The Elementary Stress Test

A mind stripped down to bare skill at pursuing advantage from moment to moment could prove useful in stress-testing the systems of a society. When conceptualizing that elementary mind, you might hit first on a reptilian metaphor. However, since you want your elementary mind to have a certain capacity for operating within human systems, you need to back up just a bit and settle on the mind of Donald Trump.

Trump’s mind has often plucked the usefulness of a thing from its encumbering web of intentions and restraints. In his first term, he learned that various executive posts could be filled with “acting” officials while proper appointments awaited confirmation by the Senate. Then he used that item of knowledge to game the confirmation process so aggressively that he had more acting appointees than confirmed ones in his administration. He also learned the trick of asserting executive privilege to frustrate congressional investigations at will.

In his second term, he surged well beyond other presidents (no mean feat) in governing by executive order. He didn’t just abuse the executive order, he settled on it as his usual instrument of power. Having learned that he could work his will by signing his name to a sheet of paper, he proceeded to do so as a matter of course. Even though his own obedient party controls both houses of Congress, he prefers the act of name-signing to the process of passing legislation. He hears that some of his executive orders are illegal, but by the time the law catches up close enough to bite (if it does turn out to have teeth, which he doubts) — well, he’ll think of something. Anyway, his antagonists can’t pump all the water back over the dam.

The framers of the US Constitution saw fit to vest the president with a power which European heads of state — monarchs — traditionally possessed: the nearly unlimited power of pardon. They recognized a few real needs for such a power. Donald Trump recognized endless possibilities. Other presidents have overstepped ethical bounds in the granting of pardons. Trump knows no bounds.

The president is supposed to exercise extreme restraint in using the armed forces for domestic law enforcement, but Trump understands that violating that norm falls crucially short of trying to use them to overthrow local governments or dissolve Congress or place the country under martial law. Short of such abuse, the chain of command is going to rattle all the way down to the last link when shaken by the Commander in Chief. Trump sees that. To find that the Posse Comitatus Act contains loopholes is, with him, to find a way forward as a snake finds a way between rocks. After all, his whole life has been a slithering through loopholes and perfunctorily-kept gates.

Henry Kissinger once remarked that, in dealing with communists, one must understand that they have no rationale for declining to exploit an opportunity. The same awareness is necessary with Donald Trump. If a rule can be broken with impunity, he’ll break it. If a safeguard presupposes any degree of forbearance, or if a system depends in any part on moral rectitude, he’ll yank out that linchpin as sure as you’re born.

It could turn out to be a service to freedom and the rule of law. Suppose Trump doesn’t succeed in wrecking everything for all time. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that he doesn’t. More than a few commentators have lately taken to writing that America is no longer a democracy or a free country or a country governed by laws and that America has become an autocracy or a kleptocracy or a proto-monarchy, as though History’s moving finger had written and moved on. That implies, rashly, that Trump’s successors will have no choice but to operate on his level amid the ruins of blown-up institutions or else that only equally rapacious personalities can ever succeed him. It implies a theory of entropy that need not be accepted out of hand. Donald Trump is very far from being a Carlylean Great Man or even a sketchy template for historical influence. He’s an arrested infant, utterly self-absorbed and self-expressing; ultimately self-consuming. He lives — truly lives, thinks, feels, work-plays — in a make-believe world. At this moment, he thinks he’s managing the violent conflict between Israel and Iran the way a child puts on a paper-doll play in a little cardboard theater, narrating all the while.

THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire in in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

ISRAEL, DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

This is pathetic. Outrageous when one thinks of the office held by the author, but still pathetic when one thinks of the little mind forever stunted. It's politically absurd no matter how one thinks of it: a childish projection of shadow-shapes on the surface of reality.

Pathetic inhabitants of make-believe have their places in history; but they don’t write it, much less when abetted by associates whose own talents are limited to transgression and disruption. The disruption, though it be senseless and disastrous, is not conclusive. It’s a disaster that can incidentally serve a purpose the way a wildfire revitalizes a woodland. Donald Trump has served to crack that which is breakable, and therefore impermissible, in the American system of government. He has shown that democracy, when it really gets going, may disappoint the expectations of eighteenth-century gentlemen and those of twentieth-century universally-educated men and women. He has posed an arduous task of systemic reinforcement, but he has not had the last word.

They'd Rather Be Left

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) is abundantly intelligent. She has shown signs of pragmatism suggestive of a career plan in which the phase of leftist advocacy is but a stepping-stone. Nevertheless, when she addresses a crowd at the side of Senator Bernie Sanders (independent democratic socialist of Vermont), affinity will out:

It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom....

