The Unreal Thing

The film Dead of Night (1945) presents several tales of the supernatural in a linking story built around — no, within — a recurring dream. Since a dream belongs to a single mind, that mind's development, its struggles, and, as the case may be, its flight from reality become the medium of everything else. So much for Dead of Night. It will not recur here except in spirit.

At this moment in history, the medium of practically everything else is one wretched mind. Disgusting, but there it is. The time is past when it was possible to counsel one another against letting Donald Trump capture our attention. He is, after all, president of the United States; and that office does, after all, extend the consequences of his words and deeds to the ends of the earth. It's too much. Donald Trump, of all people! In 2016, this man-child whose name had long been a risible byword in New York City was elected president by a coalition of out-of-towners: partly people who knew nothing about him, partly people who thought they knew all there was to know from watching him play a masterful businessman on television, and partly the universal crowd of loungers itching to see something happen. By 2024, there was a new flock of sheep to be shorn, and in he came again.

Morality apart, if Donald Trump (hereinafter "Donald") were at least a shrewd manipulator of people and events pulling marionette-strings from on high, that would be something. That's what his supporters think they've got. But Donald is not on high; he's down in the muck, breathing his own miasma. It doesn't take even the expertise of pop psychology to see how that came about, having read the story of his upbringing. The infernal pairing of neglect with subjugation left him to grow up physically while becoming hollowed out mentally and morally. Most people probably have never associated with anyone so lacking in material for healthy self-esteem. Donald soon learned to cope with that lack by trying (clumsily) to present a mirror image of himself to the world. Such diametric misrepresentation is odd. Other people may meet their needs for self-flattery with a bit of inflation here and omission there, but Donald's self requires nothing less than headlong flight through the looking-glass. Others may chafe at society's failure to celebrate them and yet shrink from the degradation of bawling in society's face, but Donald is either unable to recognize the degradation or unable to keep himself from it. Who but an abjectly ignorant man would claim to know more than the experts about a wide array of subjects? Who but an abjectly incompetent one would preface "I can fix it" with "only"? As proprietor of a family business, Donald could be a little god despite his unfitness for any position of responsibility. In that private universe, created by his father, he could do as he pleased and then explain it away as he pleased with no one to tell him he was making a fool of himself. It was that universe that completed his ruin as a human being.

As president of the United States (that crazy fact again!), Donald has proceeded to treat the US Government as an enlargement of the family business. It suits not only his habit of wielding absolute power, but also his vital dependency on make-believe. Outside the bounds of a private universe, a leader must be the real thing. Inside, he can pretend. He can put on a little play in a little nursery theater, improvising as he goes and narrating all the while; ever the triumphant hero because he says so and because, for good measure, he's surrounded himself with a collection of stuffed toys who say so.

Of course, Donald is surrounded by the rest of us as well. We can see that he's making a fool of himself and say so. We can see that he's wrecking America and endangering the whole world, and we can struggle against this madness. But, as in a dream, we can't get traction; and it's not even our own dream we're trapped in, but Donald's. His madness is our medium. His curse is our handwriting on the wall, the true meaning of "MAGA" spelled out: Make America Go Away.

Monsters from the Id

You'll presently see where this is going.

In the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet (1956), a spaceship from earth lands on a distant planet in search of an expedition that reached it years ago and then mysteriously fell silent. The would-be rescuers find two survivors, a middle-aged academic and his daughter, who are living in comfort with all modern conveniences (including a robot butler) thanks to technology developed by the planet's original inhabitants, the Krell. Their crowning achievement was a huge system, still operating after their extinction, that makes it possible to conjure up material objects from a user's thoughts. The academic, having mastered the system, has no wish to return to Earth. The daughter, having lived her whole life on this remote island in the sky, doesn't know what she's missing. (Yes, that does bring The Tempest to mind.)

The daughter takes an interest in the young commander of the spaceship. The father accordingly grows impatient for him and his companions to go away. Soon the rescuers come under attack from an invisible monster that tears its victims limb from limb and leaves footprints inconsistent with any efficiently-evolved life form. It turns out that the father's selfish wrath has manifested itself through the conjuring system in the form of a fanciful but potent thought-creature. Finally, we learn that the releasing of such "monsters from the id" into society is what drove the Krell to extinction. Those noble but flawed beings had built a noble but flawed system that achieved great power while failing to guard against wanton exploitation.

That, too, brings something to mind: the American system of government, wantonly exploited by Donald Trump, who is a slave to the basest of impulses.

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. ... 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.

Both Trump's apologists and his critics keep circling around that crude truth, trying to divine more complex theories of motivation and calculation populated by more actors, but it's no use. The nightmare in which we're living really is an emanation from Donald Trump's inner world. Where other malevolent actors appear, they're not influences on Trump but products of his will. Frank Bruni brings us back to this truth in a recent essay for The New York Times:

"Bad advice" is a plausible excuse only if the person you're trying to excuse had little to no part in picking his advisers or had reason to believe they weren't who they turned out to be. In Trump's case, the opposite is true. He ended up with such a wretched crew of cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials because a wretched crew is what he was after....

The Trump administration is the house that Donald built as an annex to his personality. The federal agents who have lately terrorized Minneapolis are monsters from his id. Even MAGA World is his personal creation: not a crowd of people who desired such conjurings, but of people who desired other things; drew near to the conjuror; and fell under his spell.

As the people enacting Donald Trump's will are, in their current lives, actually products of it, so are the presidential outbursts in advance of policy (or in advance of nothing) products of his personal grievances and grudges. Here is Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic yesterday:

The Trumps were indeed cut off from some financial services in 2021. But although they claim that it had to do with political bias and checking "certain boxes," there is likely a simpler explanation: the fact that, on January 6, the president fomented a riot at the Capitol and tried to overturn the results of a national election.
...
And financial dealings with Trump were considered risky well before January 6, thanks to his history of business failures. In 2016, The New York Times reported that some bankers had captured the sentiment in a neat, two-word phrase: Donald risk.
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"There are certain communities that have a legacy of having been redlined out of getting access to credit and financial services," Steele said. "That's the real debanking problem." Trump's lawsuits and executive order probably won't do much to chip away at that systemic issue. The president may say that he is protecting those who face discrimination, but his goals here are, as usual, extremely personal.

Surely the federal rage in Minneapolis owes much to symbolic affronts in Trump's mind: the summer of 2020; the campaign of 2024, in which Minnesota governor Tim Walz was an opposing warrior; the Somali community in Minnesota and its association with Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Trump nemesis; the political identity of the city itself. So also with Trump's gratuitous scorning of European troops who gave their lives in World War II or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Europeans of his acquaintance offend him the way New York society does, by being superior to him without even trying. Their fallen troops offend him by having gone bravely into harm's way in contrast with his own craven avoidance of it in his time. No cruelty to others, no shame brought on the country he represents, is too great a sacrifice to Donald's burning id.

Of course, a personality cannot wield power without an engine of power to exploit. Some responsibility lies with those who designed a system requiring a moderately noble nature in its operators. Some graver responsibility lies with a society whose moderately noble nature can be subverted by a single id.