Post #193: A Writer’s Karma and the Call of the Wild (Trump Revisited)

11 May 2026

“I hate this book. It has brought me fame, but also untold misery.”

—Curzio Malaparte, Foreword to the 1947 edition of his Technique du coup d’Etat

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

I am human, and nothing that is human is alien to me.”

—Terence, Heauton Timorumenos [The Self-Tormentor]

     A rogue artist and ur-gonzo journalist, Kurt Erich Suckert delighted more in taking freedoms than in strict adherence to the truth. (His pseudonym, Mala-parte, is a mischievous nod at Napoleon, his German last name not suggestive in the original.) Yet, while he spent most of his writing life dramatizing (not to say fabricating) events—rather than reporting on them, as he liked to pretend—he never abandoned poetic license for untruthfulness outright in the way Mr. Trump does with his egomaniac fabulator’s view of the world (no. 147).

     The straining after effect that is so characteristic of Malaparte’s style makes it hard to believe that he could have found unwelcome the attention that his famous manual brought him, even if it the recognition he received was tinged from the first with notoriety. On the other hand, he did pay a stiff price in the currencies of police chicanery, imprisonment, and years of banishment to an island on Mussolini’s direct orders, though the Duce acted less on his own behalf than on the wishes of another Duce in Berlin, whom Malaparte had grievously offended by a brutal though incisive sketch in the final chapter of the book.* A highly instructive episode, both as to the rewards and the dangers of getting noticed on the big stage. (Malaparte in a cable to Trotsky, the night of the latter’s Copenhagen speech in October 1931: “Why are you dragging my name and my book into your personal quarrels with Stalin? I have no business with either of you.” Trotsky answered right away: “I should hope so, for your sake.”**)

     Not that I worry unduly about my dark musings getting noticed by Mr. Trump and his courtiers, or by anyone else for that matter, beyond the faithful band of my regular readers. I cannot imagine that either notoriety or prison-times lie in store for me; if such were the expected fruits, I would hardly have shaken the tree as energetically as I did. I wouldn’t bear up well behind bars, and although I enjoy and perhaps even crave recognition no less than others, the benefits of obscurity are very present to my mind. To be a nobody can be dispiriting; but it brings a measure of peace and quiet, at least—a freedom from harassment that is not to be expected from the glaring lights and clamors of the stage.

     Alas, in my relations with Mr. Trump, such as they are, I must face the bitter truth that I am one of the harassers, even if that was never my intention. I only meant to say what I saw, more in sadness and disbelief than in anger, let alone hatred. It is anyway not the man I so despise, but the example he is setting; the human behind the mask, as per Terence’s line, is no stranger to me, nor an enemy—and although I do not want him anywhere within a hundred miles of the White House, or any of its command-and-control tentacles, neither do I wish him any harm.

     Oh come off it, I expect to hear in response: this is Donald Trump we are talking about here, the self-proclaimed greatest of great men, who intends to build the biggest triumphal arch in history to his own glory; who is planning to stage gladiatorial games for his upcoming eightieth birthday; and who has of late taken to comparing himself with Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon*** (supposedly outdoing them all in the field of honor). Nay more, who does not scruple to pose as the Redeemer himself, aura and all, with his flagging manhood propped up by violence visibly in the air and proletarian visages all around in postures of rapturous adoration such as would have done Lenin or Mao proud, while nasty dark-winged creatures buzz overhead whose pop-cultural provenance I refuse to concern myself with, but whose archetypal significance is only too apparent and repulsive. (Suffice it to say that angels fly on feathers of light; these creepy things do quite the opposite.)

     And this faux superman, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles you are anxious to spare your negligible mosquito bites, from a position so peripheral that Mr. Trump will think you likelier to fall off the edge of the earth than to cause him any trouble? If he ever heard about you in the first place, that is, which will never happen, not least because he is reviled by millions in the queue ahead of you, many much better placed to make their opinions count, and with worse to say about their nemesis.

     All right, all right, point taken. I can see all that as well, but it doesn’t change the melancholy fact that in the days and weeks after I finished what I was hoping would be my last public reflections about Mr. Trump and what his presidency means for the rest of us, a frightful thought kept occurring to me: what if anyone wrote so scathingly about me? Would I not wish the scribbler dead, however obscure he might be, as surely as Mr. Trump did Robert Mueller? And does that not make me a blatant hypocrite—the one thing of which the President cannot in fairness be accused, if only because he seems to be so utterly unrestrained in what he says and does? (He may even be more forgiving than I, since he is said to be quite ready to make up with anyone willing to recant and turn for penance and absolution to the Sun King.)

