Op-Ed

History And Literature Will Be Extremely Unkind To The Age Of Trump

Trump Reuters/Jim Bourg

John Blades Former book editor of the Chicago Tribune
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It’s anybody’s guess what Donald Trump means by his marathon pledge to make America great again. A year into his presidency, Trump (aka Boss Tweet) has been too busy and distracted to nail down his model for a born-again America, leaving the curious to speculate on the grand and glorious era he’s promised to resurrect.

Given Trump’s notoriously blinkered knowledge of history, he would probably be drawn to the era from nearly a century ago, famously if erroneously known as the “Age of Innocence.” Like so many other Trump decisions, that would be a bad choice.

The label originated with Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence,” winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. In the decades since, the title, if not the content of Wharton’s book, has come to signify a mythic chapter in the American past, a kinder, gentler, more harmonious time.

But Wharton’s title was ironic, a trenchant commentary on the tremors rocking and roiling America during that period, and her microcosmic view of the nation — as seen from within the aristocratic precincts of old New York — is not such a great leap backward — politically, economically, socially — from the fractured and volatile era of Trump. Wharton’s story was about the struggle “to reconcile the old with the new,” and as one critic put it, “fundamentally about America and its failure to fulfill its own possibilities.”

America then, as now, was a country in great turmoil, still recovering from the aftershocks of World War I, with many traumatized veterans crash-landing in Hemingway’s “Lost Generation.” The White House was occupied by Warren Harding, whose brief tenure (he died in 1923, after two years in office) is considered among history’s most corrupt, primarily due to the Teapot Dome scandal. Harding packed his cabinet and staff with relatives, sycophants and cronies. He hosted poker parties in the White House. He was alleged to have had sex in a closet with his mistress.

With his own candidacy and presidency marked by similar disarray and scandal, Trump would seem to have a lot in common with Harding, largely his predecessor’s defects and libertine excesses. Trump would probably be offended by any comparisons to such an infamous loser, while fantasizing a spot for himself beside Washington, Lincoln and the other presidents on Mount Rushmore.

A more likely retro link for Trump’s American renaissance would be “The Gilded Age,” considering his grandiose affection for the garish and meretricious — gold door knobs, faucets, light fixtures, beauty pageant crowns, showers and hair dye.

The tag for the Gilded Age (roughly 1870-1900) came from a novel by Mark Twain, who even more caustically than Wharton, satirized an era dominated by industrialists, magnates, financiers, tycoons, corporate crooks and robber barons bearing such names as Vanderbilt, Guggenheim, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Mellon, many of whose mega-fortunes came, according to one historian, “at the expense of the working class, by chicanery and a betrayal of democracy.”

Whether despite or because of their bad deeds, Trump might be flattered to be included in such a royal fellowship. But as well as banks, railroads, oil and steel monopolies, names such as Carnegie and Rockefeller are also associated with libraries, museums, schools and numerous other cultural landmarks, which would effectively exclude Trump from their company.

Trump’s relatively meager philanthropic, educational and charitable efforts are almost exclusively limited to his eponymous and discredited foundation and university, while the Trump brand — etched on urban towers, wine bottles, golf resorts and imported clothes — belongs in the same tarnished category as golden arches, horseshoes and parachutes.

The Trump presidency, like Trump himself, is still in its adolescent stage, so it’s impossible to predict how novelists, historians and biographers in the next century will define his term in office, especially since his capricious behavior has left so many contradictory markers or clues. An early but accurate entry came from David Bromwich, whose recent essay in the London Review of Books called this “The Age of Detesting Trump.”

Whatever Trump does manage to accomplish, his term will hardly go down as an Age of Innocence. Unless it’s an ironic reference to those deluded voters who believed his boasts to — single-handedly and faster than a speeding bullet! — build a great wall, “knock the hell out of ISIS,” resuscitate the coal and steel industries, replace Obamacare with something bigger and better, and restore America’s role in the world to a dubious and illusory level of greatness.

If Trump’s hardcore disciples ever expected him to perform such hyper-heroic feats, they’re living in an Age of Ignorance. Judging by Trump’s many failed and thwarted boasts, his presidency could just as easily be labeled the Age of . . . Avarice, Arrogance, Alternative Facts . . . And that’s only the top of an endless list of applicable pejoratives.

The dishonor roll of Trump appointees and confederates who have been dumped from the West Wing suggests an even more definitive “A” label: the Age of Attrition. There have been so many casualties that the scenario resembles the Agatha Christie movie, “And Then There Were None.” Flynn, Spicer, Scaramucci, Preibus, Bannon, Gorka, Price . . . Who’s next? Tillerson, Kelly, Kushner, Kellyanne, Melania? Trump himself? When he entered office, Trump promised to drain the Washington swamp, but so far he’s only managed to swamp the White House drain with his washouts.

Trump’s follies and schemes, misdeals and fast shuffles have brought him comparisons with Machiavelli and Napoleon, a bum rap for both, who were skilled and articulate diplomats, strategists, and warriors.

Trump already has a privatized version of a Greater America (aka Mar-a-Lago) but it’s off-limits to 99.9 per cent of his fellow Americans. It’s evident that his vision of a Great America for the rest of us is a fairytale facsimile, a never-never land, no more real than Brigadoon or Glocca Morra.

Trump may have scored a milestone win in November 2016, but he’s been a sore loser ever since (perhaps the sorest in American history, though that’s one superlative he wouldn’t embrace). He’s a fake Midas, whose every touch and tweet turn to brass. Stumbling ahead on its present course, his presidency is on a pace to topple Harding’s record for mismanagement and disorderly conduct (and his occupancy of the Oval Office could be similarly short depending on the outcome of the Mueller investigation). Just as likely, Trumpism will take its rightful place in history alongside another equally reviled and dishonorable tactic, known as McCarthyism.

John Blades is the author of the novel “Small Game” (Holt, 1992), former book editor of the Chicago Tribune, and presently fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.