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.
