Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The Devil's in the Details


There are tyrants on the world stage and in the bedroom, but Trump may be exemplary. If you didn’t believe in the devil you may have changed your mind by now. In fact, when you think about it, Trump is very much like The Joker. He is the anti-Christ to say Obama’s superhero. If you were casting Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the former president would be perfect for the part. One wishes that Trump conformed to the soubriquet Hannah Arendt invented for Eichmann, “the banality of evil.” But actually he’s not the man in the glass booth who claimed he was taking orders. He cackles confidently like some arch villain in a comic book when he talks about how his baseless class action suit against Facebook, Twitter and Google will be the first of many. You cannot sue a private company on First Amendment issues, as Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe pointed out on CNN. However, Trump is the Lord of Misrule. By the time you’ve amassed the evidence against him for January 6, he's initiated a new attack (currently he's demanding to know why there have been no investigations into the shooting of the insurrectionist Ashley Babbitt). Ha ha, there have been all the requisite investigations. One of his greatest of transgressions is the violation of that increasingly rare commodity known as truth. Trump is the Houdini of misinformation. Back in his lair, Mar-A-Lago, the dybukk is already brewing a new poisonous potion for the body politic, which will hee hee hee, also ignite a spate of fundraising letters.

Read "The Seven Ages of One Man" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star


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