I have an abnormally poor autobiographical memory, but I am certain that in January, 2005, I attended the wedding of Melania Knauss and Donald Trump. I was there as the plus-one of my wife at the time, who had spent a few days in Melania’s company while reporting a cover story for Vogue about Melania’s wedding dress—a Christian Dior cone of white satin, from which the beautiful bride and her fuming sixteen-foot veil materialized as if from a volcano. I had met neither Melania Knauss nor Donald Trump, but, according to the Tiffany-produced invitation, they requested the honor of my presence at their marriage, at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, in Palm Beach, and thereafter at a reception at the Mar-a-Lago Club.
I mentioned this to a few friends, and only one—a poet—took issue with my intent to accept the invitation. Trump, in those days, was merely a self-publicizing real-estate guy who had recently scored a big hit with “The Apprentice,” in which he played the part of a judicious and masterly business magnate. I took the poet’s abhorrence to be more aesthetic than political, and, even if it were the latter, even if she had, in fact, given voice to a sense that a gathering of the very rich and powerful ought to be met with nothing but one’s rejection, there was no question, from an anthropological perspective, of not going. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who presumably hated partying and partiers, would have made the trip to the subtropics. But he wasn’t invited.
We flew south on the eve of the big day and checked into a cheap hotel in West Palm Beach. The next morning, we were told that we’d been expected at Mar-a-Lago itself. That had to have been an error. Even a palazzo like Mar-a-Lago has a finite number of guest rooms, and surely these were going to accommodate the happy couple’s innermost social circle, and surely my wife’s agreeable but plainly journalistic interactions with Melania could not have propelled her, plus me, into the sanctum sanctorum. But they had. Nothing less than a room in the main house was ours to occupy. Any lingering concerns about mistaken identity were removed when we discovered, in the bathroom, his-and-hers Mar-a-Lago Club bathrobes, each embroidered with the club crest and a monogram of our initials.
The wedding was not till the evening. In the meantime, guests were invited to make full use of the Mar-a-Lago Club’s spa facilities, including massages, and of the nearby Trump International Golf Club—the first example of the many client-entertainment, cost, and branding synergies that would characterize the occasion. (The Trump wedding, if it isn’t already, maybe ought to be taught as a case study at Wharton.) I chose to play a round of golf. Because it involves sport, I remember the circumstances reasonably well.
The golf course looked like the set of an old Tarzan movie: man-made knolls and lakes; fairways bordered by countless newly planted palm trees; and, at one par three, an unapologetically fake cliff tricked up with artificial waterfalls. Unexpectedly, the course’s most memorable feature was an immense and forbidding concrete building that loomed just out of bounds. This was the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, somebody told me. Evidently, the detainees fell into the habit of screaming at the passing golfers, many of whom had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of joining the golf club, and it wasn’t until Trump donated some flat-screen televisions to the jail that things quieted down in there. Certainly, I heard no screams when I walked by.
My playing partners were two amiable guys in their sixties, who worked in real estate and chatted about the résumés of the pilots they employed. They were also in town for the wedding, although neither seemed to know Trump that well. It interested one of them that I was a writer. He told me that the thriller writer James Patterson lived nearby and often played this very course, and that he, the real-estate developer, had a thriller of his own all figured out. For the duration of several holes, he related its plot in great detail. It had something to do with—I may not have got this right—serial killers serially killing detectives who themselves serially killed serial killers.
The wedding started at seven o’clock. The gentleman sitting to my right was Pat O’Brien, then of “Access Hollywood” and “The Insider” fame. He appeared, when rising to his feet or kneeling, to be engaged in a tough physical struggle. Indeed, there reigned in the church a slight atmosphere of indignity, produced, it seemed to me, by the fact that lots of personalities had to squeeze themselves into rock-hard egalitarian pews, as if they were just a bunch of Joe Blows. This atmosphere was only intensified by the unmentionable incongruity of, on the one hand, the wedding’s V.I.P. and Ultra-High Net Worth ethos and, on the other hand, the ethos of the church, which recognized only one Very Important Being, of Incommensurable Net Worth.
The newlyweds looked very pleased and happy as they walked back from the altar; far was it for me, their friend, to poke a nose into what was going on in their hearts and in their brand-new, instantly opaque marriage. Melania looked lovely, and the fifty-eight-year-old Donald—as a friend of the family, I was bound to call him and his wife by their Christian names, even if Donald reportedly liked being called “Mr. Trump”—looked uncharacteristically bashful; bashful, that is, by comparison with his character on “The Apprentice.” My impression was that he was in awe of some of the people who clapped as he made his way down the aisle, specifically those who exceeded him in the matter of net fame. But there was no reason for awe. Donald’s high status in the tabloids and on TV was clearly respected by everyone. (His career as an educator was not yet visible: Trump University opened its doors later that year.) As for those very few who didn’t watch TV or read the tabloids, or respect these media, surely even these miseries bore the groom the respectful good will one naturally bears any person who has just committed himself, for the third time, to the noble and demanding sacrament of marriage. About his latest union, Donald had predicted, in People, “I think it will be very successful.”
