Our Firebug Problem

 We truly do have a Firebug problem in this election. What I mean by that is: no matter how clearly Trump telegraphs his violent and authoritarian intentions, people simply will not believe him. Thus, our nation is in the same position as the protagonist Biedermann in Max Frisch's 1950s play, The Firebugs. The evidence keeps piling up in his attic that his newfound guests intend to start a conflagration. They even brought drums full of petrol and lots of matches. But he simply refuses to take the threat seriously. 

The New York Times reports today, for instance, on the surprisingly large share of Latino voters who support Trump. Most do not endorse, when asked, his plans for mass deportation. But they also insist that Trump does not really mean it. Reporter Jazmine Ullua writes that those who are aware of his pledges tend to "believe he will not go through with such actions, because he did not the first time he was in office." Ruth Igelnick adds: "40 percent said people who are offended by Trump are taking him too seriously." 

One is reminded of what the townspeople say in another 1950s play, which can similarly be read as a warning about totalitarianism. In Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, the people who encourage the main character to quietly submit to the process of rhinocerization always tell him: "Oh, you take it all too seriously." That's what Biedermann tells himself and his family too, when the petrol drums and the fire kits start appearing in his attic. He tries, time and again, to pass it off as a joke. "Haha, good one guys!"

It would seem that no matter how clear Trump makes it, no one will ever take him at his word. He gets up there, day after day, rally after rally, and shouts about how immigrants are a plague, are "poison," and how he will not stop until he roots up every last family. He plumbs new depths of depraved and obscene violent rhetoric with each passing occasion. Most recently, he called for the death penalty to be imposed unequally on immigrants who kill U.S. citizens. And still—no one thinks he might actually mean it.

No one has ever put this better than one of the arsonists in Frisch's play. There are three ways to hoodwink people, the criminal says. One is humor. Another is to try to drug them with sentimentality. But the third, and by far the most effective way, he says, "is to tell the plain, unvarnished truth. Oddly enough. No one believes it." (Bullock trans.) That seems to be our situation in this election with Trump. He's telling us the truth about the horrors and violence he intends to inflict. But, oddly enough—no one believes him.