The recent chatter about Donald Trump’s declining mental state and increasingly erratic behavior has me thinking of the legend of Faust. Isn’t everyone? In the classic German legend, an eminent scholar, Faust, becomes bored with his life, unable to sate his desire for something beyond the scope of his studies. Enter Mephistopheles, servant of Lucifer, who grants Faust 24 years of unlimited knowledge and pleasures of the flesh. In exchange for Mephistopheles’ favors, Faust signs a pact to surrender his soul to Lucifer at midnight on the last day of the 24 years. The legend, originally written down in the 16th century, has known many retellings, including those by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Hollywood actor and director Richard Burton.
Although the various renditions change the names a bit–Faust is also Dr. Faustus–and alter the ending, the story has become a metaphor for any situation in which a person is willing to exchange their morals and values, in other words sell their soul, to test the bounds of human limitations and gain a greater share of earth’s power, wealth, and pleasure.
Donald Trump is certainly no scholar, but he shares with Faustus the insatiable craving for more, the drive to overcome human limitation. The title of his niece’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, is a fitting epitaph for his life. Our tragic hero, Trumpus, was teasing the idea of a presidential bid as far back as 1988, bantering about the idea with Oprah and Larry King over a period of years. His hunger for power and prestige led him to leave his home borough of Brooklyn and cross the river into the more glamorous and highfalutin Manhattan, the place his more frugal father would never venture into.
Trumpus’s appetite for the pleasures of the flesh is also well known. Conquests of beautiful women, both willing and unwilling partners, have stoked his ego and caused him to brag to Howard Stern during an interview that sex should count as his Viet Nam and he should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for having avoided contracting any STDs in his numerous liaisons.
He had money, he had fame of a sort (mostly the supermarket tabloid sort), he had his name in tall gold letters on buildings across the globe, he lived in ostentatious penthouses, he had wealth (though not as much as he claimed), he had success as a reality TV star, he had power as the CEO of the many companies that comprise the Trump Organization, he had the appearance of success as a businessman (convincing enough to dupe millions of people into voting for him to run the business of our country), and he surrounded himself with beautiful women, including Miss Universe contestants.
But, like Faustus, Trumpus’s restlessness drove him to take great risks in his quest for the salve that would soothe his itch for more. Rising to the highest office in the land and wielding the authority of the most powerful position on earth felt to him like the last mountain to be climbed. With it would come the adulation of millions and the opportunity to destroy the legacy of the man he envied and hated; and as the CEO of the country, he could expand his wealth by making his private enterprises venues for government business.
It was the perfect plan, but there were obstacles. He was inexperienced in politics, he was completely uneducated in the constitution, foreign policy, the economy, global alliances, geography, or any other subject that might have given him knowledge and insight needed for the job. Moreover, he lacked the basic intelligence and intellectual curiosity to learn any of those things. He even had to pay someone to sit for his SAT so that he could earn the required score for admission to the Wharton School of business. What to do? Well, he could summon Mephistopheles.
And so he did. In this version of the tale, Mephistopheles is named Vladimir Putin. Putin, with the complicity of the Republican Party, would grant Trumpus the presidency–with all of the glamour, power, wealth, and ego inflation–in exchange for complete control over Trump and freedom from the inconvenient sanctions that would be imposed on him by any real president. I would not presume to make suppositions about Donald Trump’s eternal soul, if he ever had one, but it has been clear to all with eyes to see and brains to process information that he is beholden to Vladimir Putin in ways detrimental to him and to the country gullible and stupid enough to elect him.
There is throughout the tale a sort of madness to Faustus, like the character in Edgar Allen Poe’s story who is strapped down and unable to move while the pendulum that could slice him in half inches its way closer. Trumpus’s base level madness shows itself in his frenetic tweeting, bragging, and lying about such things as crowd sizes and his ability to handle things: “I alone can fix it.” Trumpus knows his time is limited, unless of course he can incite his base to make him the kind of life-term authoritarian ruler he so admires in other countries.
Whether it’s four years or eight years, midnight is coming, and he sees the bottomless chasm opening to swallow him up: that deep pit of legal troubles over which he is dangling, which must be every bit as terrifying as the mythical hell flames. As long as he can remain in office, he will continue to have the immunity to prosecution and unveiling of his deepest secrets that he has so far enjoyed. At the stroke of midnight, however, he will be open to exposure–the threat of which is driving him further into madness, just as Faustus descends into madness during his final moments.
Former CIA Director John Brennan said to MSNBC news anchor Joy Reid, on October 12: “Things have gone from the abnormal to the surreal.”
