeful era was apparently little more than a prelude to—or the dress rehearsal for—the eventual coming to power of one Donald J. Trump. And just as apparently Huey Long was apparently wrong, at least insofar as John Ganz is concerned.
At the height of his power, Long was asked if he could be regarded as a fascist. No, Long replied, he was sui generis. Besides, Long added, when fascism comes to America “they’ll call it something else.” Not so, according to Ganz, whose conclusion seems to be that since fascism has come to America it should be called what it is.
And what is it? Little more than a protection racket. Whether it’s John Gotti or Donald Trump, they’re both in the same business, namely that of offering/guaranteeing protection to the faithful. That word appears and reappears again and again because that’s exactly what John Ganz presumes that Trump supporters want: protection against enemies foreign and domestic.
There is never any sense in these pages that the grievances of those who supported Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan, or even David Duke, had any real legitimacy. They were all feelings based. Therefore, they were somehow illegitimate, surely wrong-headed, and certainly easily manipulated.
More than that, it apparently never occurred to Ganz that Long may have been right after all: that fascism can and has come in both left- and right-wing varieties, that at the heart of fascism is cooperation between big government and private interests, especially large private interests. In other words, those who rant and rave about “saving our democracy” are, more often than not, those who oppose the current effort to break something other than the clock. And that “something other” might well be the unholy alliance of public and private forces that is determined to save the single-party rule of the Democratic party and the administrative state.
Apparently, it has also never occurred to Mr. Ganz that the modern Democratic party offers to the voters its own version of a protection racket. And that would be cradle-to-grave protection, no less—especially for women. Witness those infamous Julia commercials that ran during the 2012 presidential election. But then there is also protection for minorities facing “systemic racism” and “toxic masculinity” as well.
Will the Trump attempt at a different sort of break up succeed or fail? Ganz offers no final solution—or interim speculation. But clearly he is worried, especially since Trump has succeeded, electorally speaking, where his forerunners did not.
As that clock was breaking three-plus decades ago, the major players in Ganz’s account of that era are neither Bush 41 nor Clinton, and certainly not Trump, but the allegedly fearsome threesome of Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke. Each in his own way offered a sneak preview of at least aspects and/or elements of Trump and/or Trumpism. And yet each of the three had obvious political weaknesses.
Ganz refuses to treat any of the three with even so much as a hint of sympathy. Perot is little more than a crackpot, who can’t decide which issue to emphasize or whether to stay in or exit the 1992 presidential race. Buchanan is too easily, and lazily, portrayed as a combination of backyard bully, Confederate sympathizer, anti-Semite, right-wing Catholic, and racist, while Duke is nothing more than an out-and-out racist, minus the white sheets and plus the three-piece suits.
When all is written and done, Ganz wants the reader to think of this threesome as a foursome, and yet somehow he realizes that Trump is at once someone who is both less and more than any of his alleged predecessors. His New Yorkness notwithstanding, he was and remains the national figure than none of them were. His brashness notwithstanding, he is a master of the medium of television. And the charges against him notwithstanding, he may well be our first post-racial president, especially when set against his most immediate presidential predecessors, Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. Witness the amazing jump in his support from black and hispanic voters in 2024.
All of this should worry the John Ganzes of the world. And perhaps not-so-deep down, it does. How else to explain a decision to wallow in the chaos of the “crackup” of now long ago, especially when staring him in the face is an opportunity to appraise the dismantling of a different sort of clock, namely the very protection racket that he prefers to ignore rather than condemn.
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