     And this too: is the man not already tottering and flailing above the abyss, all his deafening self-promotion notwithstanding? The menace implied in his continuing power to do harm may obscure the obvious, but has he not become a pitiable case lately, and perhaps always been so upon closer scrutiny? Talk all you want about power, no truly rich or truly strong man needs to boast of it at every turn; that is the part of the guy wearing a big hat, perhaps very big indeed, but who does not have his cattle lined up, as they say in Texas, where the type is familiar enough (though not as much as in New York). The striking rejuvenation and improvement of features in Mr. Trump’s blasphemous self-portrait is only too telling in this regard, as is the unmistakable note of overdoing it, on the cheap, in nearly everything he touches.

     Nor is it only the President at issue here, but much wider circles of malaise in these blessed millennial times of ours. For what are the dreams of magical super-powers that one encounters at every turn nowadays but evidence of the most desperate efforts at overcompensation—that is to say, indications not of strength at all, but of impotence that is felt keenly but cannot be openly avowed. What is Mr. Trump’s invincibility syndrome really but the muffled cry of a scared mortal, ever liable to defeat and death, whose time is running out every day a little more? It is the thinly disguised wretchedness beneath the gilded façades that deserves our consideration and compassion here, even if we may recoil from the wretch.

     Schopenhauer once proposed a sage remedy for overcoming ill-will: just imagine, as vividly as you can, the object of your rightful indignation suffering due punishment already, at your hand, and see how it makes you feel. Not so much gratified, Schopenhauer predicted, as mollified and ready to feel sympathy again, now that the danger has passed.† Granted, we are not there yet with Mr. Trump, since the menace remains all-too great and present; but the end-game has nonetheless begun, the man has cornered himself, and he is most likely going down for real this time—a dangerous moment, to be sure, but also a doleful one that does not give much occasion for cheering, even if one prefers it to the alternatives, and then some.

     Whatever the rights and wrongs of what I had to say before, I would rather not be thought such a despiser of all things Trump that I might itch to bring out the knives, wield them with relish, and delight in the bloody stains on the floor. Not so: in fact I am disturbed by my own facility with word-blades, and the spilt blood (if there is any) fills me with dread—the taint of rough karmic dealings, as it were, even if what I wrote reflected the best judgment I could arrive at.

     What maddens me so is not one foible-ridden septuagenarian among many, but the utterly misguided way of life he represents while so many threads run together in his hands. Nor is what I am saying much more than a digest of time-honored standards currently in abeyance. Whether on Arnoldian or Burkeian grounds, in terms of Buddhist right views or Platonist ideas, according to the outlook of the Federalist Papers or of the old-school liberalism I have espoused (no. 68), the specimen before us looks not only bad but terrible—a character not only without discernible signs of inner cultivation, but utterly without interest in anything of the sort; a philistine and unrepentant vulgarian through and through; the very model, in other words, of what the Buddhists mean by an egocentric mind blindly beholden to its defilements, and what Plato warned against so insistently when he denounced the evils of a disordered inner life, with the rational faculty atrophied, the spirited misdirected, and the appetites in uncontested control. Politically, he illustrates to a distressing degree what in Plato’s Republic can sound like a caricature bordering on jest: the enfeebled sense of direction and dissolute inner bearings that are typical (though by no means inevitable) in democratic societies, spinning now here now there, with a tendency, at the extreme, to veer off towards authoritarian pseudo-remedies.

     Once again, to survey all this with the greatest alarm is not the same as loathing someone or failing to see the common human element that unites us all on some level. To be sure, Wild Man Trump at his vicious worst is nothing to smile or connive at; but besides his crazier antics, Trumpian moments of truth also come in milder variants—not much more appropriate in a head of state, admittedly, but certainly less damning, and even a little endearing at times, maybe. I am thinking, to give just one recent example that jumps to mind, of when the President was recently caught in a petty lie about a living predecessor supposedly telling him (in his dreams?) about how much he wished to have done what Trump did on Iran. The assembled journalists broke into laughter and jeering (was it Biden? Clinton? Obama, haha?) while he kept repeating like a little boy that he could not tell, could not tell, could not give away his big secret.

     Or take his preposterous mouthing-off about how “everything is dumb about Gavin Newsom,” a rival apparently not fit for high office on account of his “many learning disabilities”—this coming from someone so aliterate and evidently undereducated that many have questioned whether, even granting that he probably knows his letters, he is able to read in any meaningful sense of the word at all. Of course one might choose, in the usual millennial knee-jerk mode, to be morally outraged at such “discriminatory” antics, but this was not lashing out at the disabled so much as unwitting self-parody at his own expense. For what did it show us but the slow kid in class (obviously dumber than Newsom, however limited the latter may or may not be) as he is trudging out, alone, to the playground, mumbling to himself, before he finds someone’s hair to pull, how very stupid his classmates all are, especially those who pass for clever with the teachers.

     That no such playground productions should be staged around the West Wing, I would be the first to insist; likewise that this is scary stuff indeed within reach of so many red buttons and levers of power. Nonetheless, there is surely a tragicomic dimension to all this, a melancholy commentary on the lamentable side to our human condition, at which I would rather not sneer. Lord have mercy, for we  (not only he or they) know not what we do. Of course something has gone terribly wrong when one of the school children is driving the yellow bus; lives are in jeopardy on all sides, and one must do everything possible to get the kid out of the driver’s seat and ensure that no such thing happens again. But consider for a moment how desperately our superannuated little boy wants to do a great job, and how much he needs to be loved and admired for it. (So much for not caring about what others think of you, perhaps the most common pretense and self-delusion of all.) Absurd and contemptible in a grown man, you say? Perhaps so, but does this way of looking at the scene really make you angry, or does it not touch something a little gentler—even if it in no way affects the judgment that such a road trip is a nightmare for us all, and that every minute longer of having to witness it an almost intolerable ordeal. (Meanwhile thoughts of harming the kid, or even making attempts on his life, are completely out of the question for any sane and civilized human being.)

     Did I just say civilized? Hold the thought; perhaps I have been missing something here, although I did catch glimpses of it before (see for instance my reflections on elephant bulls and other wild things near porcelain in my double-asterisk note to no. 175). Clearly the Trump phenomenon has much to do with an electoral rebellion of the less educated and credentialed against more polished classes that have always taken themselves to be vastly superior, but that the deplorables will no longer accept as their betters (if they ever did before). So far so familiar; call it the pitchfork dimension. But maybe the discontent springs from deeper sources still and amounts to nothing less than a (partial) revolt against the demands of civilization itself, especially as the female half (or more) of the equation has become more predominant.

     As Freud discussed a century ago, we get tired of the constraints that good behavior is constantly putting upon our instincts, and in view of the ever more pedagogical politics of the left, and much of the center, the urge to shake it all off for a change may become irresistible. Women being the special agents of domestication, civilization owes them much (nearly all, arguably, if we include everything men do to impress them, as Orson Wells once observed). But let us slacken the reins for a moment and adopt the mischievous boy’s perspective—on the ever-superior older sister (with Big Brother obligingly by her side); the nagging wife or mother writ large; Nurse Ratched and her associates in soft terror. What boy has not dreamt, before the great index finger of society forever raised in scolding, of one brave day answering back with a digit of his own, the middle: FUCK YOU, teacher, boss, governor, judge, President-in-waiting! Detention be damned! What else, after all, has Trump been doing than to play not so much the Commander as the Motherfucker-in-chief, a role to which he is far more congenitally suited.

     Of course the relief to be had from watching someone as he acts up at the White House—or breaks glass and bone-china on the diplomatic circuit, or plays the teenage thug before adult audiences, or struts about and knocks down things (and people) in the barbarian mode, just because he can—the relief from such displays, I say, will soon exhaust itself, when the bills come due. But until then it may feel worth it, even if the price is bound to be stiff at best, crushing or deadly at worst. Such is everywhere the logic of misbehaving. I fought the law, and the law won—as the house always does in the end. Meanwhile behold Mr. Trump, who appears to have been getting away with it, despite plenty of hard knocks along the way, far longer than most bad boys, and at a higher altitude.

     Not my game, obviously, but let us not be too quick to dismiss it out of hand, or to imagine that it belongs always on the right. Think of it as the call of the wild inside us, or what remains of it, and Jack London, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, or Henry David Thoreau are as much part of the picture as the Trump gang. “We need the tonic of wildness,” Thoreau intoned, and “I love the wild not less than the good.” A peculiar fellow, granted; an early prototype, some would say, of those spoilt brats of modern civilization that loom so large over our millennial cultural landscapes; but perhaps worth lingering over for that very reason.

