Once upon a time the story goes, and from there the laws of the normal world change – magic replaces what is real, and sometimes power falls into the grasp of a sorcerer, and the land falls under a spell.
Sorcerers possess the gift of shapeshifting. They have confidence in their ability to use their magic to evade disaster or to turn their corruption into gold.
I’ve begun to think of Trump and his followers in terms of fairy tales, the Grimm kind, the ones where ugly things happen because spells have been cast by creatures of enormous appetite, and those spells lock people into territories of blindness and cruelty and violence.
Think of Trump as a sorcerer but not a god. He lacks supreme power. He can only summon about 40% of the American Public to support him. Let’s stay with that number. Through their faith in him (for them, he is a religious, magical figure), they follow him into a waking sleep, where their decency and common sense and their bullshit detectors all go quiet. They believe without reflection. Some are willing to assault police officers. Some are happy to make violent threats against law enforcement, against teachers, politicians and their children, judges, etc. They were perfectly happy with all of his abuses of power during his Presidency, including the separation of children from their parents at the Border. Most are willing to see democracy die if it will restore him to power.
Trump’s magic is threefold: one, his utter shamelessness. He has no real human qualities of conscience. He is all stomach, no soul, no heart except when he weeps for himself alone. He fears loss of face but nothing a normal person would feel if he or she had done something wrong – remorse, contrition, a desire to make amends.
Two, he is the eternal victim rising from his enemies’ assaults. Nothing can stop him. In popular iconography, he is Rambo, the avenger, but one who suffers injustice before he kills everything in reach.
Three, he is the preeminent voice of American darkness, that 300-year-old undercurrent of no-nothingism, racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of authority, conspiracy-believing, paranoid-dwelling, genocidal white-person rage. He knows this. He is an idiot, but he is cunning. He understands how to wield fear and hatred.
Trump will hold sway over vast numbers of Americans until he is dead. He may even win reelection. His spell will not be broken by any prosecution for his many crimes. As long as he can speak, he will rally his faithful with stories of his tribulations and of the evil of his myriad enemies, and of his plans for vengeance.
Sorcerers may exert their power as long as they are alive. That power may dim, but for most of their followers, it never goes away until the sorcerer dies.
When he is finally gone, more stories will emerge from those who stayed close to him out of opportunism – more tales of his inexhaustible moral ugliness that he will not be able to turn into money. It will take decades to gain a full perspective on the damage he has done and who knows how long to repair it. That peculiar American evil he has helped unearth will remain above ground for a time, but it will have lost its prime mouthpiece.
His funeral will be garish. His mini-me accomplices will tell lies about his greatness and rage against his foes and shed faux-tears. Then they will stick him in the ground … and all those who actually had to spend time in his presence … will breathe sighs of relief. For the rest of us, the silence alone will be a blessing.
