MAUREEN DOWD
Trump, American Monster
June 11, 2022, 10:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen
Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they
used to be.
I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary
Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an
elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of
Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator,
Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his
loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust
from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black
lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
“Every where I see bliss, from which I
alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery
made me a fiend.”
Before he disappears
into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had “high
thoughts of honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” of malignant deeds piled
up.
Shelley’s monster,
unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to
feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from
pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his
vile mendacity.
It never for a moment crossed Donald
Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a
debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the
Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.
We listened Thursday night to the
frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to
fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.
The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time
hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the
presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away
convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!
The hearing drove
home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government.
If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the
Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump
said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that
day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”
Liz Cheney cleverly
used the words of former Trump aides to show that, despite his malevolent
bleating, Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the
election results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with
the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I
told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump
— in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I
respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the
prize for gall in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for
sleazeballs to pay attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit
over the sleazeball in the Oval.)
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly
that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled
a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of
pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on
social media with the Big Lie.
It was fine with him
if his followers broke the law and attacked the police and went to jail, while
he praised their “love” from afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.
Everywhere you look,
there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein”
is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”
Russia, also in the grip of a monster,
is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except
Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.
In Uvalde, the unfathomable story
unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour
because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
Greedy golf icons joined a tour
underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a
journalist dismembered. (Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his
government position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his
new private equity firm.)
As Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the
committee, noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British.
This time it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the
democracy he swore to protect.
“They did so at the encouragement of
the president of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop
the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”
It’s mind-boggling
that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only
about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating
her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or
studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”
Let some
conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly
refuse to run them.
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing
a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even
Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million
viewers.
Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol
Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back
up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she
recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I
was — it was carnage.”
In his dystopian
Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he
delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and
not just in the court of public opinion.