It is Going to End

On the parallels between Trump and Arturo the Aqua Boy

This week, for the first time, I fully believed that it is going to end.

You know what it is, right?

I think like a lot of folks I’ve had a hard time understanding how people are able to reconcile this:

With this:

Or this:

With this:

The reality of Donald Trump - a vain, cruel, ignorant, incompetent man - juxtaposed against the image his supporters and sycophants put forward as a uniquely competent, wise, and “strong” leader is a significant part of their theory of power. If we can make this obviously wrong choice not just the right choice, but a world-historical consequentially correct choice, a divine choice, imagine what else we can do.

The fact that Donald Trump’s seams show - the makeup line, the scotch tape on his tie, the sexual assaults, the doctors who certify that he is exactly one pound under the threshold for obesity - is not a diminishment of power, but a testament to it.

It’s not an illusion because it doesn’t fool anyone, truly, but more of a willing self-delusion. Trump’s genuine charisma when he doesn’t have the burden of responsibility as the President goes a long way with a lot of people, but in office, where responsibilities are real, things get tougher.

But the delusion is at last breaking down. Those seams are becoming rifts.

Trump publicly snoozing on the daily, the makeup on his hand covering some kind of persistent bruise or discoloration, his cankles, are not the most meaningful signs of the breakdown. Rather, it is the desperation of the people who are running his presidency - Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, Karoline Leavitt, Susie Wiles - to keep Trump interested that is the real tell. Every week some new bauble for Trump to admire must be presented. A few weeks ago it was his “FIFA Peace Prize.” This week it was the renaming of the Kennedy Center and the bizarre hallway of plaques mocking his predecessors.

Trump is interested in his ballroom and his arch and having his name on things and not much else. This has always been the case, but before, these desires seemed tied to a larger will to power. Now, Trump is checked out. He doesn’t know who he’s pardoned or why. He repeatedly defers to others for decisions as consequential as committing extrajudicial executions in open water or changing the entire vaccine policy for the United Sates. Consider the first term, particularly during the pandemic when even as he was offering true idiocy (injecting bleach!) he was striving to look in charge.

This no longer seems to be the case and the people who are trying to wield the actual power of the presidency are increasingly desperate. Desperate people will do a lot of horrible things, but this doesn’t make them not desperate or vulnerable. The crack-up is well-illustrated by chief-of-staff Susie Wiles’s interview with Vanity Fair in which she revealed all manner of internal dysfunctions, juxtaposed with Karoline Leavitt’s post-Wiles interview declaration that Wiles “has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history.” These people know the end is coming.

Trump also knows it’s going to end, perhaps sooner than 2028. The feuding factions on the right, ranging from the overt white nationalist anti-semites to the merely gutter racist anti-semites are jockeying for position as Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and even fringier figures of the whole freak show engage in a verbal food fight.

Personally, I am heartened without being fully hopeful because the crack-up will cause so much damage and we have no idea what’s on the other side, potentially something worse.

I don’t know what the future holds, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve become increasingly interested in what I think are parallels between the arc of Trump and the story arc of the character of Arturo “The Aqua Boy” Binewski in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. (Probably some spoilers coming, but I don’t know for sure.)

Geek Love is the story of the Binewski family of circus performers, the children, who were altered through the deliberate exposure to radioactive isotopes while in utero, the progeny of Al and Crystal Lil . The novel is narrated over two timelines, past and present, by Olympia, and albino hunchback considered the least “special” of the Binewski children as compared to conjoined twins, Elly and Iphy, Arturo (who has flippers for hands and feet and performs in a large tank of water), and Chick, who has a regular appearance but possesses the power of telekenisis.

The storyline of the past traces a cult of personality that rises around Arturo, who uses his considerable charisma to convince his followers - the Arturans - to alter their bodies by amputating digits, then whole limbs so they will be more like him in terms of physical appearance. Olympia is frequently employed as a kind of henchwoman, aware of Arturo’s megalomania, but also captive to him.

There are numerous Trump/Arturo parallels. Both are birthed in grievance, Trump against so-called “elites” and Arturo against the able-bodied. The grievances are viewed by both as the essential source of what makes them special. Both turn their physical quirks into trademarks that come to signal a kind of superiority. Arturo convinces his followers that being able-bodied is a hindrance to progress and enlightenment. In Trump’s case it is the moral distortions that he has most obviously bequeathed to his followers, the virtue of simply lying about everything so the truth ceases to have meaning or power.

Arturo demands the sacrifices of his followers bodies while Trump is a stripper of human dignity as so many - Lindsay Graham, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, etc… - simply abandon any pretense of previous beliefs to serve Trump’s ends, believing the proximity to the power is worth it.

Both figures demand sacrifice without sacrificing anything in return and the followers are left destroyed. After morphing from a centrist into a Trump true believer Stefanik has now melted back into ground losing out on becoming UN ambassador and now waking up to the fact that too many people of New York State loathe her to have a path to the governor’s mansion. J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio appear to be vying for the post-Trump mantel. We shall see what happens to those two.

In Geek Love, the sensitive and noble Chick who has used his powers to block the Arturans from feeling pain as they experience the amputations comes to understand Arturo as dangerous and starts to undermine his performances to pierce the veil of power. I don’t know if we have quite reached this point of the Trump presidency, but many of these photo ops where Trump looks weak and checked-out may be early examples. Government officials standing around droning on about policy Trump couldn’t give two shits about while he slumps behind the desk doesn’t seem like a great way to highlight your boss’s physical prowess and command of the issues.

In Geek Love, once the Aurturan myth is pierced, the end is swift and brutal, as his followers turn most decisively against him. Novels are not life (though it’s clear Dunn thought deeply about the nature of cults and power), so I don’t want to make predictions based on one, but it would not surprise me to reach a point where what remains of Trump’s power is destroyed by someone once closest to him.

Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to be moving that direction, anyway.

It is going to end. The question now is what and who is going to survive.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I hand out my Biblioracle Book Awards for fiction.

At Inside Higher Ed I decried universities going all-in on AI-mediated futures when we have no idea what it means to teach AI.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) released their award longlists.

I recommend this interview with Brandon by Lincoln Michel about Taylor’s Minor Black Figures, which also one of my Biblioracle Book Awards.

This reflective post from Naomi Kanakia was very inspiring. So inspiring I’m going to put some of it to action myself.

LitHub has collected some of the most scathing book reviews of the year.

Can’t remember if I posted this here yet or not, but if so, it’s worth doing twice. Samuel Ashworth uncovered what’s going on underneath the scam of people promising to expose your book to “reading groups.” I’m now happy to just send this link when I get these inquiries.

From my friends McSweeney's this week, something other than the usual levity. Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte have been tracking the Trump administration “horrors” throughout his presidencies and this week we reached 580.

Recommendations

1. Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher
2. Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
3. Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis
4. Into the Woods by John York (
5. The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Karin R.

I’m going to take a shot here by recommending Max Barry’s Lexicon, a novel about secret agents who wield language as weapons.

I hope this one wasn’t too upsetting for folks, but I’ve had that Trump/Geek Love connection on my mind for months and wanted to float it to the world.

Next week, I won’t have a full post because I’m going to try to do a week without any deadlines for the first time in over two years as I spend time with the family at Christmas.

But…I am working on a present, free to all Biblioracle Recommends subscribers, so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Take care,

JW
The Biblioracle