I can, in all seriousness, think of absolutely nothing that Trump has in common with Thompson, other that they’re both white American men whose last names start with the letter T. They could not be less alike. I don’t know where you could possibly get the notion that there are any parallels whatsoever to be drawn between the life Thompson lived and the one that Trump has lived.
They’re both heavy on gun rights.
It’s like Larry King said, he suspects that rather than being on opposite ends of a linear scale, the far right and the far left meet each other coming around the corner. Thompson did get along famously with Pat Buchanan.
OK, they were both heavy on gun rights. Like approximately 50% of America’s population. I doubt Thompson would have agreed with Trump on anything else at all.
Thompson was an intensely creative individual who was a prolific and gifted writer. Trump is not remotely creative, he can’t write for shit, his own books are ghost-written. Thompson loved mind-altering drugs. Trump is a teetotaler. Thompson lived a bohemian life of adventure, traveling around the world as a young man with fellow beatniks and misfits, working as a reporter in Puerto Rico where he wrote The Rum Diary, then living in the mountains of Big Sur, then riding on the road with the Hells Angels, and that was all well before Fear and Loathing. Trump leveraged a bunch of money, built gaudy hotels, and played golf. What the fuck do these two men have in common? Sorry, I just can’t abide this, the man was a major hero of mine and this comparison sticks in my craw.
Buchanan’s not remotely creative either, but they were buddies. I liked Thompson’s books, but really, he sounded like he’d be a real jerk-off in person, and I’m glad I never met him. Kind of like Jim Morrison.
Piece of advice, kid: Never meet your heroes.
Maybe HST was an asshole and maybe I would have been disappointed had I ever met him. All I’m saying is, I don’t think he’s fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as the creative black hole that is D.T.
Or Spider Jerusalem.
HST is the Hemingway of his era, the voice of a generation, the man who set the tone for an important aspect of what the culture was at that time.
In specific, they both defined matrices of masculinity, molds for men to try to shape themselves into and measure themselves against. They both embodied substance abuse and violent action (not necessarily violence against others, just the use of weapons and destruction of wildlife and/or landscape and property) and self-reliance, but they took those attributes in different directions and aimed their literary instruments at different targets for different reasons.
And, in passing, I doubt Thompson could even bring himself to discuss sports with Trump.
You mean like he did with his most hated enemy Nixon?
Read the Great Shark Hunt in its entirety to get an understanding of Thompson’s abilities and his importance to the development of the New Journalism. Campaign Trail stands as some of the most incisive journalism I’ve ever read. IMO he squandered what was left of his immense talent after that. A tiny peek of what he had been is present in the ESPN column he wrote after 9/11.
Political correctness? Has the world gone completely mad? What can you be thinking of?
It’s called professionalism. A magazine is a business and must be run like a business. Otherwise it’s a fanzine. A business requires being certain of getting your materials out to the door in a timely fashion and in finished condition. Rolling Stone made concessions to Thompson to leave space for him to fax pages in at the last minute before deadline, but the rest of the magazine was locked in by that point. Dozens of articles, dozens of pictures, dozens of ads, all of which had to be laid out page by page so that not a square inch was left over. Try thinking of it as a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. If a few pieces are left out but they all go into one square area you can scramble to put them in order. If all 1000 are dumped on the table with two minutes to go you wind up with nothing at all.
Most of the counterculture publications died because of lack of professionalism. Wenner wasn’t having it. He made himself much disliked by his perfectionism and the occasional favoritism, but he lasted 50 years. Where are the rest now?
I love HST and I detest twitler.
Anything I said was not to place them in the same moral or experiential universe. But the discussion has been mooted about what would a left wing trump look like, if there could be one, in an alternate universe.
They are both amateurs who ran for political office. Both pushing a hard ideological line based on impulses, but hard to say what kind of reality would ensue. There was a lot of political offense and trolling in both of their campaigns.
Anyway HST was a piece of work emotionally. He wasn’t as progressive as his fans. I think he had a brother that was gay that he wouldn’t talk to. He was part of another time, pointing to the next things, without a lot of control over it.
I’ll second this thought and wonder why more haven’t said it: We need Hunter out and free in the trump world, speaking. We miss him a lot right now. That’s a kind of importance.
I agree he wouldn’t talk sports wth trump. trump doesn’t know anything.
Exactly right. The reason things become more locked down as an institution grows is because more people depend on the end result: If a blog skips a few posts, nobody is likely to get fired, but if a magazine starts slipping, advertisers and subscribers get annoyed, and the whole division, if not a whole company, could get destroyed.
More to the point, art flourishes in a context, social and economic and political, and HST’s magazine articles flourished in the context of magazines being financially successful to the point they could fund long trips and exotic styles of journalism, the politics being unsettled enough to support people who wanted to give an outsider’s take on the whole process, and the culture lionizing the outsider in general as being more authentic than the insider. These days, magazines are nowhere near successful enough to fund a Thompson, in terms of where he’d have to go to see what he wanted to write about, and the gonzo thing has been done and is no longer as much of a draw.
A modern-day HST would be a blogger, because Patreon funds outsiders more effectively than an institutional publisher, and he’d have a modern style and tone. It would be insane to imagine a 1970s-era young man transplanted bodily into this era; everyone is a product of what’s come before.
Totally disagree. HST would have loved to play 36 holes with Trump, betting on every swing, only using a 1 iron (or was it a wood?), and drinking like a fish after having dropped acid. 
“Doonesbury” nailed it: