Trump: How Fast from Farce to Tragedy?

In an 1852 essay, Karl Marx famously remarked that all great events and personalities in history occur twice – once as tragedy and the second time as farce.

Today’s United States may well be in for a variant of Marx’s dictum. The country is currently experiencing the farcical stage of a charismatic leader with dubious motivations that could end up as tragedy.

Living out personal pettiness and vengeance

Many of President-Elect Donald Trump’s appointments do not augur well either for American democracy or a solid maintenance of American power. All too often, the driving force behind those appointments seems to be a curious mixture of personal pettiness and vengeance.

Previously, it was the Europeans who, beginning in the 1920s and after an initial bout of hope and excitement, experienced how fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy unmoored their nations and led to great tragedy.

Donald Trump’s pre-election rallies as farce

Take Donald Trump’s pre-election rallies. Despite being undergirded by venom and resentment, they were basically stand-up routines. The deliberate clowning aside, there was plenty of accidental weirdness and outright absurdity in the President-Elect’s campaign.

Just think of the presidential debate, when Trump went on a rant about people eating cats and dogs, making Kamala Harris shake her head and laugh incredulously.

Or the leaping entrance of the world’s richest man on a stage in Pennsylvania, whom Trump insisted on introducing as Leon Musk.

From OK to awful

Trump’s buffoonery has intensified since the election. The announcement of cabinet picks for his second term started out with three serious candidates, former ICE director Tom Homan as “border czar,” Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

These appointments were followed by an absurdist clown cart: A Fox News weekend host as Secretary of Defense, an alleged trafficker of underage sex workers as Attorney General and a apparently drug-addled anti-vaxer as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Then came the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, a vociferous advocate of strongmen such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to serve as Director of National Intelligence – a nomination that truly spooked plenty of American spooks. It also outwitted intelligence professionals who had had no inkling of what was coming.

Gogol to the rescue

The continuing fawning over Trump in the Republican camp is a big facet of this low comedy. It seems to come directly from the pages of 19th century Russian satirist Nikolai Gogol, the author of the play “Inspector General.” In his play, officials in a provincial town try to ingratiate themselves with an obvious imposter.

And so it happened at Mar-a-Lago recently, when aging tough-guy actor Silvester Stallone called Trump “the second George Washington”.

The idiotic comparisons with great men of the past are certain to multiply as an army of Trump’s sycophants compete to festoon him with the most ridiculous accolades.

Trump secures a golden age of comedy

Even before it has officially commenced, Trump’s second term has ushered a golden age of comedy. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Jon Stewart and their younger colleagues and plenty of other comedians are being provided a plethora of material on a daily basis.

Their monologues are literally writing themselves – so much so that satirical website “The Onion” has purported to go out of business since its absurdist articles can no longer compete with actual news.

More than preposterous buffoonery

And so while Donald Trump has been called a fascist by such different people as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and President Joe Biden, his ongoing power grab appears to be couched in the most preposterous buffoonery.

It would appear then that Trump 2.0 will be a continuous circus. His detractors may therefore be wrong when they claim to hear the death knell for the American democracy.

A word of caution

Indeed, a word of caution in order: It may be a farce, but the time-honored thespian symbol pairs the mask of comedy with that of tragedy.

In fact, Mussolini and his cronies also seemed laughable, at least for a time. So did Adolf Hitler in Germany. Charlie Chaplin brilliantly ridiculed the Führer and his ambitions as well as his toadying entourage, in his 1940 film The Great Dictator.

Charlie Chaplin had no inkling

That story had a happy ending on the screen, when the Jewish barber, mistaken for the dictator Adenoid Hynkel, tells the soldiers to stop fighting and to stand down.

But a darker Hollywood movie, The Cabaret (1972), shows how easily laughter can turn to tears. While on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, the show’s Master of Ceremonies, played by actor Joel Grey, keeps clowning and making fun of the Nazis.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Berlin, the brownshirts go with great determination about their grim task of suppressing dissent and turning Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship.

In fact, in his memoirs written after World War II, Chaplin claimed that he would not have made a comedy about Hitler had he known at the time about the extent of the horrors the Nazis were committing.

Conclusion

Is there a way out? What is ahead is perhaps the biggest test for the U.S. Senate in over 150 years.

If should not make light of its highest constitutional duty – to advise and consent on nominations. If it fails to reject quite a few of Trump’s proposed candidates, what’s now considered farce may well turn into not just a national, but also global tragedy.