As criticism mounted around his unprincipled decision to remove troops for Northern Syria on Monday, Donald Trump tweeted out about his “great and unmatched wisdom”. It was so typical of Trump: unbound egotism but also a touch of self-awareness. Was he trolling his antagonists? Or does he genuinely believe in his own powers? The answer is immaterial since both lead to the same conclusion: this isn’t an American tragedy we’re witnessing but, rather, the unfolding of the great American farce.
Trumpism read as farce makes sense if, as the late theatre director Sir Peter Hall suggests, it “allows us to watch the sort of bad behaviour that we could never publicly endorse, but which we secretly know we might be capable of”. Farce is much more than broad comedy – it places us in that morally ambiguous universe where life has little or no meaning. It is associated with the archetype of the Trickster, denoting the most rudimentary forms of nihilism and absurdism. Its form is old as well as modern, and it is everywhere once you begin to look for it.
Farce might well be the dramatic form that embodies the greatest truth – if you can’t laugh about the heat death of the universe, then, honestly, what can you laugh about? Yet tragedy is understandably the more respected because it posits the primacy of something else, even if it’s the protagonist’s failure in that universe.
That, really, is why Donald Trump does not represent the tragedy of the American experiment but, rather, the farcical culmination of a system founded on Reason but congenitally burdened by Religion. “Truth” as a vaunted ambition of America is now reduced to whatever is individually declared right.
Tragedy, on the other hand, amounts to the truths lost in the process and that is the place where the Republican Party now finds itself, trying to assert meaning where meaning isn’t fashionable. Senators like Mitt Romney end up resembling Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, trying to convince Brutus about a leader gone rogue.
“Men at some time are masters of their fates,” he says but “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Trump is no Caesar. Nor is he Macbeth, who always had the capacity to be a good king. Trump is farcical in nature because farce deviates from the tragic in the absence of moral value. It devolves into an obsession with mechanisms of power rather than simply being power badly wielded, which is properly the stuff of tragedy. This is the central conceit of so much great farce, where men typically believe in an illusion and strive tirelessly in pursuit of that illusion. It is the point of every Mad, Mad, Mad World-style caper which ends with them winning an object of no worth. If the tragedy of The Godfather is how Michael Corleone sacrifices his innocent life in order to aid the family, then the farce of the risible Godfather III is his realisation that these sacrifices are ultimately meaningless (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”). It is as Marx said: history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce”.
Obstruction of the House of Representatives’ impeachment process, therefore, amounts to the long, elaborately choreographed chase that stands in the place of a plot. It is pure farce and we’ve seen it before. In fact, many, many times before. “Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute” said John Mortimer, but it’s not the speed but the repetition that robs us of hope.
Trump is indeed the apprentice of Roy Cohn, in the words of playwright Tony Kushner, “the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54”. He exists with no higher purpose other than to serve himself. His answer is to throw more paper into the air. Obstruct, delay, and deny.
The eight-page letter sent by White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, to the House’s Democratic leadership is, in the words of George Conway, “constitutionally and legally […] garbage.” Garbage might be too strong. It is, rather, eight pages of elaborate legalise, which has a dollar value in the American system.
The Democrat’s problem is to find an answer to the obstructionism but it’s like finding a greater meaning to a Beckett play. “Meaning” isn’t always a convincing answer to meaninglessness. The main energy of farce is comic because it reveals no deeper value about life – indeed, that would be to counter its essentially nihilistic outlook. It is particularly suited to today because it asks us to put our faith in nothing deeper than the act of having faith. If Trumpism has a meaning, it certainly isn’t conservatism, but, rather, akin to “a constant challenge to process”. From the moment he was sworn in, Trump challenged constitutional conventions: the limits of Presidential Orders; whether presidents could be indicted of crimes; and now the validity of an impeachment process in which one side doesn’t play.
And if there’s something admirable about all of this (and in that Trickster-like way, there is), it’s in his mastery of the mechanisms of muddle and mess. It’s like the staging of a Brian Rix farce: the adroit way the mistress is hidden in the wardrobe just as the vicar walks in the door. Trump’s world is different only in terms of the number of mistresses and scarcity of vicars. It is really an absurdist play reaching not so much a conclusion as prolonged state of senselessness. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang. Not even as a whimper. But with something that sounds like the slow comic drone of a slide whistle.
Let us know your view. Send a letter for publication to letters@reaction.life
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.