Donald Trump Explains … Something

“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart. You know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged. But you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?). But when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years. But the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

Donald Trump, Sun City, South Carolina, July 21, 2015.

Slash’s Tips for Gracious Living

“That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans.”

“He had been hired to turn my extra bathroom and its huge corner Jacuzzi into a massive snake terrarium that took up a quarter of the room. He was going to build glass walls from the floor to the skylight to enclose the tub, which was elevated, plus add a set of Plexiglass stairs so that you could see my pets wherever they might be. I couldn’t wait to fill it with trees and all the other shit that snakes like. In the Walnut House I kept about ninety snakes and reptiles: I had lizards, caimans, all kinds of animals. When the work was done and I finally moved into the Walnut House, I commemorated it by getting really high.”

“Here’s how we spent our time: I’d get up in the morning and fucking lie on the floor and drink vodka and smoke cigarettes until she got up… I watched a lot of cooking shows; The Galloping Gourmet, Great Chefs of the East and West, and The Food Network. It was the start of a lifelong obsession with cooking shows, though to this day, I don’t cook at all.”

“I’d wake up in the morning and fill a Solo cup 85 percent full with vodka, ice, and a bit of cranberry juice. I called it breakfast of champions. Duff was in the same league, though I believe that he made a fresh drink, packed it with ice, before he went to bed and left it next to his pillow; that way the ice would keep it cold enough while he slept that it would still be nice and fresh first thing in the morning.”

“We’d go down to one of those big public YMCAs with our security guard, Earl, to pump iron. We’d be doing there in our jeans, doing sets between cigarette breaks– it was invigorating. We’d usually cool down afterward with cocktails at a sports bar.”

Slash, Slash with Anthony Bozza, Harper Collins, 2007.

F. Lee Bailey Defends Patty Hearst

The defense attorney F. Lee Bailey was involved with some of the most infamous criminal cases of the twentieth century. He defended OJ Simpson, the serial killer Albert DeSalvo, and Patty Hearst, a kidnapping victim unjustly tried for crimes she committed while under control of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was not impressed with the defense he provided in her 1976 trial.

“The judge said, ‘You may proceed, Mr. Bailey.’ He rose from the defense table, grabbing an unruly stack of notes, and I could see that his hands were shaking. His hair was slightly mussed and his face was flushed. I wondered if he had been drinking at lunch. He detached the microphone from its stand at the attorney’s podium and began to address the jury without referring to his notes. Soon, he was talking of people eating each other in the Andes, of G. Gordon Liddy, of the plot of a book called A Covenant with Death, and he talked at length about himself and the difficult tasks of lawyers. It was not easy to follow his train of thought.

He seemed to be talking more about his difficulty in handling this case than about the specific evidence, more about what had appeared in the press than about what was said in the courtroom. And then disaster struck. As he swept his arm up in a gesture, he knocked a glass of water off the podium. The water dribbled down the front of his pants. Several members of the jury tittered. The judge smiled. But F. Lee Bailey went on talking, disregarding the ignobility of having wet his pants. (The jury had a good laugh about this later in the jury room.) It was, to say the least, distracting.”

Every Secret Thing, Patricia Campbell Hearst, with Alvin Moscow, Arrow Books, 1982.