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Wednesday
Here’s a tiny item that caught my eye, largely because it’s an instance of a Trump enthusiast using a well-known story to praise his idol, only to expose a darker truth. Apparently Cardone Capital founder Grant Cardone informed Laura Ingraham of Fox News that Trump is proving all the experts wrong with his tariffs. The president, he insisted, does indeed have “the Midas touch” and is turning everything he touches into gold.
I doubt whether Trump’s constantly shifting tariff goals will actually bring manufacturing back to the United States, as Cardone insists, but let’s take a look at the Midas story. The “Midas touch,” as we learn from the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses, is not a good thing.
Not that Trump would acknowledge this. Apparently in 2011 he “co-authored” a book (which means that his co-author did all the writing) entitled Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich — And Why Most Don’t.
Most of Trump’s critics, of course, counterclaim that everything Trump touches turn to s**t, not gold. And then there’s the memorable summation by former-GOP consultant and founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project that “everything Trump touches dies” (ETTD for short). This in fact is what happens in the story.
As Ovid tells it, when King Midas is granted a special wish by the Bacchanalian god Silenus, he unfortunately gets what he asks for:
Give me, says he (nor thought he ask’d too much),
That with my body whatsoe’er I touch,
Changed from the nature which it held of old,
May be converted into yellow gold.
He had his wish; but yet the God repined,
To think the fool no better wish could find.
At first, Midas is like Trump in the White House, who appears to add gold gilding to every cornice piece he can find:
Down from a lowly branch a twig he drew,
The twig strait glitter’d with a golden hue:
He takes a stone, the stone was turn’d to gold;
A clod he touches, and the crumbling mold
Acknowledg’d soon the great transforming pow’r,
In weight and substance like a mass of ore.
His hand he careless on a pillar lays.
With shining gold the fluted pillars blaze
The Ovid version of the Greek myth surprised me in that it does not include the episode where Midas’s daughter runs to embrace him, only to be turned into a statue upon contact. We find it in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Golden Touch,” however:
Alas, what had he done? How fatal was the gift which the stranger bestowed! The moment the lips of Midas touched Marygold’s forehead, a change had taken place. Her sweet, rosy face, so full of affection as it had been, assumed a glittering yellow color, with yellow teardrops congealing on her cheeks. Her beautiful brown ringlets took the same tint. Her soft and tender little form grew hard and inflexible within her father’s encircling arms. Oh, terrible misfortune! The victim of his insatiable desire for wealth, little Marygold was a human child no longer, but a golden statue!
Perhaps the only difference between Midas and Trump is that, whereas Trump sees nothing wrong with draining the life out of everything he touches, Ovid’s Midas at least has regrets:
O father Bacchus, I have sinned, he cried,
And foolishly thy gracious gift applied;
Thy pity now, repenting, I implore;
Oh! may I feel the golden plague no more.
There’s a further twist to the Midas story that also applies to Trump. Midas is chosen as one of the judges in a musical contest between Apollo with his lute and Pan with his reed pipes. The other judges have high musical tastes and so realize that Pan’s music does no more than please “the low taste of all the vulgar throng” whereas Apollo is a true master:
High on the left his iv’ry lute he rais’d,
The lute, embossed with glitt’ring jewels, blazed
In his right hand he nicely held the quill,
His easy posture spoke a master’s skill.
The strings he touched with more than human art,
Which pleased the judge’s ear, and sooth’d his heart;
Who soon judiciously the palm decreed,
And to the lute postponed the squeaking reed.
Because Midas esteems Pan’s “squeaking reed” over Apollo’s “more than human art,” the latter god punishes him by endowing him with ass ears. Or as Ovid puts it, “fixed on his noddle an unseemly pair,/ Flagging, and large, and full of whitish hair.”
Apollo would no doubt do the same for Trump after the president, deciding that Washington’s esteemed Kennedy Center needed someone like him to run it, fired the board and changed the program. In his opinion, the concert hall should be performing musical hits from the 1980s, like Cats and Les Mis. Meanwhile, Rep. Bog Ordan (R-MO) has introduced a bill that would rename the Kennedy Center after Trump.
In other words, everything that our Midas touches dies.