We all headed off to the reception. Here was Simon Cowell, waving at the roaring, cordoned-off crowd of real people gathered on South Ocean Boulevard; over there, by the swimming pool, was Shaquille O’Neal; and hither and thither went Barbara Walters. I don’t recall seeing Senator Clinton and her husband, but they were definitely in the house. Paul Anka and Billy Joel I for sure laid eyes on. There were stars everywhere. Either they were walking slowly somewhere, glass in hand, or they were just standing there, glass in hand. When I eavesdropped on one star-to-star conversation, I overheard a discussion about the humidity or lack of it, or maybe the middlingness of it. Basically, they were just shooting the breeze with a lot of humbleness. It was extraordinary, and most extraordinary of all was that everyone was furtively rubbernecking everybody else. Imagine a room that is empty except for a large population of flies on the wall.
As for Mar-a-Lago itself, who am I to cast a tattered net of words over this splendid Jazz Age fantasia, the living-room ceiling of which had actually consumed the country’s entire stock of gold leaf? A new and lofty kind of writing, marmorealism, would be required merely to do justice to the mega-villa’s acreage of limestone. I must, at last, surrender to the description currently offered by Maralagoclub.com: “The Greatest Mansion Ever Built.”
I met the Trumps in the receiving line. We shook hands cheerfully. Later on, I ran into Donald in the men’s room, where he took a leak just like the rest of us. Someone congratulated him, and he replied, with great simplicity—I paraphrase—that the time had come to let Melania make an honest man of him, that this was her night, not his. I have no memory of seeing him again that night.
If I consult The Hollywood Reporter, I learn that for dinner we ate steamed-shrimp salad with champagne vinaigrette, followed by medallion of beef: right-wing food, you could say. I sat next to an attractive woman who rang no bells. She was really not up for any kind of chitchat. Later, when I repeated the name I’d seen on her place card, Kelly Ripa, I learned that this was a deeply celebrated television artist; I felt bad that she had voyaged all the way down to Florida only to find herself stuck next to the wedding’s one nobody, and I understood her taciturnity and the pain that lay beneath it.
A small drama occurred at our table. The newspaper entrepreneur and alleged embezzler Conrad Black was sitting a few seats away, and the placement called for Katie Couric to sit in front of him. Couric was the wedding’s troublemaker: I’d spotted her impishly operating a small camera, in breach of a rule against photography of any kind. It didn’t entirely surprise me, therefore, to see her forgo her seat across the table from Lord Black and instead join Matt Lauer and other members of the NBC family at a jolly and crowded table nearby. Either Couric had jumped ship because she hadn’t recognized Lord Black, or she had jumped ship because she had recognized him all too well. Whichever the case, this violation of etiquette seemed like an unkind snub of a guy who, after all, had not yet been convicted of fraud and as yet was guilty of little more than grandiosity and rightist fanaticism. He sat at the end of the table companioned only by his wife, the conservative journalist Barbara Amiel. She was being prosecuted, too, in the forum of public opinion, on charges of unacceptable ostentation: her extravagance, she had admitted to Vogue, knew no bounds. I chatted with them. We talked about the defects of the American criminal-justice system.
Later, we caught sight of the Blacks dancing by the swimming pool. Others were moving to music, too, but I can’t remember who they were. Maybe Don King danced. Maybe Chris Christie obeyed the Miltonic call to “Com, and trip it as ye go, / On the light fantastick toe.” Or maybe not. I ran out of ethnological energy, which is to say, I grew tired of gawking. We turned in early.
I never heard again from the Trumps, or, to be fair, they from me. I used their wedding as material for a scene in a book, but otherwise I gave Donald little thought, even as his name continued to force itself onto one’s attention, most insistently in the bizarre matter of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Then he ran for President, and ran, like multi-headed Cerberus, “ ’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.” (Milton again, same poem.) The Donald who was my friend had only one head, and it was not a head of much consequence. How things have changed.
A revisionist remembrance feels called for. This wedding, for years an anomalous and trivial item of personal recollection, now strikes one as the stuff of historic testimony. Christie, Black, the Clintons, the Trumps, the Trump children: more prefigurative dramatis personae could hardly be concocted. Surely what I witnessed in Florida can be brought into a realm of superior comprehension. Surely, if I review the occasion in the spirit of a Hannah Arendt or a Victor Klemperer, some important link to the present moment will be uncovered.
According to the abovementioned Hollywood Reporter article, which ran in April, the magazine sought comments from eighty-nine of the wedding guests, and none responded. This is unusual, but, I’d suggest, unsurprising. It’s not just that, in show-biz terms, it’s difficult to see the P.R. upside of being associated with Trump and his radically modified brand, or that to spill the beans might be seen as graceless. It’s that the attendees are probably just lost for words.
Simply to think back to the wedding is to undergo a strange perceptual immobilization. In the light of Trump’s unforeseen metamorphosis into a would-be dictator, the event’s longstanding significance as a prestigious entertainment-industry function no longer holds, and no alternative significance readily offers itself. The matrimonial facts, already far-fetched, have been overtaken by events so unlikely as to feel counterfactual. Most of the Trumps’ guests, I reckon, are anti-Trumpists. They will be feeling a kind of baffled retrospective horror.
The problem of historical cognition was investigated by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he wrote shortly before he killed himself, in 1940, while attempting to escape from the Nazis. It contains a famous meditation on Paul Klee’s monoprint “Angelus Novus.” The image is of an open-mouthed, spread-winged angel who looks, Benjamin wrote, “as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.” Benjamin reimagined this creature as the angel of history:
