Monday
As we await the continuation of the Congressional hearings on Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, my son Tobias Wilson-Bates has noted that the Trump cult reminds him of the sycophants in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Toby tweeted,
The Emperor’s New Clothes is an amazing theory of power. Like, there are so many levels to that story from the power of groupthink, to complex forms of commodity fetishism, and revolution. It’s all in there!
If that’s the case, will the investigative committee be like the little boy in the story, dispelling all illusions when it states the obvious?
The political obvious is that Donald Trump not only lost the election but then did everything he could to throw the election results into confusion, including incite his violent followers to threaten, intimidate, and otherwise pressure Mike Pence. When all his other attempts to overturn the results failed, his last best hope was to delay the certification of the election and hope that the resulting chaos would give him, as president and commander in chief, something to work with. When Pence refused to go along, Trump sicced his paramilitary supporters and an amped up crowd on him.
And yet, over half of all Republicans claim that Trump won the election and contend that the sacking of the Capitol was no big deal. Trump has been like the weavers in Andersen’s story, creating a fiction that his supporters convince themselves to believe.
The fiction in the story is a set of clothes that (so the two “weavers” contend) are so fine that they will be “invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.” They then proceed to do nothing at all with the fabrics they are given other than stuff them into their bags:
When the king can see nothing on their looms, he sends in his “honest old minister”:
Both the swindlers begged him to be so kind as to come near to approve the excellent pattern, the beautiful colors. They pointed to the empty looms, and the poor old minister stared as hard as he dared. He couldn’t see anything, because there was nothing to see. “Heaven have mercy,” he thought. “Can it be that I’m a fool? I’d have never guessed it, and not a soul must know. Am I unfit to be the minister? It would never do to let on that I can’t see the cloth.”
“Don’t hesitate to tell us what you think of it,” said one of the weavers.
“Oh, it’s beautiful—it’s enchanting.” The old minister peered through his spectacles. “Such a pattern, what colors!” I’ll be sure to tell the emperor how delighted I am with it.”
First this minister, then another, then the emperor himself, then his retinue convince themselves that the emperor is wearing magnificent new clothes. When the emperor goes on parade, the populace accepts the fiction as well:
So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!” Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.
Donald Trump has been weaving non-existent clothes his entire life. I thought for a while that his greatest con was first getting elected president and then convincing millions that he had done great things when in actuality he’d accomplished almost nothing of substance. Now, however, I’m not so sure. Maybe his greatest accomplishment has been convincing millions that he won an election he actually lost.
In the story, Andersen supposedly added the little boy who cries out the truth at the last moment, and my son observes that it may be the least realistic part of the story. After all, people who are duped would often rather cling to the deception than acknowledge they’ve been made fools of. As Toby notes, this ending is “an entirely too convenient deus ex machina in an otherwise perfect dystopian social horror!”
Here’s the moment of truth-telling:
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
This is the moment that people like me long for: the House investigators revealing the truth for all to see and the whole town at last crying out, “But he hasn’t got anything on!” Or in the words of Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who quoted Gertrude Stein after hearing from a Trump lawyer that there had been no significant voter fraud in the 2020 election, “So there’s no there there.”
In his final paragraph, Andersen himself suggests a more pessimistic ending. There we see things proceeding on just as before, the truth having made little impact:
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
That’s the secret to success as the GOP currently sees it. If they walk more proudly than ever, maybe they can keep the illusion going.
Further thought: Tom Nichols, a conservative and NeverTrumper, has offered up the following explanation for some of the willful blindness that one encounters amongst Trump supporters. It corresponds with the behavior depicted in Andersen’s story:
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
Nicols also quotes a passage from the film version of Jean le Carré’s novel Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Spy: A British spy says of a Soviet spy that he is “a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
Another poetic sighting:
Trump lawyer John Eastman, who at Trump’s behest tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election results, is in a lot of trouble since he appears to have acknowledged to witnesses that he knew doing so would be illegal. Realizing this, he sought a pre-pardon from Trump, writing, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
Some wag on twitter turned the request into a modernist poem:
I’ve decided
that I should
be on the pardon list,
if that
is still
in the works
Another tweeter, seeing resemblances between this and William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just to Say,” wrote the following:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast
I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works