Humpty Trumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Trumpty had a great fall … Must have been Wall Street Donald Trump was sitting on when he fell several times earlier in the year with egg shells scattering all over the place. But unlike the children’s tale, America is the land of DIY, where geniuses have long developed superglues for every occasion and the king and the king’s men could put him back together again.
There are only 15 official kings left in the world, and only three are absolute monarchs with men to order around, including King Mswati, head of the “shithole country” Swaziland.
But do not grieve. See, Trump himself is the king that so many people yearn to have, the King of the Whites. And once he is a whole egg again and wins the election, he and Ivanka will market the glue under the brand name Melania, with the slogan, “It sticks to you through thick and thin.”
It is one of the features of the current US election campaign that Trump has been mocked in all two dozen ways suggested by the synonyms in a Thesaurus. With no palpable effect. It’s a serious issue: how did it come to this, is the question being asked across the political spectrum, among Republicans and Democrats alike, from London to here in Cape Agulhas. And the worst is, as Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian, even should Donald Trump lose on November 5, the crisis for American democracy remains: more than 70-million people voting for a convicted felon, habitual liar and crude immoralist.
At the heart of it is a peculiar paradox of representative democracy, that the voter votes in secrecy. It is meant to ensure that said voter is impervious to arm-twisting and all the many sorts of political blackmail, to allow maximum freedom for decision. But it creates another kind of freedom, that of the analyst, or politician or governance agent, who has to puzzle out why certain people have been chosen over others. It can start out as painful thing, which it must have been for the Clintons in 2016, when Trump so unexpectedly — especially for himself — beat Hillary. But it also creates vast spaces for second-guessing, conjecture and any sort of experimental analysis.
In the US this situation is probably at its worst. Its people’s almost pathological insistence on freedom and their relatively high levels of education also mean wide arrays and spectra of opinion, of doctrines applied in many local nuances. These then get amplified in hugely different ways and volumes by the world’s most technologised society. The ground is prepared in such ways for myth making, for hold-all explanations that are easy to digest and rally around.
The Orange Man’s Maga (make America great again) myths, around purported foreign hordes waiting at the gates of heaven or women’s bodies being wrenched from ownership by men, have been exposed to death as based on falsehoods. But the one revelation that stands out for me after all these years of Trump mania, is that made by the ghostwriter of the 1987 book that first made him a household name, The Art of the Deal.
Throughout his life, said Tony Schwartz in 2017, Trump had had an obsession with appearing to be filthy rich. He didn’t know much about real “deals”, it was all a façade, and the extent of his incompetence became fully known during the scrutiny brought on him by the many court cases that started in 2023. The façade could not last for so many decades, and the only way to make his finances work out was to conspire in tax avoidance.
It’s an obsession that many people suffer from, like Jacob Zuma, and before the Zondo commission we heard about the love for luxury cars among people like the then chairperson of the ANC’s integrity appeal committee, Maud Mokonyane. In a recent edition of Time a wonderful essay appeared on the philosopher Plato’s lament about pleonexia, or a kind of illness of greed, an “insatiable lust for things that could never be acquired in adequate amounts”.
People who want to look filthy rich have long been captured in the ancient myth of King Midas, who turns everything he touches into gold after he is offered anything he wishes for by the god of excessive partying, Dionysius. When his daughter complains all the flowers are now golden too, he gives her a hug to console her and she too is transformed into a statue of gold.
The best modern spin on the myth is the interpretation by Carol-Ann Duffy, in her poem Mrs Midas.
I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.
The toilet I didn’t mind. I couldn’t believe my ears:
how he’d had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted.
But who has wishes granted? Him.
This is perhaps Trump’s only talent: making his wishes come true. Want a skyscraper in New York? Granted. With a golden toilet like Midas? Granted. Want a gridiron team? Granted. Your own reality show? You’re hired. President of America. Just sign on the dotted line.
The golden key to all these treasures and granted wishes is to keep a Potemkin palace going with several facades of wealth. It helped that his great-grandfather, a German immigrant, established the family fortune with a series of hotels and brothels in the California gold rush. Donald Trump lost billions on failed projects, but the fortune was always big enough to carry it, and if in the future the US taxman did manage to tighten the screws, a Russian oligarch somewhere might come to the rescue.
Puff up wealth
One mystery to the success of rich people is how easily they can hire accountants, lawyers, investors and auditors to puff up their wealth. It is not just about the money these people can make, there is another kind of hubris. Wiseman Nkuhlu wrote in his book Enabler or Victim? KPMG SA and State Capture how he struggled to convince the people who had participated in the brazen forgeries that enabled the SA Revenue Service’s investigators to be called a “rogue unit”, a key instrument in the wealthy Gupta brothers’ state capture project, of their complicity.
Quite a few philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists argue that humanity has a need for people who are so powerful and have so much money that they can obtain the maximum freedom that ordinary people cannot. The mob’s admiration for and acceptance of kings stem from their own projections of wants and wishes and the compromise they make to allow at least one person to be granted these to the fullest extent, through whom they then live vicariously.
Former City Press editor Mathatha Tsedu tried to explain to me around 2000, when the invasions of farms in Zimbabwe had just started, that Robert Mugabe would remain a hero precisely because of his luxurious life and Chinese palaces because Africans are the sort of people who need a king. Well, there was no need to be so racist, people all over the world want kings to look up to. The Afrikaner mouthpiece Beeld’s front page showing Prince Charles kissing Diana on Buckingham Palace’s balcony after their wedding sold enough of that day’s issue of the newspaper to set a new record, one that, with the demise of the print media, will stand forever.
