It’s hard to miss the cover of the latest Esquire on the newsstands. It’s a stark, ugly black-and-white close up of Donald Trump’s face, under the banner “Hater in Chief.” And the issue’s contents are politically weighted, in ways virtually guaranteed to irk me – especially the magazine’s specious, irritating accompanying “news survey” about rage in America, the forms it takes, the numbers that allegedly reflect it, etc. This junk gambit – trying to somehow legitimize talking about Donald Trump by characterizing him as some kind of bellweather of forces that are important to talk about – started in earnest in late summer and has now become a cliché on its own, inviting the lazy alignment of cover articles about him and articles about rage or disillusionment or the ills of the political system.

The issue’s “Cold Open” partially calmed me down. It’s a short one-page piece by a decent, articulate Iowan, about how revolting Donald Trump is, and how revolting it is that he’s nonetheless polling so well in Iowa:

If you regard honesty and humility as virtues, which I think most Iowans do, his ridiculous boasts demand derision. He’s the business genius who brags about screwing his investors and who has declared bankruptcy as often as some people overdraw their checking account. He sports the world’s silliest comb-over and makes fun of other people’s looks. He’s the tough guy who never served in the military, never risked his life or his interests for anyone other than himself, and disparaged the service of a decorated veteran.

The tone of outrage there, added to the deliberate face-slap of the issue’s cover, made me wonder if maybe this would be one of the first mainstream magazine treatments of Donald Trump that wasn’t fawning for table-scraps of attention. I flipped to an excellent Tom Junod piece on Hillary Clinton, “The Last Optimist at the Apocalypse,” in which his wonderful flow of prose was pitted only once in a while by wince-inducing lapses. See, for instance, if you can spot the one in this otherwise-fine paragraph:

She likes to laugh. She’s famous for it – the forced bark of her parodists. But in fact her laugh is the most spontaneous thing about her. It’s the most appealing thing about her, because it shows her willingness to be entertained. She’s not particularly funny, but she likes funny people. You can hear her laughing when she disappears into crowds; you can see her laughing when she’s being introduced before her speeches. Her laugh overtakes her. It startles her, and sometimes she bends slightly at the waist to accommodate its force. It’s restorative; it brings light into her eyes and her high, round cheekbones into sharp relief. She has a radiance sometimes, almost gravid, and it’s usually when she’s been laughing.

Hillary Clinton has spent over three decades at the heart of American politics; she’s been the country’s face to the world for over a decade; she’s certainly going to be the Democratic nominee to be the next US president. It would be great – it would be just super-dooper – if we could read even one single article written about her by a man who didn’t mention or even allude to her goddam womb. Tom Junod would never – and I mean not even with a gun to his head – refer to any male presidential candidate as “tumescent.” But referring to Hillary Clinton as “gravid” not only struck him as OK but struck his Esquire editors as OK.

But the piece itself was in general very good, and I perked myself up a bit more by reading Scott Raab’s interview-piece with actor Bob Odenkirk. I didn’t recognize the actor’s name, but the piece was pure Scott Raab: beautifully written, full of great dialogue, atmospheric … dramatic, in a way no other interviewer even thinks to do, let alone could ever manage to pull off.

But sooner or later, I had to steel myself and read the Esquire Q&A, which was the cover story. I hate the fact that Esquire put this evil buffoon on its cover. I hate the fact that they either don’t know that you don’t extinguish a fire by constantly supplying it with oxygen or they actually want to keep it burning. But I saw that Scott Raab was the interviewer, and not only am I a big fan of his Esquire interviews (usually, that is – when he sits at a restaurant across the table from somebody he considers a guy’s guy, somebody maybe even, God help us all, from Chicago, the sheep-dip surges to waist-height in no time at all) but because I’m familiar with his writing from of old. I know perfectly well the whetted glory of his controlled contempt-in-prose, and I thought: good. That cover, plus a Scott Raab skewering, will be much to Esquire‘s credit.

And the Q&A opened encouragingly. When Raab meets Donald Trump for the interview, we get a promising set-up:

But he’s gone down the hall. Me, I’m thinking about Larry David’s old stand-up bit:

“You know, if he’d given me a compliment, Josef Mengele and I could have been friends – ‘Larry, your hair looks very good today.’ Really? Thank you, Dr. Mengele!”

In their first few minutes together, Trump assesses his interviewer while also – it’s become almost boring by now – grossly insulting the physical infirmity of an earlier interviewer:

“I like this guy,” Trump says to his press secretary, who’s seated off to the side, behind me. “It usually takes me, what, about three seconds to know? I had a guy come in from – what was it, GQ? He was the worst guy. He walked with a cane. He wasn’t an old guy, but he had a bad leg. You know that guy?”

No.

“He was the worst human – terrible guy. I actually said, ‘Why are we wasting time with this guy?’”

I’m thinking that it was was to wear a quality suit with a nice pair of shoes and the Rolex. I’m thinking Dr. Mengele did not smile upon the infirm either.

It was at that point that I started to get irritated, and not just because any Chicago guy’s guy worth his balls would have spoken up and told another adult – especially another guy – not to take cheap shots at somebody’s lame leg. No, it was because the Mengele conceit is good, but only if you use it. Instead, I started to realize this was only partly irony. Raab wasn’t dressing up nice and smart and wearing his Rolex so he could score a borderline-civil interview with Donald Trump and then use that fact to serve up Trump’s guts in Esquire‘s pages for his readers. No, the more I read, the more I realized he was dressing up to pay court. He drops the Mengele conceit very quickly, and then he drops the whole pretense of an interview at all and just lets Trump talk until his word-count is up.

I’ve read the piece three times, and I admit: I don’t understand what happened here. But I know one thing: we are way, way past the point – in the nation and in the Republic of Letters – where anybody should be even trying high-minded clever po-faced conceits about Donald Trump. We’re way, way past the point where we should be talking about Donald Trump, the vicious, bigoted, misogynistic, anti-Semitic bullying fascist moron, as a bellwether or a revelation or an indicator of anything. We’re way, way past the point where we can afford to be clever about this porridge-faced monster, even for boffo newsstand sales. If Scott Raab wrote a classic Raab slam-piece and his editors muzzled it, shame on them. And if he got to Trump Tower in his suit and Rolex and decided on his own to futz around and make classroom faces on the asinine assumption that this idiot is too transparent to mock, well, then shame on him.