Trump’s Final Act, Nothing New Under the Sun
Watching Donald Trump these days, with his increasingly unhinged bluster and threats and humorless assaults on common sense, I see more and more of what I have always seen. It is the same thing we would see in Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and any other upside-down man of our time for that matter, were they all as constitutionally inclined toward infantile public exposure as Trump, their emotional and intellectual inferior, happens to be.
I see a scared, desperate little spoiled brat; a tiny, shivering atom who all his life has tried to persuade himself and everyone else that he is a cosmos, looking finally, fatally, continuously at the prospect of meeting his demise in that increasingly oppressive state of unceasing loneliness, friendlessness, and isolation which only the true tyrannical soul is capable of experiencing. His reality-defying pleas for loyalty, adoration, and deference, as he wanders with an ever-more-apparent sense of infinite separation among his own political allies and sycophants, among other world leaders, and among the ruins of a country growing increasingly tired of his boringly predictable unpredictability; his middle-of-the-night social media barrages, spewing invective and self-admiration in equal measures out into a universe that is mostly laughing at him now while staring impatiently at its watch; his growing impotence in the face of the collapse of all his delusions of grandeur and his dreams of immortal glory; all these, the essential events of his inner and outer life now, reveal a colossal and inevitable failure — not a new failure though, but merely the same old failure that every single one of these characters, for millennia, has at one time believed that he and he alone could escape.
But he cannot, as they never can. And so now, in coming to terms, slowly, with this inevitability, his behavior becomes all the more erratic and absurd, and with it the mockery and laughter of the world that finds him less and less intimidating, and more and more pathetic. That too is part of the fate of all these ersatz great men: to recognize while still alive that all their hopes of eternal fame are quickly crumbling into a rubble of infamy over which everyone will clamor tomorrow in search of something new.
