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gromet's avatar

It is fascinating, the extent to which our 45th president (still hard to type that) is a literary character more than a real person. That is, a snarl of discernible cause and effect and metaphor and metonymy, a composition of depths so easy to perceive that he becomes a kind of poetry, meant to be understood, to clarify the world. Most real people are ill-defined, full of contradictions and mysteries, dozens of causes crashing into each other inside a black box before they emerge as effects.

Obviously part of the reason Trump is not a black box is that the presidency puts a man (or let's hope, soon a woman) under a magnifying glass for years, not one minute out from under it. So you might feel you know Joe Biden as well as you know your own sister who moved to Utah. In fact Biden plays as unusually clear too, partly because he's less a snarl of a man; so it might be more instructive to compare Trump to Hillary, McCain, Cheney, Kerry, W, Pence, Clinton -- none of those national figures really ever threw light on the human experience like Trump does. Not even Obama, who spent so much care writing about his life, parsing his own motives; for all that, Obama remains too complicated to have a plain effect on the narrative the way Trump does. Obama remains human. Trump is literary.

The enormous problem is that Trump is a composition in a cautionary tale, or perhaps a bitter satire, that is being read by millions as a heroic epic.

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Cassandra's Grandson's avatar

As noted elsewhere ~ there really is a pony in all that horse-hockey ... !

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