SEEING IS DISBELIEVING: Yeah, I saw the speech. That’s one hour and 47 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. As speeches go, I’d say this one qualifies as an act of auto-erotic asphyxiation. To be clear, the asphyxiation was all mine; the auto-erotic gratification strictly his.
And no, it was not good for me.
I pretend no open-minded dispassion where Donald J. Trump is concerned. If he were to come up with a cure for cancer, I’m sure I’d find myself rooting for cancer.
Not even my dog, McDuff — who happily parks himself on the floor next to me while I waste what’s left of my life watching Law & Order reruns — would stay in the room. It’s a Pavlovian thing: He hears Trump’s voice, and I hear the dog-door swinging. McDuff knows there’s a reason Trump’s the first president in the last two centuries who didn’t have a dog.
My brother Joseph suggested that a bottle of Sagamore Rye might help. It’s high-grade hooch made not far from where my brother lives outside of Washington, D.C. It’s also pretty close to the canal where 300 million gallons of raw sewage have burst loose into the Potomac River. The spill first surfaced January 19. This past weekend, the federal government finally officially declared it an emergency.
It’s like that.
I have been warned against forcing deeper metaphorical meaning out of random fact patterns. But some metaphors just make themselves — 300 million gallons of raw sewage in the nation’s capital?
I bring this up not out of some juvenile fixation — a delight, really — with bodily excretions. Instead, it offers an irresistible “through line” — one of those phrases du jour that can’t disappear soon enough — for some startlingly apt historical analogs.
I know a lot of Lefty hysterics run around calling Trump the second coming of Hitler. But no. There are two better body doubles lurking in the historical past.
Initially, I thought of Benito Mussolini, the notorious Italian fascist, famous for publicly forcing massive quantities of castor oil down the throats of his political opponents. Mussolini knew that with enough castor oil, the body explodes in a fecal eruption on a Vesuvian scale.
It’s all about the humiliation.
Even better is the French king Louis XIV, who lived from 1638 to 1715. Louis is best remembered for coining the pithy epigram, “L’État, c’est moi,” which means, “The state, it is I.” No more succinct blueprint of Trump’s essential MO could be stated. Trump rules by executive fiat, issuing one executive order after the next, forever daring the Supreme Court to draw a Constitutional line in the sand.
No, he never quite said, “You and what army?” He didn’t have to. When last week, the Supreme Court justices ruled 6-3 that the law Trump relied on to impose so many tariffs didn’t say what Trump said it did and that the tariffs were not legal, he went as Vesuvian as Mussolini’s victims. He called the justices “fools,” “lap dogs,” and stooges of “foreign interests.” Not only should they be ashamed of themselves, he ranted, but so should their own families.
Maybe I was subliminally hoping that Trump would show up Tuesday night for the State of the Union. Instead, he glowed with faux magnanimity as he surrounded himself with the victorious American men’s Olympic hockey team and military heroes — some young, two 100 years old — ordering his generals-in-waiting to pin medals of honor on them.
That’s where things got uncomfortably auto-erotic.
Louis XIV wrote the book on being an “absolute monarch.” His nickname was “Sun King”; his middle name translates to “God given.” Louis famously domesticated France’s feudal nobility by forcing them to leave their independent fiefdoms and move into the Mar-a-Largo of the time, the Palace of Versailles, where the king’s censors could read everybody’s mail. That is when the censors were not otherwise occupied screening everything published in the entire country.
Like Trump, Louis had to be the center of attention at all times. “There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or to put it more bluntly, adulation,” wrote one of the king’s memoirists. “The coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.” Those who didn’t fawn endlessly over the little Sun King paid a steep price. With one hand, he limited the power of the Catholic Church; with the other, he persecuted the Protestants. No one could take any independent action unless they cleared it with him first.
One contemporary observer described Louis XIV’s rule as “a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique.”
Sound familiar?
Not to beat a dead horse, but the Palace of Versailles reeked of a hundred uncleaned outhouses no matter how much the occupants drenched themselves with perfume. Yes, there were toilets, but not remotely enough for all the nobles in attendance; chamber pots were dumped indiscriminately both inside and outside the palace. By the most clinical measures, it was a shit show.
As for Louis himself, he took maybe three baths his entire life, believing water on the skin opened the pores of his body to disease. RFK Jr., the man now rescuing measles from the brink of eradication and ushering in the biggest outbreak since a vaccine was invented in 1963, would have fit right in. Louis’s health problems — a painful rectal fistula for which he was operated on without anesthesia — became the stuff of legend. Ultimately, he would die of festering gangrene. His final words? “I depart, but the State shall always remain.”
Let’s hope not. The Sagamore Rye, by the way, was nice. Just not nearly nice enough.
