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Friday
Watching Donald Trump “negotiate” a tariff trade deal with China brings to mind my favorite character in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. I first compared Trump to Nozdrev in 2017 and then again in 2023, although the comparison evolved so that I came to see Trump less as a Nozdrev and more as a Chichikov, another Gogol conman but one far more noxious. Or rather, I saw Trump evolving from a Nozdrev to a Chichikov.
Like Trump, Chichikov eventually wrangles a government position that gives him opportunities for endless grift. The comparison ends there, however, as Trump has risen to a position beyond Chichikov’s wildest imaginings, one from where he is doing incalculable damage.
In my earlier post, when Trump was bilking real estate clients but operating at a fairly modest level, I cited a judge who had found Trump guilty of fraud. The judge observed,
In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.
The stakes are now higher but the craziness continues on. In his dealings with China, Trump at one point threatened 74% tariffs, then raised the figure to 145%, then reduced it to 80%, and now has brought it down to 30%, all without the Xi government doing much of anything. A CNN article noted that all of this have given the impression “that Trump was negotiating with himself,” while Georgetown political scientist Abraham Newman describes the situation as an “omnishambles” in which America “has just blinked.” For China, Newman writes,
the negotiations have revealed the weakness of America’s threats. Given that the U.S. was unable to maintain higher tariffs for more than a month, how credible is the proposed snap-back? In many ways, the bargaining dynamics mirror those between the U.S. government and bond markets a month ago. Repeatedly escalating to extremes and then backing down only further reveal U.S. pressure points. The initial round of negotiations thus has undermined much of the leverage that we have for future rounds.
Here an excerpt from my earlier post, revised to cover recent developments:
Gogol’s novel owes its name to a con played by one Chichikov, who is seeking to buy “dead souls”—which is to say, serfs who have died but who are still on the landowner’s tax rolls. Once he has acquired enough dead souls, he will take out a loan against them and pocket the money. While Chichikov is thoroughly unlikable, the same cannot be said of another conman, Nozdrev, who is so transparent (unlike Chichikov) that one can only gape in wonder. When I wrote my posts on Chichikov and Nozdrev back in 2017, I was trying to figure out which kind of con man Trump was, the vicious Chichikov or the relatively harmless Nozdrev. At the time, I associated Trump with the latter.
That’s because Nosdrev is mercurial and “a lover of fast living.” At one moment he seems to be your friend, at the next he is quarreling with you. Overall, he is “loquacious, dissipated, high-spirited, over-showy.”
Like Trump, Nosdrev must be constantly in the public eye, and, like Trump, he thrives on conflict. Chaos appears to energize him:
Never at any time could he remain at home for more than a single day, for his keen scent could range over scores and scores of verses, and detect any fair which promised balls and crowds. Consequently in a trice he would be there—quarreling, and creating disturbances over the gaming-table…
Nozdrez, it turns out, has the same regard for the truth that Trump has:
Moreover, the man lied without reason. For instance, he would begin telling a story to the effect that he possessed a blue-coated or a red-coated horse; until, in the end, his listeners would be forced to leave him with the remark, “You are giving us some fine stuff, old fellow!”
Had social media existed in Nozdrev’s time, one could imagine him wielding it as effectively as Trump:
Also, men like Nozdrev have a passion for insulting their neighbors without the least excuse afforded…The more he became friendly with a man, the sooner would he insult him, and be ready to spread calumnies as to his reputation. Yet all the while he would consider himself the insulted one’s friend, and, should he meet him again, would greet him in the most amicable style possible, and say, “You rascal, why have you given up coming to see me.” Thus, taken all round, Nozdrev was a person of many aspects and numerous potentialities.
Also like Trump, Nozdrev promotes everything he’s connected with, refusing to let facts stand in his way. Here’s only one instance from the many where he makes extravagant claims while refusing to yield to rational assessment:
The tour began with a view of the stables, where the party saw two mares (the one a grey, and the other a roan) and a colt; which latter animal, though far from showy, Nozdrev declared to have cost him ten thousand rubles.
“You NEVER paid ten thousand rubles for the brute!” exclaimed the brother-in-law. “He isn’t worth even a thousand.”
“By God, I DID pay ten thousand!” asserted Nozdrev.
“You can swear that as much as you like,” retorted the other.
“Will you bet that I did not?” asked Nozdrev, but the brother-in-law declined the offer.