     When he was not accidentally burning down a forest (300 acres on one ill-fated camping trip with a rich-kid buddy), or bemoaning the horror of the true wilderness (in northern Maine, as against the tamed nature of his pastoral fantasies in suburban Massachusetts, by the pond and on the page), or else engaging in showy acts of civil disobedience that were not likely to get him into any real trouble, our man Thoreau wasn’t such a bad chap, really, though like most of his sort he made rather too much of being under thirty, while it lasted, as if youth alone were some great distinction. And this progenitor of our times, if he repented of anything, proclaimed that it would be his own good behavior: “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”††

     I cannot imagine that Henry David would have rushed from his imagined woodland utopia to vote for Mr. Trump (if rites of citizenship had meant anything to him), but neither would he have been happy with the choices and prospects before us.

*Thus some of the most strident lines (originally published in 1931, not in hindsight after the war), translated loosely and with an ear mostly to tone: “In truth Hitler has a very feminine character: his intelligence, his ambitions, even his willpower has nothing masculine to it. He is a weak man who takes refuge in violence in order to disguise his lassitude, his astonishing weaknesses, his pathological egotism, and his impotent haughtiness. Hitler is jealous of everyone who helped to make him the most visible political figure in Germany; he fears their pride, their energy, their courage, and he is determined to use all his brutality to destroy their high spirits, to choke off their freedom of conscience, to obscure their merits, and to turn them into servants who have lost all personal dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise. All his ambition aims, one day, to corrupt, to humiliate, and to degrade the entire German people in the name of freedom, glory, and power for Germany.”

**Malaparte recalls the anecdote in his 1947 Foreword, and clearly delights in his cameo appearance on the world stage even while he blames Trotsky for ostensibly dragging him there.

***As per the reporting by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer for The Atlantic, in particular, “The Yolo Presidency,” 28 April 2026. Only the title is a non-starter: carpe diem is a fine motto for individuals who pay their own bills in life, so to speak; if you wish to put yourself on the line without dragging anyone else into your messes, and without griping when the bills come due, go right ahead. But when you are responsible for others, and millions of them, “YOLO” is a moral (and not just a semantic) obscenity: now you are gambling with the lives of other human beings—a different beast altogether. Granted, there are times when you may, as a leader, put your charges in harm’s way, if public safety or the common weal should require it; but what you must under no circumstances do is to judge the interests of the state by your own limited lifespan, as if the world would end with your departure from it. This mad turn is the mark of the worst among the worst, and not coincidentally one of the most hideous features of Hitler’s final years. (See my no. 171 and the argument in Sebastian Haffner’s seminal The Meaning of Hitler.) As I’ve said before (nos. 158, 192), I cannot on the whole discover a Hitler in Trump; but where the shoe fits, it fits, even if nothing would be more ridiculous than imagining The Donald in uniform and jackboots. Hitler earned this one thing in life: not to have his corporal’s uniform scoffed at, even if he later disgraced it with his utter irresponsibility as the self-declared “greatest general of all times” (Gröfaz). Sound familiar? Hitler too had Alexander and Caesar very much in mind, and Napoleon all the more—probably as much a motivation for the disastrous Barbarossa campaign as his demented Lebensraum ideology, since he dreamed of triumphing (before an ocean of blood) where even Bonaparte had failed, in Moscow. Go figure how this fits with Mr. Trump’s paradigm of total entertainment newly overlaid with martial bluster.

† See §19, par. 6, of his extraordinary essay on the foundations of morality (Über die Grundlage der Moral), which not only firmly establishes compassion as the root of all morality, but culminates and concludes with an unforgettable affirmation of the hidden unity of all things (§22). Anyone for whom this innermost connectedness, between living beings especially, has become more than a tenet of moral conviction, a philosophical insight, or an article of faith, namely a matter of unshakable intellectual and experiential understanding, has joined the ranks of the saints and sages. Their opposites, those wretched worldlings to whom such connections remain not only altogether inaccessible and alien, but outright incomprehensible, or even laughable, are not only to be feared for the harm their egomanias and paranoias will continually do others, but also to be pitied for the miseries to which their unabated selfishness condemns them inescapably.

†† See Walden (Vintage 2017), pp. 10, 187, 281. The less flattering impressions of Thoreau are suggested by Kurt Andersen in Fantasyland (Penguin 2018), pp. 101–103.