Now, "the masses" is part of a political vocabulary that grates on most American ears. It suggests the new politics of old countries, in which intellectual gods reach down to touch fingertips with an agglomerated hoi polloi. So does another term Ocasio-Cortez used in the same speech, "class solidarity". That may be an accurate shorthand for what is needed in place of racial solidarity, but it's an alien code to the majority of Americans in all walks of life. To succeed in American politics at the national level, one must bow to the American ethos of individual dignity. Politicians and activists whose hearts belong to the Left simply cannot bow — not to an individualist ethos, not to the traditionalism of many working people across ethnic lines, not to the possibility of progress without progressive ideology in full regalia.

Ocasio-Cortez apparently understands the need to bow but can't quite bring herself to go beyond alluding to it. Nothing less than a cathartic repudiation of her political debut would make any difference in her own standing with the electorate, and then probably not enough. Her established divisiveness is at least as limiting as Hillary Clinton's was. It's easy, too, to portray her as a phony: the architect's daughter who laundered her life story through a post-college job as a bartender and thus can let her supporters begin the story with "Working girl walks out of a bar...." Nevertheless, she's being touted widely as a leading contender for the next Democratic presidential nomination. Within progressive circles, the familiar upward spiral of enthusiasm for "rock star" figures is occurring in chronic isolation from the currents — and the stillnesses — of actual politics.

Individual figures aside, enthusiasm for progressive articles of faith is rapidly overwhelming the initial recognition that they hurt the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections. The party's national committee has chosen as its leader a denialist who says, "We've got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with voters." The erstwhile vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, a singularly gray eminence who, when photographed in the midst of orating, has the alarmed look of a school principal in a youth movie at the moment when things get out of hand, regrets that Democrats "weren't bold enough to stand up and say: 'You're damn right we're proud of these policies.'" He was referring to the faddish campaign of social coercion known as DEI, which was in retreat even as he spoke. Reaction against the outrages of Donald Trump is once again approaching symbiosis with them as Democrats prize those displays of diametric opposition that fail to click with the general public.

There are three ways, possibly all correct in various combinations, of understanding this perversity. It may be that the Democrats in question are suffering such extreme effects of intellectual incest that they really think a substantial majority of voters will start to like what they've been standing for if only the message gets through. Or it may be that they think each part of the message, such as the urgency of drastic action on climate change, is so important that there's no question of leaving it in the background; that one must simply keep expounding it. Or it may be that they find themselves in an endless game of musical chairs with other Democrats and can't bear to risk being ejected from the progressive circle.

The perversity is complicated by a false alternative: a message that concentrates on economic positions while leaving cultural ones implicitly unchanged. William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, in a conversation with Yascha Mounk and Galston's colleague Elaine C. Kamarck, puts his finger on the fatal flaw in that strategy:

Elaine and I came to regard cultural issues as a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. There is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and culture is the superstructure. And that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans.

Kamarck explains,

Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like. Emotion will always trump intellect.

It shouldn't take a think tank to arrive at that insight, but rigorously progressive minds are bound to skirt it. After all, it implies that they must give way to a different set of minds within the Democratic Party. One can hardly pretend to share sentiments and values that are antithetical to one's very persona; and even the most skillful pretense would fail with the electorate. So beleaguered party strategists ponder the superficial task of messaging and not the fundamental task of metamorphosis, while internal ideologues and external pressure groups redouble their rigor.

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"I had rather be right than be president."
— Henry Clay, 19th-century American statesman

Henry Clay never became president. Since his notion of being right was to strive for the best available modus vivendi between slaveholders and abolitionists with a view to eventual emancipation, he can be said to have upheld his principles by striving. Moreover, he actually succeeded in maintaining peace and national unity for a time by negotiating compromises.

In the Senate, leaders of the new generation, such as Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, sat with giants of other days, such as Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. It was Henry Clay who divined the high strategy of the moment. The Union was not ripe to meet the issue of secession. Concessions must be made to stop the movement now; time might be trusted to deal with it later. On 27 January 1850 he brought forward the compromise resolutions that kept an uneasy peace for eleven years. The gist of them was (1) immediate admission of California; (2) organization of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah without mention of slavery; (3) a new and stringent fugitive slave law; (4) abolition of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia. Such was the Compromise of 1850.
— Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People

Before that, however, Clay's adroitness had suffered a fateful lapse. In his fourth bid for the presidency, in 1844, he obfuscated his opposition to the annexation of Texas (a slaveholding republic). The upshot was that he failed to reassure the South while losing crucial support in the North and, with it, the election. An ambiguous approach to a great moral question must have seemed intolerable to abolitionists, but history's alternative to Henry Clay was not a foursquare abolitionist. It was James Knox Polk, a slavery expansionist who set in train the series of events that led to the carnage, and the legacy, of the Civil War. Of course, we'll never know what a President Clay would have wrought.

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Insist on a forcefully anti-slavery president, and you may get a disastrously pro-slavery one. Insist on the most rapid advancement of the climate agenda, and you may get a devastating reversal of it. It's not just the one agenda, either. On every head, Donald Trump's second presidency is far worse for leftist objectives than any Democratic moderation would have been. Successive Republican administrations will perpetuate the harm.

It matters who becomes president. It matters who occupies a seat in Congress and not in some coffee-shop retreat for righteous losers. Therefore it matters what mix of principle and practicality a candidate or a party offers to the electorate. If the Left can't bring itself to behave like the minority faction it is, then the Democratic Party can't afford to keep it.

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Fight Fire with Water
You American Intellectuals
Out of the Looking-Glass

Consummation

Donald Trump is a complex human being only in the sense that he's a mess. Otherwise, the man and the political phenomenon form one sodden lump that's confoundingly simple. Observers go on trying to make out his aims and his strategies long after having learned that everything about him is just an emanation from the lump, because it's unbearable to think that the world has come to this.

At the start of Trump's first presidency, there was a spirited public debate about his mental state centered on the question whether this was a clear case of narcissistic personality disorder. February 2017 brought a letter to The New York Times, signed by thirty-five mental health professionals, noting traits typical of people who "distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists)." It concludes,

In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.

The next day brought a rebuttal from another professional: the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, who should know.

I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

To this non-professional, the requirement of distress and impairment seems odd. Perhaps it's due to the origin of psychiatry in medical science, with its assumptions of suffering and succor. At any rate, Dr Frances's defense of professional standards is by no means a defense of Donald Trump.

He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

Take away the technical dispute — which has, in fact, disappeared from the public forum — and the two letters to the editor merge in prophetic accuracy. It doesn't matter whether we think that Donald Trump is having more and greater episodes of mental illness or that he's wreaking havoc in a perfectly normal transport of rage. The successive cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden dispelled any hope that the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution would ever be invoked when the president was conscious and determined to remain in office, much less when also surrounded by sycophants as Trump is now.

Trump's psychological motivations are obvious, as Dr Frances wrote eight years ago. One might add that psychological motivations are basically the only kind he's got. Intermediate aims such as the demolition of the rule of law and the reduction of the economy to an access racket serve the ultimate purposes of protecting him from the consequences of his undisciplined selfishness and providing a plush nest for his wingless soul. He carries on blighting public life, inflicting pain on innocent people, and isolating America from decent international society because blight, pain, and isolation are personal grievances calling for tenfold revenge.

With Donald Trump, everything is personal; and everything personal is going to be an affront. His first administration showed how he hates the inevitability of having more competent people around him. Even in the clown show that is his second administration, the most ridiculous figure of all is the one at the center. It was an impossibility to surround himself with dimmer bulbs, so he surrounded himself with people who unfailingly pretend that he outshines them.

Consider the letter Trump wrote to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019:

Dear Mr. President:

Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.

I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!

I will call you later.

That's the president of the United States conducting direct diplomacy with another national leader. If he'd been capable of writing like a normally intelligent adult, regardless of education, he'd have done so. But, then, if he'd been capable of understanding the task and judging that he wasn't up to it, he'd have let someone prepare a draft for him. That one incident should have ended all speculation and spin about the face Donald Trump presents to the world. It's not a theatrical mask, but the face of an appalling truth: that while other human beings were growing and maturing, he was not. Oh, yes, he knows it. His life has been one frenzied construction project, a ceaseless piling-up of pretenses and distractions before the door of the old nursery where his character died of neglect. He never laughs. If he ever cries, it's for the little fellow curled up in the nursery.

Mary L. Trump's 2020 book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, bears the subtitle How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. That seemed a bit hyperbolic, at the time. Five years on, the whole world is in fact suffering through the consummation of one man's wretched life.