One reason it’s been difficult to recognize and chart Donald Trump’s descent into madness is that he’s never been sane. Abnormality has been the norm: the lies, the tweeting, the flouting of tradition and norms, the disrespect for his office, the ignorance, the utter lack of compassion for other humans, the refusal to treat his supporters and his critics with equal respect and responsibility, the refusal to condemn white supremacist groups, the inner circle of felons and the lowest level of humanity, the willingness to do anything to boost his ego and retain power and adulation. Tragically, this is the base line.
How could things get worse? When the guy who signed the deed (made the deal with Lucifer) is looking at possible debt collection time (November 3), even the thinnest semblance of control is going to be next to impossible to maintain.
Hence, the infamous tweets appear to be escalating in both number and recklessness. This one, posted on October 5, 2020, could win awards for misinformation, insensitivity, and shameless self-promotion:
“I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
Yes, misinformation, insensitivity, and shameless self-promotion are his primary characteristics on his best day; but this tweet hits a new low.
In the most inane report of the week (so difficult to single out just one), it’s been widely reported that he had cooked up this stunt and discussed it with several people as he was preparing to leave Walter Reed Medical Center. In his always-delusional, now drug-enhanced extra-delusional brain, he saw himself walking out of the hospital in his usual button-down shirt and suit coat. Then at just the perfect moment, he would rip open his shirt, revealing a Superman T-shirt underneath. Really. This was his fever dream for demonstrating his strength and virility. With 210,000 Americans at that same moment having lost their lives to the disease he claims to have beaten, he wanted to do a Reality TV stunt to show how strong he thinks he is.
His scattershot efforts at voter suppression expose the desperation which drives him. Tampering with the postal service, raising unfounded alarm about mail-in voting, putting up roadblocks to make voting more difficult, and lying about ballot fraud are all aimed at suppressing votes for his opponent and creating enough doubt about the legitimacy of the election to set the stage for the Supreme Court to decide the winner. And he’s orchestrated, with his complicit Republican senators, the greatest sham hearing in history to railroad through a SCOTUS nominee, to be sure he has a majority on the bench when the election case is presented.
In a move typical of banana-republic dictators but not of the republic to which Americans pledge their allegiance, he is using the power of his office and of our government agencies to attempt punishment of his political rivals. During the week following his release from Walter Reed, he launched a series of tweets demanding the imprisonment of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and excoriating his own Attorney General Bill Barr for not acting fast enough. The tweet storm culminated in an all-caps scream:
“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!”
I’m trying to imagine what congressional action would have been taken against any other president who made such an unhinged demand.
To prove he’s an equal-opportunity employer, he also attacked his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for not having declassified and released all of Hillary Clinton’s emails (groan!). CNN’s Jennifer Hansler reports:
“’She said she had 33,000 e-mails,’ Trump told Fox News on Thursday. ‘They’re in the State Department, but Mike Pompeo is unable to get them out, which is very sad actually. I’m — I’m not happy about him for that, that reason. He was unable to get — I don’t know why. You’re running the State Department and you get them out. But they’re in the State Department.’”
My mother always said, “Any port will do in a storm.” And Trump’s storm is rising, so he’s frantically throwing out whatever might appease the storm gods and find him safe harbor.
So what is it that may await our tragic hero when his days in the White House end? What does he see in that chasm that is slowly opening beneath his feet? Among other things, exposure of his crimes and misdeeds and most embarrassing moments, a wave of lawsuits, and if justice prevails, prison time.
Parts of the Mueller Report which have so far been redacted could be made public, further information about his tax fraud may be published, whatever Vladimir Putin is holding over his head may be exposed, evidence may be revealed to substantiate parts of the Steele Dossier, more aides and administration officials may feel free to tell what they know and write more tell-all books, he could face even more lawsuits than are already pending against him from families of COVID patients who have died, and worst of all to his narcissistic mind he will stand naked before the world as the thing he hates most: a loser.
Individual lawsuits are already too numerous to list, but they can be organized under a few general headings: finances and taxes; violations while in office, including the Hatch Act, the emoluments clause, and using White House property for political gatherings; possible lawsuits arising from the Mueller Report; campaign violations; sexual misconduct and assault, of which he has been credibly accused by 20 women, including one who was only 13 years old at the time of the alleged assault; and contractors whom he has refused to pay money he owed. This is just a small sampling of what he and his family may face when he can no longer retreat to the safe harbor of the White House.
Our job is to be sure midnight comes on November 3, 2020–not November 5, 2024. As Senator Amy Klobuchar so passionately argued during the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, “This isn’t Donald Trump’s country, it is yours.” I’m ready to take it back. Let Donald Trump pay for the bargain he made, and let us restore our country. By 2024, it may be too late.