At the Court of King Don

All Hail the Criminal Rapist-in-Chief

In the 1981 film Mephisto, based on Klaus Mann’s novel of the same name, Klaus Maria Brandauer plays the German stage actor Hendrik Höfgen, who collaborates with the Nazis in order to become a theatrical superstar. Höfgen starts his career as a frustrated and ambitious provincial actor. He sings, dances, and even forms a left-wing theatre company, which forces him to go into exile when the Nazis come to power.

But Höfgen also longs for stardom, and so when the Nazis invite him back to Germany to head the National Theatre and reprise his famous role as Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, he eagerly accepts, abandoning his wife, his left-wing friends, and all the principles that he supposedly lived by.

Mann based his novel on his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens. Like Höfgen, Gründgens flirted with Communism, fell into disgrace when the Nazis came to power, and then went on to enjoy a stellar career under Nazism, thanks to the patronage of Hermann Göring and his actress wife Emmy Sonneman. Like Höfgen also, Gründgens mesmerized Goering with his portrayal of Mephistopholes in Faust, and was appointed director of the State Theatre as a reward for associating himself with the regime.

Mann wrote his novel in 1936 in order to ‘analyse the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth’ but his warning is also applicable to our own times. Because in every age, political monsters are always enabled by ‘abject types’ who pave the way for their ascent.

Some do it for fame, money, access or relevance. Some do it for power, and some do it because they adore the monster or sympathize with his goals.

Since November, there has been a long procession of squeaky bath-toy Mephistos looking to jump into Trump’s scummy bathwater. Some have talent, others clearly don’t, but all of them hope to gain something from the criminal rapist-in-chief’s less than august presence. It’s difficult not to see Liz Truss, pathetically posing in Washington with a MAGA cap, without thinking of her as a supplicant at the Corleone wedding, pleading for vengeance and justice against the woke lettuce that prevented her from saving Britain.

And then there is Nigel Mosley-Farage - the oily Cerberus at the gates of our political hell - and Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, and even the ludicrous Laurence Fox, who all went to Washington in much the same way as some nuns once went to Lourdes. As abject as these types are, they are not Höfgen/Gründgens, who at least had principles - for a while.

This rabble never did. Like Charlie Kirk, these are men and women without honour; acolytes and courtiers, who will say that TikTok should be banned one day and then call for it to be opened the next, depending on what Don Mangolini tells them.

The same, it seems, can be said of the billionaires who have kissed the Trumpian ring in the last few months, and who were also present yesterday to pay homage to the criminal rapist-in-chief.

These people may not have the mesmerizing allure of Hofgen’s Mephisto, but they do have a lot of money and power, which Trump admires, and they admire it too. All of them, along with the millions of voters who brought Trump back from the political dead, know exactly what he was and is: a rapist and sexual predator, a sociopath, a dishonest crook and a convicted criminal, who would quite likely have ended up in court and probably in jail for illegally trying to overturn an election, had he not won this one.

But winning, in our corrupt age, is what counts, and increasingly, it’s the only thing that counts. The corporate capitulation to Trumpism had already begun even before the election. But now the tech bros are queuing up to ingratiate themselves with a government that some of them paid for and partly own.

Amazon has given a whopping $40 million to Melania Trump for a documentary to be directed by Brett Ratner - the previously-disgraced director accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by six women back in the day - but hey, who is bothered about that kind of stuff any more?

Hasn’t Muck Zuckerberg more or less eliminated Facebook’s entire content moderation teams because too many companies have become ‘culturally neutered’, and the world needs more ‘masculine energy’? And how about Bill Gates. Wasn’t he the nice one? The philanthropist who wants to use his vast wealth for the common good? Who once called out Trump’s ‘dangerous’ attempt to defund the World Health Organization during the pandemic? Who Trump’s henchman Roger Stone and many others accused of creating the pandemic for his own financial gain? - that Bill Gates?

Once upon a time, according to the New York Times, (paywalled), Gates made an audience laugh by mocking the then-president’s inability to distinguish between HIV and the sexually-transmitted infection HPV. Last December, Trump tweeted that Gates had asked to come to Mar-a-Lago - a claim dismissed as ‘bizarre’ at the time by outside observers. But it turns out that Gates did make that pilgrimage and had an ‘intriguing’ and ‘impressive’ dinner with Trump, which convinced him that the man he had once mocked was ‘energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation.’

