There's something about Trump's strange power to survive and gain strength from every apparent political disaster (the fact, for instance, that he still holds the frontrunner position in the GOP primary, even as he is now under multiple federal and state indictments) that invites comparisons to dark magic. In a recent review published in the New York Times, for instance, the writer quotes a passage from the new Stephen King novel, in which a character "thinks Donald Trump is a boor, but he’s also a sorcerer; with some abracadabra magic she doesn’t understand (but in her deepest heart envies) he has turned America’s podgy, apathetic middle class into revolutionaries."
Nor is the implication that Trump is a kind of occult entity limited to his critics and political adversaries. Tucker Carlson, who has done more than anyone to introduce Trump's dark spells into millions of American homes, and to amplify the former president's odds of once again securing the GOP nomination, once characterized Trump in a leaked text message as a "demonic force."
We are hard-pressed to disagree with Tucker on that one. After all, the man continues to be roughly the second most likely person to be elected president in November 2024, and this after he attempted to subvert the previous election and came under multiple federal indictments for hoarding classified documents and conspiring to defraud the American people. Does it not seem like he must be aided by some occult power?
The comparison between a political demagogue's ability to sway a mass audience--even to the point of compelling them to undermine their own interests-- and that of a stage mesmerist or dark sorcerer is of course not original to any of the figures quotes above. Thomas Mann makes the point at length in his 1929 short story "Mario and the Magician," in which a German family goes on holiday in Italy, during the period of Mussolini's dictatorship, and witnesses the performance of a conjurer and hypnotist by the name of Cipolla.
The stage magician in the story brags of his acquaintance with "Il Duce," his ties to the fascist capital, and even makes the "Roman salute" at various times. But the real essence of Mann's political critique is allegorical, rather than direct. Cipolla, in his ability to sap the audience of its free will and capacity for independent thought, is a kind of Mussolini figure himself. As Mann's narrator observes, he seems to be a "personification" of the general cultural climate and mood of vindictive nationalism that was prevalent in Italy at the time--and which would soon infect much of Europe.
The thought of drawing upon Mann's story for insights into the Trump era came to me independently. (Perhaps the idea is close-to-inevitable in anyone hearing about the plot and themes of "Mario and the Magician" in our present primary season--or at any other time since Trump declared his first candidacy eight years ago.) But I learned after the fact that another writer had already made the same comparison in a piece in The New Republic all the way back in 2016, so I went to look that up as well.
The New Republic author makes compelling use of the story's imagery to draw a comparison to Trump: the sorcerer/demagogue's power on stage, in Mann's tale, to bend people to his will; to overcome their capacity for rational choice; to develop in them, as the conjurer puts it (Lowe-Porter trans. throughout), "[t]he capacity for self-surrender [...] for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation."
The dynamic that Mann's story seeks to chronicle is how people can be brought to act against their own interests, to submit to someone who merely wants to exploit and humiliate them-- in short, how people can come to will their own political degradation. Why, after all, would a free people want to subject themselves to someone who makes no pretense to be anything other than a tyrant? Part of the answer, Mann implies, is that it is simply the path of least resistance.
When one member of the audience offers to test his will against Cipolla, and hold out against his efforts to hypnotize him, the magician breaks his resistance at last by wooing him with the prospect of how easy it would be-- what a great blessing after all that strain-- to simply give in. "Who wants to torture himself like that?" asks the hypnotist. "What a relief to give way [...,]"
One is reminded of Winston Smith realizing at last that he loves Big Brother, at the end of Orwell's parable. Or of Roland Barthes' ironic words on the power of advertising, describing the moment when the sales pitch finally manages to break the viewer's conscious resistance: "There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude." (Howard trans.)
Such, surely, accounts in part for Trump's perennial appeal to his base. They admire in him simply the sheer effrontery of his assertion of power-- the gall he has to simply claim he is in charge, to elbow his way in, to aggrandize himself at others' expense, despite all the evidence, mounting by the hour, that he deserves none of these prerogatives.
If someone is simply laying claim to one's attention and freedom in this manner, over and over again, after a point it becomes easier to just lay back, stop fighting, and let him ransack one's soul at his pleasure.
These Cipolla-like aspects of Trump's rise are all well-described in the earlier New Republic piece, as I say. But it dwells less on what is to me perhaps the eeriest aspect of Mann's tale: namely the extent to which the elite narrator and his family become complicit in Cipolla's activities, even as they deplore them. And it is this part of the story, perhaps, that has the most salient lesson for those of us outside of Trump's base, who would never dream of supporting him politically, and who therefore imagine all too easily that we are immune to his dark powers.
