David Remnick of The New Yorker thinks so, beginning his posted yesterday piece The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump with these words:
What made the Emperor Nero tick, Suetonius writes in “Lives of the Caesars,” was “a longing for immortality and undying fame, though it was ill-regulated.” Many Romans were convinced that Nero was mentally unbalanced ...
Chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, and obsessed with gaudy real estate, Donald Trump is of a Neronic temperament. He has always craved attention. Now the whole world is his audience. In earlier times, Trump cultivated, among others, the proprietors and editors of the New York tabloids, Fox News, TMZ, and the National Enquirer. Now Twitter is his principal outlet, with no mediation necessary.
As a freshman at Haverford College in 1963-64, the course that most engaged me was Classical History, the Greek portion taught by George Kennedy, and the Latin portion by Howard Comfort. I remember reading Suetonius and being fascinated by it, finding myself from time to time over the years since having occasion to return to my now well-worn paperback copy, most notably when I watched the terrific “I, Claudius” starring Derek Jakobi more than 4 decades ago. Thinking about it, Remnick’s comparison of Trump with Nero is quite apt, and I am surprised that this is the first time I am seeing someone make it.
Certainly the gaudiness of his Trump Tower apartment is one exemplar. His temperament is another.
Were the Neronic comparison all that were offered in this piece, that alone would make it worth reading. But its subtitle is “The West Wing has come to resemble the dankest realms of Twitter, in which everyone is racked with paranoia and everyone despises everyone else.” That is also more than apt, and as anyone paying attention should agree, probably explains a lot.
Remnick takes us back to when Trump first signed on to Twitter, in March 2009, and provides us a good sense of how Trump’s expressions have changed over time, offering examples. Here are a few early examples (there are more in the piece):
His early work in the medium provided telling glimpses of his many qualities. He was observant. (“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”) He used facts to curious ends. (“Windmills are the greatest threat in the US to both bald and golden eagles.”)
Among the other qualities Remnick attributes to Trump is that he is concerned with personal appearane, fastidious, and sensitive to comic insults.
Then there is a anoter very much on target paragraph, from which I offer a snio
In due course, Trump perfected his unique voice: the cockeyed neologisms and the fractured syntax, the emphatic punctuation, the Don Rickles-era exclamations (“Sad!” “Doesn’t have a clue!” “Dummy!”). Then he started dabbling in conspiracy fantasies: ...
Remnick provides us with his evaluation of Trump as seen through Twitter since ascending to office, with observations such as
Trump’s tweets are most valuable as a record of his inner life: his obsessions, his rages, his guilty conscience. No bile goes unexpectorated.
and that
Some of Trump’s tweets were more squirrelly.
But, as we see in continuing in that paragraph, those tweets are more than that, as Trump’s approach is emulated by others, and changes how others view the US:
Though he lauded Iranian demonstrators for standing up for their “rights,” he continued to offer respect bordering on servility to the likes of Vladimir Putin. One of his signature phrases—“fake news”—has been adopted by autocrats from Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, to Nicolás Maduro, of Venezuela. To the astonishment of our traditional allies, Trump humiliates and weakens a country he pretends to lead.
And so Remnick tells us, in the paragraph from which the subtitle comes,
And so the West Wing in the era of Trump has come to resemble the dankest realms of Twitter itself: a set of small rooms and cramped hallways in which everyone is racked with paranoia and everyone despises everyone else.
That certainly seems confirmed by the new Michael Wolff book. I might note that I spent a couple of hours yesterday at a bar oin the hotel where the convention of the American Historical Association was ongoing as my spouse worked a booth on behalf of her employer. The woman to my left was reading Fire and Fury on her Kindle, a man two seats to my right had the hardback out and was making marginal notes, and as I walked through the room going to and leaving from the bar saw several other copies (some open) and heard snatches of relevant conversation.
Returning to Remnick’s piece, he has another paragraph on Nero, which begins
Nero had hoped to last long enough on the throne to re-brand the month of April “Neroneus” and the city of Rome “Neropolis.” He did not succeed.
His penultimate paragraph, which begins
Scandal envelops the President. Obstruction of justice, money-laundering, untoward contacts with foreign governments—it is unclear where the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will land and what might eventually rouse the attention of the U.S. Senate. Clearly, Trump senses the danger.
and reminds us how Trump cannot totally control what is happening, feeling stymied in his attempts by many of those close to him (and hence his plaintive query about not have a Roy Cohn), before concluding his piece with these words:
In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.
I could have used that final sentence as the title of this post. If put in quotes, it surely would have gotten a fair number of folks to open and read further. I felt the more honest approach was to note the comparison with Nero, who was assumed to have deliberately burnt a major portion of the city to rebuild it in his own image, a rebuilding that never happened. Trump seems perfectly willing to destroy the United States as we have known it in order to enrich himself and in the vain attempt to have himself glorified.
Which is why that final sentence is so important, and something of which we ALL should be cognizant, and make sure others are also fully aware:
The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.