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The Tiny Man Theory

The Rites of Spring

There are things one believes even though they're unknowable. I, for example, believe that since the advent of the elevator every child has wanted to push the button. I believe that soap bubbles will be chased hither and thither, vainly but gladly, for a brief period across generations. I also believe there's a solemn ritual that has taken place in a greater number and variety of homes than you could shake the most prolific stick at. It goes like this:

A friend of the parents who is a stranger to the child comes to dinner. On being introduced, the child hides behind her mother's legs and buries her face in the fabric that presents itself. It would be possible at this point to write down how the story will proceed to a happy ending and set aside the prediction in a sealed envelope for the child to marvel at in about an hour (if she could read). For a while, she'll listen to the grown-ups' conversation in woolly darkness. Then she'll peek out and study the visitor's face for another while. Presently she'll be standing in front of her mother, her body now relaxed though she keeps close. She'll allow herself to be implicitly included in the conversation, the grown-ups being wise enough to leave it implicit. By the time her mother must withdraw behind the kitchen counter, she'll be ready to show her toys and books. Then it won't be long till she's taken the visitor in hand, explained how one plays with the toys, and proposed a collaborative effort. When at last the dinner bell rings or the cook hollers, the new friends will troop to the table having pledged to play again. All in the space of an hour at most.

There's a lot about a child's early progress in life that you could chronicle beforehand with a fair degree of accuracy: the rite of bubble-chasing; the rite of deliberately stepping in puddles; the rite of shunning broad walkways for narrow edges to be negotiated like high wires; the rite of asking for the same story, read in precisely the same manner, again and again; and so on.

Such things are written in the stars beneath which each individual child gets to know the world. Our love for the particular child is undoubtedly infinite in itself, and yet it burgeons with adoration of the universal child. While actively studying a single child's uniqueness we passively witness the freemasonry of children and other primal elements, only slipping into the plural to note ad hoc what "they" do at this or that age; not quite accepting that they belong to an unseen society from which we have been cast out.

Before rational insight and religious belief comes pagan affirmation. In childhood we're mirthful little sylvan deities, each of us a whole string of them performing the rites of one brief existence after another. The end of an existence always grieves the surrounding grown-ups but not the child (save for one ripple of longing to be a baby again just for a little while). The child is unconscious of loss because, at least in this, nature is gentle.

Fight Fire with Water

"They've got to fight fire with fire!" "It's time to DO SOMETHING!" Such are the reader comments that have lit up the website of The New York Times since Donald Trump and his enablers started off on their current rampage.

Being told to fight fire with fire is a bit hard on Democrats in Washington when the Republicans have won control of everything. About the only "fire" that comes to mind is obstructionism of one kind or another. That's not fighting with fire, but playing with it. Some people have suggested that congressional Democrats should force a partial government shutdown next week — thereby becoming the ones directly responsible for the consequent suffering and inconvenience. Yesterday, the irrepressible Representative Al Green (Democrat of Texas) disrupted Trump's address to Congress until he was ejected, despite the party leadership's prior plea for members to maintain decorum. Other Democrats booed and shouted catcalls. They may have garnered credit with the "do something" faction of copartisans (not that they could restrain themselves anyway), but it was no way to get the country behind them. Most people just don't like heckling.

Most people just don't like street protests, either. Even demonstrators for a patently good cause risk rubbing the general public the wrong way unless they stay on their best behavior and, for good measure, look like the general public's most flattering image of itself. The famous student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which did dissuade Lyndon Johnson from seeking re-election, did not end the war and were never viewed favorably by a majority of the American people. The world over, "most massive rallies fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies."

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters' demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government.
— Moisés Naím, "Why Street Protests Don't Work" (The Atlantic, April 7, 2014)

More recent research confirms that observation and finds demonstrations becoming less productive as convening them becomes easier. Last May, Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic reported on a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that efforts to organize mass demonstrations do succeed at consciousness-raising.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail — including the Women's March and the pro-gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators — they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

...

Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful — and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The something that needs doing by Democrats is not anything noisy. It's not a response that adds to the din surrounding Donald Trump or that seeks to evoke a sense of crisis before Trump has done so himself. It's a long game of noting the pits Trump digs for himself, the liabilities his minions bring on him, and the workings of his patrimonial administration. Note well, in detail, how it serves the rich and the well-connected at the expense of ordinary Americans, and store up the most damning examples. When a tale of betrayal has begun to coalesce in people's own minds, then give it voice for them. No argument is so forceful as one that's already incipient in the hearer's mind. All along, hold councils and evolve novel plans for a truly national response to Trump's malfeasance. Begin at once to instill discipline in the Democratic Party so that it can credibly recommit itself to the service of shared interests above all; above any assortment of special interests.

Don't pull Trump's chestnuts out of the fire by answering tantrum with tantrum. Let him scorch his chestnuts. Then douse the fire with the water of sane leadership.