Nozdrev trying to make deals is like Trump selling “Trump steaks” that have someone else’s sticker on them. Both men are so transparently fraudulent that sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the show, as the media did with Trump in 2016. Here is Nozdrev trying to sell some worthless dogs and then a worthless barrel organ to Chichikov:
“Then buy a few dogs,” said Nozdrev. “I can sell you a couple of hides a-quiver, ears well pricked, coats like quills, ribs barrel-shaped, and paws so tucked up as scarcely to graze the ground when they run.”
“Of what use would those dogs be to me? I am not a sportsman.”
“But I WANT you to have the dogs. Listen. If you won’t have the dogs, then buy my barrel-organ. ‘Tis a splendid instrument. As a man of honour I can tell you that, when new, it cost me fifteen hundred rubles. Well, you shall have it for nine hundred.”
“Come, come! What should I want with a barrel-organ? I am not a German, to go hauling it about the roads and begging for coppers.”
“But this is quite a different kind of organ from the one which Germans take about with them. You see, it is a REAL organ. Look at it for yourself. It is made of the best wood. I will take you to have another view of it.”
And seizing Chichikov by the hand, Nozdrev drew him towards the other room, where, in spite of the fact that Chichikov, with his feet planted firmly on the floor, assured his host, again and again, that he knew exactly what the organ was like, he was forced once more to hear how Marlborough went to the war.
“Then, since you don’t care to give me any money for it,” persisted Nozdrev, “listen to the following proposal. I will give you the barrel-organ and all the dead souls which I possess, and in return you shall give me your britchka, and another three hundred rubles into the bargain.”
For Nozdrev, deal making is a form of play. He is a bad dealmaker, as apparently Trump is as well, but one can’t help but admire his enthusiasm.
Chichikov, by contrast, is cold-blooded and calculating. When he figures that one can make a fortune by working in customs, he first figures out the lay of the land before cashing in. As I read Gogol’s account, I imagine Trump regretting, after his defeat in 2020, that he didn’t take more advantage of his money-making opportunities. He has been using his second term to to make up for that, figuring out new ways to accept bribes.
Chichikov, it should be noted, is more subtle: he first establishes himself as an exemplary employee before moving on to corruption. Trump, by contrast, is like Nozdrev in that he doesn’t even try to hide his grift:
But now he decided that, come what might, into the Customs he must make his way. And that way he made, and then applied himself to his new duties with a zeal born of the fact that he realized that fortune had specially marked him out for a Customs officer. Indeed, such activity, perspicuity, and ubiquity as his had never been seen or thought of.
Having established his credibility, Chichikov then makes the job pay off in a big way:
It happened that previously there had been formed a well-found association for smuggling on regular, carefully prepared lines, and that this daring scheme seemed to promise profit to the extent of some millions of money: yet, though he had long had knowledge of it, Chichikov had said to the association’s emissaries, when sent to buy him over, “The time is not yet.” But now that he had got all the reins into his hands, he sent word of the fact to the gang, and with it the remark, “The time is NOW.” Nor was he wrong in his calculations, for, within the space of a year, he had acquired what he could not have made during twenty years of non-fraudulent service.
For Trump, the time was NOW from the moment he was reelected, when billionaires paid huge amounts to finance his inauguration.
In the novel, Chichikov grows rich whereas Nozdrev bankrupts himself–just as Trump would be bankrupt were it not for a wealthy father, Russian gangsters and Arab sheiks looking for ways to launder money, and now anyone with money seeking favors (including Qatar, with its gift of a $250,000,000 jet.)
When I wrote about Gogol’s two conmen in 2017, I reflected that it made sense why rightwing voters would go for the flamboyant liar over the Chichikov-like politicians that he ran against. If many of Trump supporters despised the Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnells almost as much as they did the Hillary Clintons, it’s because, like Chichikov, they carefully take the measure of every person in the system, add up their strengths and weaknesses, and act accordingly. If such types are assuring you that you will keep your healthcare in the very act of taking it away, I noted, why not just vote in Trump to blow everything up?
And because I didn’t know what to expect from Trump’s first presidency, I asked myself, who would I rather have running things: a blowhard that everyone knows to be a blowhard or a secretive conman who says all the right things but, as a result, is able to fleece us all the more effectively? At least when you get taken in by a Nozdrev or a Trump, I rationalized, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
What I failed to factor in is how a Nozdrev with presidential power would behave. What we have seen is Trump evolving into something far more insidious than Gogol’s light-hearted bungler. Not that Trump was ever as harmless as Nozdrev, as his assault victims will testify, but his second presidency is leading to a level of grift never before witnessed in the presidency, not to mention mass injustice and mass death.
People once laughed at Trump as they laugh at Nozdrev. They’re not laughing now.
