If you are struggling to fathom what goes on in Donald Trump’s mind, I recommend a trip to the cinema to see Maria, the sensorily luscious life story of La Callas. Watch out for the seduction scene where Aristotle Onassis invites the diva to his boudoir aboard his yacht and shows her a statue of Hermes, the Greek god of thieves. “I stole it,” says the tycoon who was the richest person on Earth in his time and once tried to buy Monaco. “If I want something, I steal it,” he expounds, before pouncing to steal her heart.
Trump wants Greenland. He has not ruled out using military force to snatch it from Denmark. He wants the Panama Canal too, come hell or high water. Canada, he has intimated, is also in his sights. In the Middle East, he wants to drive about two million Palestinians out of Gaza and turn the Mediterranean territory into a brownfield site for his brotherhood of developers. A braced world blinks with bewilderment in the headlights of his ruthless sense of entitlement. What possesses him? Again, the diminutive, bespectacled, floppy-featured Onassis provides the explanation. “I’m ugly, but I’m rich,” he tells Callas.
With those five words, he puts his grubby finger on the cause of humankind’s current self-made plight. The worship of mammon and mammon-makers has brought us to the point where a rich felon purports to rule the world and carve it up to his liking. A man imperiously dubbed The Donald, who has been feted for most of his adult life because of the several zeros in his assets valuation, is running immigrants out of the US, deploying troops to “seal” the southern border, sacking lawyers who prosecuted his alleged crimes, freezing federal grants for those in need, pardoning and freeing convicted insurrectionists, declaring war on diversity, equality and inclusion, and demanding the handover of Greenland in a phone call described as “horrendous” with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. This is the result of capitalism, a politico-economic system that enables an unscrupulous minority to disable the great majority. With his characteristic crudeness, Trump echoes Onassis’s philosophy about the power his moneyed stardom bestows when he delights in that infamous Access Hollywood tape: “You can do anything ... grab ‘em by the pussy”.
As schoolchildren, my generation was taught that the only record of Jesus Christ ever losing his temper was when he drove the moneylenders out of the temple, condemning it as “a den of thieves”. The US president professes to have been saved from assassination by divine intervention so that he can Make America Great Again by generating loads of spondulicks. If Christ had a grave, he would be turning in it. Trump is the president because he is rich. Had he not been, he would never have been acclaimed by sycophantic celebrity-news reporters agog at his gold elevator in Trump Tower and become a television mega-star for barking “you’re fired” on a reality show dedicated to moneymaking. It is the celebration of his wealth that endows him with unshakeable self-belief.
Trump is a throwback to days when destitute Ireland gazed at Haughey and thought he’d make us rich
Five years ago I entered a psychiatric hospital with an eating disorder
The people who really care about you shouldn’t abandon you over tricky conversations
Civil servants told to spend more time in office as working from home scaled back
The same is true of the obscenely rich chorus of choirboys he has gathered around him. Elon Musk, the richest individual on the planet, feels entitled to tell Britain to ditch its prime minister and Germany to get over its Holocaust guilt and elect a fascist party. Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, the third-richest person, feels empowered to dispense with established truth on the social media platform and to relax its hateful-conduct policy, thus allowing women to be called “household objects”. The capitalist ethos ordaining that the ability to become super-wealthy is worthy of deification is what makes these people think they are the masters of the universe.
During the 2016 US presidential election, some people interviewed for a CNN vox pop said they intended voting for Trump because they hoped that, as he was rich, he would make America rich. It was a throwback to 1980s Ireland when Charlie Haughey was in his political prime and a destitute country gazed at his mansion home, his yacht and his private island and thought he would make Ireland rich too. We know how that ended when the veil was ripped off the former taoiseach’s own chorus of rich choirboys feathering his nest.
Why is so-called civilisation more seduced by the trappings of personal wealth than by expositions of human goodness? In the past week, individuals and communities have demonstrated unquantifiable kindness after Storm Éowyn wreaked power failures and water shortages and felled trees on to roofs and into bedrooms. As unsung electricity workers climbed poles still trembling in the storm’s wake and volunteers in sports clubs and community centres offered hot showers, food and shelter, where were the masters of the universe? Sunning themselves on the beach in Barbados?
Ireland suffered the consequences of rich men’s hubris when the insatiable appetite for tax shelters, concessions for developers and bank deregulation culminated in the 2008 economic crash along with the surrender of the country’s fiscal sovereignty. After the flight of various erstwhile fat cats into quickie-bankruptcy exile, a debate germinated in the land of ghost estates and abandoned hotels they left behind about the imperative that a better way than capitalism must be found. There was no easy answer and, in a jiffy, the exiles were back and the same old system went on ruling the roost. Unlike Trump, most people are not egomaniacs loath to question their own minds before rushing into action.
When you have watched Maria, there is another movie worth seeing before you leave the cinema. In Conclave, Ralph Fiennes, playing the dean, addresses the college of cardinals before the first ballot to elect a new pope. A couple of red hats, smugly confident they have their ducks in a row, are unimpressed when he warns them not to succumb to self-assurance but to entertain doubt. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance,” he tells his audience of powerful men.
Perhaps the god that saved Trump’s life is sending the rest of us a message.
