I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly vivid dream—probably the result of eating too much pizza at dinner (melted cheese being understood since Victorian times to be a source of intense dreaming—most likely for lactose intolerance reasons).
In the dream, Donald Trump had just taken over the organization where I work, and was now serving as CEO. I guess he was paying an in-person visit for some sort of team-building exercise, because we were all seated outside around a conference table. Trump had a personal calendar open before him, and was trying to rally the troops.
He seemed to be confused about why team morale had been so low since his takeover.
I remember trying to explain to him in the dream why a left-leaning human rights advocacy organization that works on immigration issues might have a variety of objections to being managed by Donald Trump. "It's no secret that many of us have values and a worldview very different from yours," I lectured him in the dream.
Which sounds like an understatement to me in waking life—but which seemed boldly insubordinate in the context of this awkward would-be collegial work meeting that felt so real in my dream.
The more I laid into him, the more he seemed to shrivel into himself. He just sat there looking more small and devastated, the longer I went on. He stared down into his calendar and nodded. "Yes," he said, "yes; I understand."
In other words, he collapsed like an accordion. He "folded like an umbrella," as Trump himself recently said of Jeanine Pirro.
I noticed myself softening and trying to magnanimously concede a few points, since he refused to push back in any way and just kept staring at his calendar with that crushed expression. "Well, look, and I do respect and appreciate that you've kept all of us on staff despite these differences of opinion," I said. I was suddenly trying to comfort him.
Despite spending almost every day for the last ten years writing about how much I despise this man, here I was in the course of my dream trying to buck up his spirits and make him see that it wasn't the end of the world. We could still all get along...
Again, this was a dream. But I reflected, after I'd woken up at two in the morning thinking about it, that, by many journalistic accounts, this might actually be close to how an interaction with Trump would go in real life.
Ezra Klein observed in his recent interview with Maggie Haberman, apropos of her latest book on the subject:
"The Trump-Mamdani meetings reflect what I thought was the funniest part of your book, which is Trump’s tendency to be incredibly conciliatory and friendly when he meets one-on-one with people whom he has been slandering, whom his administration might be entirely persecuting. But for somebody who is so brash and aggressive, he’s a bit of a pussycat one-on-one."
To which Haberman adds: "He does not like one-on-one interpersonal, direct conflict. This has been a constant in his life."
On the one hand, then, this points to something encouraging. Trump in the flesh is evidently a push-over. He's a "paper tiger" (to use yet another one of Trump's own insults that—master of projection that he is—he has deflected onto other people).
And this means he could be easily trounced in any direct confrontation. To quote Hazlitt's description of Cobbett: "He is bullying and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon staggered by a few smart blows."
He easily crumples and collapses upon the slightest concerted pushback. As D.H. Lawrence would put it: Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside / just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow / under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
But the obverse of this, then, is also true—and that's the problem. For those of us who are never in the same room with him—who have no opportunity to confront him directly—he can in fact bully us to his heart's content without facing any pushback. Only in my dreams am I able to lecture and harangue him at length in this manner my subconscious obviously had stored up.
The 200 innocent people Trump disappeared to a torture prison in El Salvador last year, for instance—they had no chance to confront him. He might have come around and said something like, "oh, actually they are great people, and I didn't realize, you know—it tuns out they were asylum-seekers and they hate Maduro too!" if they had happened to be the last people he'd spoken to.
But they never had that chance, and probably never will.
Or the former Olympian whom Trump has spent the whole summer trying to persecute and grind into the dust, merely because he is convenient collateral damage for Trump's reflecting pool debacle. Trump needs the narrative to be that "vandals" sabotaged his construction project, so he sent out his Justice Department to hunt up some phantom saboteurs, and they found a man who allegedly happened to pick up a paint chip.
Eventually, though, even Jeanine Pirro was forced to drop the prosecution of the former Olympian for a lack of evidence. So Trump then immediately pivoted to attacking her; and now DOJ is reportedly considering opening a second prosecution at the White House's request.
In other words, our own supposedly free government is actively trying to deprive a U.S. citizen of his liberty on charges everyone now admits to be utterly spurious—merely because Trump needs some scapegoat to deflect blame for his own poor management of his ridiculous construction project.
North Korea's Kim regime could hardly do any better in inflicting baroque excesses of "funny-if-it-weren't-real" petty tyranny on the innocent.
If Trump is indeed "bullying and cowardly," then, sometimes the bully part of his personality wins out—particularly against those who are defenseless and without sufficient pull or influence in the White House to get a seat in the same room as Donald Trump, and who therefore are never in a position to take advantage of his equal-parts cowardice.
If Trump is indeed a "Big Ben" in politics who simply wishes to "crush" others "by his weight," then (to echo Hazlitt's phrase above), sometimes he simply gets away with it. He does in fact succeed in crushing others, like the monstrous divine being—the sort of cosmic Jabba the Hutt—that Isaac Rosenberg once described, in one of my all-time favorite poems:
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,*
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
[...]
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!
__
* A "pussycat," as Ezra Klein put it.
No comments:
Post a Comment