Friday
Those of us interested in cultural allusions were struck by a recent Donald Trump Tuesday tweet referencing Mutiny on the Bounty. Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s reflections on the reference alerted me to even better one: Trump as the captain in David Eggers’s comic novel The Captain and the Glory. It so happens that Eggers’s captain is based on Trump, and the parallels are spot on.
Trump’s tweet requires some deciphering:
“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
The governors have started setting up multi-state consortiums to address the pandemic. (When it’s working properly, the federal government should be that consortium.) So is Trump thinking of himself as Captain Bligh and perhaps New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as first mate Fletcher Christian? Is he in effect saying, in a patronizing manner, “Ah, isn’t it cute– the governors are declaring their independence when it would be so much easier just to ask me for help?”
That he sees the governors as mutinying is revealing.
Of course, they’ve more or less given up asking for help given how little good it’s done them. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday,
We have gotten very little help from the federal government…I’ve given up on any promises that have been made. I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don’t expect it anymore.
Unlike Trump, however, Bligh is an accomplished captain, even if he shares his brutishness. When cast adrift, he somehow manages to navigate a lifeboat with 19 passengers 3500 miles to safety. Would that we had someone with these abilities guiding our ship of state.
Or a captain like Brett Crozier, who warned that authorities that Covid-19 was rampaging through his aircraft carrier and was subsequently fired for his truth telling. (One sailor has since died and 580 have tested positive.) (Update: The number is now 655, with six sailors hospitalized.)
A more accurate parallel is Trump as Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. There we encounter a captain who freezes whenever action gets too hot to handle. At one point, he flees rather than escort low-lying landing craft to their line of departure, at another he freaks out in the face of a typhoon. Our own captain is doing all he can to avoid responsibility and escape reality.
Queeg also falls apart on the witness stand, just as Trump breaks into a rage when asked tough questions by reporters.
Milbank, however, has steered me to a much better parallel in Eggers’s novel. Here goes:
He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.
This is what it has felt like to have Trump as our president for the past three and a half years. Pray to God that the American public rises up in November and replaces him. Such mutinies have the full support of the Constitution.
Further thought: I just have a new take on Trump’s tweet after seeing new tweets where he is supports people defying governors’ settle-in-place orders: he imagines he is one of the mutineers (“exciting and invigorating”) rather than captain of the ship.