Monday
We’ve been listening to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House on our trip to Maine and that, combined with the January 6 Investigation Committee wrapping up its current set of hearings, lead me to associate Donald Trump with Harold Skimpole, one of the more disagreeable characters I’ve encountered in a while. At issue with both men is their utter lack of accountability.
Skimpole is a mildly talented artist who leeches off his friends, including the benevolent John Jardyce. He explains that he is an innocent child and therefore cannot be expected to be responsible. In the following passage, for instance, we see him answer a question about principle—or rather, his own lack of principles. The question is how he can leech from both parties in a dispute, to which, “in his gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile,” he replies,
Upon my life I have not the least idea! I don’t know what it is you call by that name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you possess it and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you heartily. But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don’t want it!
At one point he employs such reasoning to deny offering assistance to homeless orphan Joe:
“You had better turn him out,” said Mr. Skimpole.
“What do you mean?” inquired my guardian, almost sternly.
“My dear Jarndyce,” said Mr. Skimpole, “you know what I am: I am a child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional objection to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical man. He’s not safe, you know. There’s a very bad sort of fever about him.”
Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we stood by.
“You’ll say it’s childish,” observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at us. “Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten—you are arithmeticians, and I am not—and get rid of him!”
“And what is he to do then?” asked my guardian.
“Upon my life,” said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging smile, “I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he’ll do it.”
Now to an important observation by Liz Cheney in the January 6 hearings. She offered it to counter those arguing that Trump’s advisors, not Trump himself, should be held responsible for the attempted coup:
“In this version the president was, quote, poorly served by these outside advisors,” she said. “The strategy is to blame people his advisors called, quote, ‘the crazies’ for what Donald Trump did.”
“This of course is nonsense,” she said. “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
Far too many have used the Skimpole excuse for Trump, holding him to a lower standard because he behaves like a spoiled child. If he indeed thought that he won the election, they say, is he wrong to have attempted to reverse the results?
Bucket, the always hovering detective in Bleak House, has witnessed a number of Skimpoles and Trumps. As he notes to Esther Summerson, people who use the child excuse are remarkably good at getting money out of people:
Now, Miss Summerson, I’ll give you a piece of advice that your husband will find useful when you are happily married and have got a family about you. Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child,’ you consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held accountable and that you have got that person’s number, and it’s Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I’m a practical one, and that’s my experience. So’s this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one.
Donald Trump is fast and loose in everything, and it has proved to be a devastatingly effective way of prying money out of people—and of avoiding responsibility for his actions.
I haven’t yet finished Bleak House and so don’t know whether Skimpole is ever held to account for his irresponsible behavior. It doesn’t help, just as it doesn’t with Trump, that he has enablers. Chief among these is the benevolent John Jarndyce, who bails him out time and again. Trump’s enablers are not so beneficent but, over and over, they have allowed him to escape the consequences of his actions.
Unfortunately, as with Trump, others are harmed by Skimpole’s self-absorbed behavior. He graciously accepts a bribe from the unscrupulous lawyer Vole for an introduction to his acquaintance Richard Carstone. Carstone, who is already at risk of being captured by the unending and ruinous Jarndyce v Jarndyce case, goes on to be held captive by Vole’s empty assurances, with catastrophic consequences.
It’s particularly frustrating to encounter Skimpole at a time when I, like many Americans, hunger for accountability. If someone can get away with inciting an insurrection (not to mention all Trump’s other infractions), then “justice for all” is just an empty catchphrase. I haven’t finished Bleak House and so don’t know if Skimpole is ultimately held to account, and of course we don’t know how the Trump saga will end.
The suspense is intense.