The White House Wonderland
Over a cup of tea the other day, a young friend complained that people think the Trump administration is “writing the book” on how to run a wildly improbable political campaign and then try to run the country the same way. “But they’re not,” complained Alice. “They’re just copying.”
She pulled from her pocket a couple of well-thumbed old volumes, picking quotations at random as she went.
“‘I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different than yours. Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.’ ” Congress, I mused, is already working on it.
She pointed out the administration has already found for our confusion curious language; the crowd on the mall that wasn’t, “alternative facts” and the “curiouser” suggestion that President Donald Trump should be “judged by what is in his heart rather than what comes out of his mouth.”
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said,” she went on (his name sounded perhaps like he might be a distant relative of the president), “‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
“‘The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ “‘The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.’ ” We talked seriously for a moment about the Trump administration’s many schemes, apparently thought up but not thought out, to wildly disgorge or dismember legislation, regulation, treaties, alliances.
“That’s all explained right here, too, in one sentence,” Alice declared.
“‘The adventures first, the explanations take such a dreadful time.’ ” She rushed to a different passage. “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax — of cabbages — and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot — and whether pigs have wings.’ ”
“There,” said Alice brightly, “you have global trade, climate change and financial deregulation for greedy hedge-funders flying to tax havens. And all in one paragraph and in rhyme.”
She pulled the old pages apart excitedly, as if she were opening oysters and finding a pearl in each one.
“You think they are original in coming up regularly with unbelievable ideas?” she asked, pointing her delicate finger into a page. “Try this: ‘Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ ”
Her old books described almost a mirror image — a looking glass, it might have once been called — of the world we are seeing and hearing.
“This book is full of outrageous-sounding creatures like Jabberwocks and Snarks and the fruminous Bandersnatch,” she bubbled. “Their descendants, obviously, are the fearsome Yuge, the terrible Tweets, the bogs of Blogs. And towers of Trumps.
“And, if you’re worried that they are already ‘writing the book’ to accommodate misstatements, factless facts, falsehoods, lies and so on,” Alice offered, “how about this for their subtitle?: ‘Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.’ ”
She thought for a moment and remarked, “There have been so many pictures of wealthy Mr. Trump in his baseball cap helping his crowds imagine a populist Donald who understands them. This book already has a Mad Hatter; there’s even a tea party.”
Who, 150 years ago, could see so clearly into this White House wonderland?
“He was sort of an ancestor of mine,” Alice replied. “His name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. “You probably know him as Lewis Carroll.” She closed her book wonderingly, “I guess he just really understood Mr. Trump.”
Suddenly shy, she added softly, “It is said he also fancied the company of younger girls.”