40. Trump's bloodbath
When characters in literature and oratory fail to finish a thought or utterance, they’re often pretending to falter in eloquence in a bid to make themselves relatable.
The Chapo Trap House guys were being very funny about Biden the day after the Presidential debate back in June—“They should deport everyone who works for him,” someone said—when one of them produced an instance of aposiopesis that was straight out of a David Mamet play.
Aposiopesis, which I wrote about here, is the fancy term for when someone breaks off from speech. In the podcast, what was being discussed was Trump’s failure to deliver “a decisive knockout punch,” which one of the guys said was as much an indictment of Trump as Biden’s performance had been of the Democratic leadership. Then one of the other guys suggested with ill-concealed mirth that Trump might have felt sorry for Biden.
“Honestly, I think Biden was doing such a bad job, even Donald Trump couldn’t, like, assass—like, shoot him in the head.”
I’d never heard anyone do that in real life—actually break off in the middle of a word like that, though characters do it sometimes in Mamet’s plays.
I keep saying “someone” and “one of the guys” because I don’t know the Chapo Trap House podcast well enough to be able to recognize the voices of its hosts. I’d never actually listened to it before happening on that post-Presidential-debate episode.
There’s a reason for this. I think I may have traumatized one of them when he was little. I once accosted Will Menaker’s father, Dan, a longtime editor at The New Yorker, on the 104 bus.
This would have been in the mid-1990s, when I was going a little out of my mind. Veronica Geng was dying, and I was spending a lot of time looking after her. I was feeling like a fraud about it, too, because I hadn’t really been that close to her and certainly hadn’t been anyone important in her life.
But there was no one else to do it. She was estranged from her only family, her brother, and everyone at The New Yorker seemed to have abandoned her. No one came to visit her. No one took up a collection to help pay her hospital bills. No one worried about whether she’d die alone without even money enough to pay for a decent funeral.
It made me sick.
That said, none of this had anything to do with Dan. Poor guy, he’d certainly never done anything to me. I barely knew him. I don’t think he was even at the magazine anymore. Nevertheless, when I boarded the Broadway bus that day and caught sight of him, I let loose and told him what I thought of everybody at The New Yorker—even though he had a kid with him. It was irrational and unforgivable.
For years I used to get the bolt uprights thinking about this shameful thing I’d done.
And I used to worry about the kid, thinking that if Dan Menaker’s son went bad in some way—turned into a serial killer or something—it would be my fault.
I thought the Chapo Trap House guys were pretty funny, and there’s one I thought sounded particularly sane and clever, and I hope that’s Will, because it would mean that he came out all right after all.
But back to aposiopesis, the whole time I was writing about it earlier, I kept thinking about Trump because his speech is almost entirely made up of unfinished thoughts and phrases. One such statement he made this spring, on the campaign trail, caused a certain amount of consternation.
“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it!”
I didn’t take it that seriously back in the spring.
I’m a little more worried about Trump’s bloodbath today.
What’s really bothered me until recently, though, is the way Trump’s tendency to spout a kind of gibberish made up of unfinished statements and non sequiturs was greeted as a natural, ordinary phenomenon and at times, indeed, even as a form of oratory.
Trump is always being described as “a performer,” owing to his former life as a reality tv star, and a performer is supposed to have control over how he presents himself. Before the term “sane-washing” was coined with reference to the American press and public’s nearly decade-long acceptance of Trump’s incoherence, it was almost as though his fractured, imperfect speech was being couched as a canny appeal to the common man, a way of furthering his appeal to the ordinary Joe.
Historically, that’s a common and legitimate rhetorical use of aposiopesis: affecting imperfect speech in order to endear oneself to an audience. It’s what Mark Antony does in the funeral oration scene in Julius Caesar. (“My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar”—i.e. I’m too overcome with emotion to be able to finish out this speech.)
It’s what a character called Sinon, a Greek spy pretending to be a defector, does in Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy. Sinon wants to seem unskilled at speaking so that the Trojans will be disarmed and not think too hard about whether it’s a good idea to bring that great big statue of a horse the Greeks have left behind into the city. (“But why go on about all this unpleasant stuff!” Sinon says, interrupting himself in the middle of a fictional account of the wrongs the Greeks have done him.)
When characters in literature and oratory fail to finish a thought or utterance, they’re often pretending to falter in eloquence in a bid to make themselves relatable.
That’s what characters in Mamet’s plays tend to be doing when an instance of aposiopesis occurs: they’re pretending to be inarticulate so that the person they’re trying to bamboozle won’t catch wise to how skilled they actually are at verbal manipulation.
At times, over the course of the last couple of Presidential cycles, I’ve found myself wondering if Trump is some sort of Mamet character—whether he’s what the social satire in some of those plays was warning us of, hinting presciently about what was coming down the pike. And at times I’ve thought so.
The trouble is that Trump may be a crook, but he isn’t really a con artist because he isn’t good at any of the things a con artist does. The conman, like the sociopath, is good at making himself appear plausible. But there’s nothing remotely plausible about Trump. He’s a joke, a human pratfall. He may be an avatar of everything loathsome and contemptible in our society, but he isn’t a good actor or a charismatic speaker. His unfinished thoughts and phrases aren’t a form of rhetoric, they’re a function of the fact that he’s an inarticulate boob with a limited vocabulary and vocabulary of ideas.
That’s what’s been so disorienting and distressing about his rise to power. If Trump had any talents or skills, that would be one thing. It might be a cause for concern or frustration, but it would be understandable. What’s been so terrifying is having to watch this man who lacks anything but a shrewd sense of how to appeal to the worst in people hailed as though he were a great performer.
It's the same phenomenon that exercised me about the New York stage when I was in my 20s and 30s: the wild acclaim of mediocrity. Only here it’s magnified exponentially with real consequences for real people as opposed to a mere abstraction about the way art may or may not figure in our lives.