Mann's story can be read from one perspective, after all, as simply a pre-war German's critique of a flamboyant foreign dictatorship (perhaps not yet knowing, at the time the story was penned, that Germany would soon fall into fascist hands as well). The family at the center of the story are outsiders in Italy, and the narrator is able to keep a critical distance from Cipolla's mesmeric powers (and his appeals to the chauvinism of his audience) in part because the narrator is himself a stranger in the country and has fallen victim once or twice already during his stay to the nationalism of his Italian neighbors.
But, at the same time, the narrator's involvement with Cipolla becomes ultimately more complex than mere contempt and opposition. Even as he submits the magician to scathing criticism, after all, he is forced to acknowledge that he is unable to tear himself away--either from the spectacle on stage or from Italy itself. Why? "[S]heer curiosity may account for something," he admits. For, as he states at the outset of the story, the compulsion to find out what's going to happen next can prove irresistible.
This, even more than any parallels between Cipolla's demagogic style and mesmeric powers and those of Trump, was what stood out to me in reading the story, and running through the comparison in my head to our present era. For if I examine my own heart during the Trump era, I realize that this was my own original sin. As much as I always detested Trump--as much as I thought I was doing my part every step of the way to resist him and to register my utter disgust and contempt for his claims to power--I must confess that I kept watching. Just like Mann's narrator, I didn't leave the show.
And the reason why I stayed glued to the spectacle was exactly the same as that in Mann's story: morbid curiosity. I wanted to "know how such an evening turned out," as the narrator puts it.
I think many of us who perhaps fancied ourselves members of a superior intelligentsia, liberals who were able to look on the grotesque Trump phenomenon with critical distance--much like Mann's elite foreign narrator viewing the public spectacle from the stands and deploring Cipolla's every move--we were all guilty of something similar. Even as we condemned Trump, we could not escape the fact that he was doing something unprecedented, and we had a ghoulish desire to see how far it would go.
Early on in Mann's story, even before he gets to the start of Cipolla's performance, his narrator first wonders why he and his family don't simply up and leave Italy-- especially given the hostile and jingoistic reception they have met. He concludes:
"[W]e stayed because our stay had by now become remarkable in our own eyes, which is worth something in itself, quite apart from the comfort or discomfort involved. [...] Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn. We stayed on and reaped as the awful reward of our constancy the unholy and staggering experience with Cipolla."
So many of us, even as we thought we were opposing Trump, were similarly stuck in place. Even if we disowned the feeling consciously, we were drawn in the spectacle of Trump's rise to the element of the "uncanny," the "not quite normal" that it contained. We sensed that here at last something interesting--albeit horrifying--was taking place.
The fact will be hard for future generations to comprehend, I fear, but at the time (2015) it seemed astounding that something might go off script in American politics. We had witnessed decades of stable and predictable competitions between centrist parties throughout the democratic West, most of whom seemed merely different shades of one political color. Some dark corner of us therefore, some suppressed political id, secretly wanted to see if it were really possible for someone to come in and upset such a stable, dull, and predictable apple-cart so catastrophically.
We got what we wished for, with interest. Trump not only became a disastrous president, he proved even more dangerous than many of his worst critics had feared, ultimately conspiring to subvert an election and to hold power after the expiration of his lawful term.
Meanwhile, the "boring" centrist parties are on the defensive not just in the U.S., but in Europe too. Europe's fascist and far right parties are surging in popularity, while cementing an unholy alliance with Russia's dictator Putin (himself a Cipolla- and Mussolini-like figure in his own right). Trump himself appears poised to win the GOP nomination, and if he is reelected to the White House will almost certainly align the United States as well with Putin's interests, turn his back on democratic allies, and work internally to strengthen his own autocratic power and wreak vengeance on his foes and critics.
The demonic force has truly been unleashed. And we would be misreading Mann terribly if we took the lesson from his story merely that we should blame the masses for once again abetting and caving in to a demagogue bent on maximizing his own power. The true lesson of Mann's story is that the detached critic--the distant observer--the elite outsider who fancies he is above it all-- is ultimately no less able to resist the magician's spell than the public at large.
He too abets the sorcerer's power by succumbing to the sheer force of spectacle. He, like all of us, can't escape the morbid curiosity. He wants to know: what will happen next?
The answers to that question will keep coming. We may not like what we see.
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