The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-29)

B2 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022

A

s of May 2022, we’ve been subjected to

enough inside-the-Trump-administra-

tion memoirs to last us an eternity.

Could there possibly be any lingering ques-

tions about the 45th president’s tempera-

ment, level of competence, political beliefs or

preferences regarding the preparation of

steak? If so, for everyone’s sake, they should be

left unanswered, so we can all move on.

At this point, nearly every Cabinet mem-

ber, staffer and intern has published a book

testifying that Trump’s impulsiveness, igno-

rance of how government works, willingness

to use the office for personal gain, seemingly

Trump administration memoirs

BY ELIZABETH SPIERS

compulsive lying and gratuitous manufac-

ture of chaos were bad for the country. We’re

lucky that we’re all still standing, these books

repetitively (and obviously) observe. Yet ev-

ery single one of these memoirs — see: Esper,

Barr, Bolton, Grisham — also goes to great

lengths to explain that its author did their

absolute best to mitigate the damage, lest

readers think they were personally responsi-

ble for enabling the chaos of the Trump

administration. Of course, by all external

accounts, the authors were in fact personally

responsible for enabling the chaos of the

Trump administration.

It’s painfully clear that this genre of self-ha-

giography is intended as a prophylactic

against future criticism. By the time the next

presidential election cycle rolls around, the

authors hope their reputations will have been

scrubbed of association with Trump. (Trickier

for some than others; Jared Kushner is cur-

rently working on a memoir, and it’s hard to

distance yourself from your father-in-law.)

Who is the target audience for these self-

serving books, anyway — except perhaps other

Trump staffers, whose misery could use some

company? Does anyone else really want to

relive the years from 2016 to 2020? The

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOLA SUN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

D

uring periods of extreme market volatil-

ity like the one we are experiencing, the

old Warren Buffett adage comes to

mind: Only when the tide goes out do you see

who’s swimming naked. For people who have

“invested” in cryptocurrency, an education on

these dynamics may be underway.

Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed not

because of law enforcement derring-do or its

inherent contradictions, but because of the

financial crisis. It was only when the subprime

contagion sank the broader markets that

Madoff’s investors sought to take their profits

off the table. Only then did they learn that the

business model was a fraud. Billions were lost,

and much of the “profits” were never recov-

ered because they were never there to begin

with. It was a lie.

What’s different with the cryptocurrency

bubble is the scale and blatant nature of the

scheme. Madoff famously kept his fraud tight:

to invest with him, you needed to know the

right people to enter the circle of trust. And he

claimed to have a secret trading method that

could generate consistently above-market re-

turns. As a former head of Nasdaq and one of

the inventors of payment for order flow (in

which brokers sell information about their

customers’ trades to hedge funds and other

BY BEN MCKENZIE AND JACOB SILVERMAN

Cryptocurrency Biopics

BY MARY JO MURPHY

B

efore the Oscars slap that dropped jaws

in living rooms across America, the buzz

was about the excellent chance that

someone playing a character based on a real

person was about to win the Academy Award

for best actor. Will Smith, who portrayed

tennis dad Richard Williams in “King Rich-

ard,” did indeed collect the Oscar, but two of

the other four nominees also performed in

biopics, and the leading actors in such films

have won Oscars 13 times in the last 20 years.

Among this year’s leading actresses, three of

the five nominated played real people, and

Jessica Chastain won for her role as the

televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker — the 11th

time in the 2000s that a biopic actress had

taken the top prize.

Enough.

It’s not that biopics are an affront to cinema

and movie lovers; their crowded history goes

back to the beginning of film, and for every

few hundred Princess Dianas there’s a “Law-

rence of Arabia.” It’s not even their tendency to

mimicry, to hagiography, to really creepy

prosthetics.

But the times call for something fresh.

Reality has been in crisis in recent years. Up

is stuck in down. The solution is not more

movies that sanitize it or sentimentalize it or

stretch it — most often creating neither

history nor art but something in between.

Eudora Welty once wrote that art is the voice

of the individual doing its best to speak truth,

“and the art that speaks it most unmistakably,

most directly, most variously, most fully, is

fiction.” Bring fiction back to the movies. The

kind that makes reality real again. That at

least seeks to speak truth and not merely

assemble facts that refract truth through a

fun-house mirror.

The buzzed-about biopic this season is Baz

Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” which had its debut at

Cannes on Wednesday and will arrive in

theaters June 24. Lisa Marie Presley wrote on

Twitter that the actor Austin Butler “chan-

neled and embodied my father’s heart & soul

beautifully.” Spoken like a loving daughter,

who was 9 when her father died. Luhrmann

has made some great films, but will his

depiction of the most impersonated man in

history tell us anything new? Or will it stretch

reality beyond the obligatory biographical

contours, constricting truth to a few facts as it

balloons into the kind of truth-neutral Holly-

wood telling that defines the biopic genre?

Twitter:@MJoMurph

Mary Jo Murphy is an assistant editor for Outlook.

spring cleaning

CONTINUED ON B7

Twitter: @espiers

Elizabeth Spiers is a progressive digital strategist

and writer.

number of book buyers who read for masoch-

istic pleasure is surely very small, and even if

that’s your thing, there’s vastly more interest-

ing material to plumb out there. You can buy

“Medieval Punishments: An Illustrated His-

tory of Torture” online for $12.19. Or sample

any novel by Sean Penn.

No more Trump memoirs, please. Published

and forthcoming alike, put them where they

belong: in the remainder bin of history.

Twitter: @ben_mckenzie

@SilvermanJacob

Ben McKenzie is an actor, writer and director.

Jacob Silverman is a freelance journalist. Their

book about cryptocurrency, “Easy Money,” will be

published in 2023.

financial institutions), Madoff had the credi-

bility to pull off this audacious fraud for

decades.

But for crypto, the deceit is everywhere, and

not particularly sophisticated. Spreading vi-

rally through the Internet and social media,

crypto offers something that’s always been

popular: a get-rich-quick scheme. No need to

really understand any of the supposedly inno-

vative technology behind it (blockchain is 30

years old, but never mind that). Anyone can

become an investor in what is sure to be the

future of money, as long as they are willing to

part with the current version of it. As the

saying goes, all it takes is a dollar and a dream.

The problem with get-rich-quick schemes is

that they are based on lies, and people invari-

ably lose the money they put into them. With

many crypto investors (who bought in when

prices were higher) now in the red, the

question is just how bad the damage will be —

and just how many are swimming naked.