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Tuesday
Because I switched from The New York Times to the Washington Post after their hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, I no longer have access to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Which is a pity because, even when I disagreed with her, I always appreciated her literary references. Recently I came across someone quoting a passage from a Dowd column where she piled one allusion on top of another:
No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever.
The image of Trump as a blood-sucking vampire lurking in his castle works for me. And the idea of his coming back from the dead seems fitting as well given that Trump was seen as down-and-out after his January 6 coup attempt. Would Mitch McConnell have persuaded colleagues to find him guilty in the impeachment hearings if he could have foreseen that Trump would be the 2024 GOP nominee for president?
It’s worth noting that Dracula is as much of a narcissist as Trump. Here he is telling Jonathan Harker about his dictatorial ancestor:
They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.
A dictator from day one, in other words.
Dracula has the same effect upon Harper that Trump has upon many of his critics:
As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.
Dracula, like Trump, has his fanatical supporters: the Romani, who attempt to protect him when Van Helsing and company track him down. The good news is that, in the end, he is decapitated and stabbed in the heart, at which point he crumbles to dust. Will Trump crumble away with these court hearings. We should be so lucky.
The albatross, of course, comes from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For having shot the albatross, a benign and friendly bird that is doing harm to no one, the mariner has the bird hung around his neck (no small burden given that albatrosses are huge birds). Think of the albatross as America’s multicultural democracy. Killing the bird leads to a crisis aboard the ship, which happens to be our case as well. Pray that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at the albatross.
The mariner is able to find redemption through repentance. No one thinks there is any chance that Trump will do the same.