Comment by Steve Gold
23 January 2024
This was such a great comment that I thought it deserved its own entry:
The would-be dictator on his way to absolute power must destroy confidence in every other potential source of authority, personal or institutional. There can be no doctor who knows more about medicine than he does, no general who is a shrewder military strategist, no woman who can credibly attack his morality, no journalist who can reveal his undeniable errors and lies, no judge or legislator who can check or balance his executive power, no religious leader who can assert that a greater executive has issued higher laws.
Trump cannot and will not see that he is subject to any authority greater than his own, that no authority besides his own is even imaginable. If he deigned to limn the relationship between himself and others, it would be the relationship that Gloucester described in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.”
Because no power has ever constrained Trump, he lives as though there is none that can. But how is he wrong? What is there that can even erode, let alone crack through the supremest of narcissism? How can solipsism acknowledge a disputant? Did Napoleon understand, finally, when he saw his empire shrunken to tiny Elba? Did Rasputin understand, finally, when he could no longer shrug off the multiple deaths imposed on him? Did Hitler understand, finally, as he put his pistol to his head?
The reality Trump lives in shares nothing of significance with our common reality. It is therefore immune to any imposition from our reality, except perhaps an imposition sufficient to destroy it. I don’t like this conclusion, but I am led to it.
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