Wednesday
I’m repurposing an essay I wrote two years ago applying Tale of Two Cities to the Trump family. Then I wrote about Jared and Ivanka celebrating in the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem at the same time that Israeli soldiers were killing over 50 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza while wounding many more. Now we’re watching the president tweet obsessively about non-existent voter fraud while ignoring the 10 million Covid cases and quarter of a million Covid deaths in his country. As with Dickens’s self-absorbed marquis, Trump sees Covid victims as an unfortunate bump that interfered with his gilded chariot ride.
And what a wild ride the past four years have been. Dicken talks of how the marquis to watch the crowds scatter before his stagecoach:
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way.
Covid interrupted Trump’s ride in a way that even impeachment failed to do. The novel’s equivalent interruption is a dead child. While Trump didn’t cause the Covid pandemic, his failure to address the pandemic has led the kind of desperation we see in the child’s father:
At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis—it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”
Not once has Trump taken responsibility for his handling of the pandemic, which is always someone else’s fault. Same with the marquis:
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up…
The skinflint Trump wouldn’t have even thrown out a gold coin, but other than that, like the marquis he all but blames Covid victims for his own misfortune. They messed up his campaign, just as the child victim may have hurt the horses.
Trump once famously aid, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He might just as well have said, “Let them eat cake.”