Like their predecessors, even the most philanthropic twenty-first century corporations with the scent of oligarchy in their nostrils will always go to where the money is. If diversity capitalism is profitable, they might support it, and if not, not.

The Great Leap Backwards

This is why, according to the Financial Times, the ‘2020 corporate rush to support social justice causes after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman’ has now produced a headlong rush for the exit door in which:

Companies are scrapping diversity, equity and inclusion departments, cutting their support for racial diversity charities, and dropping out of climate change groups. They are also scrubbing anything that could be perceived as “woke” from public statements, corporate documents and advertising.

Now, according to the FT, ‘Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly without nodding to any broader social goals,’ and ‘bankers and financiers say that Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed against “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.’

Now - hallelujah! - they can do all the offending they like:

‘I feel liberated.’ said a top banker. ‘We can say “retard” and “pussy” without the fear of getting cancelled…it’s a new dawn.’

It’s not difficult to guess what other words this anonymous ‘top banker’ and his pals would like to use. This Great Leap Backward is not limited to bankers and CEOs. Take the recently-knighted Niall Ferguson. In an article in Bloomsberg News back in January 2021, the Republican Party’s favourite expatriate historian appeared to have stumbled into an unusually principled position, when he attributed the assault on the Capitol to a mob ‘whipped into revolutionary fervor by President Donald Trump’.

Ferguson condemned Trump’s attempt to ‘overturn the result of the presidential election he lost, using mafia tactics…as well as cynical “lawfare”.’ He noted that Trump ‘egged on the mob’ and defended them afterwards’, and he declared unequivocally that these actions ‘clearly violated his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.’

Trump was out of power then, and seemingly headed for the garbage heap of history and possibly to jail, which may partly explain Ferguson’s indignation at a ‘coup, putsch, autogolpe — take your pick’, instigated by a man he denounced as

a demagogue and a would-be tyrant whose disregard for the rule of law and encouragement of sedition and insurrection have, very fortunately for us all, been thwarted by his own incompetence.

Harsh words. And historian that he is, Ferguson also suggested that the January 6 assault was worse than Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which ‘didn’t happen in the national capital and it wasn’t inspired by either the German chancellor or the president.’

Since then, things have changed. As early as last October, in an article in the Daily Mail, Ferguson predicted that Kamala Harris would lose the election, and offered the following mea culpa:

I admit it: I was wrong about Donald Trump. I thought on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, that his political career was at an end. The reality is that, regardless of how recklessly he behaved that day, the Democrats have failed to persuade around half of likely voters that his conduct revealed him to be a Hitler-like threat to democracy.

Ferguson went on to suggest, as Trump and his supporters and minions had done before him, that the Department of Justice’s attempts to bring criminal convictions against the former president were politically-motivated:

Trump himself may have little respect for lawyers and generals. Who can really blame him after nearly four years of 'lawfare' – politically motivated litigation designed to discredit if not to jail him – and multiple political attacks by generals he fired?

Such declarations earned Ferguson an invitation to Trump’s celebration party in Mar-a-Lago, where he described Trump’s ‘beatific air’, danced to YMCA, and happily depicted Mangolini ‘at the height of his power…in his own palace, surrounded by adoring courtiers and supplicants.’ The veneer of ironic detachment cannot conceal the fact that Ferguson himself is now a courtier, if not a supplicant. In an interview with the Times (paywalled), it turns out that January 6 2021 was not comparable to the Beer Hall putsch after all. Why? Because:

We were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup. With the passage of time, one realises that that episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called The Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.

That ‘both sides’ again, because weren’t we all a little crazee back then? Except, as Ferguson himself once pointed out, not all of us were crazy enough to attack the Capitol building and prevent the certification of an elected president. The publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution case makes it clear, even if Ferguson doesn’t, that the assault on the Capitol was motivated by something more than a pandemic-induced fever dream.

Smith distinguished between hardscrabble politics and criminal behaviour: he believed that Trump was guilty of the latter, and that he would have been convicted of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election if he had not been elected.

But Ferguson could care less, and the same could be said of so many others who once found many faults in the criminal rapist-in-chief, and now see only power, victory, and a ‘mandate.’ As the former BBC US correspondent Jon Sopel recently argued in the Independent,‘Teflon Don has dodged justice - it’s time for the rest of us to get on board’.

