Against Presidential Idolatry

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

 

As you may know, I have an interest in the American presidency as a cult and in the president as an object of idolatry. I am writing a book about the subject. So I was amused when Donald Trump’s perfervid votaries at that ghastly clown show down in Orlando actually went so far as to set up a golden idol of the man for public veneration — I’m starting to feel like they are trolling me personally, but it’ll be a funny footnote in the book.

 

Of course, the Trump idol was fake gold, and it was made in Mexico — which is to say, it was only four bankruptcy proceedings away from being the Trumpiest thing imaginable. When the alien archeologists sift through the ruins of our civilization at some time in the future, I hope they discover the golden Trump idol, which may help them to understand where we went wrong as a species.

 

(Maybe the chimpanzees or some other cousins will have stepped up by then.)

 

Trump presents himself as an outsider, but, in truth, he always fit in pretty well in Washington, D.C., a city that is packed to the rafters with elderly mediocrities who had rich parents. Trump’s godlike conception of the presidency is bipartisan Washington orthodoxy, and his nationalist/neo-mercantilist views are a lot more like Joe Biden’s than anybody in either camp would care to admit.

 

Even the Caligula-by-way-of-Versace frescoed ceilings in Trump’s noncy Manhattan apartment have their Washington equivalent. I refer, of course, to The Apotheosis of George Washington, painted on the inside of the Capitol dome by Constantino Brumidi, who honed his pious craft for years in the service of Pope Gregory XVI. Like the golden idol of Trump, The Apotheosis of George Washington expresses in immediate visual form precisely what is wrong — what is worst — in our political culture.

 

I understand that, because of the events of January 6, I am not supposed to talk about how much I detest Washington, our nation’s hideous capital city, and that I am especially expected to avoid vituperation against the Capitol itself. It surely is bad form to keep making jokes about my desire to endow an architecture scholarship in memory of General Robert Ross, the British commander who burned Washington in 1814. But there is an ideology and, indeed, a theology in the monumental ugliness of Washington, and it is worth understanding.

 

George Washington was venerated during his own lifetime and immediately thereafter with religious language, particularly with pagan religious imagery. And so it is in that sense appropriate that his apotheosis is depicted on the Capitol, under the dome of which Christian worship services were conducted in the early days of the republic. Those services were Protestant in character, but Brumidi’s work is entirely Catholic in its aesthetic sensibility, in part inspired by the Apotheosis of St. Genevieve at the Panthéon in Paris.

 

But there is some political tension in the choice of site. The Capitol is the seat of legislative power, but it is the executive, not any lawmaker, who is elevated to the heavens there. S. D. Wyeth, a chronicler of the “federal city” in the 19th century, described the work shortly after its completion:

 

Washington, the Saviour of his Country, apotheosized, appears seated in majesty. On his right is the Goddess of Liberty, and on his left is a winged idealization of Victory and Fame — sounding a trumpet, and in triumph displaying the victor’s palm.

 

Before the three, forming a semicircle, are thirteen female figures. The head of each is crowned with a star. They hold up a ribbon banner on which is inscribed, E Pluribus Unum.

 

These figures represent the thirteen sister States of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island — the original British colonies — that fought, and bled, and conquered — winning freedom, and the right to sing and shout the glad “morning hymn” announcing the coming dawn of man’s Millennial Day.

 

This should if nothing else help to establish that the cultic character of this and other images is not the result of the 21st-century reader projecting his contemporary secular mindset back onto what was only an affectation of artistic style that was fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Man’s Millennial Day” is a Christian or pseudo-Christian apocalyptic religious proposition, not an extract from the conventional democratic discourse. Others read even more into the work than Wyeth did, for example noting that the goddesses representing the Confederate states then at war with the Union have their backs turned to Washington. Here, the identity of the founding father with the nation itself is once again reiterated: To turn one’s back on the United States of America is not only to reject a political arrangement but to reject a deity — treason, yes, but also apostasy.

 

The scene surrounding Brumidi’s Washington is a very American mix of the pagan, the democratic, and the commercial: Ceres is mounted atop a McCormick mechanical reaper; Venus grips the transatlantic telegraph cable; Vulcan labors alongside Charles Thomas, who managed the production of the Capitol’s iron dome; Minerva holds court with Benjamin Franklin and S. F. B. Morse; Mercury passes off a bag of gold to Revolutionary financier Robert Morris. The six surrounding tableaus represent the totality of national life as Brumidi conceptualized it: War, Agriculture, Mechanics, Commerce, Marine, and Arts and Sciences.

 

Above it all presides grim-faced George Washington as commander in chief — as god of war — his military uniform draped in imperial purple, gripping a sword. Constitutionally, George Washington had no authority in the Capitol, which is the domain of the legislative branch — because the president is not a member of Congress, if he even wishes to address the legislators, he requires an invitation. When George Washington actually was serving as president, Congress was quick to remind him of the executive’s limitations, for instance by ritually cutting him down to size in the matter of the treaty with the Muscogee Nation and rejecting his nominee for a position at the Port of Savannah when he failed to consult with Georgia’s senators beforehand. Washington the president vowed never to return to the Capitol and instead conducted all his business with Congress in writing.

 

Washington the god soars high above it all.

 

In this context, it is clear that Washington is something more than “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” and by no means “first among equals.” Primus inter pares had been a sufficient dignity for Augustus and Constantine, but after his apotheosis, George Washington was something more, a spiritual king who established the president as the central dramatic figure in American life. With his sword and his military regalia, Washington is the commander in chief who calls to mind the Romans’ word for that position: imperator, from which our word “emperor” is derived.

 

As such, it was inevitable that Washington should develop divine powers, which he did in the context of his mythology. While Brumidi was hard at work on his Apotheosis of Washington, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Amid the inevitable emotional outpouring for the national martyr were works of art in the now-familiar style, including a carte de visite by an unknown artist depicting the apotheosis of President Lincoln, who is welcomed to the hereafter not by winged Fame or Minerva but by George Washington himself, in the role of deity, who embraces Lincoln while crowning him with laurel. It’s a political picture that suggests both the communion of democratic saints and an apostolic presidential succession.

 

It is, to my mind and to the minds of all sane people, much easier to understand the quasi-religious veneration of George Washington than it is to understand the popular cult of Donald Trump. But the principle is the same, and the error is the same. Idolatry is idolatry, even when it is Washington above the altar. There will never be order in our political culture until the presidency is put in its proper place — which is not God’s place.