Mad Max

This great piece of reportage by Maureen Tkacik in the American Prospect really has to be read in full to be appreciated. One notable aspect of this story is that almost everything in it is public record: You just need journalists who are willing to do the work that Tkacik did in finding those records, and putting them together into a coherent narrative.

That narrative, in short, is that Max Miller is an almost unbelievable piece of shit, even by the non-existent standards of Donald Trump’s Republican party. And the key to understanding Miller’s brilliant political career is exactly the same as the key to understanding Donald Trump’s:

JUST OVER A DECADE AGO, Max Miller was working at Lululemon, training a weekend a month with the Marine Corps Reserve and trying to figure out to do with the Cleveland State University history degree he’d just obtained on the six-year plan; “the quintessential failson,” in the words of an constituent who grew up in his affluent Cleveland suburban social circle and has met Miller in social settings. Today, he represents Ohio’s Seventh District—with assignments on the powerful Ways and Means and Foreign Affairs Committees—actively trades stocks, and frequently appears on CNN, which devoted an extensive discussion on its Saturday morning show last year to Dr. Hamdan’s purported attack, but until this summer had never grilled the congressman on the years-old allegations that he had assaulted three different women, most recently his ex-wife and the daughter of Ohio’s junior senator Bernie Moreno.

What has not changed about Max Miller is his sense of impunity. “He would get in trouble and just—nothing ever seemed to happen,” a former Shaker Heights High School classmate and baseball teammate of Miller’s told Politico in 2021 for a story that documented no fewer than four arrests between ages 18 and 22 on criminal charges—including assault, resisting arrest, and operating a vehicle while impaired—that Miller and his lawyers either got expunged from his record or substantially downgraded. More than 60 interviewees marveled at Miller’s imperviousness to accountability.

Of course, he hailed from a family one local publication dubbed “Cleveland Jewish royalty”; his grandfather Sam had helmed the iconic Ohio real estate development dynasty Forest City Enterprises at the height of its relevance, served as one of the country’s highest-profile emissaries between American Jewry and the Vatican, and sired many ambitious and distinguished children. In a community with no shortage of affluence and achievement, the defining quality most of his peers associated with the otherwise unremarkable Max Miller was the shocking consistency with which “he gets away with stuff,” in the words of one. “He doesn’t pay consequences for the things he does,” added another. This is of course the defining quality of the Trump era, but it is worth an examination of how Miller perfected it. . . .In light of the implosion of Graham Platner, the unusual suspects have leveled the usual grievances about hypocrisy and “double standards,” somehow failing to grasp that Miller and the entire ideology or ethos he represents revolves around flaunting, reinforcing, and codifying his own insulation from any form of standards. As he once said to his ex-wife in a letter that was revealed in the court case, in a very rare moment of candor: “I’m just a fuck up and worthless.”

It turns out the horrifying story of Miller’s abuse of his wife and two-year-old child is very much just the tip of the iceberg with this guy, as Tkacik’s curation of his rap sheet, literal and metaphorical, makes all too clear (Really, go read it).

LGM commenter Tzimikas:

I don’t think Trump’s genius is about finding marks. Rather it is learning that as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people. And he continues to have a good instinct for how far can he push things, so that other powerful people judge that it is better to treat his outrageous behavior as normal than it is to allow his behavior to make elite belief and behavior more generally questionable. He abuses the protection his status grants him at every opportunity, but others of similar status regard the threat to their status from punishing him greater than the threat to that status from letting him get away with his behavior.

That right there is the key to understanding the present political and cultural moment.

Trump is a person born into extraordinary wealth and all the privileges that go with such wealth in our society, who also happens to be a narcissistic psychopath of an extreme type.  He therefore feels even less bound by social rules – such as don’t steal from people just because you can get away with it – than even most other extremely rich people in our increasingly degenerate plutocracy.

His genius, such as it is, was to grasp early in life that consequences were for other people.  That he managed to use that insight to become the leader of the United States of America says more about the depravity of the culture of which he has become the central and characteristic figure than it does about Trump himself.

From The Triumph of Stupidity