"Alasti keiser," or “The Naked Emperor,” stencil graffiti by Edward von Lõngus in Tartu, Estonia, 2016. (Photo by Ivo Kruusamägi, via Wikimedia Commons)
Lake Ontario is now Lake America. Kharg Island is being blown to smithereens. No one in Pennsylvania has died of measles. Trump is not constantly falling asleep in public; he is just resting his eyes because the meetings are boring. Canada has been “ripping off the United States for decades” and is one of the “worst abusers” on trade. Prices are all coming down, and it’s a hoax that Americans are concerned about affordability.
No one expects President Donald Trump to be statesmanlike, or to tell the truth. Lately, however, the tension seems more acute. As usual, he throws out offensive, pointless, lawless, or clearly fictional assertions like the above, and others run to back him up. Some of these people are in his cabinet, or work for him in other capacities. But some of them are the heads of corporations such as Google, which swiftly moved to show “Lake America” to any Americans who looked up the lake on Google Maps. Some of the people are on the Supreme Court.
What is different is the context: these eager affirmations come as the midterms loom less than nine weeks away. Unless Trump is able to torpedo the elections, as a whistleblower says he is trying to do via a compromised postal service, things are unlikely to break for Republicans in the House, and control of the Senate is widely believed to be a toss-up. If Democrats capture one or both legislative bodies, some accountability may well be on its way. And yet Google and top courts and Trump’s courtiers and various in-the-tank media outlets burble along, repeating and affirming whatever he spews out, as if judgment day will never come.
I referred to Google’s capitulatory behavior this week as “emperor’s new clothesing the lake,” but the more I think about it I’m not sure that’s fair to the emperor. In Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale, adapted from older versions present in Spain, Germany, and India, the emperor is credited with some motivation for his lie. The supposed master weavers who create the ruler’s suit let it be known that their work has “the wonderful property of remaining invisible to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character,” so of course the emperor and all his followers are at pains to say that they see it. This emperor is vain, yes, but above all he is overly concerned about what other people think. As character flaws go, this is at least a sympathetic one.
Donald Trump, by contrast, does not seem to care much what other people think. He has not been conned or manipulated into making his absurd statements (as far as we know—the AI slop disseminated through his social media account does raise some questions about whether he is receiving equally garbagey input). His approval rating has slumped to 33%, the lowest rating of his presidential career, and yet all he can seem to do is to double down on unpopular initiatives like an unnecessary war with Iran and starting beef for no reason with our friend and neighbor Canada. In DC, a city that loathes him, he could be collecting some grudging approval for getting fountains running again, but he is too busy knocking down parts of the White House, menacing the Kennedy Center, chopping down beloved trees, and trying to put his name on everything in sight, in acts of what geographers have dubbed “toponymic narcissism.” His plan to help his party win the midterms seems to be limited to trying to rig elections.
As crazy-making as it can be to feel like a child shouting to no avail that the emperor is naked, my suspicion is that corporate powers such as Google will fall back in line with reality if Democrats take the majority and start enforcing laws and norms again. (The latter is not assured—while some Democrats are yearning to crack down on the nonsense, others in leadership appear more concerned about bipartisanship, letting bygones be bygones, and punching left.) In most cases, the powerful are backing Trump’s outlandish lies and grabs for power out of self-interest—his policies may be bad for the vast majority of Americans, our shared resources, and our children, but in the short term they do benefit the richest white men, as long as their children can dodge the measles. When the winds shift, most of this crew will not hesitate to move along, just as when the child’s words about the emperor are finally heard. ‘“Listen to the voice of innocence!” exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people.’
As I remembered it, that’s the end of the story—the child reveals the emperor’s nakedness, everyone realizes their folly, and order is presumably restored. But in rereading Andersen’s text, I realized those are not the very last lines. Andersen continues: “The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.”
Unless his health fails, Trump will remain in office till 2029. Can one believe that this president—armed with nukes, an indulgent Supreme Court, and a violent anti-immigrant strikeforce—will be any less determined to maintain his course than the emperor of legend? Voters need to choose their fighters carefully this fall, and put pressure on power-hungry pragmatists who may be brought back to earth. But Trump himself is unlikely ever to admit that he is naked, and we should expect our contemporary lords of the bedchamber to follow him to the end.
In short (youth edition)
How exactly does the modern political influencer economy work? In the Columbia Journalism Review, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs senior lecturer Anya Schiffrin does a case study on a true master of the field, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. She and her fellow researchers find that influencers receive a range of fees from the city while serving as a combination of information disseminators and hype squad—replacing an older model of communicating via journalism, public service announcements, and ad buys. In Mamdani’s case, it helps that a lot of the young influencers are genuine fans: “I didn’t know about the government until Zohran showed up,” one says. “Adams, de Blasio, Bloomberg were just guys on TV. What were our mayors doing for the last thirty years? These people literally did not exist to me.”
In northern Vermont, another toehold for youth in politics: a 17-year-old named Aiden Otterman (D) has won his primary for a seat in the state house, and now goes up against his great-uncle, an adult named Tom Otterman (R), for the seat in November. “We need somebody in the Statehouse who’s actually going to fight for working people,” the younger Otterman says.
Perhaps you prefer your youthful rebellion in musical form? I enjoyed this protest ditty from Jesse Welles, “Nerd Reich.” Not everyone can namecheck Palantir and still get a hummable song out of it.
Meanwhile, in much sadder news from Ohio, a promising Haitian-American high school graduate named Pierre Damas Bel became despondent after the Trump administration revoked his legal status and forced him to wear an ankle monitor, and this week reportedly walked into traffic on the interstate, where he was hit and killed by a truck. The Washington Post’s Arelis R. Hernández has the story of this 20-year-old, beloved by his family, who wrote on Instagram this summer: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
Recommended
“The Return of Odysseus (Homage to Pinturicchio and Benin),” by Romare Howard Bearden, 1977. (© Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, via the Art Institute of Chicago)
I finally saw Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey,” and while I managed to make it past the first lugubrious, expository, jarringly anachronistic 45 minutes without walking out, it was pretty touch and go there for a bit. When I got home, I rewarded myself with translator Emily Wilson’s much discussed London Review of Books takedown—but a very thoughtful, funny, judicious takedown—and felt grateful there are still people so robustly engaging with the narratives being served to us. Sometimes I think all this insistence on generative AI and attacks on higher education and the humanities in particular is about trying to make people less able to process and analyze the rhetoric around us, at a time when understanding what we’re looking at has never been more important.
Though she’s critical, Wilson finds plenty of upsides in the blockbuster film’s reception. “Despite all this,” she writes, “the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities,’ translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.” I can’t really recommend the movie, but I do absolutely recommend thinking about what it means to us and why, and honestly maybe just thinking in general. Keep doing that, even and especially if the genAI CEOs leading the stock market tell you it will no longer be necessary.
Also, figs. I recommend figs.
Aw yeah, fig time. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
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Hope your September is off to a promising start. See you next time.