The illiterate lion of literary literacy

by David Benjamin

“It became necessary for me to choose whether, using only the existing means, agencies, and processes which Congress had provided, I should let the Government fall at once into ruin or whether, availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection, I would make an effort to save it, with all its blessings, for the present age and for posterity.” —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

MADISON, Wis.—Despite rumors to the contrary, the current occupant of the Oval Office is not literally illiterate. Despite frequent fits of hysterical punctuation and onsets of spastic capitalization, the president has demonstrated a rudimentary command of the tweeted word. Witnesses have verified his ability to convincingly peruse “documents” (one of his favorite words) of a page or less.

It is said that, while attending two universities, Donald Trump turned in a number of papers assigned by professors. But no available evidence supports this improbable assertion, partly because all of Trump’s transcripts have been secreted in hermetically sealed Mason jars, never to be breached under penalty of burning at the stake, in the root cellar of the Wharton School. Moreover, the fact that the president in his student days had scads of his daddy’s money available to bestow upon impoverished honor students willing to sit in class, take tests and write papers for the gilded scion of Jamaica Estates.

However, despite the basic literacy of a president whose grasp of the Constitution suggests a roughly third-grade reading level, Donald Trump has sent thousands of observers to the library in prolific efforts of looking-stuff-up. While the term “unprecedented” has become the go-to adjective for the travesties of this regime, op-ed pundits, political scientists and presidential historians have undertaken a hard-target search for historical parallels and fitting metaphors for the carnage—bull in a china shop, turd in the punchbowl—that Trump hath wrought.

A telling example is a recent essay, in the Times, “Why Trump Always Needs a Crisis,” by Jamelle Bouie. Almost before Bouie’s analysis is out of the gate, he cites three federal laws—namely the the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977—that Trump’s flunkies dutifully read aloud and explained to him, which the president then gleefully misused to commit high crimes and misdemeanors.

In his argument against Trump’s abuse of these statutes, Bouie proceeds—within the space of roughly a thousand words—to cogently quote six different sources, including Abraham Lincoln’s reluctant justification for invoking his power to use military force against an insurrection.

To wit, Bouie quotes Gary Wills, perhaps the most eloquent ethicist of his generation. He quotes John Adams on the British constitution and finds a comment, offered in 1765, by a Maryland lawyer, Daniel Dulaney. Finally, in support of the constitutional system of checks and balances now being violated daily by Trump, Bouie cites historian Bernard Bailyn and quotes Massachusetts lawyer James Otis who said in 1782, before the Constitution was ratified, “… when the checks and balances are preserved, is perhaps the most perfect form of government, that in its present depraved state, human nature is capable of.”

The spectacle of a president who doesn’t read and doesn’t understand what’s recited to him—rather like a toddler whose mom reads him to sleep with passages from Bertrand Russell—has expanded, as it has for Jamelle Bouie and so many Trump analysts, my reading load. For me, the quest is literary. There are many examples in literature of megalomania, malignant narcissism, petty vindictiveness, childish cruelty and plain old creepiness. So far, the most chilling volume on my list of literary Trump parallels has been Lord of the Flies, which I wrote about last year. I’ve discussed the eerie similarity of the vast effigies of Big Brother in 1984 and Trump’s building-size blow-ups of his self-iconic Fulton County mug shot. In each of his terms in office, I’ve compared and contrasted Trump to Berzelius Windrip, the dictator of Sinclair Lewis’ prophetic It Can’t Happen Here.

Right now, as I read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, I already have a sense that the story’s demonic but politically deft despot, Willie Talos, is a poor match to Trump. Willie—modeled after Huey Long—would be rightly insulted at the parallel, because the defining brilliance in Talos is his knack for reading people and manipulating them accordingly. Indeed, like Trump, he’s a bully, but he bullies more charmingly and subtly than the Donald could ever manage.

Lately, also, I’m re-reading Richard Hofstadter, whose historical analyses are essential sources for plumbing the American psyche. Hofstadter books that everyone’s looking up nowadays are two masterworks, Anti-Intellectualism in American Society and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. If you want to understand—using Trump’s formulation, “What the hell is going on?”—you’re advised to bone up on Hofstadter.

As we talk about reading, of course, the irony of a president allergic to reading is that he’s so easy to read. Vladimir Putin had him at “Hello.” One by one, the con man of “The Apprentice” has been sequentially conned into acquiescence and obeisance by the most obvious gangsters of our time—Bibi and, Kim, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping. The list goes on. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy—although visibly disgusted by the effort—has figured out how to humor the big lug.

The word often cited by reporters covering the recent Ukraine emergency summit, during which the leaders of the free world crashed the Oval Office, was “flattery.” The whole crew knew that the way to Trump’s heart is to lie to his face about what a swell guy he is. Want Trump to turn over his firstborn daughter or current wife? Tell him he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Freedonia. (Don’t worry, he’s never seen Duck Soup and has no idea he’s the second coming of Rufus T. Firefly.)

Of course, when critiquing Trump’s myriad outrages and excesses, there is a dilemma in citing classic histories, academic sources, learned scholars, bleeding heart liberals like Abe Lincoln, and even Marx Brothers movies. Each reference, however apt and revealing, reinforces the canard among Trump’s cultists that he is the victim of egghead elitists who hold in contempt the “poorly educated” whom Trump says he loves (but doesn’t like them to touch him).

Trump doesn’t read. He isn’t curious. That’s why he doesn’t know much—well, anything—about art, music, literature, drama, history, geography. But he knows what he likes. He hates what he doesn’t like. He didn’t like school. He hated his teachers. He really didn’t like going to college, where the teachers were mean to him and everyone was smarter. Trump shares and nurses his myriad deficiencies, insecurities, resentments and animosities with millions who hated school and entered adulthood with lousy grades. He’s the patron saint of everyone who has felt as though all those snotty honor students and college-bound smarty-pantses have been sneering at them since kindergarten.

Trump never talks about what he’s been reading, because he doesn’t read. He doesn’t learn because he already knows everything he needs to know. Defiant ignorance is his bond with his people.

The irony of Donald Trump is that he has inspired more reading, among those of us trying to figure out why he has attained more power—despite a pathetic dearth of intellectual capacity and a complete absence of decency—than any previous president. But all this study and footnoted analysis is the secret of his success and the seed of our impotence. We read, therefore we are wrong.