The late German philosopher Hans Blumenberg had a persuasive theory about the “reoccupation of myths”, which, among other things, accounts for our proclivity to return to mythologies of ancient times even if we don’t believe in them at all. Myths and from them religions arise because of our basic insecurity in the face of the overwhelming reality of a merciless nature and death. Confronted with an ever-changing future, we tend to fall back on the security we believed we had gained from a previous set of myths.
So even though as democrats we don’t believe any longer in monarchies as ordained from above, we subconsciously revert to the vaunted securities of monarchist times. We reoccupy the old beliefs, and we do so by creating new manifestations of their occupants — which reoccupation may then carry remnants of the old to a varying extent. One persistent theme in all the attempted explanations for Trump’s popularity is of the old, white, patriarchal America disappearing, showing that among the commentariat there is at least the recognition of a vacuum in US society. (One has to add that it is one which they cannot fill with their relentless rationality.)
In the book Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl writes about a dying poor and white American who rejected Obamacare even though it would have saved him from the Hepatitis C he suffered from because he believed it was the thin end of the wedge that was destroying the old America.
America’s identity is wholly bound up with its great rebellion against the British monarchy, which in turn inspired even greater convulsions such as the French Revolution. Yet what was never removed was the notion of sovereignty. It was turned into the idea of colonial sovereignty, of the right of the individual to annex his piece of property, clear it of wild animals and natives, over which he had a sovereign’s power of life and death and to defend his domain with anything at his disposal.
Perfect collateral
The historian Niall Ferguson has argued that this ethos of sovereignty on individual property — and its concomitant ability to serve as the perfect collateral for bank loans — was the difference between what made the US great and Latin America, where a new “hacienda aristocracy” cornered all the land, simply replacing the old colonial masters from overseas with local ones.
The landed sovereignty, or kingliness, of the settler is at the basis of the US’s steadfast insistence on maintaining its gun culture, keeping it enshrined in its constitution in the face of one grotesque mass shooting after another. I’m the King of the Castle could be called its national children’s game. Among adults, brash declarations of kingliness are de rigueur, as when Muhammad Ali said: “I’m the greatest thing that ever lived! I’m the king of the world! I’m a bad man.”
That “bad man” gives away what kingliness is about in America, and for that matter everywhere else. The more decadent, misbehaving and surrounded by opulence a celebrity is, the closer they come to acquiring epithets like the King of Rock, as Elvis Presley did. The kings or queens in British history who get the most press were the worst behaved. No other movie or series may ever be made about Elizabeth II than The Crown, whereas those about Henry VIII or his executed wives will keep coming. (And what kept The Crown going were the peccadilloes of the other royals.)
A good case can be made that it was Trump’s royal self-licence as opposed to Hillary Clinton’s technocratic composure that gave him the presidency in 2016. Documentary maker Michael Moore’s warning that the mainstream media’s revulsion in the crotch groper was giving Trump far more entertainment time in US lounges and living rooms than Clinton could hope for, was played out. The more women came forward to complain, the more lies he told, the more Americans jeered and sighed: ah, finally, a King for the Whites.
There are only five white official kings left. The fact is that kingship remains a pestilence. History and literature are full of stories of tragic kings and emperors: the patricidal Oedipus, the Trumpian liar Odysseus, Julius Caesar, the sex monster Caligula, Macbeth, the Japanese Lear-like Ran, the mad George IV and Queen Anne — good kings are as rare as egg shells on a palace’s red carpet.
And the Achilles heel of them all is the narcissism we all fall into when we look in the mirror too much, especially if our loved ones hold them up for us all the time. As Duffy’s Queen Midas writes:
“What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed
but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness.”
Narcissism becomes extreme and socially destructive when it turns into paranoia. Its prevalence among the rich has been particularly strikingly treated in classic films such as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. It is a matter of time before the King of Space, Elon Musk, is the subject of a movie about his particular set of billionaire’s vagaries.
Germs
The Aviator is about Howard Hughes, who developed a mania about germs, something that seems to often emerge among the rich, including nouveau riche actors like Clint Eastwood, who only bathes in crystal water. Trump himself is so obsessed with disease that for years he has had a special employee keep hand sanitiser at the ready when he shook people’s hands, long before Covid-19. People who had coughed too much in his presence ended up being fired.
Of course, such obsessiveness doesn’t help. Too much hand washing destroys the unique microbes on your palms, which can result in eczema. An extension of this dilemma is that you then can’t touch anybody, like King Midas. Duffy writes:
“Who, when it comes to the crunch, can live
with a heart of gold? ...
He was below, turning the spare room into the tomb
of Tutankhamen...
I feared his honeyed embrace
the kiss that would turn my lips into a work of art.”
One can adapt the last line to: If you are grabbed between the legs by Trump, you run the risk of your story becoming a film like Bombshell.
The great irony in Trump’s case is that the real person is someone completely different from the leader who was so dismissive and ignorant of the coronavirus, that he touted quack medication for it on national television. His cousin, Mary Trump, wrote that Trump’s great weakness, which was also his authoritarian father’s, was a deep contempt for anyone with illness. This was probably the reason he had so little to say about one of his opponents for the Republican nomination in 2016, Herman Cain, who died of Covid-19 after attending a Trump rally where people defiantly removed their masks. But it could also have been because Cain was black.
Indeed, Trump remains the King of the Whites. According to one poll at least 30-million Americans are willing to forgive him for anything he does, even if it were trying to install a dictatorship. Even if Trump were to lose the election, or die in office, his millions of fans will glue his shells back together again and ensure that he will be with us for a long time in spirit, as they look for a new King of the Whites to succeed him.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.