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Thursday
A month ago, when Trump was stirring up the news cycle by threatening to take Greenland away from Denmark—Vice President Vance even visited a U.S. military base in Greenland–authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder invoked Danish fairy tale author Hans Christian Anderson. What we saw in Greenland, he wrote, was “American imperialism with no clothes. Naked and vain.”
After reading Snyder’s essay, I went back and reread “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for the first time since childhood. What I encountered was a perfect description of how an authoritarian conman like Trump operates. The president is not only the emperor in the story. He is also the swindlers who weave the non-existent gown.
The GOP, meanwhile, are the sycophants who surround the emperor while Trump’s followers are the townspeople who cheer him on.
Trump’s imperialist ambitions make no sense, Snyder points out, because the U.S. is getting everything it wants from current arrangements with Greenland. If, for the sake of a differently colored map, the U.S. were to seize the autonomous Danish province, it would actually end up with less. As Snyder explains,
There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last eighty years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations. Musk-Trump are creating the bloodily moronic situation in which the United States will have to fight wars to get the things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking. And of course wars rarely turn out the way one expects.
Back to the story. In one way, it captures Trump successfully in how it depicts the emperor as vainglorious and in love with show. All hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas:
Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so monstrous fond of fine new clothes that he spent all his money on being really smart. He didn’t care about his army, he didn’t care for going to the play, or driving out in the park, unless it was to show his new clothes. He had a coat for every hour in the day; and just as people say about a king, that “he’s holding a council”, so in this country they always said, “The Emperor is in his dressing room.”
Yes, we have a wannabe emperor who is more interested in Red Square-type military parades than in keeping the country safe.
In the weavers, however, we see how Trump has been able to pull off his con. Like him, they have a genius for creating an alternate reality:
[O]ne day there arrived two swindlers. They gave out that they were weavers, and said they knew how to make the loveliest stuff that could possibly be imagined. Not only were the colors and patterns extraordinarily pretty, but the clothes that were made of the stuff had this marvelous property: that they were invisible to anyone who was either unfit for his situation or else was intolerably stupid.
Going along with the con becomes the major criteria for advancement in this kingdom:
“Very excellent clothes those must be,” thought the Emperor; “if I wore them I could tell which are the men in my realm who aren’t fit for the posts they hold. I could tell clever people from stupid ones…
In other words, only those who are willing to say that 2+2=5 need apply. And so it happens:
So the worthy old minister went into the hall where the two swindlers were sitting working at the bare loom. “Heaven help us,” thought the old minister, staring with all his eyes; “I can’t see a thing”; but he didn’t say so.
Both the swindlers begged him to be pleased to step nearer, and asked if here was not a pretty pattern, and beautiful colours; and they pointed to the bare looms, and the poor old minister kept staring at it, but he couldn’t see anything, because there was nothing to be seen. “Gracious goodness!” thought he; “can I be stupid? I never thought so, and nobody must get to know it. Can I be unfit for my office? No, no! It won’t do for me to say I can’t see the stuff.” “Well, have you nothing to say about it?” said the one who was weaving.
“Oh, it’s charming! Most delightful!” said the old minister, looking through his spectacles. “The pattern! The color! Yes, indeed, I must tell the Emperor I am infinitely pleased with it.”
Meanwhile, the weavers continue to behave in Trumpian fashion:
The swindlers now demanded more money and more silk and gold to be used in the weaving. They pocketed it all; not a thread was put up, but they went on, as before, weaving at the bare loom.
By the end of the story, practically the whole city has bought into the fraud:
So the Emperor walked in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and everybody in the streets and at the windows said: “Lord! How splendid the Emperor’s new clothes are. What a lovely train he has to his coat! What a beautiful fit it is!” Nobody wanted to be detected seeing nothing: that would mean that he was no good at his job, or that he was very stupid. None of the Emperor’s costumes had ever been such a success.
This is why it’s so important not to normalize Trump, which is why many activists have been criticizing the mainstream media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, for doing so. Trump wins once organizations and people tacitly agree to ignore the fact that he set his thugs on the Capitol and that he is an adjudicated rapist. In fact, too many in the media and the GOP take their cue from those watching the procession and not in the fact that the emperor is naked.
The story perhaps departs from the Trump case in one respect. Given how the president appears to escape accountability at every turn, the story may more of a wish fulfillment than an accurate depiction of what happens when the truth is revealed:
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” said a little child. “Lor! Just hark at the innocent,” said its father. And one whispered to the other what the child had said: “That little child there says he hasn’t got anything on.”
“Why, he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole crowd was shouting at last…”
The Emperor’s response is familiar, however. While, unlike Trump, he has a moment of self-doubt, very much like Trump he brazens it out. Meanwhile his ministers, like GOP members of Congress, follow along obediently:
[T]he Emperor’s flesh crept, for it seemed to him [the people] were right. “But all the same,” he thought to himself, “I must go through with the procession.” So he held himself more proudly than before, and the lords in waiting walked on bearing the train—the train that wasn’t there at all.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump famously declared in 2016. I’m also thinking they wouldn’t say anything if he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue butt naked.