The Test of Genius

Donald Trump has always confessed his weaknesses by asserting the opposite strengths. The premier example is his almost endearingly clumsy response to doubts about his mental fitness: "I'm a very stable genius." As always with Trump's boasts, there was none of the self-aware irony that can give éclat to otherwise struggling personalities. He was in earnest. His boast thus reinforced the doubts and left the impression that his only portion of intelligence was the low cunning which he had, at any rate, demonstrated.

Now, in the grim game to decide the fate of the republic, low cunning appears to be the essence of genius. Donald Trump has peered into the constitutional system he despises and grasped the way to defeat it in four steps:

1. Become President of the United States.
2. Work his will by means of executive action without regard for the Constitution or federal law.
3. Order his minions to ignore unfavorable judicial rulings, including those of the Supreme Court.
4. Pardon his minions as promised.

As for the president's own liability, all official acts are protected by the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. United States (2024).

Now that Trump has accomplished (1) again, who can stop him from repeating (2) — (4) until he has turned the United States of America into a literal dictatorship of the federal executive? An uncorrupted military? It would be terrible to owe the restoration of constitutional government to a military coup. Incorrupt generals would themselves abhor such a solution. Who, then? And how?

At this writing, the civilian defenders of the rule of law are mostly biding their time while Trump piles up malfeasance, inflicts pain, and presumably rouses the American public against himself. Already, people and organizations that supported him while he sowed the wind as a candidate are declaring their displeasure at the whirlwind of his presidency. An aroused public may soon be ready to back a plan for breaking up Trump's game — if a workable plan emerges from somewhere. Impeachment is a dead letter. Taking to the streets willy-nilly won't get the job done. There's got to be an intelligent plan, wisely implemented. The republic awaits a mind or two superior to Donald Trump's.

The Tiny Man Theory

"The History of the world is but the Biography of great men."
— Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

No ordinary man could play the part that Donald Trump is playing now. No great man, either. Only the tiniest moral entity — mind, heart, character — could leave such a vacuum within the human shell. A vacuum is no mere hollow. It's a hungry hollow that endangers the world around it.

I used to work with a man who craved attention and praise every bit as much as Trump does. He was unlike Trump in most other ways but equally needy; truly love-starved, to judge from the few words he let drop about his mother. He'd boast to us of his accomplishments and then almost weep at the silence that followed. One co-worker strove mightily to help him out of his morbid state with sympathetic attention and lavish praise. He ate it up, but it made no difference in his need. The man was a perpetual vacuum. He didn't care to be otherwise, either. At some point in life he'd become aware of his obtrusive egoism and had learned the trick of declaring it when starting to speak in a group, warning that he was apt to go on and on about himself. Having done so, he seemed to think he had sidestepped any obligation to behave considerately. We were at his mercy.

It's impossible to know whether Donald Trump is aware of his egoism beyond noticing that others accuse him of it. However, there's no need to play amateur psychologist in his case. His niece has observed him with a professional eye.

Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. And whether he knew it on any level or not, neither of his parents was ever going to see him for who he truly was or might have been — Mary was too depleted and Fred was interested only in whichever of his sons could be of most use — so he became whatever was most expedient. The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
— Mary L. Trump PhD, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Any chink in Donald Trump's armor becomes a vulnerability for others: an orifice through which the inner vacuum tugs violently at the outer world, sucking in what it can and wrecking much more.

And that is the whole story of the part Trump is playing now. It's the reverse of a crime novel in which the apparent obsession of a madman turns out to be explainable as a rational scheme. One can look at his welter of actions on resuming office and make out some rational objectives, but the unifying factor is obsession. After all, the revocation of certain people's security clearances or Secret Service protection serves only to inflict punishment for injuries to his pride. The rooting-out of FBI agents and government lawyers who had any part in investigating him is a wanton vendetta. The breathtaking departures in foreign policy are of a piece with his vain pretense of knowing better than anyone else when the gnawing truth is that he knows practically nothing about anything and can only trust to luck for vindication. The slashing and smashing of agencies is a grotesque mockery of small-government conservatism. It's all a tantrum, the final towering rage of one poor little rich boy who sits atop the world's highest pile of toys and still can't catch a glimpse of love. It's Donald's bitter wish-fulfillment dream, and we're in it.

Now the vacuum commands the whole world with its inrushing roar. Tall buildings tilt toward the tiny man from every city. Forests tremble. The oceans rear up, and the clouds lower.

But you must excuse me. I've just this minute heard a thumping at the window. It's February, two years on, and I do believe the thing is back.