He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house-agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire…
Readers sometimes ask me the old chicken-and-egg question: Which comes first? Do I write these columns and ask Jeanne for an illustration, or does Jeanne hand me a drawing and ask me to write about it? Usually, it’s the former, and occasionally a tie: I might see something in the paper about an athlete or politician; we’ll talk about it at breakfast and, sometimes, agree it would be interesting to both of us to take a shot.
Recently Jeanne came up with a new drawing of Donald Trump; I took one look at it and said “Trumpus Pompous”; and that’s all it took. She went off to polish the drawing, and I sat down to work on this new classification of our presidential snowbird (Name: Trumpus Pompous. Species: Hawkita. Genus: Humanish. Behavior: Grossae).
Because Trump likes to boast about his liaisons, I remembered T. S. Eliot’s self-inflated clerk who seduces a tired young woman in “The Waste Land.” Trump has succeeded in seducing half the country with his bald-faced braggadocio. “Like Crooked Hillary,” he cried last week to a screaming crowd as he began his repetitive rant for the 2020 election, “they hate you. I love you. I’ll take care of you!” Friends from abroad, who have their own troubles, shake their heads in disbelief : “You fell for that crap?” they ask.
Trump’s smugness enables him to lie without blushing. Obama wasn’t born in America; I’ll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it; I won the popular vote; I had the biggest crowd ever; I’m the greatest… One after another, easily checkable lies roll out of his mouth, and people cheered, and still cheer. Probably the most truthful statement Trump’s ever made is “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Republicans used to belong to a party. Now it’s a cult.
For my “retirement” I’ve determined to start rereading favorite novels from decades ago. Last week I read Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (1973); this week it’s Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Good novels, like good poems, stay relevant no matter what the time. The Honorary Consul’s a story about political chaos and brutality in South America, not far from describing what’s happening today; a scene could be set on our border with Mexico. The Trial is even scarier, placed in an unnamed modern city, probably Prague, where Kafka lived basically unknown during his lifetime (Jeanne and I once visited his house, where its address is now Námesti Franze Kafky, or Franz Kafka Square). But the story is definitely in Trump territory, a poisoned Alice-in-Wonderland mixture of terror and buffoonery, where the joke is always on us. As the doomed protagonist, “K,” more and more frantically runs around, trying to find out what’s he’s charged with, he meets a good number of characters resembling Trump’s ménage of friends, family, and appointees: Bolton, Kim Jong-Un, Kushner, Putin, DeVos, Carson, Perry, Pompeo et al. In Kafka’s novel, they’d fit right in.
Think of these people, in a time when war hangs hovering above us, advising our overconfident and under-informed president. Trump seems to have no real political opinions, determined only to win, not to look “weak.” He has no sympathy or empathy for individual tragedies, ordinary people like “K” trapped in inhumane bureaucratic webs.
No country in the world can even come close to America in its numbers of weapons, nuclear or not. To an unmoored leader with limitless hammers, the rest of the world’s cities may look like nails.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
—both quotes from “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
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This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 4, 2019.