In the closing days of such a high-stakes, world-historical election as this, one is wracked by fears that one has somehow still not done enough. One has not said enough to persuade one's compatriots; one has not written enough or marched enough. Even if one has spent four years filling a personal blog with rants against Trump, it still seems there are unappreciated dimensions of his terribleness.
This, more than anything, accounts for the sudden spate of activity on this blog as we gallop across the finish line of the 2020 vote. I keep realizing that there are aspects of the Trump phenomenon that I have still left unexamined, and that this may be the last chance to do so when it can still make a difference to the outcome.
We are aware, after all, of so many of the various bad Trumps, but there remain more to be told. Let me count the ways. There is Trump the buffoon; Trump the con; Trump the racist; Trump the would-be dictator; Trump the embarrassment; Trump the Z-list celebrity; Trump the reality TV star; Trump the vulgarian; Trump the campy quasi-unintentional stand-up comedian. And it's possible to see Trump in all these lights because he is all of these things. Each has its element of truth.
But lately, in these final weeks of the presidential race, I've been drawn to yet another theory of the case. The Trump that has landed uppermost, if I were forced to cast before me all these true and possible Trumps, is Trump the gangster. (Much the same could be said of Trump's handler Putin, the murderer and assassin, who constitutes the other side of the Trumpian coin.)
If Tocqueville was right, and Russia and the United States are shadow-versions of each other, both are passing through a shared organized crime phase. I don't say this merely because of Trump's literal ties to the mafia throughout his "career." But also because his whole aesthetic, mentality, and approach mirrors that of the stereotypical don—the placing of personal loyalty above any moral scruple; the use of subordinates as patsies and accomplices to the commission of crimes so that they can later be made to take the fall.
A recent New York Times opinion essay that my dad shared with me describes these much-reported patterns of behavior in detail. In it, we hear from senior members of the administration–current and former—who openly acknowledge that the president will say anything, do anything, try anything to advance his interests and ensure he stays in power.
Trump demands absolute loyalty from others, while displaying none in return himself. He uses people to the hilt, then rips them off and discards them. He is treating the country like the participants in "Trump University," and the worse thing is that all along we had not the slightest reason—not the least sign—that we should expect anything different. Each step of the way, Trump has fulfilled the ideal type of the career of the villain and crook; and he gave us no indication, in fairness, that we should not have been prepared for this.
It was this pattern of selfishness and treachery—the way a person first demands their associates compromise themselves morally before betraying and eliminating them in turn—that first led me to compare Trump to the perfect theatrical exemplar of villainy, Shakespeare's Richard III. After reading another classic play during another restless evening last night, however, I realize there is a character of the twentieth-century stage who perhaps encapsulates him even better, and that suits my new sense of him as fundamentally best defined as gangster and crime boss: Brecht's Arturo Ui.
If we were to cast this drama along modern principles, therefore, we could do no better than to costume the anti-hero with orange skin and yellow, upswept hair.
Brecht intended his quintessential villain, of course, as an allegory of the rise to power of his own country's infinitely worse demagogue—the one whom Brecht liked to refer to obliquely as "the housepainter." While ostensibly telling the rise to power in Chicago and the neighboring jurisdiction Cicero of the crooked head of a "Cauliflower Trust," Ui's career mirrors that of the housepainter in ways not hard to discern: tracking alongside it from the Reichstag fire to the Night of Long Knives, all the way to the Anschluss.
Trump is not Hitler, of course, but there are so many ways in which every career in villainy seems to chart the same course. Even if the rise of such men may be "resistible"—resistible by us, that is, the citizenry—it appears irresistible to the demagogues themselves to play out this whole pattern, to fulfill this entire course, from early success to eventual downfall—due nearly always to the inability to retain human connection with others or to grasp enough of the basic principle of reciprocity to retain the loyalty of anyone around them.
Ui is, like Trump, the self-loathing "little man" par excellence; the weak spirit consumed with insecurities and driven by the perpetual fear that others may be laughing at him (much as a joke at Trump's expense during the White House correspondent's dinner seems to have launched the man's bid for presidency). To overcome these inward doubts, he perfects the art of demagoguery, memorizing Mark Antony's speech at Caesar's grave to learn the cadences needed to stir a crowd.
