The Donald, American monster
Monsters are not what they used to be. I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his loneliness. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has selfawareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy.
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country.
We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will be convinced he should be criminally charged and put in jail.
The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that Pence “deserves it.”
Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump aides to show Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social media with the Big Lie.
Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”
Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.
In Uvalde, the unfathomable story unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered.It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.
Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was carnage.”
In his dystopian inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.