With all the blame for Donald Trump’s rise to power, the last culprits to be accused are his ardent followers. The limitless control of the people’s passion is usually blamed on the tyrant, not on his victims. Pundits see him as a manipulator of the minds of battered citizens, longing for a champion.
But what if the citizens are the enablers?
Enabler: a person who encourages or enables negative or
self-destructive behavior in another.
What if the people have made Donald Trump what he is, by egging him on with delight of his disdain for the heartless bureaucrats of Washington? What if Trump was more the fulfillment of the people’s revenge, their “retribution,” than the ruthless tyrant grasping for control?
This is not to absolve the ex-President for his part in enraging the voter: In The Art of the Deal he confides, “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” [ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/is-passion-meant-for-politics/402457/]. Clearly Trump knows what he is doing.
But as he labors under the weight of huge legal losses, most recently of $83.3 million dollars for defamation of E. Jean Carroll, as he stammers at his rallies, confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, as he makes self-defeating threats (“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp”), he loses stature and becomes the fabrication of the people.
Lately the former President’s public appearances have shown more frustration than unflappable leadership. Viewers are reminded of his age and the burdens he carries, as he exits the courtroom before the charge to the jury in the defamation suit against him. While the subject of aging is usually applied to the current President, the former one, himself, is 77.
His fuel remains the public passion at his rallies. He comes from them energized and ready to face his enemies in the courtroom. So who is manipulating whom? Are Trump’s loyal fans generating the zeal for his campaign or are they enabling a driven man, unable to control his ambition? Are they propping up a staggering figurehead, someone on a collision course with disaster?
Shakespeare had insight into the psychology of the tragic politician. In his critical study of Shakespeare’s tyrants, Stephen Greenblatt speculates:
“How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne?
Such as disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? . . . Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?” Tyrant, pp. 1-2
Greenblatt compared some of the great tyrants in Shakespeare’s repertoire, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear and Coriolanus, in his study of famed tragic figures. He found that they were not merely repulsive in their lust for power, but fascinating for their ability to magnetize people to follow them.
The identification with power is as strong as the loathing for it. Every tyrant has his enablers, hoping to gain by his abuses. Greeblatt suggests that even the audience to the drama, detached by their safe viewpoint, has a morbid fascination for tyrannical power. They fantasize, as Trump suggests in The Art of the Deal. Regarding Richard III, Shakespeare’s most ruthless and murderous tyrant, Greeblatt says:
“We are charmed again and again by the villain’s outrageousness by his indifference to the ordinary norms of human decency, by lies that seem to be effective even though no one believes them. Looking out from the stage. Richard invites us not only to share his gleeful contempt but also to experience for ourselves what it is to succumb to what we know to be loathsome. ” Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, pp. 81-82.
As the former President’s devotees play the spectator to an epic drama of a man hurling himself toward tragedy or triumph, they should consider: could we be enablers of a man unable to control himself? Are we using Donald Trump as our proxy for power? Are we testing his limits, because he has inflated ours? What about the media? Are they complicit in this unraveling tragedy? Are they enabling the goose that laid the golden egg? When the goose is exhausted beyond rejuvenation, who gets the blame?
A perspective on the possible fate of the tragic politician.
