Barbarian at the Gate
As a permanent outsider, I should be circumspect about Christmas. Every Jew I know thinks that they could nail the holiday. We’ve all got opinions about lights and trees, and which forms and styles do honor to the season. That is, of course, a classic case of envy. We rehearse the Christmas we would want for ourselves if only we had gotten there first.
But even I knew that Melania got it wrong. You might remember that godforsaken episode. One of the jobs of the First Lady is to deck the halls of the White House. In her very first rodeo in 2017, she played out the pissy, resentful impulses that are a kind of signature in her reluctant First Ladyship. Instead of a cheerful, anodyne display of candy canes, she ordered up a spooky corridor of blasted trees, more Brothers Grimm than Santa’s Magic Orchard. It was the post-apocalyptic version of Hansel and Gretl, where the children wander through an irradiated forest and get eaten by the witch in the gingerbread house.
Regrettably, 2018 took us further downhill. Matching the mood of her husband’s detractors, she lined the same corridor with hemoglobin-red Christmas trees which looked like they had been drenched in a slaughter-house assembly line. Say what you want about the Trump Family aesthetic, but they seem to have a gift for blood and gore.
You might be thinking that this was as low as it has gotten, but that means that you have been asleep for much of this year. Side by side with the evisceration of democracy, Sauron has taken the sanctum of our civilization and turned it all into a stinking ruin. Every time we see him in the Oval Office, he is backed by the gilded tinsel of his taste: a dozen sparkling gewgaws on the mantelpiece that telegraph his pathetic appetite for glitz. He brings together many different traditions: the sad, exhausted glitter of Elvis and Liberace, the bedazzled fingernails of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, and the diamond pavé pinkie rings on mobsters and Russian oligarchs.
It is, of course, about to get worse. After promising a responsible, deferential renovation, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the East Wing of the White House. The symbolism is almost freakishly obvious. As with the house, so with the country. No historians consulted, no planning agencies involved. Just the sick, violent impulsiveness of our sick, violent president. The physical domain of a century of First Ladies is now a scraped-bare void on Pennsylvania Avenue, its hauled-away rubble intended for a public golf course. Such is the fate of history with Donald Trump. The only thing it’s good for is to create berms on a fairway.
And in place of the East Wing will rise the Donald Trump Ballroom, an unholy amalgam of Trump Tower in Manhattan, Mar-a-Lago in Miami, and the Winter Palace of the Czar. That and a dollop of the Peacock Throne and the quartzite backsplash of a McMansion in Dallas. If you are clutching your belly, clutch a little harder. I have seen the future and it will be nausea incarnate: spray-painted gold leaf on acres of drywall.
But there is no reason to expect anything else. The president just posted an amusing (?!) video in which he douses the American people with excrement, extruded from the anus of his AI-generated bomber. Not even blood-red Christmas trees could match that image for awfulness. This is a Trumpian World, and we are merely along for the ride.