Monday
I owe today’s essay to a recent Tom Nichols observation. When a reported Iranian assassination plot had DJT being secretly whisked away from his plane in a catering cart, with accompanying journalists and staff members left behind as decoys, the national security expert for The Atlantic recalled two scenes from cinema before settling on a Stephen King reference.
First, he mentioned the escape scene in the first Fab Four film:
One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi. They duck in alleys, they dodge around corners, and in one scene, they all jump into a taxi and then climb out the other side and get in a different taxi. It’s a wonderful, exhilarating sequence.
“It seems less fun,” Nichols adds, “when the president of the United States does it.”
At the thought of Trump climbing into a catering container with “three of his White House footmen,” Nichols’s mind then shifts to the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera before ending at our master of horror and suspense:
When Trump ducked out of that 747, he was not channeling John Lennon or Groucho Marx. Instead, he affirmed that the character he most resembles is Greg Stillson, Stephen King’s cowardly presidential contender in the novel The Dead Zone. Stillson’s candidacy ends when he tries to shield himself from an assassin by holding a child in front of him.
I checked out Dead Zone after reading the comment and discovered it was all too close to our own situation. That’s largely because it too features a huckster—a former Bible salesman, now a mayor—who is on the political fast track upwards. While possessing immense charm, Stillson has a vicious streak and at one point, unseen, kicks a dog to death. (This brings to mind what Kristi Noem did to curry favor with Trump—boasting about shooting her dog Cricket apparently helped her become Trump’s director of Homeland Security and overseer of ICE operations.) The novel’s protagonist, who has developed second sight after a childhood accident, foresees that Stillson will one day become president and unleash nuclear Armageddon on the world.
The novel therefore presents us with a classic ethical question: If you knew the future and had the means and opportunity, would you kill Hitler before he rose to power. After much internal debate, Johnny Smith does indeed decide to shoot Stillson but is killed by his bodyguards before getting off a shot. He dies thinking he has failed.
Nevertheless, he accomplishes his goal when a photographer gets a shot of the scene Nichols mentions. Here’s the scene:
Stillson moved with good speed for such a big man. The dark-haired young woman Johnny had noticed earlier was about hallway up the center aisle, holding her crying son in her arms, still trying to shield him with her body. And what Stillson did then so dumbfounded Johnny that he almost dropped the rifle altogether. He snatched the boy from his mother’s arms, whirled toward the gallery, holding the boy’s body in front of him. It was no longer Greg Stillson in the front sight, but a small squirming figure…
At that point Johnny lowers his gun, even though he knows the future of the world is at stake.
As Nichols notes, however, Stillson has been exposed and knows it. “Never mind this guy,” he says to his bodyguards. “Find the son of a bitch that took that picture. Smash his camera.”
Only they don’t succeed. And when the dying Johnny reaches out and touches Stillson—touching the subject is necessary to activate his second sight—he realizes that “everything had changed.” Because of the incriminating photo, Stillson’s political career will end:
Touching Stillson this time had been like touching a blank. Dead battery. Fallen tree. Empty house. Bare bookshelves. Wine bottles ready for candles.
It sounds like a description of DJT’s interior landscape.
His version of “smash his camera” may be ordering the Department of Justice to investigate the reporters who revealed that his Qatari jet, despite the millions spent on it, was not yet ready for prime time. He even accused them of treason. Nichols explains he didn’t want the truth to come out
because it makes him look cowardly and puts the lie to all his happy talk about the war. Trump has crowed—as he did at the time in Turkey—that the Iranians are beaten and pleading for a deal. In truth, the Iranians might have been planning to blow the president of the United States and some of his top officials to smithereens.
While we have no photo of Trump in a catering container, memes imagining him in various cowering positions have exploded on social media (see above for an example). Along with the scene in Dead Zone, it also brings to mind the moment when Jimmy Carter, out fishing in a boat, scared away a swamp rabbit swimming towards him. A headline in the Washington Post announced, “Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President” (it must have been a slow news day), and Ronald Reagan would later use the photo to contend that Carter was a wimp who couldn’t stand up to world threats.
Unlike Stillson, Trump became president. Still, the catering container memes may further undermine his crumbling authority.