Though Sopel admitted that the Smith report was ‘likely to be true’, he asks ‘what is to be gained by continuously relitigating the arguments that have torn America apart’, before mocking - not Trump - but the Special Counsel:

I do not doubt that the Jack Smith report is an important document and record of Trump’s discreditable attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election. But there is a danger that those who want to wave this report around – six days away from inauguration – are like the Japanese soldiers who hid in the dense Burmese jungle, unaware that the Second World War had ended.

This is the kind of journalism that gives journalism a bad name - a lazy amoral and intellectual capitulation that has the unmistakable whiff of Weimar about it. And the fact that it comes from a supposedly liberal journalist now ‘freed’ from the BBC to host his own podcast really does explain, in a way, how the criminal rapist-in-chief got away with it.

The Trump Whisperers

But even Sopel’s lame offering pales in comparison with the British Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s volte face. There was a time when Lammy called Trump a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath,’ a ‘serial liar and a cheat’ and a ‘tyrant in a toupee’. But that was then, and this is now. And yesterday, Lammy told Radio 4 that the ‘most of the world is glad he’s back’, and gushed about the ‘extended dinner’ that he attended with Trump last year:

The Donald Trump I met was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the UK, our Royal Family, Scotland.’

Some may see this unctuous grovelling as a diplomatic attempt to uphold the national interest, but I can’t help feeling that it is really has more to do with self-interest.

Klaus Mann once warned of ‘the coming catastrophe. It will be like nothing that has ever happened. Everything will be swallowed up…Everything that exists will fall apart.’ The election of the criminal rapist-in-chief may not result in a catastrophe on the same scale that Mann and his generation lived through, but as Trump and his pals prepare to career recklessly across our burning world, it would be foolish to rule that possibility out

His election sends a message to every would-be authoritarian, to every crook, cheap pick-up artist and sexual predator, to every trigger-happy cop and border guard, that there are certain categories of people to whom ‘you can do anything’, as the Great Man once put it, and certain crimes and abuses that you will get away with.

When these expectations become normalised, politics ceases to offer even the possibility of a route to the common good, and the very notion of civic virtue, even as an aspiration, is called into question. America is now fully embarked on this course, in part because of the willingness of so many craven apologists, from the humblest voter to the richest billionaire, to normalise what should not be normal, to sanewash the criminal rapist-in-chief no matter what he does.

It is not normal that an outgoing president should have to issue ‘pre-emptive pardons’ to protect appointed officials and generals from prosecution by his vengeful successor. It is not normal that a man who tried to overturn a national election is allowed to win another in order to protect himself from prosecution. The cowardice and collusion that simply ignores such things or even embraces them is as much a manifestation of our corrupt and depraved political times as the man who stood yesterday in front of the building that his supporters once attacked, and might have attacked again, if he had not won.

The people who made these choices have their reasons. But David Lammy is wrong: there are millions of us who do not want Trump and government-by-billionaire, who want to preserve our common planetary home, not burn it down while Elon Musk sends rockets to Mars. We still exist, those of us who believe that politics either has a moral component or it is nothing, that a criminal-rapist should not become a figure of admiration and adulation just because he won a ‘mandate’, and that truth is preferable to lies.

We should not allow ourselves to be seduced and gaslit by the bath-toy Mephistos. We don’t have to abandon every principle or belief we ever had just because so many are willing to do the same. We don’t have to accept the world that ‘Teflon Don’, MAGA and the tech bros are preparing to shove down our throats.

We do not have to grovel at the feet of the criminal rapist-in-chief, even if so many others are queuing up to do it. And even at this grim moment, when Trump and his filthy crowd want to drink our tears, we should not cry or give them the pleasure of ‘drinking our tears.’ But we should stand with those Americans who oppose him and who still dream of a better America, and with those who will come under attack over the next four years.

It might be easier to disengage and turn away, but we would be ill-advised to do that. In this country a weak and politically inept Labour government is in Trump’s sights. Lammy and the would-be Trump whisperers like Peter Mandelson have gained nothing through their grovelling. If the worst comes to the worst, we might see Farage as prime minister, and Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate as MPs.

Sounds mad? Not after yesterday. And if this comes to pass, there will be no shortage of ‘abject intellectuals’ willing to cheer them on.