A Quixotic President

By Daniel Tenreiro

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

 

Four in ten Americans agree at least partially with the claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Some believe it so wholeheartedly that they dressed up in Viking costumes, painted their faces, and caused a world-historical commotion. Imagine putting your feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, pocketing her mail, and then smoking a cigarette in the Capitol rotunda. Picture yourself swinging from the rafters of the House gallery like a chimpanzee. What could drive you to such mad antics?

 

Those proffering explanations for last week’s events blame either Trump or the Washington establishment. Each side attributes the fault lines in American society to political disagreements, and each naturally sees policy as the corrective. Those blaming the president would deploy an army of censors and social workers: Keep dangerous information away from the deplorables and put them in diversity workshops to extirpate their nutty ideas. Those more sympathetic to Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, would take their ostensible grievances seriously: restrict immigration, bring back manufacturing jobs, and voila.

 

But if the carnival at the Capitol tells us anything, it’s that politics is totally irrelevant. Look at the face of the Trump supporter carrying a podium through the Capitol rotunda: He waves at the camera with a gleeful smile, swaddled in a parka and beanie like he’s on his way to play pond hockey. I’ve seen this face before at frat parties and football games: “Wow, this is epic,” he’s thinking.

 

To dismiss his demands is a mistake — if only because he’s proven willing to risk his life for them — but to take them at face value is laughable. Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, he is fighting for sport.

 

“The thing is to turn crazy without any provocation,” Quixote tells his sidekick, Sancho Panza, when asked what compelled him to give up his quiet countryside existence and playact knight errantry in the mountains of Spain. A rich bachelor wasting away on his vineyard in La Mancha, the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel grows frustrated with the smallness of life. He yearns instead for the toil, anxiety, and arms of the chivalric romances he spends his days reading. Unable to make his dream a reality, Quixote opts to pretend: He mounts a ragged horse, costumes himself in a rusted breastplate, and sets off in search of eternal fame.

 

To tell Quixote that he lives in a fantasy is to vindicate his quest, for he asserts autonomy precisely by rejecting reality. Besides, “There are always a lot of enchanters going about among us, changing things and giving them a deceitful appearance, directing them as suits their fancy, depending upon whether they wish to favor or destroy us.” A more articulate Trump could have recited this line to explain away the paucity of evidence for widespread electoral fraud.

 

Trump is — as Vladimir Nabokov said of Quixote — “a crazy sane man, or an insane one on the verge of sanity; a striped madman, a dark mind with lucid interspaces.” And since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015, he has invited Americans into his fantasy world. The president built his career on the willful denial of reality: from the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City (a pipedream, financed with $700 million in junk bonds, which professionals warned was doomed to fail) to The Apprentice (a literal fake reality) to a presidency spent playacting caudillismo. In negotiations with Trump’s obstinate inner child, the real world never called his bluff.

 

The Sancho Panzas who stormed the Capitol have joined Trump for the ride. Sancho — an illiterate, obese, rustic laborer — enlists in the quest after being promised the governorship of a rich island. Though skeptical of his master’s claims, the squire follows him out of a mix of curiosity and greed. Over time, Sancho comes to worship Quixote, despite having no interest in chivalric romance himself: “I have never read any history whatsoever, for I do not know how to read or write, but what I would wager is that in all the days of my life I have never served a more courageous master.”

 

Trump’s base found its courageous master. It doesn’t matter if he builds the wall or bombs Iran or brings back manufacturing jobs: The movement is an end in itself, the agenda a mere means. In an interview with National Review’s Ryan Mills, the “Q Shaman” whose Viking garb won frontpage coverage in national newspapers, put it clearly: “Donald Trump asked everybody to go to D.C., didn’t he?” Indeed, he did.

 

Like Quixote and Sancho, Trump and his followers have proven hopelessly ineffectual. As shocking as the storming of the Capitol was, it was also a stark display of the impotence of the MAGA movement. In a movie, various parts of this live-action roleplay might have been a scene of slapstick comedy. The rioters won nothing from their quest but blood and bruises.

 

But the fantastical nature of the riot — its obvious detachment from a real political agenda — is precisely what makes it an intractable problem. Indeed, five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the chaos. Only in a world of virtual reality could a band of merry pranksters see an act of domestic terrorism as a kind of practical joke, an extension of the fantasies of Roman rebellion they playact online. Whereas, say, the Weather Underground could see the conclusion of the Vietnam War as the end of its raison d’être, the MAGA fantasy has no terminal point.

 

What makes Quixote innocuous is that he inhabits only a fantasy. The windmills he construes as villains are, in fact, windmills. In the 21st-century information environment, reality bleeds into fantasy. The social-media feed serves as a Rorschach inkblot enabling anyone to construct his own personal reality. Observers have long worried that “deep fakes” — doctored images and videos that appear real — would fuel mass disinformation campaigns. It turns out authentic videos do the trick.

 

At the behest of politicians, tech CEOs have attempted a quixotic fix by banning Trump and banning Parler, the MAGA alternative to Twitter. Quixote’s niece tries something similar: She burns his library. Perhaps getting rid of the books that are driving him mad will restore his sanity. No dice: The destruction only validates Quixote’s sense that he is under attack, driving him further into madness.

 

What does restore his sanity is defeat. Quixote ultimately recants his delusions on his deathbed. Battered by reality, he realizes the jig is up. One wonders whether, summoned to a court in the Southern District of New York, or else facing the possibility of post-presidency unemployment, Trump will do the same. If the analogy holds, Sancho Panza will not: The delusion has taken root.