In 2016 I wrote a little essay about the alarm that spread with Trump’s election…
There is no way to understand this! There is no way to predict the outcome. Trump is defying all projections, all analyses.
So the rhetoric of despair or jubilance went, depending on your predilections. In order to understand the “Trump” phenomenon appeals were made to past demagogues, tyrants, or heroes, again depending on your values. Faced with a collapse in categories of understanding (ie the way we reliably understood things previous to the emergence of Trump), efforts to force comparisons with past experience have surely failed, and, more importantly, have masked what else needs to be seen. Although I will not join with trying to understand Trump through the eyes of history, I think that to compare him to literary figures can serve to spur the imagination into fresh pathways, pathways not already determined by the past. My imagination stirred when memory suddenly connected Trump and a fictional character by the name of The Mule, or, as he likes to call himself, Magnifico Giganticus (from Isaac Asimov: Foundation Series).
The Mule has the temerity to upset a Galactic plan that had been in play for generations. It is called the Seldon Plan. Very briefly, the Seldon Plan is based a form of mathematics called psychohistory as applied to large numbers of people (billions) in order to make predictions and manipulate humankind across the Galaxy onto a path of progress, from Barbarism to a new Empire. At that scale of humanity the laws of psychohistory could come into play and reliable predictions made. The Second Empire is to be ruled wisely by a class of mental scientists. Controlling emotion is the key to the successful rule. The one flaw in the plan is its inability to predict the emergence of anomalies and their effect on the carefully calculated path to the Second Empire. And so, The Mule is born—a stunted, sterile little man with an amazing power to mentally force others to join his personal mission of ruling the Galaxy. Those whom he touches with his mental prowess cannot help but love the Mule, even though this love is an outcome of mind control. They behave normally as before, except that they now love The Mule and accept his cause. The Mule single-handedly upsets the stability of the axis of the Galaxy, and the course of history, sending it all into a tailspin. So the story goes.
This pertinent story by Asimov teaches us that something new and totally unexpected can enter the established order at any time, destroy it, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Now let’s jump to 2018…
On May 10 this year (2018) George Will wrote a searing column against Mike Pence calling him, among other things, oleaginous. In comparing Trump and Pence, Will says:
Trump seems to have been born this way. Donald Trump is an open book, has been reading himself to the country for 30 years. There are just no mysteries left and he is this, as I said, this jumble of insecurities and partially or not of all really compensating vanities. He’s a kind of mistake of nature and he is what he is.
Whether Will was literal about his assessment of Trump’s essential nature (i.e. a mistake of nature),he has succeeded in introducing, just for a moment, another kind of discourse into the convoluted, tortured, and legalistic gabble which is holding the USA hostage today, while bigger, much bigger, and accelerating, events are unfolding across our Galaxy. He is suggesting that an anomalous phenomenon has entered time and space, one that cannot be controlled by reason or the law—an anomaly, like the Mule. As our legal and political attempts to reign in Trump’s wild excesses collapse one by one, we are, maybe, beginning to sense at last the enormity of this particular anomaly. How can you deal with an anomaly that is willing, for example, to destroy a country that turned down his son-in-law’s illegal request for relief from a crippling personal debt (Qatar)?
Letting go of discourses rooted in power and control (how can we legally/politically stop the monster etc.) will probably still take more time even as they get more and more convoluted and tortured, but it does seem, as I said, to be accelerating:
this is a phenomenon that we’re having to get used to in the Trump era; things we thought were completely separate stories, important and complex and dark stories in their own right, turn out to be connected often in even darker ways than we’d imagined. Well today it appears to be happening again only the turn around this time is apparently getting shorter [TRM show May 12, 2018].
Taking George Will’s suggestion a bit more seriously could open us up to another kind of discourse altogether—the kind of discourse that Asimov’s characters had to enter, beginning with a question: how do we even begin to deal with a “mistake of nature”, an anomaly that threatens to destroy everything, an anomaly that is functioning so far beyond the law, morality, reason, in fact, everything that up to now has served the American fantasy of progress and manifest destiny?
