I received an e-mail from reader Donna Raskin about how D. H Lawrence’s harrowing short story “the Rocking Horse Winner” reminds her of Donald Trump, and I instantly saw the connection. The story seems even more relevant with the recent publication of Vicky Ward’s Kushner, Inc.: Greed Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner […]
Monday The rise of white terrorism around the world is leading liberals like me to question some of our basic assumptions. Are our democratic institutions, which we took for granted, strong enough to withstand the murderous resentment of entitled people who feel threatened? Amongst the entitled I include both those wealthy individuals who countenance violence […]
Wednesday New Yorker writer Francisco Cantu has alerted me to an important book on the role that the frontier plays in the American imagination. Greg Gandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, traces Donald Trump’s wall back to America’s frontier days. I describe the […]
Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]
Thursday To defend the Trump Administration’s unconscionable actions on the U.S.-Mexico border, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen dodged and weaved as the House of Representatives grilled her yesterday. Disregarding conditions that a number of Congress members had witnessed with their own eyes, she insisted that children are not being taken away from their parents and […]
Tuesday Though I’ve compared Donald Trump several times to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (for instance, here), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has compared the Trump saga to another monster story that I hadn’t considered. Michael Cohen, she writes, is Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Renfield is a Dracula acolyte who has been imprisoned as a madman, […]
Thursday One of the interchanges in Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Investigation Committee yesterday jumped out at me because it had such an 18th century flavor to it. Kentucky Republican James Comer, seeking to undermine Cohen, challenged him with the following: Comer: “You called Trump a cheat. What would you call yourself?” […]
