Christopher Lee at 93 years old just joined his late lamented buddy Peter Cushing among the honored shades occupying Hollywood’s Vampire Hades. His heart gave out. Why? Perhaps because he could not swallow the prospect of Donald Trump entering the 2016 GOP presidential race.
As an historian, I want to find an appropriate historical precedent for Trump. Senator Joe McCarthy comes to mind, who treated communists with the same civility that The Donald reserves for hapless Mexicans whom he plans to shanghai into construction gangs to build another Great Wall—this time on our Southern Border. The question is—to achieve this goal grander than that of TR and the Panama Canal—will he bend his Sinophobia a bit and allow the Chinese to finance the Wall’s construction the way they underwrite every other American debt?
A better choice than Joe McCarthy—who, compared to The Donald, was “an Old Roman” and man of principle—is William Randolph Hearst, immortalized by Orson Welles as “Citizen Kane.” Does anybody remember that Hearst actually served a term in Congress, elected with the help of East Side Jews, and even flirted with the idea of becoming the Democratic presidential standard bearer succeeding William Jennings Bryan?
Hearst and Trump both were men of boundless egos as well as bank accounts, unbounded national egotism, and nary a scruple in their natures. Of course, Jews won’t be voting for The Donald, but they should be concerned that such an abomination, who couldn’t be invented if he didn’t exist, is getting media attention like hot cakes just off the griddle.
Compared to The Donald, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ranks up there with Washington and Lincoln (and Eugene Debs) even if his defense policies amount to an update of Norman Mailer’s account in Armies of the Night of how antiwar demonstrators in 1969 planned to levitate the Pentagon. The American political scene is such that we need to revive Orson Welles to do cinematic justice to The Donald, and H. L. Mencken to handicap the madness of our presidential race to the bottom. What does a terminally ill political culture surviving only on social media intravenous look like? Don’t ask.
Dont fire Trump. Fire us Americans for tolerating his presence in our politics,