In doing so he concludes that he needs do no more to succeed than to create a false impression of swagger and class: "What counts is what the little hick imagines bosses act like," he declares (Tabori/Beaton trans. throughout); much as Trump thinks he can spend his whole life creating an illusion of wealth and success behind the facade of failing companies and bankrupt projects: an obscuring Potemkin village known as the Trump Organization.
Yet, seeming to contradict this, I remarked earlier that Trump never presented himself as anything other than what he was; never can be said to have engaged in hypocrisy. Our readiness to believe that he was something more than a crook, con, and schemer, reflects projections of our own. It cannot be laid at his door: it has to do with the greed and dishonesty of the people who thought (wrongly) that they could empower him but then use him for their own ends.
In this paradox too, he resembles Arturi Ui. He is a liar; but not one who pretended to be anything other than a liar. As the widow of one of Ui's victims (a stand-in in Brecht's allegorical scheme for Engelbert Dollfuss (the fascist but anti-Nazi leader of Austria who was gunned down by Hitler's agents in 1934) declares to him: "Steadfast you are in fickleness,/Incorruptible by any noble passion,/Sincere in lying, honest in deceiving."
Why does Arturo Ui succeed, then, if his motives and villainy are so transparent? Why did Trump become president, if we knew already, at the time of his election—if it was plain from the start—that he was a fraudster and a con?
Brecht's answer to this question was perhaps so doctrinaire Marxist as to be pat: Ui rose due to a devil's bargain that bourgeois and corporate forces were willing to make in order to drive down workers' wages. Hitler, in this telling, was a protection racket writ large, in which the violence used to suppress socialist agitation was eventually turned against the masters as well—who only realized too late that in the end it was their would-be "protector" from whom they truly needed protecting.
Whether we are willing to chalk fascism up in vulgar Marxist form to nothing other than the "death rattle of capitalism," or any of the usual formulas, however, we can say that the broader pattern of greed and ambition yielding a devil's pact holds true. Even if the answer lies in political economy as much as economics, people have been willing to collaborate with Trump in large part because they think he gets their party votes, he helps them stay in power, he slashes taxes and regulations and fills their bank accounts.
Of course, they have their doubts about his tone, style, and methods. Couldn't he accomplish the same ends without so much stink of corruption getting on everyone's hands? The Dollfuss stand-in expresses this point of view in the play, much as Senate Republicans can periodically be heard to cluck and mutter over some of Trump's more destabilizing Tweets. But then, afterward, they will clutch at virtually any indication of normality from the White House to suggest that perhaps over time he's improving, that he and his regime are normalizing after experiencing a few growth pangs.
Remember those thought-pieces after inauguration day in 2017, in which erstwhile Never Trump Republicans declared that he had now become presidential and risen to the dignity of the office? Remember when Susan Collins told us all that Trump didn't need to be removed from the presidency for trying to bribe the president of Ukraine, because he had been so chastened by the experience and would not err again? As a character declares of Ui: "He's sown his wild oats, so to speak, and shown/His manner and his grammar much improved:/He hasn't murdered anyone for weeks."
But with Trump, as with Ui, the people who thought they could compromise with him in the end just compromised themselves. Trump got the better of the Republican party, which he has hollowed out into a personalistic cult. He got the better of corporate America, whose tax bills he may have lowered but whose customers he has reduced to penury. He has got the better of everyone who joined his administration or campaign thinking it would carry them to the top—how many of them now are fired, dismissed, indicted or in prison?
And all over again the lesson becomes clear: that there is no way to meet such men half-way, to benefit from their misdeeds but not become stained and complicit in them oneself. One can only stop them; one can only say no to them; one can only vote them out of office. As the wife of a slaughtered worker in Brecht's play—one of Ui's first victims—pleads to the audience: "Hey you! Stand up! Fight back! Protest!/This pestilence will sweep the globe if not suppressed."
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