Tuesday
A New York Magazine column has just applied a Dracula character Trump enablers and followers. Upon looking up the relevant passages in Bram Stoker’s novel, I discovered the allusion was even better than I realized.
The reference comes to us courtesy of Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, professor emeritus of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, and prominent anti-Trumper. Trump, he writes, is like a hurricane except for the fact that he can “return and destroy again.” Trump, Nichols continues is “pacing just offshore, waiting and plotting to flatten and flood our political system, perhaps for good.”
And yet, unlike our response to hurricanes, some Americans are rooting for the winds to hit us while many others have given up resisting them altogether. As Nichols puts it,
And the hell of it is, we Americans know he’s there. We know what he’s done and what he can do (again). Yet millions of us would gladly welcome his landfall again. Millions more of us have thrown up our hands in exasperation as Trump and most of his regiment of Renfields have, for now, managed to escape any consequences for their actions.
Renfield, of course, is Dracula’s realtor and agent. More on him in a moment. But first let’s let Nichols finish up:
Yesterday, in what was likely the final hearing of the January 6 committee, the nation was told, once more and without ambiguity, that Donald Trump, the commander in chief, actively sought to subvert our democratic order. My Atlantic colleague David Frum summed up the committee’s findings—and the nation’s reaction—in one tweet: “Decisive [and] irrefutable documentary evidence that the 45th president of the United States tried to overthrow the US Constitution by violence, no big deal, just another news day.”
In Stoker’s novel, Renfield has been captured and is being studied by the prison doctor. Like an ardent Trumpist, he feels empowered by his Master’s presence. The doctor reports,
He is usually respectful to the attendant and at times servile; but to-night, the man tells me, he was quite haughty. Would not condescend to talk with him at all. All he would say was:—
“I don’t want to talk to you: you don’t count now; the Master is at hand.”
The doctor compares Renfield’s infatuation to a religious mania and warns of danger:
The attendant thinks it is some sudden form of religious mania which has seized him. If so, we must look out for squalls, for a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.
The good doctor would see his observation confirmed by certain White Christian terrorist groups operating currently in the United States.
Later that evening, we get more insight into what Renfield wants from Dracula. The doctor and prison guards overhear him calling out to the vampire after they track him down following a prison escape:
He was talking, apparently to someone, but I was afraid to go near enough to hear what he was saying, lest I might frighten him, and he should run off. Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic, when the fit of escaping is upon him! After a few minutes, however, I could see that he did not take note of anything around him, and so ventured to draw nearer to him—the more so as my men had now crossed the wall and were closing him in. I heard him say:—
“I am here to do Your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped You long and afar off. Now that You are near, I await Your commands, and You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in Your distribution of good things?”
Trump followers expect no less. The fact that Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he cares for no one other than himself does not faze them. They have found their savior and nothing else matters. Like Renfield, they cry out, “I shall be patient, Master. It is coming—coming—coming!”