Monday
John Stoehr, who edits The Editorial Board, had a provocative column recently that is worth contemplating on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Stoehr argues that sadism is the animating principle of the Republican Party, with Donald Trump being its purest expression. Whether this is in fact true of most Republicans, Trump himself is certainly sadistic, and his sadism thrills a number of his followers.
While I haven’t used the word “sadistic” in the past to describe the president, I have compared him to Iago and Milton’s Satan, both of whom are motivated by a dark malevolence. In Trump’s case, we first saw signs of his sadism when he told police officers to hurt suspects in custody and when he recommended waterboarding (and far worse) for people accused of terrorism. (Candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz soon followed suit.) Once Trump became president, we saw him ending Temporary Protected Status programs (TPS) for groups of immigrants who had fled disasters and attacking Obama’s DACA program for the Dreamers. Then he ripped thousands of children from their parents, and he is punishing millions in a government shutdown designed to get him his vanity wall. In his latest “compromise offer” to Democrats, he will stop persecuting TPS and DACA recipients for three years if he is given what he wants. In short, he uses cruelty as leverage.
Less seriously but no less revealing, he goes out of his way to humiliate those whom he has fired.
His followers, meanwhile, appear to approve of his behavior. Stoehr quotes one Trump voter who, distraught over being victimized by the government shutdown, complained, “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
I talk about the power of resentment in my book How Beowulf Can Save America and how to fight back. The first step is to see resentment as the monstrous force it is. It feeds off its conviction that other people (Trump targets people of color and Muslims) are getting more than their fair share:
Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet . . .
We then see the sadistic joy that Grendel takes in tearing people apart:
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picture the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh.
Or as the narcissistic Satan puts it in Paradise Lost, “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts.”
The GOP, like the Danes, have been pulled into Grendel’s resentful energy and cannot stop the monster’s nightly attacks. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, appears to be maintaining a firm handgrip, as does, in another sphere, Robert Mueller. Going by the poem, if the two hold tight, Trump will panic and tear himself apart:
The captain of evil discovered himself
in a handgrip harder than anything
he had ever encountered in any man
on the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
He was desperate to flee to his den and hide
with the devil’s litter, for in all his days
He had never been clamped or cornered like this.
In the end, the monster destroys itself:
The monster’s whole
body was in pain; a tremendous wound
Appeared on his shoulder. Sinews split
and the bone-lappoings burst. Beowulf was granted
the glory of winning. Grendel was driven
under the fen-banks, fatally hurt,
to his desolate lair.
It takes courage, steadfast vision, and a certain amount of power to pull off this result. We watch Pelosi and Mueller as breathlessly as the Danes watch Beowulf.