“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf!’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels. Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf!’ and there was no wolf behind him.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 1980

There is no wolf behind Donald Trump – no caravan of illegal immigrants bringing guns and crime out of the hellholes of Central America; no far-left fascist mobs promoting a cancel culture that “threatens our liberty of thought”. From the hysterics of Trump’s invasion of Muslim terrorists – to the “nonexistent” virus that has killed 230,000 citizens, what has coalesced is a plague that has delivered nothing but sorrow and shame to all corners of America.

If literature is a way to tell the story of man’s passage through time, then the written record of the failures to deliver anything but sorrow and shame will be the legacy of Donald Trump. His reign of terror will be remembered as that of Macbeth, who asks, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?”, in raiment that seems either too big or too small for him. Like Macbeth, Trump’s ambition is too big and his character is too small for his illegitimate role as an American president. And the Republican Party that he acquired in, what his son-in-law described as a hostile takeover, must begin to reinvent itself – somehow, some way, by some means.

But if the Republican Party’s last words after the election are: Supply side economics works; lower taxes on the wealthy will bring jobs for the middle class; or corporations are people – their race is run. The best that they can hope for is that purported party moderates like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse – politicians who ride the fence like a bucking bronco – inherit what remains of the GOP by mumbling the proverbial, “Qui s’excuse s’accuse”. (He who excuses himself, accuses himself.)

If they are to genuinely reinvent themselves and rise like a phoenix from the ashes of their attempted coup against democracy, they would be wise to embrace the final last words of Albert Einstein – words left unfinished: “In essence, the conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semi-religious trappings… Political passions, once they have been fanned into flame, exact their victims…“. If the Republican Party’s last words are anything less than a vow to restore a legitimate moral order to America, they will not be believed next time.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have exacted a tragic tribute from American democracy. With unforgivable fraud and hypocrisy, they have looted America, all the while crying “wolf, wolf!” They have fabricated constituencies such as the “un-born” to clothe themselves in what Einstein described as “semi-religious trappings”; and they sustain their plutocratic power by maintaining a twenty-first century version of slavery in their labor practices, their refusal to pay a living wage, and through their myth of “the makers and the takers”. They are, as Chekov described in The Cherry Orchard, “…the symbol of a ruthless, money-driven society that will destroy beauty for profit.

Nothing has changed on this Möbius strip of civilization. Our instincts rarely diverge from the literature that has described these political figures for millennia. While some of the most memorable players have been tragic figures, in this new age of ours, the players seem increasingly to be nothing but cartoonish autocrats like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. They both prance on the stage with ambition that is too big and with character that is too small.

I hope we get it right this time.

Image: Wikimedia, Gustav Wolf, 1945

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